Sermon: Lamentations

Last week Canon Cherry preached about grumbling, or more precisely, about giving up grumbling and I have to admit that I was sorely tested by what he said within a few hours. On the face of it, my theme this week - encouraging us to lament - may seem to contradict what he said, but that would be to confuse grumbling with lamenting. I hope to convince you that they are different and that just as giving up grumbling is a good Lenten discipline, so is committing ourselves to lamentation. After all, a whole book in the bible is devoted to lamentation and many other books include laments.

What is the difference between grumbling and lamenting? Grumbling is an expression of our distrust of God. When things went wrong the people in the biblical stories had an uncanny knack of losing sight of what God had done for them in the past, of God's care and love for them, and simply complaining. In Psalm 95 God calls it putting him to the test. And, as we heard last week, the Rule of Benedict includes a prohibition on murmuring because Benedict knew how community life is undercut by grumbling. At root is distrust of God's goodness. Lamentation, on the other hand, is founded in trust in God's goodness and so is the absolute opposite of grumbling and for people of faith, it may be the faithful response to trauma.

But there are other ways we can react to misfortune. Apart from grumbling, we can endure the hardship stoically. But that is, at root, the response of the atheist because to grin and bear it is, when reduced to bare principles, to say that there is no God, it is all down to me and my ability to endure. That is not to say that an attitude of endurance is a bad thing for a Christian, Paul explicitly says that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character. But he goes on to say that character produces hope and hope does not disappoint us because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. Endurance that leads to hope that flows from the love of God is a good thing, stoic endurance that is not open to God's Spirit working in us is essentially a response of independent pride and self-centredness.

A third alternative approach is to close our eyes to the whole thing and pretend it isn't happening, That is not so easy when whatever has gone wrong affects us personally but is far too easy when we are not confronted at every turn by the problem - whether that be the plight of refugees in Darfur, of people dealing with Zimbabwe's rampant inflation, or opponents of the regime in Burma. These situations can slip out of the news and we forget them, but that is an inadequate response theologically because have lost sight of one of God's first questions in the Genesis story, to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" Cain's response, "Am I my brother's keeper?" is in total contrast to God's statement early in the Exodus story, "I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt [and] have heard their cry ... I know their sufferings and I have come down to deliver them." To close our eyes to suffering is to act in an ungodly way. Finally, a fourth reaction is simply to lash out in retaliation, to escalate the suffering. That is bad enough when individuals do it and fights break out, it is devastating when nations do it.

If these responses are inadequate, the theologically correct answer is to lament. When we lament we acknowledge the wrongness of the situation - no burying our head in the sand; we recognise we cannot deal with it ourselves - no stoic self-determined endurance; and we refuse to turn away from trust in God - no grumbling. Lamentation is despair turned over to God rather than to other people or inwardly to ourselves. We heard a classic expression of it in the first reading as the speaker - perhaps Jeremiah - lamented:

The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall!

My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me.

But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end.

This is not grumbling, because the complaint, the homelessness, the despair, is turned over to God so that a new perspective can be gained, "This I call to mind and therefore I have hope. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end." Some of you will have recognised the first reading as the basis for the hymn, "Great is thy faithfulness", a hymn that has helped and encouraged many. But the hymn is shorn of its context which is the devastation of a city destroyed, of the hopelessness of homelessness, and goes straight to the resolution. There are very few hymns that truly lament and this lack short-changes the church, encouraging us to gloss over the suffering in our rush to confident hope.  This is something that the hymn writers at this cathedral have discussed and we hope to address, but I can tell you it is not easy to express in a hymn the utter despair yet trust of lament without descending to triteness and bathos. Very often it is prayer rather than hymnody that gets closest to lament, but even there we are weak compared to the biblical writers.

Why do we lament beyond the obvious reason that something is wrong for us? We lament because God laments over his people. Next week we will hear God's love song of lament through Isaiah about the state of his vineyard, the people of Israel, "what more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? When I expected it to yield grapes why did it yield wild grapes?" while through Hosea God laments, "When Israel was a child I loved him, I taught Ephraim to walk, I led them with cords of human kindness. [But] my people are bent on turning away from me. How can I give you up, O Ephraim, how can I hand you over, O Israel?"

