Learning to Lament
Notes
Transcript
Prayer
Lamentations
I want to begin this morning with a sampling of what you’ll find in the Psalms.
Psalms 42:1-3 - As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?
My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me all day long, “Where is your God?”
Psalm 31 - Be merciful to me, Lord, for I am in distress; my eyes grow weak with sorrow, my soul and body with grief.
My life is consumed by anguish and my years by groaning; my strength fails because of my affliction, and my bones grow weak.
Psalm 6 - Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger or discipline me in your wrath.
2 Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am faint; heal me, Lord, for my bones are in agony.
3 My soul is in deep anguish. How long, Lord, how long?...
6 I am worn out from my groaning. All night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears.
7 My eyes grow weak with sorrow; they fail because of all my foes.
I could go on for a long time, the Psalms are filled with prayers of sorrow and anguish, of crying out to God in the midst of pain and difficulty. These are known as Psalms of Lament, they make up at least half of the 150 Psalms. But it’s not just the Psalms, we find open expressions of grief throughout the Bible.
Book of Job in the Old Testament is one long lament to God, Job crying out in the midst of his unfathomable suffering, trying to get some understanding of why God has - in his mind - treated him so unjustly.
There’s a book in the Old Testament called Lamentations - it is the people of Israel lamenting to God after the Babylonians came in and conquered their kingdom, destroying Jerusalem and the temple, taking many of them into exile in Babylon.
Listen to description of Jerusalem lamenting: Bitterly she weeps at night, tears are on her cheeks. Among all her lovers there is no one to comfort her. All her friends have betrayed her; they have become her enemies.
We see Jesus himself expressing deep grief and anguish throughout his ministry - sorrowing over Jerusalem over their lack of response to his invitation into Kingdom of God, weeping in John 11:35, crying out in anguished prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, on the cross..
From Hebrews 5:7 - During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death...
Bible takes seriously that loss - and hence the need to grieve, are an ordinary part of life.
We often see losses in our life as an interruption, get through it in order to get life back to normal. God tells us plainly - it’s not an interruption, life regularly involves loss - Ecclesiastes 3:1, 4...
There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:...a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.
We experience loss all the time - some losses are big, traumatic, others are smaller, more commonplace - but they are still losses.
Some losses we readily recognize - death of a loved one, death of a beloved pet. Losing a job, divorce.
Some losses come out of great trauma - sexual abuse comes at a great cost. It’s hard to imagine what the people in Ukraine are going through right now - fleeing their homes, their country, others trying to stay put in the midst of the invading Russian army. All losses that come with that - loss of life, security, your city in rubble.
But there are many losses we don’t recognize as quickly…parents of children with special needs. Every parent has dreams for their child (graduation, marriage, their own career) - losses that come with realizing those things may never happen for you or your child.
Losses we experience when afflicted with illness, or as we age. I remember my Dad, when he had to give up golfing because his knees couldn’t take it anymore (and then had to give up driving), little by little, loss.
There’s loss even in good things, normal, everyday things - when people retire (loss of sense of purpose, work community), graduations, children becoming less dependent.
And I say all this because we aren’t typically very good at dealing with loss and pain. With grieving. Our tendency is to avoid it, brush it off - if we even recognize that it’s happening.
Consider some of the ways our culture has shifted in terms of funerals. Historically, funerals have always been a time of community mourning. Wearing black. In Jesus’ day - and it still exists today in many parts of the world, you had professional mourners - women who were paid to weep at funerals (culture was very much - we expect mourning!).
For us today that seems crazy - why would you do that? Now we often prefer to call a funeral a “celebration of life”. Shift in language says a lot - we prefer to focus on the good, the happy - celebrate, rather than mourn, focusing on the loss.
Let’s be honest, dealing with loss, grieving - hard stuff. Feels awkward, don’t know what to do such strong emotions, especially because it involves pain.
Losing my first dog, Tuesday, up at Bluestone, group of guys doing work projects, had Tuesday out there with us, and she ran under truck we were driving in.
She died in my arms, so I start weeping. Here we are, in the middle of this road, I’m sitting there, tears streaming down. Rest of guys standing around feeling really bad for me but feeling really awkward (what do you do, what do you say?).
Except one - David Kaufman, he came right up and behind me and hugged me.
Sometimes we’re afraid that if we give in to our feelings of grief, our pain, we might fall apart, overwhelm us. Or it’s going to hinder what we’re trying to do.
