Jeremiah 8:18 – 9:1
1 Timothy 2:1-7
“Starting with Lament”
I wonder if you noticed the immense grief and frustration of the Prophet Jeremiah in our first Scripture reading this morning. “My joy is gone; grief is upon me; my heart is sick,” he laments, “I am broken, I mourn, and horror has seized me.” And then he goes on to describe how his head is like a spring of water and his eyes like a fountain of tears because he is weeping day and night for his people.
This is why Jeremiah is often called “the weeping prophet,” because he lived in a time when God’s people were turning away, doing terrible things, and suffering the consequences of their sin – being conquered by Babylonian powers and being sent into exile. And Jeremiah, the young prophet appointed by God to speak the Word of the Lord to the people and call them back, is absolutely devastated by the fact that they are not responding in good way.
If you go back a little in the book, chapter 7 is an account of all the wrong things that the people are doing. It includes injustice, oppression of foreigners, orphans, and widows, shedding innocent blood, and worshipping other gods. Jeremiah mentions stealing, murder, adultery, lying, and making offerings to Baal – a false god. The people do all these things and then they hypocritically come to worship God in the temple. Even the priests and religious leaders in the temple are no better, Jeremiah tells us: Everyone from the least to the greatest is greedy for unjust gain.
How much does that description sound like the world we live in today? When you think of all the terrible things happening in our generation, including wars and genocides, and oppression, and violence, and discrimination, and greed, and misuse of power… it sounds quite similar, doesn’t it?
So, Jeremiah prays to God. Of course, he prays. When the world is falling apart, and everything you try to do seems to fail, and you’re at your wit’s end, what else is there to do but to pray?
Now, if Jeremiah had access to Paul’s letter to Timothy urging the young Christian leader to pray, perhaps he would have sat down calmly and listed his needs, concerns, prayers for others, and thanksgivings in a nice orderly way. Maybe he would have thought through who are the kings and people in high positions, and he would have prayed diligently for each one of them. But, of course Jeremiah lived about 600 years earlier than Paul and Timothy.
And maybe, that’s not where Jeremiah would have started anyway. I think that given the extreme level of frustration and despair that he was experiencing, Jeremiah still would have chosen to pray with a lament.
A lament is a cry to God. It’s not a carefully worded prayer prepared for a church bulletin, or a softly whispered prayer uttered calmly and rationally. A lament is a cry to God regarding a situation of deep grief or profound suffering. A lament arises from the heart rather than the head, and it pours out sometimes in words, but often in sighs and tears and sobbing.
Lament involves naming that which is not as it should be, and it involves telling God how we feel about it.
Last week, Nick and I watched the most recent episodes of “The Chosen” on NetFlix. If you don’t know it, “The Chosen” is a TV series depicting the life of Jesus, and it’s pretty good. We’re quite far into it now, so we just watched an episode that included Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night that he will be arrested.
You may remember that in the Gospels Jesus asks the Father to taking away the “cup” that he has to drink, to release him from his impending suffering and death. And then Jesus adds, “Not my will, but yours be done.” And when you read those words, they seem quite reasonable and rational as a prayer in that circumstance.
But in the TV version, though Jesus does say those words, the creators of “The Chosen” imagine and dramatically depict the deep grief and immense suffering of a man who was about to be arrested, tortured, and killed. Their Jesus cries and pleads with his Father. He sweats and sobs and crumbles in anguish at the thought of what will soon happen to him. And it goes on for quite some time before he pulls himself up and goes back to find his closest friends who have abandoned him to sleep.
Later in the Gospel story, Jesus will lament again as he’s dying on the cross. He quotes from Psalm 22, crying out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” before taking his last breath.
I think that we only turn to lament when we really believe that God is there, and when we trust that God cares about us. Because lament is not just saying some words, or going through a list of needs and concerns for God to take notice of. Lament is a process of honestly pouring out our hearts to God about how things are with us and our neighbours and our world, with faith (even a mustard seed sized bit of faith) that God can help us.
Biblical commentator, Bobby Morris, points out that prayers of lament (many of which you can find in the Book of Psalms) normally include both a cry to God AND a note of trust in God and confidence that the lamented situation will improve. But he also notices that there is no obvious statement of trust in Jeremiah’s lament, and he goes looking for it.
As he studies the passage carefully, Morris grapples with the interpretive question of who is speaking in the text. It’s a little bit confusing because some verses sound like they are coming from Jeremiah, and some verses seem to be expressing the questions and concerns of the people.
The prophet begins by naming his grief and anguish at the fact that God’s people have sinned and suffered the consequences. And then the people cry, “Is the Lord not in Zion?” as they wonder if God has abandoned them. After that, it sounds like God is weighing in, asking “Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their foreign idols?” And the people complain that time is marching on, and God has not done anything to help them.
After that, it seems that the prophet’s voice is back as he speaks some more about his grief and sadness, and his desire for the relationship between God and the people to somehow be healed and restored.
But Morris points out that when it comes to prophets who are called and commissioned to “speak the Word of the Lord” to the people, it’s difficult to separate out what are the prophet’s words and what are God’s words. In a very real sense, the prophet’s words ARE God’s words if he is a true prophet of God.
And so, when we hear Jeremiah explaining that he is broken, and grieving, and crying a river of tears because of the broken relationship between God and God’s people, those must be God’s own words, God’s own feelings, God’s own lament about the situation too.
And that’s where the hope comes in. Although the people have received the consequences of their sin – they have turned away from God, and God has let them go – even sent them away into exile… The prophet’s lament shows us that God is not hard-hearted about this situation, but rather God is devastated by it. God’s eyes are like a fountain of tears. God’s heart is sick about it.
And that means that mercy and restoration are still possible. Like the prodigal son who is welcomed home by his father, God’s heart is open to receiving God’s people back into right relationship once again.
The Apostle Paul urges the early Christians and us to make “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.” He suggests that praying diligently for our neighbours, for our leaders, for our enemies, for people with power, and for everyone is the right thing to do – because God “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”
So let’s do that – with our Prayers of the People in church, with our personal prayer lists and prayer journals and whatever other practices of prayer we use as individuals or in our families.
But let’s also make space in our prayer lives for lament. When we think about the struggles of our own lives, the challenges that our church is dealing with, the problems in our city, the suffering of people in our country, and the division, violence, and warmongering in our world… Let’s give ourselves permission to lament.
Only then will we come to know within our hearts that God shares our grief and heartache at the injustice in our world and the broken relationship between God and God’s beloved people. And perhaps then we can pray with confidence in God’s mercy, and hope for restoration.