When Pain Becomes Prayer

Transcript

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[0:00] So we're looking at Lamentations 3, verses 10 through 18. That's our sermon text for this morning. A few words of introduction again. This is our book, The Prophetic Lament, and there's actually still a couple copies back there, so go ahead and take them home. It looks like we ordered just the right amount because there's like only one or two left on the table there, so praise God. And thank you to Natalie because she actually ordered them for us and we reimbursed her. She got a huge discount from InterVarsity because she's on the staff, so that was really great.

[0:28] turns out the author he told us he gets like 25 cents or something like that every time one of those books is sold it's not it's not a money-making endeavor for the for the author at all well anyways we're in our third week and our focus today is chapters 8 through 10 of the book that dr rah wrote but it's chapter 3 of lamentations the book in the bible okay and again we're going going to define lament, it's a complaint directed at God or even at nobody in particular that I am suffering mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically, or probably all of those at the same time, right? And it's a complaint that my current circumstances are terrible and my future circumstances are not looking good. Now chapter 8, I'm going to talk about chapter 9 in Dr. Ra's book today, but I'm just going to in greater detail, but I'll real quickly say a few things about chapter 8 and chapter 10. Chapter 8 talks about the structure of the book of Lamentations. And if you look at it, it's easier to see if you read a Hebrew manuscript, which other people have done, but it's laid out as something called an acrostic. An acrostic is when you have lines of text and the beginning of each line of text begins with a successive letter of the alphabet. So A, B,

[1:45] but in Hebrew it would be the Hebrew alphabet. The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters in it. It doesn't have any vowels, and so it's just more consonants. And some of the consonants are doubled, so you could say, well, there's five vowels and 21, but they have 22 letters in their alphabet. So if you look at it in Hebrew, the chapter 1 of Lamentations begins with aleph and then bet, gimel, all the way through to the very last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. So why is it structured like that? Why is the Book of Lamentations structured like that? Well, it could be easier to memorize because somebody is saying, now what is the next line? If somebody doesn't memorize it, they say, what does the next line begin? Well, I know it begins with the next letter of the alphabet. That helps me remember it. So it could be a mnemonic, a strategy for remembering things.

[2:32] Or it talks about the completeness of something. We say something is happening from A to Z, right? We mean it's happening. So my suffering is from A to Z. So even in English you get the sense that I'm reinforcing how complete my suffering is. Because I have a headache 24-7. We have these ways of kind of describing sort of the overwhelming wholeness or sort of the overwhelmingness of our situation. Now, and then this is what Dr. Ross says in Chapter 8, another reason could be that structure is a good response to the injustice that we're lamenting over. over. So because even though that may not be a solution per se, but that sin and injustice and suffering have some chaos to them, which is a really fascinating subject. We talked about chaos a few weeks back when we read from Genesis chapter one. And in the future, I want us to talk about chaos more because sometimes chaos is neutral, but sometimes chaos is linked with evil. Okay. And we can, I think we can easily understand that chaos can be evil, or at least it can lead to evil. And so our author is saying the structure in our lives, in our communities, can stand against that chaos because chaos doesn't like structure and structure doesn't like chaos, right?

[3:47] And that was God's first work when he spoke the universe into existence was to actually form structure out of chaos. So I'm looking forward someday, later this year, we'll talk about chaos in more detail as its own subject. So that's it for chapter 8. This is all still introduction. Chapter 10 goes into the details that there's also hope in this book. Lamentations is in all lamentations, okay? There is actually a word of hope in chapter 3 of Lamentations, but we're talking about chapter 10 of the book. So in chapter 3 of Lamentations, we have what I think is the only part of the book that's regularly quoted by anybody. And we even have a hymn based on it, which is called Great is Thy Faithfulness. You like that hymn? So we've said that Lamentations is rarely quoted or read in the church. That's true, right? But the exception is chapter 3, verses 22 and 23. They go like this. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. Doesn't that sound nice? So that's the exception. But the exception proves the rule. The rule is that we don't talk about negative things when we read them from church. And so we only read, the only part of

