From Brokenness to Hope: Parental Justice

Our Scripture this morning is a compilations of selected Verses from Lamentations 2 & 4. Again we find two laments to God arranged acrostically, from A to Z, expressing the completeness of their suffering. I am reading this morning Old Testament scholar, John Goldingay’s translation. While many translations try to maintain the poetry and rhythm of the Hebrew, Dr. Goldingay has translated the prayer as closely as possible to the meaning of the original Hebrew.

Oh! With his anger the Lord clouds over Ms. Zion. He threw down Israel’s splendor from the heavens to the earth. He was not mindful of his footstool on the day of anger.

The Lord became like an enemy; he swallowed up Israel. He swallowed up all her citadels, destroyed her strongholds. He made great in Ms. Judah the mourning and moaning.

The Lord rejected his altar, abandoned his sanctuary. He gave over the walls of its citadels into the great enemy’s hand. They gave voice in Yahweh’s house as on the day of a set occasion.

My eyes are spent with tears, my insides churn. My heart pours out to the earth on account of the shattering of my dear people, while infant and suckling faint in the town’s squares. To their mothers they say, “Where are grain and wine?” as they faint like someone wounded in the city’s squares, as their life pours out at their mothers’ breast.

What can I testify, what can I liken to you, Ms. Jerusalem? What can I compare with you so I may comfort you, fair Ms. Zion? Because your shattering is as vast as the sea; who can heal you?

Yahweh did what he schemed, he accomplished his word, that which he’s commanded long ago; he tore down and didn’t spare. He let the enemy rejoice over you, exalted the horn of your foes. Their soul cried out to the Lord; Ms. Zion’s wall, let tears go down like a torrent, day and night. Don’t give yourself respite; your dear eye must not stop. Get up, resound at night, at the start of the watches. Pour out your soul like water in the presence of the Lord. Lift up your hands to him for the life of your infants, who faint with hunger at every street corner.

Look, Yahweh, pay attention, to the one with whom you’ve dealt hard like this. You summon (as on the day of a set occasion) terrors for me from all around. On Yahweh’s day of anger there was no one surviving or escaping. Those whom I cradled and raised – my enemy finished them off.

Yahweh spent his rage, poured out his angry blazing. He kindled fire in Zion; it consumed its foundations. The kings of the earth didn’t believe, or all the world’s inhabitants, that foe or enemy would come through Jerusalem’s gateways.

Our pursuers became swifter than the eagles of the heavens. They chased us on the mountains, they lay in wait for us in the wilderness. The breath of our lungs, Yahweh’s anointed, was captured in their traps, the one of whom we had said, “In his shade we’ll live among the nations.”

Thanks be to God for this, God’s Holy Word.

When our children were little, a new parenting book came out – 1, 2, 3, Magic. The book promised easy-to-follow steps to immediately manage troublesome behavior with reason, patience, and compassion and without arguing, yelling, or spanking. I tried it. After years of nannying and counseling parents that children know when you are ready to “get serious” and that consistency is really the key in discipline, I knew that I was strict and thought maybe a warning system would be helpful. So, I started counting when I redirected one of the kids. Put that down, let the dog go, stop fighting, 1, 2, 3. Within a week, one of my children let the air out of my hopefulness for this new discipline method when said child, as soon as I said 1, said 2 as though I needed help remembering the next number, 2 I said, and then said child said, and 3 and continued the behavior that needed to change. Parenting is like that. Suggestions go ignored. Bad choices are made. And even though we love our kids, sometimes we have to let them suffer the consequences of their own actions.

These two chapters in Lamentations are bemoaning that God kept God’s promise. When Israel was in the wilderness and needed rules for community, God gave them ten rules to live by and warned them that “ If thou wilt not observe to do all the words of this law that are written in this book, that thou mayest fear this glorious and fearful name, THE LORD THY GOD.” God warned them of plagues and destruction and that if they did not obey the laws, they would be scattered, no longer a nation, and once again be slaves.

Chapters 2 and 4 of Lamentations are two prayers that acknowledge that God did just what God promised; the people refused to obey, and God has not defended them against their enemies. Babylon has invaded and destroyed Jerusalem. Many have been forced into exile. Even the children are hungry and dying, and the people are crying out in grief.

EIkah! HOW? How has God become so angry that he isn’t looking out for us anymore. How was it possible for us to be conquered by the Babylonians? We were God’s footstool, God’s throne. With the destruction of Jerusalem, the Lord rejected his altar, abandoned his sanctuary. It seems like God has gone silent. Chip Dobbs-Allsopp, an Old Testament scholar at Princeton, compares the feelings of the Israelites here to his when he knew his dad “was the angriest” with him. He says, Dad “would not yell at or threaten or discipline me. He would simply be quiet and look away.”

