To Lament Injustice

A few months ago I wrote about a situation at Northwest Nazarene University where Tom Oord, tenured Professor of Theology, was laid off due to budget and enrollment concerns. For many students, alumni, and faculty, that was seen as a smoke screen from the very beginning. A vote of no confidence in the President came from the faculty, a commission was set up to investigate the layoffs, and in the middle of their investigation, President David Alexander resigned. A few weeks later the commission finished their work and Tom was still on schedule to be released –  not immediately, but over the next few years…without an office on campus.

This story seems fairly self-contained. A Nazarene concern at the least, an evangelical Christian one at most. But, in fact, it has much more to do with abuse, power, and control. It reflects the ongoing challenges of a Church living in a world driven by instant access to information. It has to do with dishonesty, hypocrisy, and sin.

This week we got the rest of the story.  News came out that the President’s resignation was not in fact a response to the investigation around the layoff; he actually resigned because he had had an “inappropriate relationship” with a female student while he was a member of the faculty. He got caught. So he resigned. With a golden parachute and a goodbye party…while no one on the outside was supposed to know the whole story.

This is the kind of stuff that makes Christians walk away for good. A bad situation is now a blatant, in your face deception, committed by people that knew the whole truth. Not only did they know the whole truth, but they used “protecting the victim” as their cover story. This is why people stop trying to reconcile faith and the Church.

Whether it’s a college trying to save face in light of a scandal. A church that chooses to embrace the abuser in a failed marriage because there’s no “proof”. Siding with the abuser because that’s the person who needs to be “saved”,  while the “Christian” (abused) spouse can always find another church.  It is when a youth pastor grooms and abuses a young woman her entire teen and young adult life, and then then tries to cover it up under storytelling and silence.

These occurrences in the church are devastating, mind numbing, and painful. And yet, even now, only days after the news broke, there are already cries from people to allow for repentance and not smear the name of the college because of this. Calls that all will be redeemed, made new, and sparkly clean again.

It’s been 5 days.

Those redemptive dreams may happen. But how about we spend a few moments facing down the deep seated sin that’s present here. A sin that finds its strength in power and control. A sin that takes a beautiful time of life and annihilates it for sport. How about we stand up for women who are abused and neglected by the system of faith; a system that claims women are valuable equals.

We must face the truth in situations like this. What happened cannot be ignored or more victims will be oppressed. Unfortunately, the inability to stand up for victims is one of the problems we face in a culture that seeks perfection. The world is not yet perfect. Sin is still very real here and is something that we all experience, whether intentionally or not. Here is where the call for lament should be heeded.

Lament is when we look at the world and name the fact that all is not well. Lament is a passionate response of grief and mourning when the things around us broken. Lament is a space where we face our limits, our frailty, our mortality, and live with the realities that come with human existence. And so we sit. We sit in sackcloth and ashes, sit in the pain and disappointment, sit in the mire – and lament.

Lament is a time when we admit that all is not well. When we admit we need to grieve and cry and rend and gnash. Lament is when we accept that things don’t make sense, and they hurt, and they are not of God.

Lament cannot be rushed, or pushed, or prodded. Lament takes time. It must run its course. It must be honored. Lament is not something that works at the speed of social media.

In a world where a 24 hour news cycle has to be filled with new and exciting stories, we are pushed to process through all the data faster and faster. We begin to feel that if we can’t reconcile all of it right now, then we need to move on. But the long truth of humanity’s journey, one shared by stories in our text, and through the lives of our ancestors, is that lament takes time. Lament needs breathing space. And to rush through lament to reconciliation too quickly will leave un-healed scabs, and scars that will break open again and again. Lament…takes…time.

Lament is then followed by a cry for justice. A cry for things to change in the face of sin. A cry for systems to fall and to be replaced not by better actors, but by genuine participants. Lament opens the door to conversation; conversation about what we take for granted, and what we are blind to. Lament leads us to true reconciliation.

There are all kinds of abuse and powerlessness that at one point in our lives might have been easier to ignore. Sexism, racism, discrimination, and unconscious bias. There may have been times when a simple confession and humble looking manner would have been enough to excuse systemic evil. There were certainly times in my life when I didn’t even know how to name those things. There was a time when ignorance had the power to numb the pain and make me happy with the world, even when things didn’t make sense.

But that’s not the call of Christ. We aren’t called to be numb. We aren’t called to be silent. We aren’t called to let injustice slide. Christ calls us to live. To stand up for the oppressed. To move around in the world and leave it better than we found it. To speak for the voiceless, to heal the broken, to lead them to redemption, and to fight the systems that oppress and misrepresent.

Truth is not a simple spell. It’s not an incantation that all is well with my soul. Truth is the confrontation of evil with good. It isn’t about making things look new. It isn’t about saving face. It is the participation in making all things actually new. About new life, new growth, healing, comforting, and marching forward into the Kingdom that God has promised us. A Kingdom where all things are made new.