Listening to Lament

Beloved People of God,

We surprise ourselves with pain when we ignore the grace of lament. We close our ears to the voice of grief and suffering in a naïve hope that what’s out of sight will remain out of mind. We read the Bible like a bouncing ball, alighting on the passages we find encouraging and rush past the others we find discouraging. We love to find ourselves with the Lord our Shepherd in green fields and beside still waters, saying, “I shall not want”; but what about when we find ourselves in the third of the psalms which cry out in lament? For every Psalm 23 there is a Psalm 88. Our optimism bias blinds us to reality in this life and leaves us confused when we suffer.

It may seem a strange comfort, but I was greatly encouraged to read Walter C. Kaiser, one of the leading American theologians of our time, call out this trend in the Western church. He says that by avoiding the grace of lament “our own ability to find direction in the midst of calamity, pain, and suffering have been seriously truncated and rendered partially or totally ineffective.” It’s time to change that.

We need to abandon the optimism bias we’ve built as a façade to hide an unformed faith, ill-equipped to withstand hard times. Closing our ears to suffering hasn’t made it go away, in our lives or in our world. It’s time to open our ears to the voice of lament found throughout the Bible, found on the lips of Leah and David, Rachel and Jeremiah. 

To help us Listen to Lament, we will turn our attention to the book of Lamentations, where the Prophet Jeremiah grieved the fall of Judah and the destruction of Jerusalem. His ears and heart were open to the suffering all around him, but instead of turning blindly away from them, He turned toward them and brought them, through the grace of lament, to God. What we find are raw, honest prayers that give us a model of a deeper faith we’ve left untested in our own lives.

For Christ the King, 

Brett