What do we do? When everything has gone wrong? When hope is lost? When we are suffering, and it seems like God isn’t listening or acting? Lamentations offers us a healthy, faithful response. “My eyes are spent with tears, my insides churn. My heart pours out.”

In June of 1983, on a bright, sunny Sunday afternoon, a young man was climbing, alone in the mountains of Austria. His foot slipped, and he fell to his death. His father, Nicholas Wolterstorff, was a theology professor at Yale and processed his grief by writing. “Noon has darkened. As fast as she could say, ‘He’s dead,’ the light dimmed. And where are you, [God], in this darkness? I learned to spy you in the light. Here in this darkness I cannot find you.”

On his way back from claiming his son’s body in Austria, he began thinking about tears. “Our culture,” he wrote, “says that men must be strong and that the strength of a man in sorrow is to be seen in his tearless face. Tears are for women. Tears are a sign of weakness and women are permitted to be weak. Of course it’s better if they too are strong.
But why celebrate stoic tearlessness? Why insist on never outwarding the inward when that inward is bleeding? Does enduring while crying not require as much strength as never crying? Must we always mask our suffering? May we not sometimes allow people to see and enter it? I mean, may men not do this? And why is it so important to act strong? I have been graced with the strength to endure. But I have been assaulted, and in the assault wounded, grievously wounded. Am I to pretend otherwise? ….I shall look at the world through tears. Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not see.”

When everything has gone wrong, the faithful, healthy response is to release our emotions. But we live in a society that has taught us to deny it, to be strong, to swallow our anger and ignore our sorrow, and that hard things are unspeakable. Our society needs Lamentations because it calls us to confront our despair because only when we are honest about our own pain, can we perceive and respond to the pain of others. Mourners in ancient times tore their garments and poured ashes over their heads. Jesus cried out the music of the Psalms in his suffering, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?”

The words of Lamentations gives us words to articulate our pain. “Their soul cried out to the Lord; let tears go down like a torrent, day and night. Don’t give yourself respite; your dear eye must not stop…..Pour out your soul like water in the presence of the Lord,” and Lamentations also guides us in what to say when someone we care about is suffering.

The poet of Lamentations gives us three questions to ask someone who is grieving. First, “What can I say for you” – when you are so distraught that you do not have words, how can I bear witness to your suffering? When he reflected on his son’s death, and people’s attempts to comfort them, Nicholas Wolterstorff said that some people were gifted with words of wisdom and others blurted out strange, inept things. What mattered, though, was their heart. He said, “Even if you can’t think of anything at all to say, just say, ‘I can’t think of anything to say. But I want you to know that we are with you in your grief.’…Express your love.”

Second the poet of Lamentations asks, “What metaphor might comfort you and honestly name your pain?” Wolterstorff warns against making light of the pain, “Don’t say it’s not really so bad. Because it is. If you think your task as comforter is to tell me that really, all things considered, it’s not so bad, you do not sit with me in my grief but place yourself off in the distance away from me. Over there, you are of no help. What I need to hear from you is that you recognize how painful it is. I need to hear from you that you are with me in my desperation. To comfort me, you have to come close. Come sit beside me on my mourning bench.” “Your wound,” says the poet of Lamentations, “is as deep as the sea.”

And finally, the poet asks, “Who can heal you?” Lamentations goes on to list those who might have been helpful: the prophets failed the people of God because they told them what they wanted to hear instead of conveying honestly God’s warning; the passersby heard their cries, stopped to hear the story and left to gossip about it, using it for their own gain; their enemies have insulted them and rejoiced in their pain.

Who can heal them? The poet advises Jerusalem to arise and turn to God for help and healing. God is like a parent. God won’t prevent us from suffering the consequences, and will even punish us, for our actions to bring about a change in us. And we cry out, “Look, Yahweh, pay attention, to me. See my suffering.” Nicholas Wolterstorff struggled to understand how God allowed his son to die. “If you have not abandoned us, explain yourself,” he wrote, and then he came to reflect on God’s own son dying and saw that if he had not loved his son, he would not be suffering. And that God is love, and therefore suffers. God so suffered for the world that he gave up his only Son to suffering. God is suffering love. Why can’t we have love-without-suffering? Why does God endure suffering? And allow us to suffer?

We’re in it together; God and we are in it together. “The history of our world is the history of our suffering together.” Every act of violence, every abuse, every pain, God sees…through tears. And Lamentations calls us to see as well.

“Put your hand in my wounds,” the risen Jesus invited Thomas as he doubted. Death does not have the last word.

Let me offer you a metaphor from a UT Knoxville Religious Studies professor, Dr. Lee Humphreys. Tragic suffering is like walking and walking and walking along a stone path. Those who survive and even flourish are those who are able to pause, to take up a stone and set it as the cornerstone, and begin building again.