[5:07] this book we quote is these two verses that are all hopeful. We don't talk about all the rest of the stuff like we're going to look at today. And I kind of wonder if this aggravates God. You know what I mean? Like, he's like, I gave you a whole book. You know, I gave you a lot of book, a lot lot of that book. There's five chapters and a lot of verses, and you're just going to read two of them all the time. So it's like selective listening. Does this happen in your family? Maybe if you have kids like me. So you'd be like, somebody needs to empty the trash. Oh, it's kind of noisy in here. I don't know. There's a lot of static in the air. Then you say, what do you want for dessert? Oh, I want ice cream. I heard that one. You know what I mean? So it's just sort of like, God is kind of like a parent going, can you just hear everything? thing? Or are you just hearing the things you want to hear? Well, we just hear the things we want to hear. So again, we might end on a note of hope at the end of the sermon today. I kind of promised that last week we'd end on a sort of a down note. We'll see what happens. See how I feel. Depends on my mood at the end of this. Depends on you guys. You have to respond a lot. No, you don't.

[6:08] You don't have to. So, but chapter nine, where we're going to spend most of our time today, talks about the personal and the communal aspects of lament. That's chapter 9 of his book. Sort of the interplay between the personal and the communal.

[6:23] And so for our reading from chapter 3 of the Bible book, the narrator has changed the voice. If you read chapters 1 and 2 of Lamentations, it sounds like a narrator talking on behalf of other people or on behalf of the city or the whole people of Israel. But now in chapter 3, pardon me, our whole family is kind of getting a thing and now my voice is cracking like puberty. So anyways, in chapter three, the narrator changes the voice and it's first person. So it's talking about a personal suffering that perhaps the author of Lamentations has themselves. It could be Jeremiah, we're not sure. And so listen for the sounds of personal pain, personal suffering. Listen for first person, personal pronouns like me, me, I, and my, and personal pronouns for God, he. Okay, so now everything's getting kind of personal in chapter 3. And Dr. Ra talks about the personal versus the communal aspect of lament. And so also as I read, and I'm about to read, listen for the very vivid descriptions of suffering. They do not sound anything like great is thy faithfulness, O Lord. It sounds completely different. So let's go to our reading. It's Lamentations 3, 10 through 18.

[7:38] There it is. Okay, good. Here it goes. Verse 10. Now he's talking about God. of his quiver. I have become the laughingstock of all my people, the object of their taunt songs all day long. He has filled me with bitterness. He has sated me with wormwood. He has made my teeth grind on gravel and made me cower in ashes. My soul is bereft of peace. I have forgotten what what happiness is. So I say, gone is my glory and all that I had hoped for from the Lord.

[8:47] Let's pray. Father, even this dark word, we praise you for and thank you for in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, the most vivid thing in there was the grinding the teeth on gravel for me. Now, Now you may have a different thing, but the reason why is, and this is the weirdest thing, is when I was about 15 years old, there was, you know, the planters, peanuts, and I poured some in a bowl and I still, I can barely talk about it. One of them was a rock that looked just like a peanut.

[9:22] And I bit down on it really hard. Oh, I just, I still feel it like there's a shiver going up my spine. So when I read this, I was like, you know, I pray to God. you've not had that experience. But like it was, and I like, how, I mean, I was thinking, how did that get in there? Well, obviously how it got in there, it looked just like a peanut. I don't know, but just what are the odds? What are the odds? Maybe God, now I know why. Like all those, 15, you know, like 39 years ago, God's like, in 39 years, this is going to be important to you. Okay.

[9:53] I still don't like it. I mean, seriously, I still, you know, those things you still remember. Oh man. Man, okay. So I'm gonna look at this descriptive imagery. I want you to look at it with me. You can put it back up there, Steve, if you want. I'm kind of messing with you a little bit today. You're doing great.

