Our District Synod has just met in York to think about “Lament and Laughter” together. Some of us who didn’t feel able to go gathered on Zoom to see most of the proceedings but we had our own workshop which I was asked to lead. So here’s some thoughts on the theme of Synod for us to think about.
What have you lamented about? Lament is a seriously neglected part of worship! In my view!
Lament is calling out to God from where we are. And mostly from not a nice place.
Nancy Lee in “The Singers of Lamentations: Cities under Siege, from Ur to Jerusalem to Sarajevo” (Brill, 2002) suggests lament is central to the biblical text. The majority of psalms, in terms of genres, are laments about suffering and worry. Some end with a plea to God for help. Some end with praise after receiving help from God.
The most prominent laments focus on how someone has been treated badly by his or her enemy. Read Psalm 137 – we are shocked by the end and we don’t read it in our services and Boney M certainly don’t sing it in Rivers of Babylon! But it’s raw and real and sung in utter despair when we aren’t thinking straight…
“One of the purposes of lament is just to be utterly honest and truthful. “ Lament often focuses on “the things we don’t like to talk about or don’t want to admit in our lives or society.”
Also, one of the big elements of lament in the Bible is a call for justice.
“It’s not just a prayer to God privately, but it’s done in the context of worship. It’s letting everybody know, ‘I’m being mistreated.’ It’s an implicit call to the congregation, the community, to know and then do something about it. Not just God.”
In lament prayer becomes honest. I love Nadia Bolz Weber. She’s a deeply honest writer from America. I used some of her stuff when I led a retreat in a posh retreat house in East Sussex. I wasn’t invited back! She uses words like “shitty” a lot J
How about this as a lament prayer? Written at the height of the pandemic:
“A lot of us are grieving. Actually, all of us are grieving: lost friends, lost kin, lost homes, lost income, lost connection to others, lost health. Help us not also lose hope. We can lose a lot and still survive, but not that.
I don't think you created us to be able to metabolize such a constant stream of bad news everyday, Lord.
But I do know that you created us to metabolize cookies. And for that I give you thanks and praise. They are helping. But they are not enough.
So if you could show the hell up right now, that would be great. And if you are already showing up, give us new eyes to notice you.”
Is it okay to shout at God? Lament is an underused practice. To lament is to cry out to God, acknowledging the trouble that besets us on all side. It is to acknowledge the pain, the heartbreak, the anger, the confusion, and the frustration that we feel – those feelings and reasons that we can explain and those we cannot. It is often a cathartic experience, expressing aloud those things that God already knows are living in our hearts.
Consider these words from a very wise down to earth priest I’ve got to know:
“A regular internet aphorism is ‘When life gives you lemons, make lemonade’. As advice goes it is not bad, and we are seeing a lot of lemonade being made in the form of kind acts and charitable initiatives. Bring on the lemonade! And yet lemons are perfectly nice things, just a bit sour. For those who are cheerfully making the best of an inconvenience and taking the opportunity to learn new things, spend time with the family or clear the garden, it’s a great saying. For others it isn’t. Fear, loss of livelihood and prospects, separation from family, boredom, abuse and grief are real for countless people, and we already see consequences like depression, anxiety, violence, bad behaviour, broken relationships, hunger and homelessness. Telling the victims of the consequences of this virus to ‘make lemonade’ of the situation is trite and, dare I say, a bit typical of our society which prefers not to face unpalatable facts but covers them with euphemism or blames someone else.
The truth is that real strength is to be found in confronting reality head-on, crying over it and fighting on through in the light of genuine hope. That is the power of faith. I love the Psalms in the Old Testament. They do real emotion, not lemonade. The most powerful are the psalms of lament, which howl and plead and shout at God in anger and fear when life is turned upside down. The reality today is that life has dealt many of us onions, not lemons, and the right thing to do is to make onionade and cry painful tears in front of the mirror of God’s love.
Corporate lament at our losses, repentance for the uncomfortable things we have learned about our society, and hopeful, expectant prayer to God who loves us, who builds beauty out of brokenness and hope out of despair, would be a healthy way forward as we start to work ourselves out of this situation.”
Canon Sarah Brown, soon to be Dean of Hereford Cathedral
We think Lamentations was spoken or sung on the rubble of Jerusalem after the Israelites returned from exile. How crushing would it have been to see the city and the Temple, decimated? What words stand out in this passage? Great is God’s faithfulness… in the middle of the cause for lament God is…
Where can God be found? My beloved late college principal Graham Slater used to get very excited about Wolfhart Pannenberg. We used to get tales of “when Wolfie came to dinner” at college a lot! Maybe Pannenberg hits the nail on the head here:
“Because God is the creator of everything and will be the redeemer of everything, theology has to be concerned with everything.” Even the rubble of life! Great is his faithfulness! And that may be cause for laughter, that despite everything God doesn’t ever let us go.
Some questions to ponder:
What have you lamented about in the last eighteen months? Has God been with you in your honesty? Where have you needed God to “show the hell up”?
Is your church a safe space to be honest?
After a period of loss and lament, what helped you recover?
Jesus died saying a lament prayer (Psalm 22) – what does this say about him?
| “The laments in the books of Psalms and Lamentations are all an expression of grief, but they are also an expression of hope. They are an insistence that things cannot remain this way and they must be changed.” Walter Bruggemann |
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