From this week we are starting a series of sermons in the book of Lamentations. It seems like it is a good time to explore the hard truths and wonderful message of this book considering our circumstances! I hope you enjoy this exploration of a great book that we tend to avoid, but that we need to understand. To follow this series, you need to have your Bible open to follow the progressing reading.
What is your general view on this book? Somebody without the proper orientation may think that Lamentations is exactly what is wrong with religion: a bunch of people complaining, wishing for revenge, asking for the power to pay back to the ones that have caused them so much pain and loss. But there’s a lot more to Lamentations than that! Each chapter is a poem, and the book is written following the rhythm and style of ancient Jewish funeral songs or chants. In Lamentations we have a rare encounter of three styles: prophecy, ritual and wisdom. The aim of the book is to register that disaster follows when we consciously disobey God, but that God suffers when we suffer.
As in every poem that relates a story, there are characters. The first character is the narrator. The narrator is our reporter, a somehow distant witness to the story. The narrator at the beginning is just basically telling us what is going on. Take time now to read from Lamentations 1.1-4. I’ll be waiting!
The narrator tells us that there is a city, Jerusalem. He mentions it as “she”, giving her a personification. To give you some background, there is about 1000 years between David and Jesus. About 500 years before Christ, Jerusalem was attacked by the Babylonians and basically flatted down! So the narrator tells us that she used to be the centre of the world and how people would come from all over the world to her festivals. But there are no more parties, or festivals. Some believe that this collection of poems are directly related to the taken of Jerusalem in 576 BC, others think that they are a more vast expression of the pain for Jerusalem over several hundred years and the several times the city was attacked. Regardless, it’s about the destruction of Jerusalem and what it represented to the people of Israel.
Read now verses 5- 6; let me share with you a story about a Polish pianist, Władysław Szpilman. When the Nazis took over Warsaw, his family was sent to the concentration camps. He managed to escape. His family was killed in the camps, but he managed to survive. Actually he remained in the ruins of the part of the city where they used to live and managed to survive through the Nazi occupation. In the movie about his life, The Pianist, we can see this part in which he walks through the ruins of what used to be his home, his community, and him playing the piano in the middle of the destruction. This is similar to what you would experience if you were in the time of Lamentations and were seeing Jerusalem. The city has been destroyed, nothing is like before, even if you tried to pretend, reality wouldn’t allow you to. You can’t avoid reality any more. -
Read verses 7-8; in Hebrew the title of Lamentations is “the book of eicha” which simply means “How”. Eicha is to be said like in the last breath. What experiences in life make you come to this kind of expression of sorrow? “How we did get here?”, “How is it possible?”… Or simply “How???”
Then we come to verse 9, the first part; until here the narrator has been telling the story; the glorious past, the horrendous attack, the destruction, the desolation. But now the narrator silences and the woman speaks…
We have one line from her. She will come now and then in the story telling her side. “Lord, see my misery. The enemy has triumphed.” Now we return to the narrator, who tells in verse 10 how bad was the situation. Then she speaks again in verses 11-16; whose fault is it? It may seems like it was God at times, and in other times she owns up to her sins, and then maybe the warriors that didn’t come to her rescue. Is it God, is it me, is it they? Why do we have this need to find someone to blame for, even if that won’t help to find a resolution?
Vs 17- the narrator comes again with a more distant perspective, in a way remind us that these events shouldn’t surprise us, because God had spoken about them long ago, and now we are seeing his word becoming a reality.
Vs 18- 22: she opens her heart… How would you describe the feelings coming from the poem? Heavy, dark, depressed? Unfamiliar? It was foreign to our culture the depth of the lament. We lived in a time with little or no time to digest, to work through the feelings of sorrow, desperation, sadness, confusion, and then the pandemic came slowing down everything around us. We are invited to reconquer the ability to lament, if we want to live life at a full and absorb everything God offers us through life.