One of big mistakes I made when we moved out of PC(USA) and had to forsake our building, was not taking seriously enough what a loss that was for many people.
How important that space had been, in so many ways. I was too preoccupied with moving into new, we’re going to be a part of ECO now, it’s going to be great.
But, as we just saw - though we might want to avoid it, the Bible does not shy away from grief and loss.
Why is that? All these lamentations, this crying out to God in the Scriptures? Even Jesus himself. What’s that all about? What do they know that we don’t?
It’s simply this, like we saw last week with limits, there are gifts in grief and loss. As Peter Scazzero says, “buried treasure.” Today we want to discover those buried treasures.
We’re in the thick of our sermon series, Deeper Still, about moving from shallow Christianity into deeper discipleship. Central to becoming like Jesus is growing in emotional maturity, Scazzero says it this way:
An emotionally healthy disciple slows down to be with Jesus, goes beneath the surface of their life to be deeply transformed by Jesus, and offers their life as a gift to the world for Jesus.
We’re been talking about things we need to be an emotional healthy disciple:
To be before you do. Follow the crucified, not the Americanized, Jesus. Embracing the gift of limits
Today, way we move toward being an emotionally healthy disciple is to learn to lament. This is our main paint - that if we willing to move into them, there are buried treasures in grief and loss.
So, let’s talk a little bit of how this works, how we find treasures in grief and loss. Three things: Watch. Wait. Welcome.
We watch. To watch is to pay attention, pay attention to the pain.
Rather than avoiding it, numbing it, glossing over it, or pretending the pain’s not there, we attend to it.
I love this quote from Emotionally Healthy Discipleship: “Loss demands to be grieved and pain cries out to be felt.”
This grieving and this feeling is what we see in the Bible - psalms of lament, book of Lamentations, Jesus crying out to the Father in anguished prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, on the cross.
Why? Why sit there in our pain, feeling it, grieving a loss? Because that’s reality of our experience!
And reality is where we meet God, because that’s where God is. God is God of truth, of reality. Scazzero: we “pay attention to our pain in God’s presence as an expression of prayer to him”.
This is the whole basis of Psalms. I bring what’s actually going on in me before God in prayer. This is what it means to watch, paying attention to your pain. And this is where we have to begin - watching.
We watch. Then we wait. As Scazzero describes it, we wait in the confusing in-between.
If we don’t ignore them or numb it, loss and grief force us to stop, to wait, to change our plans (which is why we so often see them as undesired interruptions).
Let’s be honest. Waiting stinks. It’s hard. Not sure where God is, what God is up to? What will come out of all this, when will it end?
You see this prayer in Psalms numerous times: How long, o Lord, how long?
It’s telling though, because it’s honestly rare to find stories in Bible where there isn’t waiting involved. God appears to be very content to let us sit in these times - which should tell us something about how God wants to work in us (as opposed to how we think he should work in our lives - fix it now!). Remember, part of the definition of success of discipleship is not just becoming who God calls us to become and doing what he calls us to do, but in his way, and according to his timetable…which often involves waiting.
Joseph, after being sold by his brothers in slavery, spent years as a slave, and then years imprisoned - all the while being completely innocent.
Numerous stories of woman aching to bear children and having to wait years…Sarah, Hannah, Elizabeth.
Israelites were enslaved 430 years in Egypt! Then they still had to wander for another 40 years in the wilderness before God brought them into the Holy Land!
In my own life, one of the most significant waiting times for me was how long I was single.
That was a loss for me, in my mind and heart, dream, desire to be married, start a family. I thought for sure it would happen by the time I was thirty - I never fathomed it wouldn’t be until I was forty!
At the time, I certainly did not appreciate what a loss that was - thought I certainly felt the pain of waiting, of the confusion, of feeling deeply held desire go unfulfilled.
I believe as a church, we’re just coming out of time of waiting: Losing our previous building, worshiping in rented space. Covid hitting in the midst of that - having to mask, keep distance, meet remotely.
When this building was becoming a reality for us last fall, Monica had a great insight she shared in Spiritual Formation Group - that last 3 1/2 years have been a time of preparation, of God working in us for something new he’s bringing us into. We didn’t just move into this new building, we did so with a new vision, new mission, greater readiness to become a church that leads others into the abundant life of Jesus Christ!