[10:08] But let's look at it. And it starts, when we come to the question of lament and how to do it, it starts with telling the truth. That was kind of the theme last week. Starts with telling the truth about how I am, even if it, or how I'm feeling, even if it means that I'm accusing God God, of being the source of my problems. We'll say over and over again, don't worry about that because God can take it. He can hear that. You're not going to sort of alienate God by putting the blame on him. It may or may not be him, but he can take it even if it's not. Okay, so here are some of the images. One of them is that God is like a bear or a lion waiting to hunt and kill me, tears me to pieces, and leaves behind what's left. Okay, do you ever feel that way about God? I mean, that's tough. That's tough. God is like a lion or a bear waiting to eat me. Or God is an archer and he's using me for target practice. That's what it says. God is an archer and he's just hung me up on a wall and he's using me for target practice. And people are making fun of me because there's arrows sticking out of my guts.

[11:20] Isn't this weird? Okay. I'm bitter and angry. I've been fed a whole plate full of wormwood. Now, this is a very unusual word in the Bible. In Hebrew, it's la-ana, and nobody knows exactly what it means, but it's leaning towards that people think it's poison. So it's almost like you're saying, he's given me a plate full of hemlock. This is what Socrates died of, remember? So like, this is my lament. God has given me a plate full of poison to eat. I'm full up with poison because I ate it all. I'm sated, right? And now for the worst, I've eaten a handful of gravel and it's crunching my mouth and shredding my teeth. I really relate to that one. And finally, I have forgotten all my happy days and my glory, my exceptionalism and my privilege are gone and everything else I had put my hope in. Okay, we can put it away now. So I kind of, it's almost like a paraphrase there, but that's the the imagery of how Jeremiah, we think, is feeling about the condition he's in. You remember that he watched as the Babylonians destroyed his city, killed all sorts of people, and then took a bunch of other people captive. And Jeremiah himself is feeling like nobody really understood him or listened to him because they didn't want to hear what he had to say. So Jeremiah has a lot of things

[12:47] to be unhappy about, right? So I want to say this. There are times when we may legitimately feel this way, okay? I hope they're not frequent, right? I hope you don't feel like God is an archer and you're his target in his target practice. Like, I hope you don't feel that way. But you know what? You might sometimes. Let's not act like that may not happen, okay? It may happen. You may be angry God. It may not be God. You just may feel like your target practice for everybody else's arrows. And I think I felt that way at times too. You know, just if it wasn't about God, it was definitely about other people, right? We've been told that it's not okay to talk like this because it doesn't project this happy and successful life. But if we feel this way, it's okay to talk like this. So I just want to say lamenting, all of that was really strong personal lament. It was really strong. wrong. And I just want to say that's okay. It almost seemed like hyperbole, like it was over the top. But maybe when you're in pain, I don't think that maybe that wasn't going too far. If you really are in pain, you might say something like that. And again, if we accuse God, even if he's not the source of our lament, God can take that. And you know what God is not going to do?

[14:03] He's not going to rush to defend himself, or he's not going to say, oh, it's not so bad, buck up. you'll be all right he doesn't say that do what he is gonna do he's gonna listen God hears the cries of this people God's gonna listen and I believe he will suffer with us so our suffering actually becomes God's suffering when we limit now why do I say that that's one aspect of the incarnation that we don't talk about too much okay the incarnation is God becoming flesh in Jesus Christ and he takes on all sorts of things that are human and one of those is actually suffering. Now, we say Jesus suffers for us on the cross, especially if you have a certain view of the atonement. Not all views of the atonement think of it quite that way, but you can also say that Jesus suffers with us. Jesus as God and in human flesh suffers with us. We're not alone in our suffering because Jesus experiences all the human feelings and emotions. So he cries when he hears that Lazarus is dead. His emotions boil over. He gets mad and he yells. He gets frustrated. If you read Luke chapter 9, it seems kind of harsh. He says, you faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you? That doesn't seem like the nice, kind Jesus.

