29 May 2005

Introduction to the Lament

by Roxie Voran

Here we are ­ Memorial Day weekend. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had some trouble knowing what to do with this holiday. The holiday was originally called Decoration Day and it began in the late 1860s and 1870s when women decorated the graves of those who died in the American Civil War by putting flowers on them.

Now, I like the day off from work as much as the next guy. I don’t have a problem recognizing and remembering those who have died in war; that’s probably a good thing to do. When those women put flowers on the graves more than a century ago, they did so to help everyone remember how awful war was. Nowadays the message is often changed from “isn’t that awful” to “isn’t that wonderful” and Memorial Day turns into nothing more than a glorification of war. That’s where I do have a problem.

This year, we’re not going to ignore Memorial Day, but we’re going to recognize it a little differently. Our service today is a lament for all the violence in our world.

We live in a violent world. We live in a nation at war—the war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, the war against terror, the war on drugs. We are constantly confronted with images of violence, with language of war. When we look at the newspaper, there’s nothing new—just the same old story; Violence and death in the far reaches of the world; violence and death in our own country; violence and death around the corner and right down the street. What ever happened to that other old story—the one about peace on earth and goodwill to all? It seems so long since we’ve heard that story.

Many of us have tried to live as the prophet Jeremiah instructed the Israelite people in exile. “Seek the peace of the city where you live (the peace, the well-being, the shalom of the city where you live) and therein you will find your peace.” Even though we may have felt alienated from the society, we have tried to find ways to contribute to the greater good—to seek the well-being of our city. We have done our best, yet there is no peace.

So what do we do when things don’t work out right, and God doesn’t seem to be helping much either? Within the Judeo-Christian faith tradition, there is a place for corporate lament. This is where God’s people cry out to God expressing their disappointment and their anguish about the situation they are in and the fact that God has not gotten them out of it. There are numerous examples of the lament in the Old Testament—one entire book, Lamentations, and many of the Psalms. The Israelite people had a history of oppression by foreign powers and they needed space in their worship to express their profound grief over disastrous situations, such as the exile. The psalms of lament gave them permission to express their sorrow. This is what God’s people did when it seemed that God did not respond to their plight, did not hear them, did not care.

So today, here we are, feeling alienated in a world that often speaks the name of Jesus but does not reflect the values of His kingdom; a world where might makes right and life is often not valued; where the leaders of our state believe they are helping when they make it easier for more people to carry guns. We too cry out to God, giving voice to our grief and sadness, remembering those who suffer, and asking for help/asking for guidance in our situation.

As we begin, we will hear the music of “March Slav” written by the Russian composer Peter Tchaikovsky in the late 1800s as a funeral march for soldiers who were marching off to war in the Slavic countries of eastern Europe, many of them never to return.

Reading

My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?

My God, why have you forsaken the children?

Why, oh God, have you forsaken the children, the mothers, the fathers, brothers and sisters, the aged and the sick?

Are they not crying out to be spared from their terror?

Creator of all that is, what have they done to deserve fear and destruction?

Why, oh God, have your forsaken us?

Have we not cried out on their behalf?

Have we not spoken clearly of your love?

Have we not sung boldly of your mercy, of your justice and your peace?

Early in the morning and late at night, at noon and all through the day we have prayed to you, our God.

We have sung and shouted.

We have appealed to those in power.

We have done all this, God, to be faithful to your law,

The Law you had written on our hearts.

Have you not seen these things, have you not heard us?

Have we not done enough, have we not been earnest enough?

Come on, God!

Give me some reason to believe that you are a God of love,

A God who loves justice and shows mercy.

Help me, oh God, to believe that you still desire that all your creation live in peace.

Help me, oh God, for I am weary.

I am tired. I am angry, and in despair.

Confessing Our Complicity

Any discussion of violence in our society would be incomplete and would lack integrity if we did not consider our own contributions to that society and the role we all play. And truth be told, most of us are more culpable and more guilty than we are to admit.

Although we really don’t know how we might react if we were threatened and backed into a corner, it’s probably true that few, if any, of us would violently attack another person; we probably wouldn’t pull the trigger.

For all of us, there are people in the world that we don’t particularly care for. They may be people that we’ve run into (or who have run into us!) or they may be people who we’ve never met, but we’ve heard what they say and we’ve seen what they do. We ourselves would probably never do anything to hurt that person, but we will shed no tears if they get what we think they deserve at the hands of someone else. We’ll enjoy it immensely if and when they get their comeuppance.

One of the unavoidable realities of our world is this: people get abused in churches. Not only that, but people get abused in families, too, and that happens at about the same frequency in church-going families as it does in society as a whole. It would seem like a minimal standard ought to be that our homes and churches be places of safety.

But perhaps our greatest complicity, our most significant contribution to the violence in our world, comes from what we fail to do. Too often Christians have failed to emphasize in their teachings or to demonstrate in their lives that the Sermon on the Mount is central to Christian theology. That includes the Catholic church in Austria where Adolph Hitler was baptized in the late 19th Century and the Orthodox Christian church in Russia that counted Joseph Stalin among its members. And it includes contemporary churches where children that are in church on Sunday can be found the rest of the week bullying their weaker brothers and sisters in the Columbine High Schools of this land.

