Lamentations 1:1-16
“Shame and Tears”
October 3, 2010 - Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

         It gets her when she’s shopping. My wife passes the dairy case and sees Yoplait raspberry yogurt and sighs, “Oooooh, I used to buy that for Joanna. Now she’s off at college and I don’t need to shop for her. Ahhhh.” Or she walks by Joanna’s empty bedroom or spies a cute dog Joanna would have enjoyed or just wants a hug. There’s a big vacant hole in our days which our youngest daughter filled with fun and laughter and love.

         Myself, I miss having someone to eat the other half of a dozen donuts from Dizzy Dean’s or to take fishing or to watch “Psych” with. I don’t show or express it as much as Beth, but when I let myself ponder Joanna’s absence, I get an ache in my chest.

         All this of course is just part of growing older and changes that come to us in life. It’s nothing compared to what some of you feel who have lost a loved one in a tragic, permanent way. The pain of knowing there’s no return home at Christmas or in the summer goes well beyond our empty nest aches.

         The pain expressed by the writer of Lamentations is as strong as the loss of a child. It is a lament for a whole people, a whole nation, a whole way of life brutally crushed and destroyed by an invading army.

         All summer Beth and I have been getting ready to say goodbye to Joanna. The last fishing trip together for a long while. A final night crashed in our family room watching television. A final breakfast of bacon and fried eggs and waffles together on the Saturday morning she left. We all knew it was coming. We tried to prepare for it, but now it’s all over and here we are with these empty nest feelings.

         For much of the summer we’ve also been reading Jeremiah and watching events move toward the fall of Jerusalem in 587 or 586 B.C. We heard his warnings and the message of God’s judgment. We read about the armies of Babylon taking over the country and setting their vassal king on Judah’s throne. Last week we saw Jeremiah act out a public display of hope, buying a field even as siege ramps were being built up against the city walls. Jeremiah and those who listened to him should have been ready, but now it’s all over and we read what it felt like to be in exile, with Jerusalem in ruins.

         Tradition is that Jeremiah was the author of the little book we call Lamentations. The Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, even adds a verse at the beginning that says, “And it came to pass after Israel had been taken away into captivity and Jerusalem had been laid waste that Jeremiah sat weeping and lamented this lamentation over Jerusalem.” A later Latin translation adds, “with a bitter spirit, sighing and wailing.”

         There is no way to know if the tradition is true, if this is in fact Jeremiah’s own lament. No author is stated in the original Hebrew text. If it’s not Jeremiah, then it is someone else who lived through the same terrible events. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is the living testimony of the horrible desolation of God’s people when everything they held dear, everything they counted on was torn away from them.

         Whoever the writer is, he was a poet. Each chapter is a carefully constructed poem. Chapters 1, 2, 4 and 5 have 22 verses. Chapter 3 has 66 verses. Chapters 1 to 4 are each acrostic poems, each verse beginning with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet, somewhat like the structure of Psalm 119. Unlike much of the Bible’s poetry, there is a discernible meter or beat to many of the Hebrew lines in Lamentations.

         Why would a writer put such profound emotion into such a carefully ordered and formal structure? He’s talking about exile and enslavement, about the shame of being punished for their sins, about hunger and loneliness and despair. Why not write it as we might today in a wild, free style that would express the devastating and chaotic effect of what has happened? Why write these neat, polished, skillful lines, nicely arranged in alphabetical order?

         One theory is that it was a way for the lamenter to get a grip on his feelings. I can relate to that. Think it through. Lay it all out in some sort of order, and maybe we can handle it. Maybe we can get through it. But this is more than just an attempt to wrap difficult emotions in a tidy little poetic box. The writer of Lamentations wants us to understand that he means to cover it all, to let us feel what his people felt from A to Z. He wants us to get the whole story of what it’s like to have your home knocked down, to be carried off in captivity by a foreign power, to have your most sacred places violated by your enemies, to be thoroughly ashamed and disgraced by the knowledge that your own sins helped bring this all down on you and on your country.

         So this writer sat down to create poems that go something like, “‘A’ is for how alone we feel. ‘B’ is for the bitterness of our tears. ‘C’ is for our captivity in a foreign land.” And so on. It’s a catalogue of all the pain and suffering that Israel would experience and live with for the next nearly fifty years.

         You’re probably already a little uncomfortable. We don’t spend much time reading Lamentations or the other laments in Scripture. We hardly ever turn to that little section there in the back of your hymnal that’s entitled, “Laments.” We almost never read aloud in worship the psalm chosen to accompany today’s reading from Lamentations, Psalm 137. You won’t find it with the other psalms selected for our hymnal. It’s just too painful, too depressing, too hard. We come to church to be encouraged and uplifted. Let’s get on to something else.

