wfn.org | More than just whining: Speakers say lamentation often leads to a passion for justice

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Note #7180 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

30-May-2002
02198

More than just whining

Speakers say lamentation often leads to a passion for justice

by Alexa Smith

MONTREAT, NC - While he stood at the podium in Montreat Conference Center's Anderson Hall, Brian Blount spoke softly.

But his words shook the walls.

He was talking about the apostle Peter's self-interested reaction to Jesus's comment that it is easier for a camel to slip through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter heaven: "Look, we have left everything and followed you."

Peter wanted to make very sure that Jesus recognized and appreciated all the sacrifices he and the other apostles had made in becoming His followers.

The incident, described in chapter 10 of Mark's Gospel, will be familiar to today's followers of Jesus, Blount said, because they also have sacrificed much for their ministry - changing careers or leaving their homes during an age when a high percentage of new pastors "burn out" after five years or less on call.

"Surely, like Peter, there must be those times when (we) ... want to cry out with Peter, 'Look Lord, we have left everything and followed you. Do something to make all this work out. Do something to make all this worthwhile.'"

Blount said the story of Peter's protest "says it's OK to feel that hurt, to process that anger and to turn it toward God for an answer."
"Mark didn't record this story about Peter just because that's the way it happened," he added. 

"Mark recorded it because he believed it happened for you. To teach you that it's not only all right, it's healthy to fire back in conversation with God. That is what lament is all about. Passion. Pathos. Deep, deep feeling. Even in the New Testament."

Blount, an associate professor of the New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, an expert on Revelation - said lamentation isn't preached much these days, even though the Old and New Testaments are full of tales of human anguish and anger in which humans beg God for help or scold Him for doing nothing about personal or communal suffering.

"It is something we have to be taught to do," said Blount, who said he thinks lamentation is a neglected practice in prayer because contemporary worshippers mistakenly believe it is "disrespectful to God" or feel that it is unseemly to show hurt so visibly.

But he said in an interview with the Presbyterian News Service that channeling such emotion outward in positive ways - personally and as congregations - is part of the pastoral task. Ignoring it, he said, may allow it to become destructive, leading to depression or paralysis.

Salvaging the forgotten language of lament was the mission of more than 400 ministers who gathered here for Montreat's third annual "Reclaiming the Text Conference" for preachers.

Participants attended lectures and workshops featuring such notables as Old Testament scholars Walter Brueggemann, Phyllis Trible and Patrick Miller, theologian Douglas John Hall, Presbyterian clergy women Joanna Adams and Roberta Hestenes, and scholars like Blount.

It was in the workshops, and in daily worship services, that lament became the pastoral or prophetic word.

The burning question: How can lamentation be used back home?

In his workshop, "Listening to Lament: Remembering Lament, Preaching Lament," John McClure, a professor of preaching, worship and practical ministry at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, said collaborative preaching is one way to help a congregation voice its deepest hurts and begin to heal.

"Let the lay people teach you," he suggested. "Hear from somebody in your group who has really suffered something, like the loss of a child. And let them talk (in a Bible study) about their anger, their protest, their sense of outrage."

McClure urged preachers to let that suffering inform their sermons, rather than retreating to their studies to distance themselves from emotion.

Discomfort with deep feelings wasn't as uncomfortable for the psalmists as for today's Christians.

"The psalms let us hear the voice of the person helpless before God," said Ellen Davis, an associate professor of Bible and practical theology at Duke Divinity School, who led a workshop titled, "Praying and Preaching the Psalms of Lament."

"These writers never say, 'We're going to go out and get that guy, God,'" Davis pointed out. "They say, 'Please God, you go get that guy.'"

Whether it is a defeat at the hands of enemies, inconsolable personal loss, or exile and displacement, the Psalms are a preaching resource for desperate people, Davis said - people who realize that they must lay claim to divine power, because their own resources are insufficient to meet the crisis at hand.

She said the pastoral burden may grow heavier when pastors begin to articulate their congregations' deepest hurts, but lamentation can be prophetic as well as pastoral.

"It is a mistake," she told the Presbyterian News Service, "to always identify with the one lamenting."

She said U.S. congregations cannot relate well to the Hebrews in Psalm 131, exiles who lament the destruction of Jerusalem. "We're not like Israel, we're more like Babylon," she said, noting that the psalter includes many cases in which people victimized by powerful empires call down God's wrath upon their oppressors.

"We might ask ourselves who might be praying that our empire might not last another generation, that our babies might have their heads bashed in," she said. "You have to keep turning the psalm. ... You have to expand its meaning beyond personal pastoral issues."

McClure seconded that notion, pointing out that a congregation may better understand the anguish felt by others if they imaginatively enter the text. 

Turning to the wrenching cadences of Psalm 13 - "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?" - McClure said Christians might ask questions of the text: "What might the person be experiencing to cry out the way he is crying out? Loneliness? Unemployment? The loss of a child?"

McClure said the 10 people who took part in his workshop shared a Bible study and together wrote a sermon about holding lament and hope together.

"You can create sermons with laity by doing Bible studies in their context in a way that will work," he said.

But lament must be more than complaint or whining, Blount pointed out.

Lament, he said during the opening worship service of the conference, comes from people "driven to the depths of social, economic and political despair, in a world without hope," and they cry out, 'How long, Sovereign God? How long?'"

Lament is the sound of human beings at the breaking the point, but humans crying out not from surrender or defeat or fear, but from trust that, in spite of all, God is in control. Lamentation becomes anger, anger becomes resistance, resistance advances the cause of justice.

Genuine lamenters, Blount said, don't give in but "give everything they have," like the martyrs in Revelation 6 who face down monstrous evil and call upon God to avenge their slaughter.

"If you're an institutional official of a church, seminary, presbytery, synod or whatever and you're singing the blues because the capital campaign didn't make its goal last year - when a huge proportion of the people on this earth can't scrape together enough pennies to feed their children, then you're whining," he said. "If you stand up on your soapbox in the midst of global poverty, famine and starvation, and rail against the heavens about how high your property taxes are in your paved-road, somebody-picks-up-your-trash-every-Tuesday, police-protected, electricity-supplied, cable- and satellite-networked, Internet-connected, municipally-bonded existence, I don't care what tax bracket Uncle Sam has got you in, you, baby, are whining."

Honest lament, he said, spurs risk-taking, such as standing before great powers, fire-breathing dragons, terrorizing empires and even church leaders "hooked on the past way of doing and being church" and speaking for justice.

The Rev. Mary Wright, asked whether she employs lament at her church, First Presbyterian in West Palm Beach, Fla., she replied: "No. But I'm going to start. There's certainly a place for it." She said her downtown sanctuary is open to streetwalkers and addicts.

"First of all, it may help the congregation recognize and face the depth of their pain, and tell them that God has ways to let it be released," she said. "Lamentation also lets us cry out to the world that things are not right ... and expect miracles.

"I think that can be very empowering."
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