[15:22] This is Jesus boiling over going, you guys are really frustrating. You guys are really frustrating. I'm annoyed, right? So Jesus can suffer with us and for us, but he's with us. So when we lament, we believe that God hears us and God also suffers at the same time. He doesn't rush in to fix it all the time. He doesn't rush in to tell us not to feel bad or that our feelings are illegitimate or not real. They are real. They are real. He made us that way. He made us to feel. He made us like Him, He feels. He suffers, we suffer. He made us in His image. Do you get that? So suffering is God's kind of something that God does, and lament is something that God does. It's a holy thing. So one of the most powerful, just to go back to this idea of Jesus suffering with us, one of the most powerful and theologically correct lament songs is, do you want to sing it with me? nobody knows the trouble I've seen this is the chorus nobody knows but Jesus Louis Armstrong wrote that Louis Armstrong nobody knows the trouble I've seen nobody knows but Jesus Jesus knows your pain Jesus knows your suffering Jesus suffers with you he listens to you he doesn't rush in to fix all the time so it's okay to lament and to complain to God as an individual

[16:49] individual. But, so that's the individual side of it, and that's kind of the difference is chapter three of lament is an individual lament, chapters one and two of lamentations, pardon me, is a communal lament, and our author in chapter, I'm keeping all the chapters straight here, in chapter nine of his book says it's both individual and communal, okay? So community can lament as well, and out of that lament are the seeds of justice taking root. When people lament together the seeds of justice are planted to stand against evil and chaos. Now I want to bring your attention back to what Wendy was reading. It's just a really cool passage from 2 Kings chapter 22 and 23 where evidently the people of Israel had lost, like they had a library, and the library got walled in somewhere and the librarian died and then 300 years later they were doing some remodeling like they were putting in like granite countertops and a new, you know, all the stuff, you know, track lighting and everything. And they knocked down this wall and they found this library in the temple and they found this old scroll, dusty old scroll, and they started reading it. Lo and behold, it was the book of the law. What were they doing without the book of the law all

[18:01] these years? Well, they were being idolatrous. They were messed up. And they read it and all of a sudden everybody was from the lowest to the highest. The king was upset. His secretary was was upset. They read it out loud to the people. The people started crying and they said, what are we going to do? Out of that communal lament, like, dear God, we didn't even know. You know, you could actually say that they had an excuse, like ignorance. Ignorance is of the law, in this case, might be an excuse, but it's not really an excuse. They were idolatrous and they found this book as a gift, you know, dusty old library corner that had been walled away that said, you can't do this. you can't be idolaters, you can't worship other gods beside me, you can't do, there's all sorts of other laws. And so they were crying and they said, we've got to change. Maybe it's not too late. Turns out it was too late, but they said, maybe it's not too late. And so we saw that out of that communal lament, the seeds of justice began to get planted. And what did they do? They went into the temple, even the temple itself. I'm not talking about somewhere else, some hillside somewhere, which on the high places of the land of Judah, there were definitely places where there were

[19:13] things like what are called Asherah poles and temples and idols that were set up. They went into the temple itself. Solomon's temple, the second temple, I mean the first temple, pardon me, Solomon's temple, there were idols in the temple. How did they get there? Well, over years, if you're not paying attention to God's word, an idol can creep in to that most sacred place of your own in worship unless you have the law to remind you that it shouldn't be there. So they went into the temple and they pulled out all these idols and statues and things, and they burned them and they buried the ashes in the Kidron Valley. It's really dramatic, isn't it? But that was that communal lament because the whole land was like, oh, we shouldn't have done that. We were wrong. And so So they lamented and they repented, communal repentance and communal lamentance. It's not a word, sorry.