         It would be easy to jump right over to chapter 3 of Lamentations, where we do find beautiful expressions of trust in God in the middle of the pain. “Because of the Lord’s great love, we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” And “For people are not cast off by the Lord forever. Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love.” So why not just turn there now and get to the kind stuff, to the hopeful word, to love and peace and joy?

         We will not leave lament behind that quickly this morning because that’s not how this book is written. The writer walks us through two alphabets worth of agony before he gets to hope and love. And it’s not how God wrote the whole book, the whole Bible, the whole story of our salvation. In the Old Testament we sit with a long, long history of sin and death and disaster before we get to the Good News of Jesus. And even when our Savior appears, we don’t get to Easter without walking a long road with Him to the Cross. Lament is part of the story, a huge part of the story.

         The truth is that Christian faith without some lament is not real faith. In fact, life without lament is not real life. If we try escape the lament, or get away from it too fast, or pretend we don’t feel it, what we end up with is a cheap, phony, shallow faith, a fake life.

         I’d like to invite you this morning to read these verses from Lamentations 1. Then maybe go home and read the whole book. Then let yourself feel it for awhile. Right now, just skim over the verses you heard today and let them evoke your own feelings of lament. Your personal sense of pain and loss may be close to the surface or it may be deeply buried, but God gave us Lamentations because He knows it’s there.

         You might read words and phrases like “deserted” in verse 1 and “no one to help” in verse 7 and “no one is near to comfort me” in verse 16, calling up your own loneliness and isolation and sense that no one is really close to you, no one can really help.

         Or you might hear “once was great” in verse 1 and “all the splendor has departed” in verse 6 and “Jerusalem remembers all the treasures that were hers in days of old” in verse 7 and remember when you lost a lot of money or a good job or a beautiful place where you once lived.

         Verse 2 says “all her friends have betrayed her” and verse 7 moans that “all her enemies looked at her and laughed” and verse 14 wails “He has given me into the hands of those I cannot withstand.” Hear those and recall a time when you were betrayed, when a friend let you down or an enemy hurt you terribly.

         In verse 5 we’re told “because of her many sins” and in verse 8 “Jerusalem has sinned greatly” and in verse 14 “My sins have been bound into a yoke” and we know that a great many of our own laments happen because of our own sins, the pain and heartbreak we’ve caused ourselves by failing God and failing others.

         Or we might just listen to the emotions in verse 2 “Bitterly she weeps at night, tears are on her cheeks” or in verse 4 “her young women grieve, and she is in bitter anguish” or verse 11 “All her people groan” or summed up in verse 16 “This is why I weep and my eyes overflow with tears.” And we feel again our own bitterness and groans and tears that came for any number of reasons.

         I know this is hard. I didn’t want to preach this text today. I know you’d like me now to tell a funny, poignant story and make it all seem better, brighter, easier to handle. But that wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be fair to that city about whom the psalmist wrote, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill.” It wouldn’t be fair to you, because your pain is real and important and should not be forgotten. And it wouldn’t be fair to God, because this text is in His Word because our pain has become His pain.

         Verse 12 of Lamentations 1 was at an early time incorporated into the Holy Week liturgy of the church. That mournful cry, “Is it nothing to you all you who pass by? Look around you and see. Is any sorrow like my sorrow…?” was taken as the lament of Mary as she watched her Son Jesus hung on the Cross, or even as the cry of Jesus Himself when most of those who witnessed His death ignored or mocked Him. It became one of the most haunting arias in the crucifixion portion of Handel’s “Messiah.”

         For us, that connection between verse 12 and the suffering and death of Jesus is a sign that God Himself connects with all our suffering and sorrow. Our laments are His laments. He made our pain His pain. Our sorrow became His sorrow. Our sins and shame and tears became His burden on the Cross. That’s the holy, mysterious, wonderful connection that Jeremiah or whoever made for us as he sat weeping in the ruins of Jerusalem or in exile by the waters of Babylon.

         As we come to the Lord’s Table this morning we come to remember that Jesus’ body was cruelly broken on a Roman instrument of execution, that His blood was shed by whips and nails and a spear. That’s what the bread and cup communicate to us. It means that we are not alone in whatever hurt and pain we feel. Our Lord felt it too. There is someone near to comfort us, to be with us in our own laments. He lamented too. This bread and this cup are the real presence of Jesus Christ with you and in you and even in your pain.

         So as I said, I don’t want to leave our laments behind too quickly. It’s right and good and holy to sit with them awhile, just like Jeremiah and all those others who could not sing happy songs in a foreign land. But I also want to invite you into the compassionate and gracious presence of our Lord who feels along with you, who in the end will not leave you alone and desolate and weeping. The greatest mystery of all is that as Jesus enters into your pain with you, you will find comfort and healing and new life. May that be your experience at our Lord’s Table today.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2010 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj