As
I’ve said before, one of my preaching practices is to focus on infrequently
read scriptures when they come around on the lectionary.
When it comes to the book of Lamentations, there are 5
times when the book can be read,
and three of them occur on Holy Saturday…
a service we don’t do here…
For that matter, the other two times the book comes up, are optional
readings…
So theoretically a Lutheran could go their whole lifetime without
ever reading Lamentations in worship.
And that won’t do.
It severely limits our experience of God,
making the Sacred a mere placeholder for important events,
and God a sort of grandfather figure, who slips five bucks into your pocket when
mom isn’t looking…
No, God is experienced at the margins and in the center,
during both joys and unjust sufferings…
as Biblical Ethicist and Theologian Marva Dawn once wrote:
“We need to have enough of God to let us lament. In
our present world, in spite of the cultural optimism of the United States, we
find ourselves facing the realities of loneliness, unemployment, violence,
worldwide political and economic chaos, family disruptions, brokenness and
suffering, the fragmentation of postmodern society. Keeping God as the subject
and object of our worship enables us to deal with the darkness by lamenting it,
by complaining about it. The psalms give us wonderful tools to move from
addressing God with pleas, complaints, petitions, and even imprecations to the
surprising outcome of praise. Throughout it all, God’s presence assures us that
we are heard, that something will change—both in ourselves and, through us, in
our world.”
Let us pray
This
rarely read book of the Bible, titled Lamentations in the English, is also
named for its first line: How!
The author is writing after Babylon destroyed
Jerusalem, both palace and temple,
throwing the common folk into thralldom and kidnapping and dragging off anyone
who could read, write or seemed even vaguely important.
To
this tragedy the author wonders and exclaims: How!?!
How
can I continue on after seeing the death of innocent children?
How can my heart hold such contradictions within it,
both a desire for God to avenge us
and also a recognition that the siege itself was God’s wrath against us!
How
could they steal all those sacred things from God’s temple,
from ornate candelabras to delicate draperies?
How!
How before the last wall of the city fell, I’ve already fallen into nostalgia,
fallen into a vacuous pit emptied of meaning,
what of my culture, my politics, my theology, all of it collapses
—my nation obliterated!
How
is it that I can witness all of this suffering,
and still have hope,
still see a future out there ahead of me!
Now, as Candy and Karen can attest, I sketch out sermon
directions about 6 months in advance
—so I had no idea of the local laments we’d be having this week.
We go for months on end without needing to name the recently dead in our prayer
petitions,
but this week there are 4, including the former Pastor here’s wife, Ginny
Ettlemyer.
For that matter, a couple families had close calls this week,
our prayers could easily have contained 6 names…
Unnamed
lament can turn to fear,
fear of loss
—and in so fearing
we can lose faith in a future.
Possibility can get eaten right up, if we don’t lament.
Nostalgia will drag hope into a corner
and smother it,
if we let it.
All
change, even good change, comes with grief.
Think of it, you quit an awful job and get a new one,
but you still miss that customer who would come in at 2:30 every Thursday,
or the way the sun hit the window when you closed up shop.
Surely you’re in a better place now,
but the change still involved loss.
Now, a truism in the New Jersey Synod,
I think we’re quoting Pastor Schanzenbach whenever we say it,
is “A leader’s job is to change things at a rate that people can handle.”
Lament is one of those tools that let us see our losses and our longings,
and consider what they might become.
Laments are not only found in the book of How,
but are their own genre
—they fit into a particular pattern.
When the Psalmists lament, they:
addresses God, complains, confesses need, asks for help, affirms that God is
trustworthy, and end with a promise of praise.
We too can lament:
Good God, I can’t believe they are gone,
I can’t do this alone, help me to keep on in the face of everything falling
apart,
I know you are faithful and on the other side of this I’ll be able to thank you
again!
Speaking of patterns, the book of How is structured in
a strange way,
one that walks you through these 5 poems,
and ultimately points you back to the central one
—one that not only asks, “How can I have hope, how can there be a future,”
but also,
“God’s compassion has not come to an end.
Great is Thy faithfulness.
I will wait for the Lord!
The Lord is Good!”
Lament
takes us through what therapists and counselors call the tasks of grief:
1. Accepting the reality of loss,
2. Experience the pain of it,
3. Adjust to new world,
4. Re-invest emotional energy.
Or
to use the frame of the book of How:
-How is this true?
-How does this hurt?
-How do things look when the dust settles?
-How do I reconnect to reality?
I
was hearted in Bible Study on Thursday. At one point I asked a way too big
question for the small venue:
“Who are the people with whom you feel the flow of God’s New Creation
—when do you feel everything being made new?”
And the first two responses were both about Lament,
about grief work:
-people gathered together at a Grief Group,
-being with a relative at a yearly event marking and honoring the sad situation
of parents losing a child.
Marva
Dawn might be onto something
—God is big enough for our laments.
When we’re able to ask and plead “How”
God might just surprise us,
we might find ourselves in a posture of praise.
Change. A New Creation!
The thrumming wave of resurrection pointing to possibility!
No longer limited by our fears,
there is a future,
there is a next step,
there is hope.
Amen.
