The Death of the Lament

Howdy! Just a heads up for those who aren’t religious: this post’s focus is entirely about the Christian faith, and is targeted toward my fellow Christians. I still hope you take a read, but totally understand if it’s not your flavor.

Almost two years ago today I saw this video, and it’s stuck in my craw since:

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Mike’s band, Tenth Avenue North, has a song I love called “Worn”. In it, he sings about the brokenness of our world and the pain that sometimes goes with living in it.

But as Mike explains in the video, a lot of Christian radio stations weren’t comfortable playing the song unless the band changed the lyric “Let me see redemption win” to “Now I see redemption wins”.

It’s a simple change, but it makes a world of difference. And I think that difference is at the core of what plagues a lot of the modern church (at least in America).

We have lost the art of the lament, and more importantly we have lost the theology that comes with said art.

On Lamentations

In the above video, Mike talks a bit about the book of Psalms, and mentions that the lament is one of the three main categories of psalm (the other two being praise and thanksgiving). But even this understates how important the lament is.

Lamentations are so important to the Christian faith that there is an entire book dedicated to them. You can take a wild guess at what the book is called (hint: it’s Lamentations).

The book bemoans the loss of Jerusalem to the Neo-Babylonian empire in 587 BC. Of the city the author writes:

To be clear, the author isn’t just lamenting something bad happening; but speaking about a feeling of being abandoned—punished—by God. Later chapters read:

And much like Tenth Avenue North’s “Worn”, the book doesn’t end with knowledge that things will get better. Instead, the author writes:

There is no guarantee of things becoming better. The final sentence of the book accepts the possibility that the entirety of Jerusalem and Judah may be permanently condemned, entirely devoid of God’s mercy.

Those of us who have studied the Bible for a while will likely make a connection between the bolded portion of this verse and Jesus’ cry on the cross. As Christ took on the sins of all of humanity, he experienced a brokenness in His relationship with God that He had never felt before—the brokenness one might feel of looking upon a rubble-filled city where crows peck at corpses in the street. He felt the pain and hurt of all of humanity.

And He lamented.

The perfect son of God lamented.

What happens when we don’t lament

When you read the above, it’s pretty easy to see why a church (especially an Evangelical one) may prefer to skim over the whole “lamenting” part of the Bible. After all, you want people to be drawn to the Gospel — the word “Gospel” literally means good news! It should all be good news, right?

Right?

Wrong.

We still live in a fallen world. Christian or not, we still sin, and so do those around us. With that reality comes its consequences—that we will continue to make each other suffer as long as we are on this Earth.

The reality is that some of us will face significant loss and pain, and all of us will ultimately face the greatest loss of all—of life.

This is a sad reality, and it’s tempting to glaze over it. However, when we do so we create a few issues:

We disregard loss

How often have you heard someone say to the family of a recently deceased person that “they’re in a better place”? Maybe you have said that as an act of encouragement.

I’m sorry, but that sucks.

When we lose a key part of my world, we don’t want to hear how “it’s all part of the plan” or “they’re in a better place”. We want to mourn the loss of someone we care about. We want to be sad. We want to be angry. We want to go through the stages of grief in our own time.

And when we hear banal back-patting catchphrases like “it’s all part of God’s plan”, we feel distant from those who mutter them. We feel isolated, not connected.

When we don’t think about loss and lamentation from a Biblical perspective, we lose the ability to truly be there for those who are going through some of the most painful moments in their lives.

We fail to support those experiencing loss in a way that way that meets them where they are.

We have no compass to guide us through setbacks

In many ways, the early church was persecuted beyond our comprehension. Believers had to commune in secret, lest they be hunted down and tortured to death by their governments.

And yet the first few centuries of the church’s existence were some of its most prolific and successful.

This was a time in which the lament thrived. People were enabled to come to Christ in their anguish, not despite it. Funeral dirges became common. Cries out of pain and suffering were frequent as prayers to God.

When we fail to discuss this era, we lose a critical roadmap for how to deal with suffering and setback in our lives.

We’re used to thanking God in prayer, and many of us are used to asking God for things in prayer. But very few of us—unless we came to Christ at rock bottom in an hour of desperation—know how to truly offer up to God a plea that we are broken down, weak, hurting, and worn.

We submit all of the small things, but when we don’t teach and learn about laments, we rob ourselves of a roadmap on how to truly be vulnerable in our relationship with God.

We get yanked around by worldly affairs

The roadmap we lose isn’t just a personal one, but a social and cultural one as well.

From war in the Levant to election season fearmongering about who’s going to bankrupt our country, it’s easy for us to feel like we are living in precarious times if we are ignorant of how bad things truly used to be.

When we lack historical context, all of the problems of our day seem so much larger. Joe Biden is no longer a sub-optimal president; he’s a demented socialist who’s going to sell us out to China! Donald Trump is no longer just an immoral, cognitively challenged puppet of ideologues; he’s a threat to our very democracy!

We don’t know how to faithfully and gently engage with earthly setbacks. When our candidate loses, we lash out. We call the other side of a political debate “deplorable” or “woke NPCs”. We fuel division and further alienate others from the church.

And in some cases, we bring politics into the church, rather than acting Christlike in our politics. I myself am guilty of this!

Loran Livingston offers a great rebuke of this thinking:

Note that in the verses from Lamentations, the author doesn’t fling insult after insult at the Babylonians—the ones who actually destroyed Jerusalem.

Rather, the author turns to God and cries out in anguish.

When we fail to embrace this pattern of bringing our pain, our hurt, and our fear to God, we take it out on other people.

So what do we do?

Suffering better

The failure to discuss lamentation in church also contributes to one other theological issue: some of us view it as an implication that lamentation is somehow sinful. After all, lamenting is in some sense questioning God’s goodness, no?

But Christ lamented, and he was perfect? How are we to think about this?

There are two ways to think about lament in the New Testament:

1. Even Christ lamented, so suffering is so pervasive in this world that it can even corrupt and pull Him into sin

2. Even Christ lamented, so lamentation is an intentional component to having a relationship with God

I firmly believe in the second interpretation. It is fundamental to the Christian faith that Christ conquers death and sin. If he does not, his resurrection doesn’t happen, rendering all of this moot.

So if it’s acceptable for Christ to lament, and Psalms and Lamentations are key components of the Bible, it not only is acceptable to lament, but encouraged!

The Bible is not just a list of rules for us to follow with the story of a magic hippie appended to it. It is part literary history, part epistle, part teaching, and part poetry. The role of the Bible is not just to educate us about God, but to give us a guide on pursuing Him.

And vast quantities of lamentation present in the Bible—in Old Testament and New—make it abundantly clear that it should be part of our spiritual lives.

Our prayers should not just be ones of asking for things and thanking for things.

We’re encouraged to go to God with our deepest despairs and hurts. We’re encouraged to let Him know that we’re angry or confused due to what He’s done. We’re encouraged to question Him in pursuit of a relationship with Him.

Suffering better means bringing your suffering to Christ with the knowledge that it may not go away. It means using your suffering to help others turn to Christ in theirs.

Open up the music video for “Worn” below and take a look at the comments.

This is an 11-year old music video (in case the hairstyle in the thumbnail didn’t give it away). But still to this day, people come to the comments section sharing how it helped them turn to Christ in their pain and to encourage others going through the same.

Sometimes a lament is better evangelism than sharing just the good parts of the Good News.