Lent 2C
March 17, 2019
Luke 13:31-35
INTRODUCTION
On this second
Sunday in Lent, we will hear a bit about lament. Lament is not a word we use
terribly often these days, it’s kind of a churchy word, but it is a word I have
come to love. How would you define it? … So in our Genesis reading, we will
encounter a longing and impatient Abram (later Abraham), who has been promised
by God that he will be the father of a great nation, and yet his wife, Sarai
(later Sarah) remains barren. So when God comes to him to tell him once again,
“I’m going to give you great things!” his response will be not gratitude, but
lament: “But God, look at what I don’t
have.” The Psalm will start off cheerfully enough, but after the first few
verses, it too slips into that lamenting place, asking God for help. And in our
Gospel lesson, we will hear about an encounter Jesus has while he is in route
from Galilee to Jerusalem, to what he knows will be his death. This is one of
the two times that Jesus will lament over the city of Jerusalem, expressing his
sadness at how far Jerusalem has fallen.
Lament is a
powerful thing, so as you listen, try to do so with empathy, remembering a time
when you, too, felt the need to lament – when you didn’t get what you felt you
needed, when you longed for an awareness of God’s presence in the midst of trouble,
when you needed a word of hope, when things had gone horribly awry and
disappointed you greatly. Remember that time, and see if you can enter into the
story with that feeling in your heart. Let’s listen.
[READ]
Grace to you and peace from God our
Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
My husband and
I have enjoyed watching the show, Parks
and Rec on Netflix – anyone watch that one? It’s hilarious and charming –
we’ve watched it through a couple times! Anyway, toward the end of the series,
one of the characters gets pregnant, and she is miserable, and her partner, who
is a busy-body and a health nut, wants so badly to make things better for her.
So he cooks, and makes her special smoothies, and massages her feet, and does
everything he can think of to ease her pain, but she only gets grumpier,
telling people, “He totally doesn’t get it!” Finally someone talks to him, and
says, “All you have to say is, ‘That stinks.’ You don’t need to fix it or make
it better. Just let her know you care that she’s miserable.” The next time he
is sitting on the couch with her and she grumbles about everything that is
wrong, he starts to fix it, then stops himself and says, “That stinks.” She
looks at him gratefully and says, “Yes! It does!” She goes on and tells him more,
and he says, “That really stinks.”
She smiles and nestles into his shoulder, happy as can be.
I always think
of this scene when I think about lament. A lament might be a cry for help, for
fixing, but it isn’t always. More than that, the purpose of a lament is simply
to get it out there, to put into words, or cries, or sighs, or whatever, that
your heart is heavy, that things are not as you wish they were. And yes,
usually we eventually want those things fixed, we want the pain to go away, but
the very first step toward healing is simply to voice our pain, and to know
that someone hears it and cares.
Before we get
any further, let’s spend some time thinking about what sorts of things we
lament. Certainly loss is one of them – lament is a sort of grief, a sadness
that we have lost something or someone we care about it. But I think if we
distill it down to its real essence: we lament over things that do not turn out
as we had hoped they would. One of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances is
along the road to Emmaus. The resurrected Jesus joins two men as they walk
toward Emmaus, but they do not recognize him. When Jesus asks what they are so
sad about, they describe the events of his crucifixion, adding, “We had hoped
he would be the Messiah.” I have a dear friend who gave birth to a stillborn
son. Following that tragic event, she and her husband resonated with those
words of the disciples. They said, “’We had hoped’ are the three saddest words
in all the Bible.” We had hoped…. They contain all the grief and loss and
disappointment of dreams unrealized and hopes dashed. In other words, they
contain a deep lament. We had hoped.
I hear that
sort of lament in our readings today. Abram is told he will father a great
nation, and he responds, “I had hoped I’d have an heir by now. Right now, it’s
looking like a slave in my house is going to be the closest thing I have to an
heir.” Dreams unrealized. As Jesus talks about Jerusalem, the city whose name
means peace but who kills prophets, he says, “I had hoped for more from this city,
home of the temple, the nexus where heaven meets earth. How I had desired to
gather you under my wings like a hen gathers her chicks, and you were not
willing. Oh, how I had hoped…”
And I hear
laments like this today. We lament division in our nation, and political unrest
– in the United States, to an extent, and even more so in countries like
Venezuela and Yemen. As a society, we lament things like hunger, and racism,
and violence in our communities. This is not how we hoped the world would be,
not how God hoped it would be. We lament when things happen like what happened
in New Zealand this weekend – nearly 100 Muslim worshippers shot in a mosque,
at least 49 killed, by a man who was inspired by a similar shooting committed a
few years ago in Charleston, in which 9 people were shot and killed during
Bible study. We lament each individual loss, but also the cycle in which hatred
and violence begets more hatred and violence, and our seeming inability to
break that cycle. With the Psalmist, we lift our prayers, asking, “How long, O
Lord? Show us your face!”
