"Weep"
- FirstPres Abq
- Oct 5
- 6 min read
Rev. Matthew Miller
During my second year of seminary I spent the January term as a student chaplain at the local hospital. We were assigned a floor and a supervisor and given the opportunity to build our pastoral skills with people in a variety of circumstances. Sometimes our role was to sit with patients, other times we were called to talk with families. For the duration of the course, in addition to our assigned floors and group learning, my classmates and I took turns as the on-call chaplain; overnight and on the weekends. The occasions for getting those calls were as random as the hospital staff that made them. Once, I was called in to help a family select which funeral home they were going to call for a man who had died. He was divorced from his wife and estranged from his only daughter and had been living on the street. As the next of kin, the daughter was tasked with taking care of her father this one last time, but her mother was incensed that the financial obligation should fall on her young adult daughter with limited resources. The hospital staff was busy enough without having to navigate the family dynamics, so they called the chaplain. “We just need her to tell us who to call to pick up the body,” I was told. Another time I was called to the bedside of a woman who had lost her baby late in her pregnancy. She was understandably inconsolable. “I’m mad at God,” she told me, “but I know I shouldn’t be.” “I don’t know about that” I told her, “I think it’s okay to be mad. God can take it.” That was almost 24 years ago and I think about those conversations regularly. So much of what passes for faith these days, particularly Christian faith, sounds inadequate in response to pain that I witnessed during my brief stint at the hospital. It’s often portrayed by huge arenas filled with people praising God to expertly produced lightshows. It traffics in promises of victory and prosperity and living one’s best life. And it’s reflective of a wider culture that lives by Vince Lombardi’s old adage that winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. We love winners and winning so much that when good things happen we’ll even say something like “must be living right.” As though there is a correlation between our success and God’s approval. Rarely do we dare to speak the converse. Rarely do we give voice to the dread that comes with that same construct, the voice that whispers to us in our failure, in our pain, when we lose, “must not be living right.” But at some level we can see how crazy that is. It’s October and this week marked the beginning of Major League Baseball’s playoff series. After six months and 162 games only 12 of the League’s 30 teams are still playing. Over the course of this month that number will whittle away to just one team as this year’s World Champion. Only one team wins. The rest? All those players and coaches and staff and front office personnel and their fans? Losers. We’re far more like Will Ferrel’s fictional stock car driver Ricky Bobby than we care to admit, thinking that “if you’re not first, you’re last.” Adding fuel to the culture of winning is the artifice of social media where we are careful to cultivate the picture of ourselves that we want others to see. Our celebrations and success; hashtag blessed. We have old family friends who are raising three adopted children. Their oldest has a profound learning disability. From time to time, when graduation season comes around and parents are proudly posting the accomplishments of their above average children, she’ll chime in that the parents of average and below average children are just as proud of their kids. Love them just as much even if they don’t have many accomplishment to announce to the world. In a world, and an American culture that places such a high value on achievement and accomplishment, one that takes as gospel the power of positive thinking and the belief that if you work hard enough you’ll succeed and that if you aren’t successful you haven’t worked hard enough, in such a world and to such a culture the book of Lamentations has a word we desperately need to hear. Because sometimes things break. Sometimes people don’t get better. Sometimes there is nothing more that can be done. Sometimes we lose. It isn’t just sports. At any given moment there are far more who are losing in the world than are winning. Hopes that are dashed. Dreams that go unrealized. Obstacles that have become barriers. Sometimes I wonder if the epidemic levels of depression and loneliness that exist are in part due to the fact that we have no language for when it all comes apart, or to an end. Instead, we’re told to stop our crying, pull ourselves together, and get over it. Because we don’t know what to say when someone ruins our perfectly banal small talk by telling the truth. That everything is not fine. That we’re not okay. That we may, in fact, be devasted. The book of Lamentations is a collection of poetry about what is left behind when Jerusalem and its temple are decimated by Babylon and many of her people are carried far away into exile. But this book doesn’t just give voice to the cries of a people in response to a single event in the history of their nation. It gives voice to the pain so many people have experienced and continue to experience in big and small ways that the world around us rarely wants to hear and consequently gives little room and even less vocabulary to express. Daughter Zion speaking here is the voice of everyone who has ever experienced the loneliness of sitting in a life that was once so full of promise, weeping bitterly with no one to comfort them. She joins her voice to so many of the Psalms, over a third of which are psalms of lament. The hard truth is that we are often at our most faithful not when things are going well, but when the wheels have come off and we are stranded on the sidelines of our life, raising our voice to God in protest, in anguish, and yes sometimes in fury. When things are going well we’re more prone to take the credit for all our hard work. When things fall apart we remember and blame God for our suffering. People in ministry know a thing or two about blame. Sometimes we’re seen as stand-ins for God, or God’s representative. Years ago, I was talking to a friend about someone in the church who was mad about something I had said, or maybe something the church had done. He reminded me that as hard as that was sometimes, the person with the complaint is still taking a step toward you. They are still seeking connection, even if they’re unhappy in the moment. This is the gift of lament. It allows us to move toward God honestly, with all our hurt and heartache and disappointment at the turn things have taken for the worse. We don’t have to pretend that things are fine when they’re not. We aren’t going to offend God for voicing the full expression of our grief. Liberation comes to the people enslaved by Pharaoh when God sees their misery, hears their cries, knows their suffering and comes to do something about it. But it starts with their cries to God. Crying out, weeping over what has been lost, lamenting where we find ourselves is the beginning of our liberation, it is the step toward God that brings God closer to us. As long as we’re pretending. As long as we’re only showing God our Instagram feed of highlights and good times and success, keeping the darkest parts hidden and far from God, we are living a lie. From birth we know instinctively to cry out to have our needs met, rescued from pain, or hunger, or a dirty diaper, of simply disconnection. As we grow up we’re told to stop crying, use our words, or better yet keep it to yourself. Too often that turns into a message that we internalize- that our needs are an inconvenience at best and not worth meeting at worst. Ricky Bobby may think that if you’re not first, you’re last. But Jesus said the last will be first, that those who lose; lose their lives, lose their battle, lose everything that they thought would save them- their wit, their money, their home, their health, their family, their reputation will find a whole new kind of life. A whole life. A new life. A life found not in our achievement, success, or glory, but in the solidarity of God with us in and through the pain, leading us toward a future that only God can provide. The year I turned 21 did not go the way I had planned. Some of that was due to my choices, some of it was due to circumstances beyond my control. I had moved back home, and one Sunday when my parents were out of town I went to the church where I had grown up. Instead of the pew where we always sat as a family, I sat in the back and I wept through most of the service. I really can’t tell you what came over me other than the grief I felt over what I had lost, what would never be, what I couldn’t see. I tried to sing the hymns, but all that came out were sobs. It was the last time I attended church for the next four years. And when I came back to it, it was in an equally desolate time of my life. Somehow, I think I knew what I hope you know this morning. There is room for lament here. We will make space for your grief and weep with you. God’s capacity to hold our pain is as wide as Jesus’ arms stretched out on a Roman cross. Our cries are met and always will be by the one who does not turn away, but sees, and hears, and knows, and comes to us in our time of greatest need to help us find the way forward from here.
