by Rev. Julianne Porras-Center
How lonely sits the city that once was full of people… The roads mourn, for no
one comes to the festivals. All her gates are desolate, her priests groan, her young
girls grieve, Her foes have become the masters, her enemies prosper… she weeps
bitterly in the night..
Am I the only one who heard the lectionary passage this week and felt it in my
bones?
Every once in a while, this happens — when I open up Scripture and words that
were written thousands of years ago by strangers feel as if they were written just
yesterday by someone I love.
Today is World Communion Sunday – a day when Christians around the world
recognize unity in diversity, unique cultural traditions composed from the same
foundational fabric of sacrificial love— and yet I think it’s safe to say that most of
us feel divided. Torn. Rather than drinking from the cup of common union, it feels
as if we’re at war doesn’t’ it? Not even with any one nation. But within ourselves.
Within our communities. And, yes, through our investments, our weapons, our
international alliances, we are also quite literally at war, actively contributing to it.
And when I read this passage, I felt the grief of that. I thought of Watsonville, the
little city I serve and love, and how one of the reasons that Gus and I decided to
move there was because of the life we saw there. Old men in cowboy hats sitting in
the Placita talking about the good old days. Women carrying bundles of laundry to
the local laundromat and talking to friends along the way. Young people flooding
the streets during lunch breaks to get tacos or hot cheetohs or whatever garbage they like to eat. There was a sadness, certainly. There was and has always been a
need. But there was life too.
You don’t see that as much anymore. Depending on the daily headline, or the
rumor mill of where ICE might be at any moment, the farmer’s markets are quieter.
The daily rhythms of life are halted by fear and anxiety. And I hear this line…
How lonely sits the city that once was full of people… The roads mourn, for no
one comes to the festivals. All her gates are desolate, her priests groan, her young
girls grieve, Her foes have become the masters, her enemies prosper… she weeps
bitterly in the night..
And my first thought is… was well that’s just too sad to talk about on a Sunday. It
already seems to come out in every other conversation I have!! How are you? We
ask. Well…..
But then another whisper… we have to talk about it. More than that, we have to
feel it. Our grief. Our anger. Our rage. Our hurt. Our disillusionment. That is our
cross to bear and I am reminded… that we are not the first to feel these
uncomfortable feelings, to wrestle with them.
Afterall, this passage comes from the book of Lamentations – there is precedent for
this level of devastation.
And so today I want to talk about lament. I want to lament with you all, grieve
together. But first we have to talk about what Lament is not:
Lament is not:
An excuse for apathy, hopelessness, or passivity in the face of the status quo. It is
not burying our heads in the sand because we are too afraid of the world outside.
Lament is also not:
A self-important, navel-gazing woe is me kind of self-pitying narcissism. It is not
focused on how devastation will befall me, but upon how it is befalling all of us.
Finally, lament is not:
A call to violence or destruction, whether in word or in deed. It’s not actually a call
to action at all. It’s the step before that. When the anger and the hurt still burns too
brightly to think clearly. Still feels too painful to strategize. When we know that if
we speak or act out we might say or do something vindictive or defensive that we
regret.
Lament is the pause in the midst of the storm, where we acknowledge and express
all that has been lost, before we figure out how we’re going to get it back.
An example:
The first pastor that I think I could ever call my pastor, the woman who inspired
me to go into ministry, she used to tell the story of when she was a young woman
who had recently suffered sexual assault. In the wake of her grief, she would go
into the fields outside her house and she would take a bible with her, and she would
flip it open right to the middle, to the Psalms, and she would read them one by one
aloud, angrily, bitterly, in pain and anguish.
She credits this with saving her life.
Because in expressing her pain, in identifying it, feeling it, and giving it voice in
poetry, in letting it echo alongside the voices of the prophets, she expelled
something from her, which could have been corrosive. And that something was not
just her pain — but her natural human desire to normalize that pain. To minimize
it. To invalidate it. To say to that stone in your chest “No, that’s not there. Or, no.
That’s not real. Or even, this is the consequences of my actions. I deserve this.”
A lament is designed not to rationalize away our uncomfortable feelings, not to
dissociate from them or ignore them, but to express them and so take a step not
towards solving them away like some problem, but toward healing them like the
wound from which they emerge.
This is true personally. Especially for those of us, myself included, who tend to
bottle up or rationalize our feelings away, sweep them under the rug of addiction,
or dress them up in the robes of achievement. We think that we will be loved less
or found to be faithless if we express our anger, our hurt, our disappointment, our
doubt — oh ye of little faith, o ye of the special snowflakes, o ye the ungrateful –
but this couldn’t be further from the truth.
If the Bible is any testament, and we are here because it is, then God not only
accepts lamentations, but in fact calls us to lament. Calls us into greater honesty
with ourselves and God. Calls us into greater intimacy. Calls us to be so
forthcoming with our pain that it looks quite frankly dramatic. You might recall
that in the Bible there are ample scenes of prophets doning sackcloth and sitting in
ashes. By wearing this rough, coarse material – made from goat or camel hair –
and placing ashes on their heads – these prophets publicly and vulnerably showed
their heartfelt grief, distress, remorse, and repentance.
This was used for personal lamentations and acts of mourning, as in Job, but more
often it was used by prophets in a communal sense. A call to express pain and
anger and rage together – a call to repent as a people, as a nation, and a body of
believers.