Here’s the thing - if we are willing to watch, to wait, then we will be ready to welcome, welcome the new. Receive the buried treasure. Isaiah 45:3...
I will give you hidden treasures, riches stored in secret places,so that you may know that I am the Lord, the God of Israel, who summons you by name.
I think about Peter, terrible night when Jesus is arrested and taken away by the authorities, disciples scatter, scared. Peter is so eager to find out what’s happening he manages to get into the high priest’s courtyard, outside the building where Jesus is being tried.
Three times he is recognized as a follower of Jesus. Three times, as Jesus predicted he would, he denies knowing Jesus. Then the cock crows a second time and Peter realizes what he’s done. As he recognizes it, he collapses in tears. He weeps and he weeps.
And it’s interesting to consider exactly what Peter is weeping over. What is he losing in this moment, what is he grieving over? His image of himself is being destroyed. Peter thought he was braver and more bold and fully dedicated to Jesus. He wasn’t - not at this point, anyway.
Scazzero says that one of the gifts, treasures God gives us in our grief and loss is that God makes us more of our true selves in Christ. That often involves gift of gaining a truer revelation of who we are. We become more self aware.
Let’s be honest, that can be a painful process - have to admit hard things about ourselves. But what a gift to be our true selves, to not have to pretend!
Similar dynamic in the tragic story of Jerry Sittser, who was driving with his mother, his wife and his four children when they were struck by a drunk driver. Just like that, 3 generations of people precious to him were gone.
Sittser went through a long and difficult journey of grief. He writes about it in his book, A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows through Loss. Here’s what he learned as he watched and waited:
It is therefore not true that we become less through loss - unless we allow the loss to make us less, grinding our soul down until there is nothing left…loss can also make us more…I did not get over the loss of my loved ones; rather, I absorbed the loss into my life, like soil receives decaying matter, until it became part of who I am. Sorrow took up permanent residence in my soul and enlarged it…The soul is elastic, like a balloon. It can grow larger through suffering.
God enlarging our soul, what a beautiful image. An enlarged soul allows us to receive gift of his revelation to us, know him more fully
In grief, God can make us softer and more compassionate, willingness to enter the pain of others because we’ve learned to live with the pain in our own lives. God can make us more truly alive, give us a greater sense of wonder of the astonishing world God created
These are some of the buried treasures we discover in our grief and loss as we learn to lament.
So what are some ways we might do this? How might we learn to entrust God with all deaths - great or small - we experience? How might we learn to lament, watching (paying attention to our pain), waiting (in the confusing in-between), welcoming (newness God will bring).
To begin with watching. Pay attention to your pain in the presence of God as an expression of prayer.
Whatever in your life that’s going on, you bring it as honestly as you can before God. You feel it in his presence. And whatever you need to express in that moment, express it as prayer.
You might do this by writing your own Psalm, your own prayer to God. If you don’t know where to start, begin by reading the Psalms, one a day. Take first few lines of a Psalm and then let it become your own.
Another way, what Scazzero calls “Explore the Iceberg” - very simple exercise, to reflect on what your feelings, where God may be working in you.
Quiet yourself, few moments of reflective prayer
Take two minutes to reflect on and write your responses to four questions: What am I angry about? What am I sad about? What am I anxious about? What am I glad about?
Inspiration - Buried Treasure really is an apt analogy for grief and loss.
Whole reason people bury treasure is so it won’t be found! This analogy reminds us that finding treasure in grief and loss will not be easy. It’s hard work. It will take time. There will be pain involved in process.
I just read a book called The Lost City of the Monkey God. Modern expedition to find and begin an archaeological excavation of a rumored “lost city” that existed deep in the jungles of Honduras. After years of searching and through modern technology, they found it - but just to begin to excavate the site, they had to hack through jungle with machetes, battle poisonous snakes, deal with parasitic infection from sand flea bites, mudslides, and on and on.
But it was an amazing find - National Geographic worthy. Perfectly, untouched artifacts, hundreds of them.
So it is with grief and loss - there is treasure buried there. It is worth the work. God can and will bring good out of our grief and loss.
in fact, that’s the whole thrust of the Gospel…from the cross to the empty tomb, from death to life, from mourning to dancing.
Taking our grief and loss seriously, we are taking God seriously when he promises to us, Romans 8:28...
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
Take God at his word, that he really can and will work for our good in all things. Even - and especially - in painful things. In losses. If we’re willing to watch. To Wait. To Welcome.