Lamentation

Rev. Rali Weaver

First Church and Parish in Dedham

March 9, 3008

Today I chose a reading from the book of Lamentations. Our Lament – and this book seemed an appropriate thing to contemplate on this the fifth Sunday in Lent, which was at one time considered the Passion Sunday. The Passion Sunday marked the beginning of the Passiontide when statures and crucifixes were veiled for the two-week period leading up until Easter.

This Sunday also follows the 120^th World Day of Prayer, which was celebrated here in Dedham last Friday at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, next door. How we make sense of our suffering and suffering in the world is something both the Passion Week and the World Day of Prayer try to address.

Lent which is the preparation for Easter in the Christian Liturgical calendar marks the 40 days that according to the bible Jesus was lead through the wilderness by the Holy Spirit and tempted by the devil.

I recognize that in general, ideas of sin, the devil, and the Holy Spirit are a long way away from our Unitarian Universalist understanding of creation and of the Creator’s love but I would like to suggest that recognizing sinfulness (the ways we miss the mark in our lives) is an important step in finding forgiveness in our hearts. But on this Passion Sunday I want to acknowledge that along side that redemption, is the important and powerful realization of the things we cannot change. The things we can never heal or make right. The things we can only raise a loud resounding “Alas” to.

The book of Lamentations, like many of the other books of the Hebrew Bible, derives its title from the first word in the text which in Hebrew is ekah – and translated into English means ‘Alas’ or ‘How’. It is comprised of 5 poems centering on the horrific calamities that befell the people of Judah around the siege of Jerusalem that happened in 573 BC.

Poems 1, 2 and 4 describe the calamity in detail. Poem 3 describes the suffering as though it was God’s punishment from sin, and Poem 5 is a prayer for deliverance. In none of the 5 poems do you find a promise of healing or of new life. They all simply express the pain and suffering of the people who experienced the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians.

There is nothing that even my obnoxiously optimistic spirit can do to make light the suffering that is expressed in these poems.

“My eyes are spent with weeping; my stomach churns; my bile is poured out on the ground because of the destruction of my people, because infants and babes faint in the streets of the city. ¹²They cry to their mothers, "Where is bread and wine?" as they faint like the wounded in the streets of the city, as their life is poured out on their mothers' bosom. ¹³What can I say for you, to what compare you, O daughter Jerusalem? “

Lamentations 2: 11-13

Wordsworth once wrote that “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Although the poems that make up Lamentations are clearly written in disciplined acrostic arrangements, the poems themselves certainly evoke the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.

The temptation is to want to escape. Our culture is masterful at escapism. There are hundreds of television channels and so if you don’t like the news you can watch something else. The newspaper is equally full of the frivolous lighthearted commentary as it is the depressing painful facts.

And if we do watch the news closely, or read the paper cover to cover every day we might just hear cries similar to the ones in Lamentations coming from South Africa, or Iraq or New Orleans or Pakistan or Guyana (which was the country of focus for this year’s World Day of Prayer) or any place a group of people are hurting.

But like a dirge or funereal hymn, Lamentations lays out the real suffering in detail by those who experienced the oppression. And it hurts to read it. It hurts to read it because we have each had glimpses if only momentary of difficulties that we thought would never end.

In our culture we generally consider stoicism to be a sign of strength. We often ridicule men and women in power positions who cry. We tell children to stop crying.

But the call to lament our troubles suggests a different course. The call to lament acknowledges that hurt and disappointment, and suffering and loss are all a part of the human condition.

We may not all know what it is like to have to evacuate our home not knowing if it will be there when we return. Or we may not know the suffering that comes from months and years of drug wars and violence such as the people of Guyana in South America are still experiencing. We may not ever understand all of the suffering the Iraqi citizens have experienced in the last ten years, but not one of us can avoid suffering. Human suffering is beyond our ability to control completely. Human suffering is a part of what it means to be human. Painful awful heart wrenching suffering that cannot be made sense of is part of the human experience and so we lament.