And of course
there are our individual laments as well. We lament when our kids whom we
raised in faith grew up and never set foot in the church again; when the
children or grandchildren we dreamed of never come; we lament when we discover that
a hobby we had always loved is no longer in our capabilities; when someone we
love turns toward drugs and we can’t seem to pull them back; we lament when we
see just how much cancer has taken from our lives.
Yes, there is
plenty in this life and this world to lament. And there is certainly value in
doing so. When we lament, we voice a recognition that we need God’s help, that
we can’t do this alone. It acknowledges our own brokenness, our insufficiency,
and our utter reliance on God’s grace and providence. This is not a comfortable
message for those of us who enjoy autonomy and the idea that we can do anything
we put our mind to. But at the same time, it is also freeing, allowing us to
put our problems into the hands of the One who can do anything. As one
commentator put it, lament makes our problems into God’s problems. We no longer
have to hold them alone.
And so lament becomes
the first step out of that place of despair. Once we have voiced our pain, and
acknowledged our need for God, we can start to have our needs met. Like the
character I mentioned in Parks and Rec
– she needed someone to hear her pain, but she did also need a foot massage and
a healthy dinner. But help and solutions don’t always come readily or
obviously. So, where might lament lead us?
In Abram’s
case, his lament led him into prayer. That’s what I imagine that night waiting
for God looked like. He has a conversation with God, in which he voices his
concerns, and listens to God’s response – the very definition of prayer! And
then he waits all night for God to show him how seriously God has taken his
pleas. This, too, is a sort of prayer. We usually think of prayer as talking to
God, but it is (or should be!) as much listening as it is talking! After
vigilantly and actively listening for quite some time, God does, eventually,
speak to Abraham, making what is now known as the Abrahamic covenant.
Another example
of lament leading us into prayer is in our Psalm. After the first few verses,
the Psalmist turns from praising to pleading. And I love this line: “My heart
speaks your message: seek my face. My face, O God, I will seek.” This has been
my motto this Lent, especially as we have been working on having FAITH5
conversations in which we seek to find God’s presence in our daily highs and
lows. This is perhaps the most important prayer we can engage in – the simple
effort to seek God’s face in our daily happenings, to see how God speaks to the
desires or our heart, and to our deepest laments.
As our lament
draws us into prayer, it may very well lead from there to confession. The theme
echoing through each Lenten season is, “create in me a clean heart,” and
confession takes a step in that direction. This helps us see how God is using
the recognition of our pain to point us toward a different way of being,
seeing, or living. Not to say we are somehow the cause of our own pain (though
I suppose sometimes we may have a role). But a lament may still draw out of us
a recognition for how we can change our ways as far as how we love and serve
one another, and seek peace and justice in the world – which, in the end, also helps
us to better live into our baptismal promises and God’s mission for us.
And that is
exactly what Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem did: it was a step on the path for
him fulfilling his mission, and what
he was sent to do. It gave him resolve to keep moving forward, to keep heading
toward Jerusalem, where he would be crucified on our behalf, and rise again
from what should have been the ultimate lament, thus proving that God does,
indeed, have final power over all sadness and brokenness.
And that, ultimately, is what Jesus’
continuing path toward Jerusalem means for us: it is what allows us also to be
pulled out of our lamenting place. Our lament knocks us down a notch, so that
we realize we cannot do this alone. It shows us our human limitations. It
demands that we look beyond ourselves, to the power that can only be found in
Christ. And Jesus’ fulfilling of his mission – to go to Jerusalem, to die and
to rise again – that mission provides our ultimate hope: that God will triumph,
over all our laments and woes and sadness, and bring us finally into eternal
life.
Let us pray… Lamenting God, our hearts are heavy with all the sadness and
unfulfilled hopes in our lives and in this world. Grant us the courage to voice
our pain to you, so that you might carry it with us, and lead us from there
into new life. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment