Lamentations 1:1-6, 3:19-26 “The Need to Lament”

Lamentations 1:1-6, 3:19-26 “The Need to Lament” August 27, 2016

(Lectionary for October 2, 2016)

We are people who do not like to lament. Let me say that more strongly; we do not like to admit that there is anything in our lives worthy of lamentation. When we are asked how we are, our automatic response is, “Fine,” or “Can’t complain,” or even “Blessed!” I admit that as religious as that last one sounds, it always grates on me, suggesting sub rosa that terrible things are actually afoot, but I am nonetheless blessed, which is supposed to hide the pain and suffering. No amount of cheery nonchalance can in the long run conceal the fears and anxieties that eat into all of us.

Society’s conventions demand that we not reveal what we are actually feeling. We Americans are individualists first and last, and any revelation of weakness brought on by frustrations or apprehensions of any sort, are to be swallowed and at best regurgitated in the privacy of a stiff drink or the sweat of a vigorous workout. “There is no crying in baseball,” as Tom Hanks famously shouted in a movie some years back, but there equally is no crying in public for anyone, unless someone has died or a nation attacked. Ordinary losses or physical pains are to be borne stoically, with upper lip stiff, and eyes dry.

There is something grievously wrong about all this. Like many of you, I was sternly warned by my parents that “there is no use crying over spilled milk.” When the going gets tough, the tough get going. The day my father left our family for another woman, my mother served sandwiches to him and to us four boys, all the while urging us not to cry. He exited without a word. Oh, he did come back some months later, but only when my furious mother went to the other woman’s house, suggested to my father that he really did not love this other one, and that he needed to get his bum back home. He did posthaste. And that was the end of all that. No tears, no recriminations, no lamentations. Why not? It was just bad form, I guess. Life goes on, and so must you, no matter the circumstances.

I got a glimpse of how valuable and cathartic lament can be on the final Sunday of one of my wife’s pastoral ministries. She was leaving her church at the top of her game, liked by nearly everyone in the congregation. She had been the first woman pastor of that church, and when she announced she was leaving, the committee responsible for receiving a new pastor said to the powers that be, “Well, we will take a man if we have to, but we much prefer a woman!” Nearly all were sad that she was leaving. She invited a group of dancers to join in that final service, and they began with a public and very loud time of wailing in their opening dance, a lamentation that asked any of the congregation to join in the lament if they wished. I was amazed how many did! There was a genuine din of lament in that sanctuary for many minutes. So many of the members commented afterward how wonderful it was to lament, to express the pain they were feeling over the loss of a leader they had grown to love deeply.

And thus we come to the book of Lamentations, hardly a top ten favorite of Bible books. It is chock fuSchnorr_von_Carolsfeld_Bibel_in_Bildern_1860_141ll of painful lament, occasioned by the destruction of the holy city of Jerusalem, the loss of the land promised by YHWH, the blinding and exile of the king, the end of the life of the temple that had stood as a beacon for the city for nearly 400 years. It is quite telling that the only part of this dark book that has become well known among Bible readers is Lam 3:22-23: “The chesed of YHWH never ceases (the reading of the NRSV based on other early translations, though the Hebrew says something like “YHWH, we are not cut off”), because God’s womb-love never ends; it is new every morning. Great is your faithfulness!” The lines have become famous due to the very popular hymn, “Great is Thy Faithfulness,” sung especially in African-American congregations everywhere, but now used as well in nearly all Christian communities of faith. The hymn is stirring and moving, announcing the never broken love and mercy of God.

However, that conviction about God does not appear in Lamentations until chapter 3! In the first two chapters and in much of chapters 4 and 5, there is definite wailing at the horror that witnesses of Jerusalem’s demise have experienced. Such horrors include endless tears (Lam 1:2),  occasioned by the loss of festival times (Lam 1:4), the prospering and gloating of Judah’s enemies (Lam 1:5), even starvation leading to cannibalism (Lam 2:20, 4:10)! The entire book ends in misery and despair: “Restore us to yourself, YHWH, that we may be restored; renew our days as of old—unless you have utterly rejected us, and are angry with us beyond imagining” (Lam 5:21-22)! Give us back the good old days, the people plead, but admit that YHWH may be so furious with them as to make any return to glory and safety impossible. God’s faithfulness may be great, but God’s fury may be greater. Hence, we need to lament and not cloud over the pain we are feeling.

And for those crying out in Lamentations, that pain has been caused by their refusal to follow the ways and calling of their God. The book of Jeremiah that precedes this small book of Lamentations offers a catalogue of Judah’s shortcomings that have led directly to their destruction and exile. The prophet in a 40-year ministry has warned over and again that Judah will one day face the inevitable consequences of its evil and indifference toward the marginalized among them, the widows, the orphans, the strangers, the immigrants. Beyond their affirmations of the mercy and faithfulness of God, they first must bewail their sins, loudly and forcefully, if they are finally to appreciate and value God’s great faithfulness toward them. Without deep lamentation, there can finally be no deep realization of the unending mercy of God.

In the German language, there is a word that has no single counterpart in English; that word is Klage. Klage means both lament and complaint, a cry of anguish tinged with anger and the demand to put things right. This word is the very hallmark terComplaint_Department_Please_Take_a_Numberm describing the book of Job. In that anguished poem Job laments because of the seeming randomness and unfairness of the life he has tried to live. Though he has been in all things righteously religious, yet he has lost everything. And though he has done nothing worthy of his appalling life on the trash dump of his city, yet his friends (more fiends than friends to be sure!) accuse him of terrible sins that have led him to disaster. He refuses their analysis of his wretched existence, and complains in unalloyed bitterness to them and especially to God that something is just not right in his universe and needs to be amended soon.

I suggest that Klage is what you and I need in our religious lives. We need to lament the pain and suffering of the world, both large and small pains and sufferings, but in our laments we need also to add a touch of anger that demands that things be put right, both by us and by God. Only after we have filled our lungs with Klage can we experience fully the power of the mercy and faithfulness of that God, a God who has promised to be with us always, even and especially in the midst of our pain. Little wonder that African-American churches have made “Great is Thy Faithfulness” a near national anthem. They have suffered and struggled in a dominant white culture for 400 years and more, and have learned all too well the need for lament. And because they have lamented, they have also learned the stark necessity of belief in a God who is great and merciful and “good all the time.”

My wife was a pastor of an African-American church twice in her ministry, and among the things I learned while participating in that nearly all-black congregation is this fact: when they say, as they do nearly every week, that “God is good all the time,” they do not at all mean by that phrase that all things are always good and fine with them. Hardly! They have known and still know prejudice and rejection for the simple reality of their skin color. But the fact is: God is good all the time, even in lament, even in struggle, even in pain. And that makes their lives possible, because “God makes a way when there is no way.” The authenticity of lament makes the mercy and faithfulness of God authentic. Our genuine tears can be the road to God’s mercy, which never fails, and to God’s greatness which is new every morning.


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