We lament, too, because God's world laments. Lamentations starts with a most startling picture of an abandoned city that is both specific to Jerusalem, razed to the ground by invading armies, her people and her wealth taken captive into exile, and also universal - there were echoes of this in Bosnia in the 1990s and in Lebanon more recently. "How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become. She weeps bitterly in the night with tears on her cheeks; among all her lovers she has no one to comfort her. ... Jerusalem remembers, Zion stretches out her hands. Look, O Lord, and see how worthless I have become. Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow which was brought upon me." The city laments because she is abandoned and lonely and comfortless, her inhabitants lament because they are homeless; "The thought of my affliction and homelessness is wormwood and gall. My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me." For me, this imagery of homelessness has been given a painful edge by the experience of sitting with and trying unsuccessfully to find help for, one of homeless people I have met in the cathedral: when I read this phrase I immediately recalled one man just three weeks ago sitting with his head in his hands and saying in despair "I am so tired, I just want to be warm and to have somewhere to sleep." Lament is specific, it names situations and admits our helplessness. If we want to be faithful we are going to have to be disturbed by and to lament the situations we encounter, not to pass them by on the other side. Lament reduces us to utter dependence on God.

Above all else, we have to remember that the psalms and hymns of lament are prayers. That is why lament is the faithful theological response to distress: we turn to God, scraping the barrel of our hope, and commit the situation to him, spelling out our trust phrase by difficult phrase. When the psalmists or Jeremiah lament they are acknowledging their own capacity for incapacitating despair or vindictive rage and they are entrusting it to God for action, rather than lashing out themselves. That is why the hideous sentiments of the last verses of Psalm 137 where the psalmist wishes the destruction of his enemies' little children can find a place in the bible, he is honestly acknowledging his own emotions and entrusting them to God rather than acting on them himself. It is lament that turns him to God rather than grumbling that leads him to hot-headed action

As a church we need to learn to lament in the face of wrong. We are too good at grumbling and lashing out - if the Anglican Communion gave up grumbling even for Lent how different things could be. We are too good at burying our head in the sand - we only have to listen to the cries from the Third World to realise how selectively deaf we can be when we choose. And, perhaps more subtly because very often this is a personal thing, we are at times too good at bearing things stoically, incurring the praise of other people, when what we should be doing is admitting our need for God's Spirit to help us in our weakness so that endurance can produce hope rather than effective atheism.

There are stages to lament, just as there are stages to grief. Lament begins by owning the cause of the suffering and how it is affecting us; it progresses through the emotions engendered and cries out however falteringly to God in the midst of it all, like Rachel weeping over her children in Jeremiah refusing to comfort until there is an answer - but it listens for that answer rather than filling the air with its own noise. And that may take a long time, but lament is tested in the waiting. Many of you will know this for yourself and will look back on times when this has been true for you. The reliable presence of others sitting and staying alongside us perhaps in silence, as Job's friends at first did, can be a source of strength. What we can offer others going through their own difficulties is our presence alongside them that is not shocked by their lamentation - grumbling is so much easier to deal with because if we get fed up we can walk away and grumble ourselves, lamentation requires of us that we remain alongside those who suffer. If we really want to know the greatness of the Lord's faithfulness we must be prepared to face the depths of our own and the world's anguish. And that is not easy, but lament trusts that one day we will have a song to sing of God's faithfulness.

We heard in the Psalm the testimony of the Psalmist to God's deliverance following his lament. I close with some diffidence with my very personal testimony, written in 1991 after the events of a year when the imagery of Psalm 77 and the Lord's voice being heard above the whirlwind became very real to me. The circumstances don't matter now, this is my testimony to the Lord's faithfulness when I lamented.

First the rending and the shredding

and the cries, "My God, my God",

And the weeping, search for meaning,

and the doubting of God's love.

In the grieving, such deep grieving,

touch new depths, then deeper fall;

in the turmoil, restless yearning,

lonely silence blankets all.

Find no place for consolation

for the ever-aching heart,

and in darkness, in confusion,

feel all constants torn apart.

Then in whirlwind, then in tempest,

over waves of crashing sea

Jesus speaks, above the chaos

saying gently, "come to me."

Then the arms outstretched to welcome,

nail-pierced hands the answer give:

that from depths of desolation

hope now buried yet can live.

Then the ending of the sobbing,

then the tears that comfort find;

still there's grieving, yet the stinging

is disarmed of power to bind.

Then the peace, for God is present,

then the easing of the pain;

Gentle hands to hold, bring healing,

and the strength to love again.

Then the stillness and the resting,

quiet trust in God alone,

then the fullness, overflowing

from the depths that now are known.