And I don’t know about you, but I don’t see the church doing enough of this. I see
us just trying to keep on keeping on… keep the same rhythms, the same status quo,
sing the same songs, except… they feel hollower, don’t they? Kind of like… kind of like Weekend at Bernie’s, somedays I think we’re just propping up and putting
cool sunglasses on something that might better be laid down.
In the midst of the current crises, it feels a bit like the status quo… isn’t really
cutting it, is it?
I think very often about how the Civil Rights movement was led not by politicians,
not by business leaders, but by pastors and parishioners of the Black Church in
America. Churches were the site of justice, the cite of reform, the place where
meetings about “where do we go from here?” happened.
And those churches were able to do that work, because they had baked into their
worship… lament.
David Docusen, in his book Neighborliness: Finding the Beauty of God Across
Dividing Lines, writes:
“Predominantly white churches are praising and worshiping and celebrating while
rarely entering into the power of lament that is experienced in predominantly
black, Hispanic and Native American gatherings.”
These churches, these brothers and sisters – they know a thing or two about
lament. They’ve had to. Because these communities have had everything taken
from them again and again, something some of us are only learning now in these
unprecedented times. But other traditions – they know Jesus not just as the Easter
Sunday victorious new creation, but as the suffering and persecuted man who was
wrongfully detained, convicted without fair trial, and put to death — a victim of
state violence by an oppressive regime.
And today on World Communion Sunday, as we take up the Peace and Global
Witness offering, I can think of nothing more fitting than a call to learn from these
churches and communities: a call to honesty, a call to lament.
And so I ask, and you do not need to raise your hand, but I invite you to bear
witness in your heart of hearts:
How many of you have lost faith in our nation?
How many of you have lost faith in the church to rise to the challenges we are
facing?
How many of you, looking out at the world, have even started to doubt, to
question, to lose faith in God?
I ask this not to condemn us, to make us feel guilty or shameful, but because the
essence of Lament is honesty and authenticity – a wittling down of our faith to the
essentials.
My favorite prayer in all the Bible is a prayer to Jesus in Mark 24.
“Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” Doesn’t that say it all?
But a new favorite prayer might be the end of our scripture passage today:
“19 The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall! 20 My
soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me. 21 But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
22 The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, God’s mercies never come to an
end; 23 they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. 24 “The LORD is my
portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in God.””
Lament unlocks our capacity for hope.
You see, our brothers and sisters in the global church – black and Hispanic and
native American churches and more, churches led by a theology of liberation rather
than praise – they know that the government was never going to usher in the
kingdom of heaven… that’s God’s work, that’s our work, that’s the church’s work. And it is the work of courage that we are called to now.
And the work of courage that Christ gives us as an example.
Did the politicians of Jesus day speak truth to power and let justice roll down like
waters… ? No, they washed their hands clean and let an innocent man be crucified.
Now don’t get me wrong — it’s not that Jesus wasn’t political. He was remarkably
so — he asked for a new social order, one which freed the captive and uplifted the
poor and poor in spirit. But he wasn’t waiting around for the government to do
those things — he was doing them within and alongside the community.
And he was doing it with what he had. Not a complex economic agenda, but a
simple one, which was and is so impossibly difficult to live up to. Give us this day
our daily bread, and nothing more. Luke 3:11 If you have two tunics, give one
away. Matthew 6:34 Do not worry about tomorrow for tomorrow will worry for
itself. Have faith.
Not a big, showy, impressive faith — but faith in the small, the minute, the
mundane. Faith the size of a mustard seed, faith enough to say to the mulberry tree
“be uprooted and planted in the sea” and faith to say “I know we’ve never grown
mulberry trees in the sea before… I know that seems impossible… I might even
like my mulberry tree right here in tis safe garden… but if that’s what God is
calling us to do, well let’s try something new.”
And if I’m honest in my lament, I lament my own cowardice when I hear Christ’s
words. I don’t just want a mustard seed. I want a 401K, and a comfortable life. I
want job security. I want a glass of wine and a good book.
And yet… as the Jewish poet Emma Lazarus wrote:
“Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”
This is the same poet, by the way, who wrote the famous “Give me your tired, give
me your poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free” poem which is inscribed on
the Statue of Liberty, the symbol of migration into this country, and which was
very recently amended.
Until we are all free, we are none of us free… In other words, I can’t have that kind
of security, the kind that my cowardice desires, unless I have courage now. We, as
churches that we know are in decline in numbers and in credibility, we can’t have
security unless we have courage now. And we can’t have courage until we are
honest in our grief and our lament.
And thank God we have a God who has baked this into the fabric of our faith.
Because here is the crux –The cross. We let dying things die. We don’t degrade
them by carrying them around all weekend. We bury them. We grieve them. And
only then, only then when the burial rights have been completed, the body
embalmed, the community mourned — then, the resurrection. Not of the same
thing — the disciples didn’t even recognize Jesus on the road to Emmaus — but as
a new creation.
So let us lament the death of an old way of being, an old false faith, an old false
assurance. Let us don sackcloth and ash. Let us wail for Goddsakes. But let us
remember the reason we gather here — not because Christ died but because Christ
is risen. And that, my friends, ought generate the tiny little seed of faith necessary
to say to the way that things have been that they must be made new.
May it be so, O Lord. Amen.
