Let’s remember a few things about our series on Lamentations. The book is actually a collection of 5 poems, probably from around 500 BC, when the city of Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians. First, there is a narrator. The narrator calls the city a widow, identifying her as “she”. We use figures of language specially when there is pain and normal language fails us. These are a few things that the narrator says in Chapter 1: In verse 2 he mentions that she is like a lover, she weeps at night, the lovers are gone, and the friends are now enemies. In verse 5: like a mother whose children are taken into exile. But then in in verse 9b: “look, Lord.” Can somebody see what I’m going through here? People were starving to a point that people were selling possessions just to stay alive.  Verse 12: is there any suffering like mine? When we are going through a struggle it feels like no one can understand what we are suffering, no one can relate to us.

In Chapter 2 the Narrator continues, metaphor after metaphor, showing how hard the situation was. And then verse 11, something happens; until here he is away, but now he comes close, he personifies himself as part of the drama, he is part of the people. He cries, he breaks down. Thirty verses into the poem, the narrator melts, he get caught into her pain.

So far we only have 2 characters. In chapter 3, we have a new character. In verse 1 we are introduced to the “Geber”, a masculine word that has a military connotation. This character is like a soldier that can say “I was right there in the middle of the fight”. In Hebrew, “to see” means to have experienced. When he says he has seen affliction, it means he has lived it.

Read Lamentation 3.1-7: What is he saying? “God doesn’t hear, God doesn’t answer”. Until verse 17 he keeps going in his rant. He is saying that he saw the destruction and that God is not there. He thinks that God is the one to blame. He starts blaming God; describing quite vividly how the punishment came over them; and now he says that he still has hope. There may yet be hope… in verse 21 he changes gear! Read slowly Lamentations 3.21-29. Doesn’t it sound like a different person?

Are you against God? Are you for God? Are you a person of faith? Do you have doubts? Can you feel the tension between the first declarations about God and the later declarations about God’s character? Catherine O’Connor says: “when you meet the Geber, you are meeting somebody with an entangled theology; hope and horror stand side by side. Hope and honesty. Hope and contradiction.”

Can we mix his first 2 speeches? Can you relate to it? In the western in general we have been sold this idea: that hope is the absence of those other feelings. That if we have hope we cannot have fear, or despair, or feel lost and abandoned. What you see in the Geber is that you can be someone with great hope, but that has gone through humiliation, deprivation, someone dealing with bitterness, speaking with brutal honesty. Here the declaration that God is good comes in the middle of circumstances that leaves us very confused, and apparently that is just that way it is. The tradition has made a god out of certainty, but what do you do when that certainty is crushed? How do we respond when we are faced with the unthinkable, with the worst possible scenario? All sort of questions come and share the same room with hope and faith. And it’s OK.

Remember the change that we saw in the relationship between the narrator and Jerusalem? In Chapter 1:9, notice how the narrator talks about the woman. She is Jerusalem, a place for God’s people, who have explored other gods, which the Lord calls adultery and betrayal, because in their covenant He is supposed to be their only god, and Israel would be a special people. When the narrator speaks here he says that she has been unfaithful. She cheated and now she is paying the consequences. But when the narrator switches over and moves from judgement to solidarity, see what he says in Chapter 2.13: He calls her a virgin now. At the distance, she is a cheater. When he enters in her pain, he calls her a virgin daughter. To understand this change, we need to talk about different genres of films… We are living in an era with genres and subgenres and subgenres of the subgenres. It’s not only action and drama and romance and fiction. It’s getting really specific.