As some of you know last week I received news that my dear friend Emil P. Dill died of a heart attack while traveling in Thailand. Emil had been my friend for over 20 years. And I had been looking forward to picking him up at the airport on Friday, and helping him to make his way back in the states. We had plans for him to help me around the house, and take care of my pets. We had plans for him to teach me to cook and finish some of his writing. The past couple months I have been preparing the Parsonage for his arrival. Setting up his computer and making his room more comfortable.

When I received the phone call last Friday telling me that my 42 year old friend had died I was in shock. I felt as though my feet had been knocked out from under me. How could he have died? He seemed so young and so healthy to me and we had so many plans.

My grief has felt immense and there has been nothing to do but cry.

Where is my friend? Where is my friend? Where is my friend?

The cry is both direct and incoherent.

I have felt both resigned and unnerved, angry and despondent, overwhelmed and in control. Where do I take these conflicting emotions –where can I take this grief?

While at King’s Chapel I often would visit a very sweet woman who was suffering in old age. She had multiple surgeries and her doctor wanted her to have one more. Her brother died and her sister had been very ill and she was ready to die. On my visits we would have had long talks about death and dying. We planned her funeral, and talked about her wishes and then week after all the pragmatic planning was done she offered me a question that honestly stumped me. And this is what she said:

She said: “I have spent most of my life trying to follow the example of Jesus’ life. I think that is what I am supposed to do. But I know that Jesus suffered on the cross and I do not want to suffer. I know that Jesus suffered on the cross because just before he died he called out, “My God My God, why has thou forsaken me” I know he suffered and if I am to follow him I know I will suffer to and I do not want to suffer.”

To be honest right then and there I would have traded anything to have a magic wand to wave away her suffering. I would have given just about anything to have the perfect words to say to her. But I have no magic words, only a listening ear.

But I have had this whole week and my own suffering to think about that question and this is the message I want to offer to all of you today.

Jesus did suffer on the cross. Jesus had a human body and it suffered. We all suffer. Suffering is part of the human condition. We cannot do a whole lot about our suffering. We can take pain killers, we can try escaping, we can work to change systems that create suffering in our communities, we might even be able to stop war and all kinds of injustice but even if we do these things there will still be suffering and there will still be grief.

But suffering is not necessarily the end of the story. There is one thing we can do, we can lament. We can lament. We can lament. We can lament.

We can cry out to the heavens and to God. We can curse the universe that can take a loved one. We can scream out about injustice.

And in this way we can clear the way for hope to return.

Lamenting is an act of sharing the truth of life. You see although these poems talk of death, they were clearly written by those who were still alive to tell the tale. And the over arching truth of this tragic story of life is that we can scream out to a God that is listening. The act of lament implies a God that hears, a God that is open to us even in our most difficult moments.

Even in the grim book of Lamentations we are also confronted with the tenacious passionate response of a people to tragedy but even their despondent words are filled with impassioned hope. In the book of Lamentations God is berated, the writers protest the outcome of the fall, make claims, demand attention and beg for a future.

Lamenting is the cry for help not as a result of our sinfulness and what we have done but in response to the wrongs that are done to us. It is the dark night of the soul. The deep abyss where hope seems lost.

In lamenting we have the power to gather pain and bring tears to the surface. In our lamentations we open more fully to the suffering because tears can offer the relief we need to make space for hope. Tears of lament can wash out space occupied by fear and despair and fury and sorrow it can make room for hope to grow.

There are times like those that the people of Judah experienced when all we can do is cry.

Even Jesus lamented from the cross, “My God My God why hast Thou forsaken me?”

But even this painful cry is evidence that we are still living. Our story does not end with the lament. Even the book of Lamentations can only be fully understood in the whole of the story of people of Judah. The fall of Jerusalem was prophesied in Deuteronomy, and it survived by a people who struggle to maintain their identity even to this day.

It is important to remember that ‘My God My God why hast Thou forsaken me?” is not the last thing that Jesus said. His last words were “Father into thy hands I commend my spirit”. The end of his story is equally full of lamenting the truth of his condition and releasing his spirit to God. In doing so Jesus’ story did not end on the cross as it continues to this day in the lives of people who try to live by his word.

Yes we are all suffering from the commonalities of the human experience, life can be very hard sometimes but we are after all still alive to yell about it in that I hope we prepare the soil for new hope to enter in.

Thanks be to God.