Preached · March 5, 2023
Series · Lament
Text · Lamentations 1
Christians aren't allowed to feel things
There can be the sentiment that Christians in particular are not allowed to feel things. I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot of times I notice that we don't have funerals anymore—we have celebrations of life. "Funeral" is a sad word; we don't want to just grieve, we want to celebrate everything about a person's life and not necessarily focus on the death. Even worship services are sometimes not called worship services anymore. The last church I served at had a big sign on it, in permanent letters, much to my pastor's anger—he was not the one who made the sign, of course. It was called a "celebration service." And my pastor was like, "But what if somebody's not here to celebrate? What if something is going on in their life that's not worthy of celebration?"
And there's a lot of bad advice out there about what Christians are supposed to do around sadness, or anxiety, or depression, or doubt. I have some examples on the screen. These are all from famous pastors whose quotes I found online. They're not worthy of putting their names on there.
"Anxiety stems from a lack of faith in our Heavenly Father, as unbelief gets the upper hand in our hearts. Much anxiety, Jesus says, comes from little faith." "God promises to be our comforter and protector, but we deny the credibility of God's word and allow fear to set the limits of our obedience." Again, this is all bad advice, okay? Just because it's on the screen doesn't mean I agree with it. "Paul and Jesus explicitly command us not to be anxious, so to be anxious is a sin." "The Bible tells us of a specific evil condition of the heart, namely anxiety. Stop for a moment and think how many different sinful actions and attitudes come from anxiety." "Is doubt a sin? If we're questioning who God is or taking lightly the promises he lays out for us, then yes, doubt is a sin. In the Bible, doubt and fear are sins."
I did not have to go to weird corners of the Christian internet to find these quotes. They're on mainstream websites of people whose names you probably might recognize.
Denial is a form of survival
Now, I have some compassion for this sort of bad advice, because denial is a form of survival. Denial is a form of survival when we are inundated with constant needs to be sad or anxious or depressed or filled with doubt. Pushing those feelings away is a way of surviving, of getting through the moment or the day or the month or the season or the year. One theologian said that the condition of our culture, particularly an affluent culture like America, is covert despair—repressed hopelessness. This feeling that we might have that things are just getting worse and worse, that the world is burning. And so our only option is not to feel all of that, because we would be overwhelmed, but to turn away.
And so I think some of this advice, from places on the internet with Christian logos on them, might come from a place where we are just repressing that sense of hopelessness. You can't have doubt, you can't have anxiety, you can't have despair—because if we allowed that to happen, then we would all just quit. We look around and we see how hopeless things can be, and so the only option is to look away or pretend it doesn't exist. Many forms of Christianity buy into this, and it's not just Christians who are guilty of this. Any sort of positive-thinking movement can be guilty of this sort of "push away the doubt, push away the anxiety—that's not welcome here."
The book of Lamentations exists
But, friends, I'm here to tell you that the book of Lamentations exists. And more than exists—it's in your Bible. It's in the Bible of two different religions. It's in the Hebrew Bible. It's in the Christian Bible. It is a book all about being doubtful and scared and angry and filled with anxiety and a distinct lack of hope. Lamentations contains all the things that the above advice tells you not to do, and yet it gets put into this inspired library of books that we call Scripture.
Lamentations questions God's goodness. It questions God's ability to save. It's filled with statements that anybody—nobody needing a psychology degree—could label anxiety or despair. It dares to complain about suffering and to admit that sometimes life just sucks. Lamentations' testimony is bitter and raw and largely left that way. It's filled with conflicting statements about suffering, God's role in the world, and about God, God's self. The poetry of Lamentations assaults God with questions and downright insults the divine. Listen to chapter 1, verse 20:
Pay attention to me, Lord, for I am in distress. My stomach is churning. My heart is wrung inside of me because I am so bitter. In the streets, the sword kills. In the house, it's like death.