One of the roots of violence is the division that exists between people and groups of people, the lack of familiarity and understanding. In his letter to the Galatian church, Paul paints a picture of a community of faith in which divisions and barriers are broken down. “You are ALL children of God . . .There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

In this place and time, we would do well to understand, like those first century Christians, that God has given to us the ministry of reconciliation and the responsibility to carry it forward. God has challenged us to create a community in which there is no “us” and “them, no “red” and “blue,” no Anglo and Hispanic, but all are one in Christ Jesus.

In that context, I have to look in the mirror and ask myself the question: “Last Sunday when our brothers and sisters from Casa del Alfarero were here, how many times did I take the initiative to strike up conversations in an effort to get to know them?”

And there’s the image in the Bible of Jesus weeping over the city and saying “If only you understood the things that would bring you peace.”

Each of us as individuals, all of us as a congregation have had opportunities to do the little things that lead to understanding, trust, peace. We’ve not always done very well. So as part of our lament, we confess our own shortcomings and the ways in which the world we live in is a world of our own creation.

Meditation

Read Lamentations 3: 1 ­ 24

Does anyone else find this a little odd? At the end of what may be the most intense bit of complaining and griping anywhere in the Bible, the author abruptly shifts to praising God’s love and faithfulness. It seems, doesn’t it, a little out of place?

Many of us feel uncomfortable throwing complaints and hard questions in God’s direction. We shouldn’t—the creator of the universe isn’t going to feel threatened because you or I ask a question! And when you think about it, if we fail to express those questions and those feelings of grief and anger, like any other relationship, it can get in the way. And for many people it does.

But by honestly expressing our feelings, it enables us to move on, recognizing that times of trouble are not a cause for doubt. Instead troubles around us present us with a reason to believe even more deeply and to follow even more closely the God who is our only security.

In his book “Choosing Against War,” John Roth tells the story of when he was attending a conference in Hamburg, Germany. Late at night he was riding a commuter train to the place where he was staying. He was the only person on the train until an old man, dressed in rags and clearly suffering from a mental disability, shuffled onto the train. He was followed closely by four teenagers with an assortment of chains, tattoos and body piercings. They were talking and laughing loudly, taunting the old man and shouting obscenities at him. Then their verbal abuse turned physical as they began punching and kicking him. Roth describes his feelings of anger and rage ­ and overwhelming fear. He writes, “despite my longstanding commitment to peacemaking, nothing in my years of Sunday school classes in a pacifist denomination had prepared me to respond to such a situation. If I jumped in, would they attack me? Would I try to defend myself? Did they have weapons? Were they drunk enough to kill us?”

Such feelings of anger, fear, and helplessness are familiar to us. We see things that upset us, but we can’t imagine what we could do to make a difference, and we don’t want to stick our neck out.

But instead of thinking we have to set the world on fire, what if we all just tried to warm up to the person next to us? Scripture tells us that the angels in heaven rejoice when just one person gets it right. What if we all began to look for the little things that God is doing in the world, to notice them, talk about them, and rejoice with the angels.

We seem to talk a lot these days about being transformed. The Bible tells us to be transformed “by the renewing of your mind,” that is, by thinking about things in a new way. Last Sunday, I was preparing for the youth Sunday school class with the 4 students who are usually there, when 7 more showed up. Everything went OK, more or less, but at several points it became clear just how different some of these kids are; they’ve had very different experiences, they have very different concerns. That can be a problem—or it can be an opportunity. Which will we consider it?

There are countless situations like that. We can feel helpless; we can feel afraid. We can feel like we’ve got a problem. But can we move beyond those feelings?

Back to John Roth—a few minutes ago we left him on that train car in Germany. Here’s what happened: He got up out of his seat and called out to the old man, “Hans! Hans, how are you? It’s been so long since we’ve seen each other!” He helped the man to his feet and helped him to a seat, all the while talking to him about “I want to hear about your family. We have so much to catch up on.” etc. etc. The young men watched all of this, talked among themselves, and then got off the train at the next stop.

Who’s to say that, in our time of need, God will not also come to us and grant us the wisdom, the imagination, the courage that we need for whatever we encounter? The same Biblical writers who express so strongly to God their grief and anger also offer some of the most profound statements of faith and trust in God—a God’s whose love is stronger than all our fears; a God whose love has vanquished the very powers of hell.

Imagine if Christians, while realistically recognizing the trouble around them, were to live really believing that God’s love is stronger than their fears. The common sense of our culture teaches that the only ways to respond to fear are a cowardly retreat or a fight to the finish. The beauty of the Gospel is that Jesus Christ offers an alternative in the transforming power of love.

So we conclude by once again turning to the words of Jeremiah: “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for the Lord’s compassions never fail; they are new every morning. Great is thy faithfulness!”