Observations so far:
God never speaks. There’s no God character in the poem; no answers; no explanation. In the whole poem, there’s no voice saying “it will be all right”. Sometimes it doesn’t even make sense, but that’s the nature of pain as well. Why are we so unfamiliar with the lamentation of the poem? Maybe it is because we live in a culture of denial. Our culture has taught us that we don’t talk about things like that. So when we find poems, songs, expressions of pain and suffering, we don’t know how to deal with it. I remember seeing for the first time when Apple released another product to the market, and the reaction of people was religion at its highest; the high priest delivering the news from above; the crowd overjoyed with the news; their faces of amazement, it was just like worship. What is so powerful to consider what is going on here: it’s because for the last 100 years or so we have been taught and we have proclaimed that if you give humans enough time, our power of creativity and innovation will sort things out. Just gives us enough time! The god here is us. But more people have died killed by other humans in the last 100 years or so that in all history combined. Our technology hasn’t made us more human; in this culture we live in denial, we don’t talk about things because they show we haven’t sort things out, we still don’t have the answers. We don’t know what to do with death, with suffering, with our limitations. The cosmetic plastic industry commands 17 billion dollars at year! We don’t know how to grieve over the reality of pain, getting older, dying. We avoid the most basic reality.
When we don’t lament, it will go somewhere. It will drive us to act in some specific way. How do you feel when you see the pictures of the soldiers dying in war? Have you ever seen a picture of a coffin? They are banned! It’s a larger symptom of the culture of denial; we don’t know what to do with failure. When you see the responses over mourning in the west and in the Middle East, what’s the difference? What is healthier? Why do we banish from consciousness the feeling of mourning, lost, death, pain, and suffering? Why do we shove things deep and live in denial? We must reclaim how to lament, so we learn how to deal with the deepest part of life as human beings.
What are the phrases of the woman that are more compelling to you? To me is: “I called and no one will listen.” Her pressing need is to someone to listen to her. How can you see what I am going through and don’t stop to listen? 1/3 of African-American males between 18-29 years old are in prison or parole. 65% of the kids in those families grow up without a parent. 90% in that group don’t have contact with their father. It says something about the whole culture. It should make us grieve and be sad; but when we speak and there’s no one to listen to us in our suffering you move from sadness to anger. You turn the volume up; can you listen to rap songs and ignore the pain that is underlining it all? It’s a lament that has gone unheard, and presents itself with an edge. Your ability to listen to the pain of another is directly proportioned to how well you have dealt with your pain. While we ignore our pain and suffering we are in no place to understand other’s pain, as person, as group, as country, as culture. “Is any suffering like mine?” What are we looking for? We look for someone to validate, to understand, to listen to our pain. When we look at magazines at the supermarket, there’s one kind that sell the most: the ones that speak about breakups. The issues that speak about reconciliation don’t sell as well as the ones about the break up! We surrogate others pain because it help us to deal with our own pain at some level. An Irish philosopher said that “by tapping into someone else’s suffering we tap into the vast reservoir of our own suffering”. Do you remember when Princess Diana died? How many people were helped to deal with their own losses by seeing others reacting to death, suffering, mourning? The power of the lament is that it brings more and more of our own need to be real with what’s happening to us. Catherine O’Connor says: “Lamentations names what is wrong, what is out of order in God’s world, what keeps human beings from thriving in all their creative potential. Simple acts of lament to expose these conditions, name them, open them to grief and anger, and make them visible for remedy.”
What happens when you name what is wrong? It’s no longer hidden, there’s no more an elephant in the room, we are speaking about it, dealing with it and that’s when healing starts. In its complaint, anger and grief, Lamentations protests conditions than prevent humans thriving, and this resistance may finally prepare the way for healing. To lament is an act of protest, is an act of resistance, it’s to finally start speaking about the situations and conditions that no one want to talk about and keep avoiding, because only then that situation can finally change. Peter Rawlins says: “Contrary to what people often thinks, the key to easing people’s suffering is not in offering some insidious theology, which means to say “oh well if you are suffering it’s because God wants you to so you can learn”, but the key is allowing a place for people to mourn and to meet others who know what it is to be burned by that black burn. It’s not about providing an answer, but offering a sight, where we can speak our suffering.”
A place where we can lament may seem depressing, but it’s actually a place of freedom. There are times when we need to just express lament, and feel like we won’t be judged. Sometimes can be simple things like saying “things are not like they used to be” to the more dramatic events in life. God invites us to name things that may cause us grief, pain, suffering, sadness. By doing so, we open ourselves up to his healing touch, and then to grow in our understanding of who God is, who we are, and who are the people around us. Grace and peace over each one of us, as we deal with our pain and experience God’s love and mercy covering us, comforting us, and inspiring us forward!