Lamentations is a book that does not hold back. At its worst moments, it can feel like a teenager crying in the bathroom about a breakup. And in its best moments, it can be this raw, honest writing of just despair and hopelessness. And I find so much hope—permission—I'm not even sure what the right word is, that this exists in the book that we call Holy Scripture, in the Bible. Because it opens up all of these possibilities for what it means to be a person of faith, to be a spiritual person—a person who maybe or maybe not believes in God, maybe believes in some sort of higher power or transcendent power. You can be that kind of person, a person who believes in the resurrection or not, who believes in the goodness of God or not—you can be that kind of person and still be part of a faith community. And in fact, even be elevated, lifted up, in that faith community, so that your words are remembered for generations and thousands of years. And so anyone who has told you, who has given you that bad advice—that your doubt is not welcome, that your fear is not welcome, that your anxiety is not welcome, that your hopelessness is not welcome—was just wrong. They were just wrong.
What is Israel lamenting?
So, a little bit of background. What exactly is Lamentations about? What is Israel lamenting? Lamentations is about the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the tribe of Judah, the people who would eventually be known as the Jews. And Lamentations was historically associated with Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, though technically the book is anonymous. And it seems to have gone through lots of permutations immediately after the destruction of Jerusalem, and then for a couple hundred years afterwards, as these poems and these deep emotional reactions to the exile were pulled together.
This chart is probably a little overwhelming to look at at once, but you can see at the very top the years—it's BCE, so it works backwards. 640 would be the furthest back from us in the past; 575, over to your right, would be closest to us. And Jeremiah is serving over 40, 50 years of ministry. Also, the confusing thing about Christian Bibles is that they're not chronologically ordered at all. So Jeremiah has overlap with Nahum, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Daniel, and Ezekiel. Isaiah, if you're thinking about him, was actually a hundred years before this. And you can see at the top that you have all of these threats to the kingdom of Judah, until eventually the Neo-Babylonian Empire and King Nebuchadnezzar put a siege around Jerusalem, invaded it, took people out of it, and then at last destroyed it brick by brick and destroyed the temple. So that's what Jeremiah's ministry was all about, and that's why Lamentations, which is about this exile and about the destruction of the temple, is associated with Jeremiah.
The book of Lamentations is intricately put together. It's five chapters. Chapters 1 through 4 are all acrostics. An acrostic uses the letters of the alphabet—in this case the Hebrew alphabet, 22 letters—and every verse starts with a letter of the alphabet. So verse 1 of chapter 1 starts with aleph, verse 2 starts with bet, and so on. Chapter 3 uses three verses per letter of the alphabet. And then chapter 5 doesn't follow quite that same pattern, but it too is 22 verses of poetry—the same number as the letters. So you've got five poems, all intricately put together, all expressing despair, sadness, anger, hopelessness, questioning God, in the writings of the Israelites and the Jews.
In Judaism, it's read on the 9th of Av, or Tisha B'Av, which is a holiday that remembers the destruction of the first temple and the second temple and other catastrophes, including the Holocaust. And so on the 9th of Av, the book of Lamentations is read aloud in the community as a remembrance of all of these atrocities that have happened in the Jewish community. And in the Christian faith, when lament is allowed, it's also read during Lent or during Holy Week, as a remembrance of the crucifixion of Jesus.
Why Lamentations now?
And so why are we reading Lamentations now? Well, in short, we live in times worthy of lament. It's the season of Lent, these 40-some days that lead up to Easter. And Lent is this time where we remember our mortality, that death comes for us all. It's a time where we remember our need for salvation. Contrary to maybe some caricatures of so-called liberal or progressive Christians, it's not that we don't believe in sin. It's that we recognize that it's not just individuals who need saving; it's the entire world and the systems within it. And so we lament that. In Lent, we remember our mortality, we remember a world that needs saving, and we remember that the story is not finished yet. Even though, yes, we declare the resurrection on Sundays, even though we remember that God is remaking the world and bringing God's kingdom here, we also recognize that the story is not done, that God's work is not complete. And so, oftentimes, the only thing available for us to do is to lament the fact that that work is not done.
