As a pastor, I experience many funerals. At the funeral, almost always there is some type of eulogy or story of remembrance about the deceased. These eulogies and stories always bring with it tears. Individual tears and many times corporate tears. For many, there is hope laced with sadness within these stories as they reflect on the dead's past but look forward to their arrival in heaven. Funerals always bring lament.
Lament is both an expression of pain and of praise. Just as a eulogy is meant to express the pain of loss, it is also meant to praise the life of and hope for the deceased. Lament is in the genre of a poetic eulogy, not of just one life, but also a corporate funeral dirge as a nation mourns together. Lament, both individually and as a nation is Biblical.
The problem with lament is that many people, especially Christians don’t understand it. Those who do understand some of what lament is, fear it, and leave it by the wayside, pretending it doesn’t exist. This is because many do not desire to deal with the past.
Many fear the past and so purposefully push it away. As a nation, we cannot push through the pain of the past with systematic racism. We cannot fail to lament as believers the sins of the past. We see the example of a nation weeping and wailing before the LORD in lament over the sins of those who had gone before them. We cannot fear to acknowledge the past, lamenting it, and purposefully choosing to live differently. Repentance then too is vital to change. Soong Chan Rah says it well: “Confession propels the community to imagine a world beyond their current state of sinful existence. Lament that recognizes the reality of brokenness allows the community to express confession in its proper context”
I think then, we have to ask:
What is Lament?
Lamentations is a poetic book that cries out to God in both pain and praise. It is a book that eulogizes the nation of Israel in both anguish and hope. But how does it describe lament?
To Lament is to Grieve Loss (1:1-2)
To grieve is simply to mourn. To allow oneself to feel the pain of the losses one has in life.
We all have loss, therefore we all need to grieve. Grieving runs antithetical to mainstream American Christianity. Jesus in the sermon on the mount in the middle of his discussion of the “be attitudes” states this: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted”.
Grieving admits the presence of our pain and opens us up for comfort! We are called to grieve. To deny our pain is to suffer under wounds of the past that continuously will find ways to haunt us today. Just like a beach ball that gets shoved underwater pops up sometimes in a random place, so too our pain shoved down will pop up sometime in random places.
Lament is not just wallowing in pain, nor is it simply healthfully grieving loss, lament also has a component of complaint to is. We must see that:
Complaint is a Component of Lament (2:1-2) Healthy lament does have complaint as a large aspect within it. The truth is this- if we are genuine and honest with our own thoughts, hearts, and souls we will recognize that we blame God for more things than we’d care to admit. Reading through Job, Psalms, Jeremiah, Hosea, Jonah, Lamentations, and many more books of Scripture, we see this theme. We have allowed American Christian culture to usurp our need to complain when we feel complaint boiling out of us.
We've become so anti-complaint, that when someone does complain about their plight, their pain, the injustice they've experienced, we tend to not just ignore their complaint but seek to hush them up with simple "Christian platitudes".
God desires to know every corner of our hearts, even our complaints. He is a Big God, with big shoulders. He desires to take all of our burdens and complaints can be heavy burdens.
Lament is not just wallowing in pain, nor complaining but it is also a protestation. In the midst of our complaint, we will notice a sense of injustice done to us or others. In the verses from chapter 2, we see both. The people of Israel were declaring the utter unfairness of God’s allowance of such tragedy in the middle of their complaints.
Protest is Part of Lament (4:3-5) When one reflects upon their suffering, loss, and complaints long enough they will see the injustice that has happened to them or to others.
If we look honestly at our world, we cannot ignore injustice, for if we do we are not seeing the world as it really is. So, in our lament, we protest this injustice. We protest against the injustice done to us and we protest the injustice of others. This is a part of lament we must embrace.
We must recognize that protest is a form of lament. People are lamenting the causation and even the necessity of the pain and wounds when they protest. It is a wailing cry to change that which has brought forth the need for lament. We cannot ignore the fact that proper lament will have protest as a part of it.
The church should not seek to quell protestation but seek to find how she can be a solution to the painful complaint offered in deep lament that something is NOT right!
As we see the protests grow around us, we should see the need to recognize the pain that is spurring on these protests and seek to lament with and alongside those who are hurting.
Dismissing the protestation by pointing to the wrongdoing in their midst is to dismiss the whole issue and to ignore or shut down true lament!
We can condemn the wrongful acts without losing sight of the realities of systemic racism. What has happened however is a narrative shift and it is not right.
Praise has a Place in Lament (3:25-26) If you look at the Psalms of lament and here in the book of Lamentations, you will find praise. Remember, lament is moving forward. The purpose of lament is not to have a constant pity party, but to move from pain to healing.
Lament moves us forward, it doesn’t keep us in the past. We are wired for joy and sorrow. We are meant to experience the fullness of human emotion and when we do not we have reason to suspect our need for lament. Lament breaks down the barriers and leads us to praise leaving behind the pain. Praise when done in the midst of lament will bring about a restoration never known before. When we can praise in the middle of our pain…we declare the truths of God when we don’t want to.
We must lament if we are to be healthy, fully restored humans. What is lament then? Something we must engage in and no longer ignore, especially in the church!
No comments:
Post a Comment