This Sunday we will be starting a five-week series on lament.
What did you think of when you hear the word lament?
The Oxford dictionary defines lament as… “a passionate expression of grief or sorrow.”
Have you had times of lament in your life?
What has caused you to lament?
How do you lament?
Can you think of people in the Bible who lamented?
Each Sunday during our series on lament, you will be invited to participate in communion.
This Sunday we will be looking at Lamentations.
If you have thirty minutes this week, I invite you to read the book of Lamentations. It is five chapters, or you could say five poems, and some would say five worship songs.
Lamentations is not a happy book. It has been described as “disaster poetry.”
Like other art, poetry tries to evoke things we find difficult to name in the case of Lamentations, loss, suffering, even God-forsakenness. In the Jewish community, the scroll of Lamentations is traditionally read on the 9th of Av, the day to commemorate and mourn the tragic events of Jewish history, including the Holocaust.
Lamentations is a text of grief, a text in which the community’s “eyes are worn out with weeping (2:11 CEB). The power of tears, which are downplayed in our society, flow openly in Lamentations. The lamenters do not look away from the pain, but right towards it. There is no way to go around the grief, the loss, the hurt, the disappointment, but only through it, only by naming it in detail.
The events described in Lamentations could easily be cause for despair, but instead of despair, we find lament.
Let’s talk about it on Sunday.
~ Pastor Dustin