I could give you a long list—and I actually wrote one down, but I'm sort of questioning the wisdom of even saying it out loud—a long list of all the things worthy of lament in our era. 371 anti-LGBTQ bills proposed this year, some of which are passing in states around our country, many of which particularly target gay marriage and trans communities. Rising hate crimes against Jews and AAPI communities. Continued anti-Black racism, and what seems to be the turning tide of white supremacy winning in our culture. We could name all of the things that Jocelyn prayed in our prayer for the world—all of the things going on in our world where it seems like evil and darkness is triumphant.
And so you name those things, and then we sometimes just don't know what to do about it. And I see this particularly on social media, and sometimes there are conversations IRL as well: we see this rising tide of hate, of bigotry, and the response is, what do I do? What do I do? What do I do that makes a difference? And yes, I believe in the power of activism and organizing—that is necessary. And there are also times where the only thing we can do is to lament, is to name what is happening and the evil that it is.
Developing an emotional vocabulary
And I think it's important that that naming happens, because we need to develop our emotional vocabulary. Vocabulary makes a huge difference in what we're able to see in the world. I think I've used this example here at the Table before, but I'll use it again because it always manages to blow my own mind: for many, many millennia, people did not perceive the color blue. The color blue just did not exist in people's perceptions. And the way that we know that is that if you go back and study old documents, languages, things from before the time of Jesus, you will see that most cultures—many cultures, at least—did not have a word for the color blue. And we can also do modern-day sociological observations on different cultures who maybe also haven't developed the color blue, or have a limited color vocabulary, and then you quiz them or test them on what colors they can and cannot see. And because they do not have a word for the color blue, it's like it doesn't exist. They just call it green. Or, in the case of Homer, he called the sea "wine-dark." Nobody describes the sea as the color of wine—but they didn't have a word for the color blue. You might see the word blue in your Hebrew Bibles, in English translations, but the ancient Hebrew does not have a word for blue. It's just interpreters filling that information in for us. So our vocabulary actually influences what we're able to perceive. If you give people more vocabulary for more colors, they're actually able to differentiate between different colors.
This happens not only with colors, but also with our emotions. Brene Brown says that most people, if you quiz them on their emotional vocabulary, are able to name three emotions: happy, sad, and pissed off. That's about it. And if you watch people drive, that's about all you'll see, too, right? People bopping to the music. Crying—I see people crying in their cars surprisingly often. Or flipping me off, for whatever reason. Maybe that's a me issue, not a them issue. But emotional vocabulary is this important thing, because if you're not able to name your emotions, you either never get, or you lose, your ability to feel those emotions.
It's actually a very important thing for Emily and I's parenting of our two kids that we develop an emotional vocabulary for them, so that they know how to express themselves. This is our emotional vocabulary book—it's a Star Wars "Search Your Feelings" book. Chewbacca's frustrated. Luke is lonely. Of course, C-3PO is anxious. This is hilarious, because it's Star Wars and it's awesome. But it also is important work to do, so that our children know more than just happy, sad, pissed off—but also all the things: oh, I feel frustrated by that. I feel scared or anxious about that.
Bearing witness
I think as a faith community, we, too, need to develop our emotional vocabulary. What does it mean for us to lament? And specifically, to see lamenting as a form of bearing witness—to speak the truth about what is happening in the world. Wanting to erase trans people isn't just a difference between me and somebody else on a different side of the spectrum. It's a form of hatred. We name that. We bear witness to it, and therefore we can lament it. Refusing to reshape our society, to rid ourselves of racialized capitalism, isn't just an unavoidable reality thanks to history. It's changeable. And to refuse to change is something worthy of lament. We can bear witness to it. Our world is burning, one degree, one so-called once-in-a-generation weather event at a time, and so we bear witness to it. We lament it. We put vocabulary and words to it, so that we can be sensitized and alive to what is happening in our world.
Now, of course, we don't stay stuck in lament. But if we don't lament, we will be stuck. If we are not able to put words to our emotions—to our rage, to our anger, to our doubt, to our sadness, to our despair—then whatever work we're trying to do to change things is going to be incomplete. It'll be an incomplete work, because it'll come from a facade of feelings that we have instead of the actual feelings that we have.
