L is for Lament

We have been through tumultuous weeks, recently.  While the bombs have stopped for now, our military is still being threatened.  People in Gaza are not able to get food and still are being killed.  I think it’s a good time to talk about a heart wringing book in the Old Testament, Lamentations.  Let me set the scene.

The place is the Middle East.  The year is around 586 BCE. Jerusalem has fallen.

The walls are broken. The temple, the beating heart of Israel’s faith, has been burned. The people—those who survived—are scattered, stunned, grieving.

They’ve lost not only their homes and leaders, but also their sense of God’s presence. Remember God’s presence was in the Ark of the Covenant, never to be found again.

Out of this silence emerges a poet’s voice – singing the song of Jerusalem’s death rattle.  A sound I heard on October 7, 2023, and when the citizens of Israel started dying this month. Listen just to some of chapter one in Lamentations and read chapter 5 later for yourselves.

How lonely sits the city
    that once was full of people!
How like a widow she has become,
    she that was great among the nations!
She that was a princess among the provinces
    has become subject to forced labor.

2 She weeps bitterly in the night,
    with tears on her cheeks;
among all her lovers,
    she has no one to comfort her;
all her friends have dealt treacherously with her;
    they have become her enemies.

Tradition says the prophet Jeremiah wrote this, but the text is anonymous.

What we do know is that this poet speaks from the rubble of pain and sorrow.

And what we are given is not an explanation or solution. But lament, portraying the brokenness of a people and their God. What exactly is lament?

It is a cry, a scream, for God—

What if everything you had was gone? Home, community, church, income, God.

Where is the hope? Vanished. Jeremiah’s warnings have come to pass.

Think of people who now and recently are suffering from wars, natural disasters of fires, hurricanes, and tornadoes.  Where is God in this?  We keep asking.

Our sermon’s title comes from a chapter in Anna Carter Florences book A is for Alabaster.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I get the sense that Pennsylvania Dutch do not like to show emotions, especially sadness. Much like the German descendants in my family.  I have observed that showing strength is the preference.

Anna Carter Florence would disagree with this, saying - lament is not weakness.

It’s the spiritual discipline of telling the truth. It’s the way God’s people say:

“This is not right. This is not just. This is not how it should be.”

Many churches often skip lament. We may have Blue Christmas services, but that’s about it.  We skip from Palm Sunday to Easter, from birth to resurrection. 

When we hide our pain from the pulpit and our congregation, when we spiritualize our sorrow into clichés, we lose not only our honesty—we lose our power. This begs the question, what pain am I hiding from.  What pain might you be hiding from.  What is breaking your heart?

We seem to forget that the Bible teaches us many ways to express grief. We just heard a small part of it. The Psalms are full of it. The Prophets echo with it. Even Jesus Christ, from the cross, chooses the words of lament: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46, quoting Psalm 22:1).

Brueggemann writes that the most faithful work we can do is not always to make efforts to resolve our grief, but to stay in the grief long enough that God can break through. It can be a long wait. But too often we are afraid to do that, burying our grief in a place no one can find and pretending it is gone.  Until it catches up to us.

In a world of loss, war, political murders, climate crisis, hungry children, mass public and school shootings, the most spiritual thing we might say is simply: “How long, O Lord?”, as we continue our grief. (Psalm 13:1)  Hope doesn’t come after the grief. It comes inside it.[1]  lament is not the opposite of praise—it’s a form of it.

“To lament is to pray like the prophets prayed: unfiltered, unrehearsed, and unwilling to stop until God listens.” (A is for Alabaster, 2023)

Paul in Romans 8 says that all creation is groaning, waiting, longing for redemption In his book, God and the Pandemic, N.T. Wright echoing Paul says, “Lament is part of the rhythm of the Christian life, because we live in the time between resurrection and redemption” He preaches that our job as Christians is not to explain why, it is to weep with those who weep.   (God and the Pandemic, 2020).

I don’t about you, but this rhythm, this pulsing beat of good times then bad, and all over again is draining. To be honest, I don’t like it.  And when life is good for us, it isn’t for our friends, it isn’t for those who suffer from hunger, here and abroad.  This is life, isn’t it? That’s why Paul says that even the Holy Spirit groans—prays for us with sighs too deep for words (Romans 8:22–27).

In my research, I read about Methodist preacher Abby Norman’s engaging book, *You Can Talk to God Like That*, also written during the pandemic. She tells the story of a time as a teen when she screamed at God, and her mother gently said, “That’s okay, you can be mad at God.”

That moment changed her life.

“Lament,” she writes,

“saved my faith. It gave me a way to stay in relationship with a God I didn’t always understand. I didn’t have to choose between honesty and belief.” (You Can Talk to God Like That, 2021)

So often people tell me they left the church because of their anger at God.  God allowed this event to happen.  Why.  Not realizing that God invites them to come to him with their anger, an anger God may share with them.

So what would it look like to be a church that knows how to lament?

We would let people weep in the pews without rushing to fix it.

We would make room for stories and tell the truth of loss, trauma, addiction, and injustice.

We would create space for silence, not just song.

We would be a church that teaches our children that God is not afraid of their feelings.

Anna Carter Florence reminds us, “To lament is to trust God enough to show up empty-handed.” And that, my friends, is faith.

Let us be honest people. While our church no longer skips good Friday or ignores Lamentation we are still tempted to run away from the hard stuff.  We can trust God.  He is present to listen to our cry, our lament, and to wait with us for the new morning that is broken.   Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sermon Citations

Florence, Anna Carter. A is for Alabaster: 52 Reflections on the Stories of Scripture. WJK, 2023.

Norman, Abby. You Can Talk to God Like That: The Surprising Power of Lament to Save Your Faith. Broadleaf Books, 2021.

Brueggemann, Walter. Reality, Grief, Hope: Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks. Eerdmans, 2014.

Wright, N.T. God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath. Zondervan, 2020.