Let the Whole Church Say Amen! by Stookey Laurence Hull;

Author:Stookey, Laurence Hull;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abingdon Press
Published: 2017-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Exercise 14

The Lost Art of Lament

Read Lamentations 1:12-16.

It is a strange thing to observe that Christians at public prayer so infrequently engage in lament despite the fact that the Bible contains a book called Lamentations. That book is very brief, by its size perhaps concealing how widespread lament is in the canon as a whole. The Psalms are full of laments, as is Job. Jesus weeps over the city of Jerusalem and utters a loud cry of anguish from the cross. The final book of the New Testament contains poignant cries of distress by the saints who are suffering persecution.

Probably most Christians do much more lamenting over the back fence than in the house of the Lord. We engage in “ain’t it a shame” discussions with friends and neighbors far more regularly than we cry out in distress to God. To be blunt: Lamentation has gotten a bad name in the church. People who complain are looked upon as lacking in faith. One is supposed to trust God in every circumstance without complaint. The silver lining of every cloud is to be identified at once, no matter how tragic the circumstances. In preparing this exercise, I happened to look at a section of an NRSV study Bible that contains some eight hundred entries in its dictionary of biblical terms. Lament and lamentation are not to be found there. How revealing of the blind spot that afflicts us!

Hence in the church we hardly know what to do when our town has experienced racial tension or gun violence in the schools, when our family has lost a member through suicide or an avoidable accident, when the nation faces an international crisis or loses a leader to an assassin’s bullet. Our inability to express our raw pain in such instances is palpable. We smile stoically, sing “Amazing Grace,” and mutter nonsense about God having done these things for some good reason. (Do we really believe that the God made known in Jesus Christ engineers shooting sprees by students, reigns of terror by dictators, and accidents that occur when drivers are under the influence of alcohol or other drugs?) Those who suffer the greatest pain thereby feel excluded. They dare not admit their deepest feelings, and the church gives them no liturgical outlet for their distress. The lack of habits of lamentation in our time constitutes an enormous but generally unrecognized form of exclusion.

Far better that we should do what biblical people did all the time: Allow people—indeed encourage people—to cry out in agony to the God who, far from causing us pain, suffers with us under it. Lament can be justified on practical grounds—it is cathartic, enabling us to feel better because we have gotten something “off our chests.” That is not an unimportant reason for lament, but there is a far better one. Good lamentation is honesty before the God who already knows how we feel. Read Psalm 139:1-6 for amplification. To put on a smiley face before the All-Knowing One is to engage in deceit.

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