[20:08] So we can apologize communally like I did to the man on the airplane. You can apologize on behalf of the community, but you can also lament individually and you can lament communally. Now we've been talking long before this study even took place. We've been talking about wanting to intentionally create space here at the church for communal and individual lament. Because we were, that's probably why we chose this book, because we wanted to maybe introduce this idea. Is that we wanted the church, and it doesn't necessarily have to be physical. If you can't come here, there's other ways to do it together. But we wanted the church to be a place where you could come and praise God and worship and be lifted up. but we also wanted at times the church to be a place where you could come with all your brokenness and with all your sadness and to come in here and just be in a safe place where nobody's going to try to cheer you up you know but just to say yeah this world is broken and i'm broken i'm gonna i'm gonna cry out to god and we're gonna do that together and that's actually how our racial justice team started it as i recall now that after george floyd was murdered we decided to have a an impromptu prayer team meeting, and we had to do it by Zoom because it was still in the middle

[21:23] of COVID. And in that time, there was lament. They were like, this is, you know, this is not good. This is the way the world is going is not good. And it turned into a desire for more education and more action. And so the seeds for justice were planted in that meeting. And as a result of that prayer meeting, we said, maybe we should have a racial justice team. And the team started meeting meeting every week. And after a while, we're like, okay, let's meet every month. But still, we're still meeting, and that's the reason why we're reading this book. But also, we want to plan times and places and spaces where you can come to the church and lament, and we can lament communally, because that's where the seeds of justice are planted. And then eventually, make that sort of like beta testing it in a way, then make that space available to the larger community around this which might sound a little counterintuitive but I wonder if that's what the world is looking for right now they're not looking for another you know motivational speaker to tell them that you can achieve all your dreams they might be looking for a place where you can come and be real and be yourself kind of like a a right so that's the plan keep your eyes open for

[22:32] when we're gonna have some of these events and we're gonna invite eventually we'll invite our neighborhood to those things so look for a special email mail sometime, I don't know when yet, inviting you to a servant of laments. And lamenting individually is, we're almost done here, lamenting individually is good for the soul. It's a good truth-telling exercise. I like how truthful Jeremiah, could be Jeremiah, is. He says, I just feel like, I feel like I've been torn to shreds by a bear or a lion. This is how he feels. He's He's like, that's how I feel right now, you know? That's good truth-telling, right?

[23:12] And lamenting communally is a good exercise, too. It reminds us that we're not alone. So that's the thing that communal lamenting can do, is that we say, I feel terrible, you feel terrible. At least I'm not the only one. We're together in this. We'll listen to each other. We're with it. We're in this together. And God is in it with us, too, because he's always listening and he's suffering alongside of us.

[23:37] So that's the kind of community that we want to be. And I mentioned that I might include some hope since I ended on a minor key last week and I do feel up to it, so okay, here it is. I don't want to medicate away the bad feelings. This is the hope. Not that I think everything is great because I don't want to medicate away the bad feelings, not with alcohol or distractions or anything like that. I really want to feel them and be in the reality that they reflect.

[24:03] I've kind of come to the stage in my life where if I have bad feelings, I don't want to, on my best days, I don't want to distract myself away from them or put them someplace else where I try not to think about it, because they'll always come back anyways. But I want to live in them and say, why am I feeling this way? And if I don't even know why I'm feeling this way, I'll just say that I'm just going to feel this way for a while, and it's okay. I'm not going to feel great all the time, right? But the reality also is that God is faithful, and he listens, and he suffers with me. And I have hope in him, and I have hope that together, as a community, we're going to learn to lament together. And it will draw us to God, and it will draw other people to God, too, I hope. And that God will be present in it, and he'll plant some seeds in us. That's the hope, that God will plant seeds in our midst because we lament together. Let's pray. right. Father, thank you again for your word, even this difficult word. Thank you for the truth in it. Thank you for the pain in it that's on display. Thank you that you hear it and that you love us anyways. So Father, we pray again for this gentleman on the plane next to me that he may

[25:12] have found you in all these years. And Father, we pray for our church as we learn to lament.