Chick-flicks are in their own world. What is the biggest chick-flick ever? Pretty woman! It made more than 463 million dollars in the box office in 1990. Do you remember it? It is a story of a businessman that hires a prostitute for a week, but during that time he falls in love with her, and she falls in love with him.  How does the movie end? He comes to her neighbourhood and rescues her. They have a business relationship and that relationship progresses to something else, until they fall in love, and then the surprise at the end… He treats her less like a prostitute and more like a woman. The more he knows her, the less he can treat her in a dehumanizing way. She is moving from being a product to becoming a person. That is the original meaning of the word porn: to attribute to a person the value of an object that can be used and discarded, abused and abandoned. This sin has transferred to other areas of life… relationships have become disposable, jobs have become just a number instead of the livelihood of people, and in many different areas we attribute numbers to people instead of names because that way we can dispose of them without thinking. But when suddenly you have someone speaking your name, and speaking a fresh word about you, helping you to see yourself in a different way, everything changes.  

Can a fresh word be spoken about me? Can a new word be spoken about me? Or does my past, my mistakes, my sins define me forever? Can we come from a prostitute to be a virgin? That is one of biggest mysteries and one of the most beautiful in life: The insistence of the Gospel is that a new fresh word can always be spoken! In Matthew 9: 20-22, we meet the woman with a bleeding disease. She speaks for the shame of the whole nation- her 12 years of suffering are a representation of the 12 tribes of Israel. As Jewish, they were in or out: their religious life was about making separations and rules to make sure that they will keep people out of their circle. Also, they were masters in labelling people. She was labelled impure, unholy, unworthy. But when Jesus meets her, He calls her daughter (Matthew 9.22).

In Lamentations the narrator speaks the new word about her value, her identity. How do you feel when someone speaks a new word about you? How do you feel when someone sees in you something that seems greater than you ever dared to imagine? The first thing the woman says in verse 1.9 is “Look, Lord…” She is looking for someone to witness her drama; not to be fixed, not for answers, but for someone to acknowledge her pain. Healing sometimes begins when someone says “I see it, it’s real”. Then in Chapter 3.1 he sees her affliction, he is a witness to her pain. Why is this so powerful? Because for 2 poems she has been searching for someone to acknowledge her pain and now she finds him. She moves from distance and isolation to find someone who acknowledges her experience, her suffering, her distress. She is no longer alone.

The Narrator speaks, the woman speaks, and now the gesser presents his perspective. Their voices are part of the very fabric of our life right now. Those are voices we find in our world. Voices of pain, of confusion, of guilt, of blame, and also voices of hope, faith, grace, and love. But in the poem they move together. They are listening more to one another. The book finds God in the middle, proclaiming his character, his faithfulness and mercy.  And then loses God again, he is not mentioned again.  How did this book make it to the Bible? Maybe the movement of finding God and losing God, declaring his character and struggling with doubts, seeing God in action and sometimes feeling alone is as godly as it gets, as real as life can be.  Andrew Sullivan says: “The point of this incarnation, of God taking on flesh and blood, is not to create a new parameter against which to judge ourselves, is not to create a new list of things to feel bad about ourselves, the point was to be with us, and to show us better how to be human, to embrace our lives by embracing the divine around us and in us.”

There are moments in life when all the divine you get is the human being at your side. Never underestimate the power of presence, even if you can’t be there physically. The power of understanding. The power of representing God by being there. The power of being aware that we find ourselves in the middle of crisis and struggles and conflict because we have experienced the love of God in a way that makes us more than a spectator, but it makes us a witness. A witness that is able to acknowledge the pain and suffering and difficulties of life, because to deny that reality is to deny the experience that other people are going through. Let us embrace people in their mess, in their conflicts, in their frailty, in their confusion. When we deny them the acknowledgement of what is happening,  is when people accuses us of being detached from reality, living in a bubble, living in privilege. But when we are able to see life through their perspective and acknowledge their pain and be there for them, in whatever way we can do it, then the opportunity arises to present the reasons of why we love, why we care, why we have hope. The miracle of incarnation can be repeated in a different way today, every time we are able to enter someone’s life with the intention of understanding them, loving them and presenting the message of salvation. So let us bring back to our memory the reasons of our hope, let’s remember the message of the Gospel and let’s live it intentionally and passionately so our lives and our words reflect forever the same love that changed our lives.  Grace and peace to all of you, wherever you are!