Lonely City
Lamentations 1:1-6
October 3, 2010
There’s not been a whole lot of lamenting going around here. We avoid laments and that is a partial reason why this short Old Testament collection of Lamentations is so seldom read and digested. The unexamined Bible is worth reading.
In many Bibles they are still entitled belonging to Jeremiah, but for a number of reasons, literary and historical, that is no longer seen to be the case. Historically, these poems were written after the conquering and annihilation of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 B.C. It was an event of catastrophic proportions that goes well beyond September 11th in the destruction of a city, a people, a culture and religion. We don’t know who wrote these Lamentations, except that they were the people left behind unwillingly endowed with a burnt down city and temple, stripped of their intelligentsia, political and religious leadership.
They were, however, not dumb. These are acrostic poems, 22 verses or the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, the first letter of the word of each verse being the consecutive letter in the alphabet. They were dispirited and disillusioned, but they wrote with exquisite lyrical beauty, expressing their faith and hope. “How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations! She that was a princess among the provinces has become a vassal.”
You have to know how to lament properly. A lament is an expression of sorrow and grief, in particular, regretting the mistakes one has made, a more poetic prayer of confession. These Jerusalemite lamenters must have known Jeremiah, for like him they openly recognized that their situation is a result of Israel’s unfaithfulness over the previous generations. It was not unlike our era in which a kind of secularism had evolved and the traditional faith of Israel had been eroding, and people seemed more interested in all the other gods available in the neighbourhood. When the Babylonian Empire started to menace Israel and its neighbours, the Israelite court attempted to placate their foes à la Neville Chamberlain, and arrange for ill-conceived alliances with Egypt until the house collapsed. All that Jeremiah had declared and prophesied against such idolatry and foolishness became now crystal clear, and so those left behind lamented deeply once all was lost.
Except, they knew that they still had the Lord God. They felt that God had rejected them, turned his back on their plight, knowing that they had brought it on themselves. “The Lord is in the right, for I have rebelled against his word” (v. 18). They did not resort to the two more popular responses to catastrophe: they were not angry, nor did they whine. The church struggles still with these other options. We whine how unfair it all is, how injustice has been served, the public influence of the church is waning and attendance is dwindling. Fingers are always pointing at other people who don’t help the church rather than at ourselves who are the church.
Yet other churches are quick to explode with anger against the forces arrayed against them, to condemn others for their problems. The ploy a few weeks back of a Florida church setting to burn Qur’ans is evidence of that smoldering anger in many parts of Christendom trying to erupt literally into flame. During the regime of National Socialism in Germany, many Torahs were burned, which logically should have created a dilemma since the Torah is the Christian Old Testament. However, there had been a movement afoot for years among segments of the German church to eliminate the Old Testament from the Christian canon, along with any references and citations to it in the New Testament. Unfortunately, they were too busy with other matters to get around to the task.
We are angry with God and others for our decline, ignoring our racism, our visceral attacks against homosexuals, our condemnation of any nation, race, socio-economic group, or faith that is different than ours. No matter how bad things get, we need to lament, not to scapegoat others.
As we gather around the Lord’s Table on this World Communion Sunday, it is too bad that in reality we can only eat together in smaller collections of people. You know that when you eat with people, something in your relationship changes. If you eat with a Muslim, by the end of the meal the two of you have only one God and a common word to share. The only thing to lament is our unwillingness to do this earlier.
The Biblical way of lamentation, however, is no milk-toast sorrowfulness for our sins, but a rather impertinent challenge to God. “They heard how I was groaning, with no one to comfort me. All my enemies heard of my trouble; they are glad you have done it. Bring on the day you have announced, and let them be as I am” (v. 21). God may have done you wrong, may have ignored you when you are down and hurting, may have permitted all sorts of injustice to flourish, but make no mistake, you still have a God. It’s never over.
If there ever were a place for lament, it was in the Nazi concentration camps. Somehow, out of these successors to the Babylonian Exile emerge remarkable stories of the human spirit infused with the divine. There was the camp Terezin where the best musicians were collected, enough for two full symphony orchestras, and concerts almost every night. Even while one plays the blues in the worst of circumstances, the music lifts the soul and sings that there is still the life God gave us.
In one camp, never quite identified, there was a group of rabbis who as was their wont talked about the faith all day and all night as long as they had the strength. They were not oblivious to what was happening, so they debated what was wrong with God that the world had come to this cruel state. One day they decided to hold a formal trial of God for unfaithfulness. Witnesses were called, the pertinent Scriptures were read, the defense and the prosecution presented their cases, struggling all day with one another. At the end of the day, the verdict was announced - God was guilty of unfaithfulness. It was a groaning lament because they had come to the conclusion that the God they had served had failed them. But they had to quit because it was time for evening prayers. The world exists, so there is God, no matter what our lament.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan