The Evil That Turns Each Day Into a Test

He will speak to this people through stammering lips and a foreign tongue  (Isaiah 28: 11 NASB)

On a call late last week, a friend described how his wife was left in tears after listening to a South African friend describe watching people die because life-saving medications had been cut off with the ending of US-AID. That same day, I was in conversation with several pastors from the American midWest. Caleb described how people in his small congregation are wrestling with the disorienting nature of life in America just now. They want a place where they can be heard and where they can lament. There is a cascading of these conversations just now. A friend in Los Angeles described how the people of his congregation and community are struggling with the devastation of the fires (many no longer have homes) and the continuous threat of deportations. 

I reflect on these heart-rending events, as I read Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This and Jeff Rubin’s, A Map of the New Normal: How Inflation, War, and Sanctions Will Change Your World Forever. El Akkad’s book is written into the terrible, wanton killings of Palestinian women and children. The killings in Palestine, El Akkad proposes, represent a fundamental rupture amongst Western peoples from their supposedly higher morality. These killings are a tearing of the fabric of our world but are passed over as the unpleasant, collateral effects of war. Rubin’s book, moving in a different direction, pulls back the curtain on how markets, globalization, wars and the fight for a new world order have torn apart the fabric of our common life to precipitate yet unknown, precarious ways of life that are discontinuous from the present. 

It’s little wonder people are looking for places to cry out and lament. What we are experiencing across society and as God’s people are deep, pervasive and justifiable anxieties about how these cascading challenges are undermining our sense of the world. Political leaders seem adrift in knowing how to address this place we’re never been before. Too often now, their solutions seem to turn us back onto roads we all know are dead ends. What else can we do but lament!

I, too, wrestle with questions of God’s agency and of how, as God’s people, we live faithfully in these darkening times. People in these stories are expressing their grief (their lament) around a deepening sense of powerlessness around what we are to do. In this context, like many others, I’ve been asking what is a response of God’s people to this unraveling of all that has shaped the Western imagination since the end of W.W.2. One of the books I’m finding helpful in that questioning is Ephriam Radner’s, Mortal Goods: Reimagining Christian Political Duty (2024). Radner is a theologian who teaches at my alma mater in Toronto (Wycliffe College). He raises a question early in the book that touches on our current experiences: “Where shall we escape the evil that turns each day into a test?” (36). He’s not advocating escape from these realities but inviting us to ask, as God’s people, how it's possible to confront the daily evil that lies before us and not be overwhelmed by the darkness. How can we locate our experiences in the context of a larger, life-giving frame that invites us to act and, in so doing, cultivates a community of hope even when there is little sense of solving the evil? 

My guess is that this is what people are seeking when they  express a desire to be heard and their desire for a process of lament. We want to do something, to act and stand against the evil around us. We want to be a part of a hopeful community of God’s people. Such hope seems out of bounds just now, which is part of our desire for lament. We have to give voice to our sense of outrage and powerlessness before the evil gathering strength before us. How do we cultivate such communities of hope in the ordinary places where we dwell with our neighbours? How do we do this as God’s people when, in these evil times, progressive beliefs in betterment and improvement are like the emperor with no clothes? Right now, such hope can seem faint, delusional, blocked, truncated, stopped! Our lament, Radner points out, is our desire to go somewhere. This search for hope and the need for lament comes as we recognize that, in fact, we cannot improve things in the ways the modern story convinces us is our right and within our power. In this place where so many of our assumptions are proving hollow, how do God’s people conceive and practice hope? Radner asks: What is hope’s location in a world that we cannot improve significantly, escape morally, or ignore successfully? (36). This world has always been insecure and unstable. It is just that after a long, seventy-five year period of unreality, our optimism is being undone and we’re coming to see the evil that has always been there, but we no longer have the resources to live in it as God’s people. Hence, the desire for lament.

An image Radner offers to us in this moment is that of Christians as sojourners. I don’t use the singular here, an individual sojourner, but the plural. It has to be as a community that we lament and as a community that we come to this question of hope. Sojourning describes both our posture and a direction. In these uprooting, evil times, the posture of a Christian community is that of discerning how to orient our common life around the commandments of God. We do this as we dwell where we are - in our neighbourhoods. This can seem like a strange response to the questions we’re asking as God’s people: What are we to do? It is important to remember that when God’s people asked these questions in Babylon, they were given exactly the same response.  

Our response just now is lament. Yes! But it must be more than that. A hopeful common life is called forth by a people whose everyday practices are formed around God’s commandments. Lament is intended to press us to this recognition. In Lamentations lament is not primarily an invitation to speak out our pain; it is an invitation to recognize that at the heart of that pain is a deeper reality - our forgetfulness of God’s commandments and covenant. This is part of Walter Brueggemann’s point in his recent book Lament that Generates Covenant (2025). These commandments are not a scholastic checklist of oughts or prohibitions. A minimal familiarity with the Jewish Testament tells us this is not the case. Deuteronomy and Lamentations are not about slavish adherence to oughts. What is grasped in the Jewish Bible and expressed so well in Jeremiah and Isaiah is that only in an embracing of God’s commandments is there any possibility of comprehending how we are to act in these evil times. 

In the final week of Lent, leading to Good Friday, we read together in church the account of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem (Luke 19). He entered a city filled with anxiety and anger, a place of clashing narratives and hunger for some kind of hope. Leaders were focused on controlling mobs, maintaining their grip on power and placating the strong man. The underlying question of the population was why God was absent in the midst of such obvious evil. Jesus’ response was sobering. He announced an even greater apocalypse. The reason for his hard words were the same as those given to the Babylonian exiles. Lamentations’ account for the dire situation of Jerusalem and the exiled was of their forgetting - forgetting the covenant and the commands of God. In that same Jerusalem, Jesus describes the cause of their situation as “because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you” (Luke 19:44).      

 Lament is necessary right now; it is not sufficient. It is a gateway to something else - the decision to reorient our common life around God’s commandments. What will that mean? First, it is seeing that God is near to us in our darkening moment and that this presence is perceived as we recognize our own incapacity to improve and change the evil that besets us. This is what the exiles (or some of them) had to confront in order to name their situation. Second, God gives us, in lament, a way to travel as sojourners. This is not a way of escape but of taking another road for the healing of the world. This sojourning is a long road that calls us to dwell deeply in the local, the ordinary, the everyday. Third, this is the place where God’s people learn to practice the ways of God’s commands. This is the word from Jeremiah. Jeremiah 29 summarizes what might be involved in a group of Christians seeking to live into the commandments of God:

“Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” 29:7. 

Lament allows us to hear the call to a vocation rooted in the commandments that are not esoteric or only for the spiritual. They are the way a local community sojourns at this moment. As Radner states well, “ it is in God’s commandments that God comes near to us” (38). That coming near is about seeing a way of sojourning in the midst of evil that imagines a different world.