And this is work that, of course, needs to happen on a communal level. How do we as a community bear witness to what is wrong in the world, to the evil that we see, to the things that are falling apart? How do we bear witness to that? And it's also individual work. It's work that we have to be able to do one-on-one, or around a table, where we are able to bring our full selves, bear our whole emotions, and be able to receive them back as well. And it's that receiving them back that can be so awfully challenging. I think either one can be challenging.
I struggle. I'm a person who struggles to let people know how I truly feel. I think I've told this story before, too, but I'll tell it again. One of my most early, foundational memories was as a six-year-old boy, standing at my grandma's grave, and being yelled at by my biological mom: "Do not cry. You're embarrassing me." And that's a way of forming our emotional vocab. It was a way of forming my inability to be able to say what's actually happening, to bear witness to my own soul. And that happens to all of us—maybe not quite in such dramatic events, but it's an overall blanket, I think, that can be laid on top of us to put out the fires of our rage or our despair or our doubt or our sadness, lest those fires grow too big and might wreck something, tear something down.
And so, as a community, we bear witness to our lament. We let our rage or our sadness or our doubt shine through. And I know that we can do that, because I see it in Scripture. You read the Psalms, you read Lamentations, you read Job, you read about Jesus weeping over a dead friend, or despairing over his own crucifixion, or hanging on a cross and being able to say, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani—my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? If God can do that, I think he might be inviting us to do it as well.
An invitation and a challenge
So, an invitation and a challenge. The invitation is: how can you be more honest with your feelings? And this is not easy work. This is not going to be a "come back next week and tell us how it went." This is a life's work. But it is an invitation to be more honest with your feelings. I want you to know, as one of your pastors, that this is a faith community where your doubts and your skepticism and your rage and your sadness are welcome. They belong here, because they're part of you, and you belong here. And so ask yourself: where are you holding yourself back? What parts of you have had a blanket laid on top of them, lest they grow too wild? And figure out the stories, the narratives that you have been told, the scripts that you have been handed about your feelings, your emotions, even the tough ones—and begin to question those scripts.
So, how can you be more honest with your feelings, and specifically, with whom? That's the tough part. Your feelings, your emotions, the bigness of them, are not necessarily for everyone. Not everyone deserves all of you. But certainly somebody does. Certainly there is somebody who is able to welcome you.
And the challenge is that question in reverse: who considers you that safe person to share their tough emotions with? There's sort of an Instagram theology, or sociology, or psychology out there that's like, if somebody's bumming you out, just feel free to shut them out of your life. And I'm like—I mean, I suppose. But if we all do that to everyone, then we're all stuck. Right? And so, yes, I understand the sentiment: if there are people who are only pouring negative energy into your life, maybe they're not the best friend that you could have, or the best partner that you could have. I understand that. But if we all do that all the time, then we're all screwed. And so you need to ask yourself: who can I be honest with? And then, who considers me a safe person? Am I a safe person for someone to share their tough emotions with? Or do I have my own—this is the challenging question—do I have my own predictable patterns of trying to fix somebody, or shame somebody, or bright-side somebody out of their tough feelings, when in fact all they're asking for is just presence and a listening ear? So: how can you be more honest with your feelings, and with whom? And who considers you a safe person to share their tough emotions with?
And then my last challenge is, these five weeks that we're in the book of Lamentations, to maybe make a habit of reading a chapter a day. Because it's tough reading. And I think sometimes we stay away from those tough parts of scripture because we don't know what to do with them. And, you know, I know enough of you and enough of your stories—if you're on a little bit of a break with God, I've got good news about the book of Lamentations: God does not speak in that book. There is no quote of "thus saith the Lord" in Lamentations. It is a book solely about the human experience with pain and heartache. And so my invitation and my challenge is to go to the book of Lamentations and to sit with that. And if you feel at home with it, then both: you're welcome, and I'm sorry. And if you feel yourself sort of pushing back against it, then—why? Why is that so hard for you, for me, for us, to sit in the ashes and lament?
This is a transcript of the sermon as preached, lightly edited for readability.
