Where Have All the Laments Gone? Part 2
Mar 11th, 2009 by John
Anger over unjust and violent treatment is understandable. Habakkuk wrestled with God about God’s use of the wicked Babylonians to punish the Southern Kingdom. Habakkuk needed answers to give to his people about God’s “ordained” purpose. The people, upon hearing Habakkuk’s prophecy, would rebuke him (an alternate reading of 2:1 in NIV footnote). Anger would wash over the people.
Anger can be a very destructive emotion. David, after an angry rant against evil-doers in Psalm 139:19-22, pleads with God to search him and test him to see if the evil was infecting him. Anger has a way of revealing that evil isn’t just “out there,” but “in here”–right in our own hearts.
Lament is God’s gift to lead God’s people from anger to grief. Grief is anger transformed into a tremendous energy for hope-making and hope-bringing. Anger can easily mutate into a “poor me,” victimization mentality that wants revenge, not justice. Had Habakkuk become merely and only angry, we would not have the laments in the form of “woes” in chapter 2. Nor would we have the breath-taking, beautiful poetry/psalm of chapter 3.
A lot of anger seems to drive American evangelicalism. Anger at the culture. We gear up for the “culture war.” Do you like that term? War. We want to win the culture war. What happen to win the culture to Christ by godly and gentle living? We are not motivated by grief.
We don’t know how to lament. In our anger (and fear), we only know how to fight.
So sad.
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Wow! Great insights, and great meat to hang on the skeletal bones of the ‘Christian Doctrine of Lament’ … which have become so dry that they have been stuffed into the closet. Thanks John.
I want you to know that I have enjoyed this series. You John have done a fantastic job as always. You make reading your blog worth it. It has helped me in so many ways spiirtally.
I don’t often do this but was wondering if you and your readers could stop by my blog and leave a prayer or word of encouragement as I have been experiencing severe pain, migrains and will be undergoing tests over the next few months. The new post will be up around 5 or so central time. Again, thank you brother for all you do with your blog. It is one of the best Christians blogs out there. Keep up the great work!!!
Lament is where I am, and where I live more than ever. And I am part of a church community that doesn’t despise lament.
Excellent insights, John. What I keep seeing is that so many evangelicals live in the suburban “bubble,” separated from the real stuff of life and their neighbor’s pain. They have insulated themselves from so many experiences that lead to lament. They stand on the outside of so much human experience and genuine human interaction, that they cannot move past anger, which they lob at the nasty “world” over there from outside the walls they themselves have created.
For years I lived in that bubble when I was an evangelical pastor. Now, as a hospice chaplain, I go into neighborhoods and homes that were nonexistent to me before. I see faces, encounter lifestyles, and hear pain that I never would have imagined was so prevalent. I watch as our nurses dress their wounds, I get the smell of their cigarette smoke in my clothes, I hold their hands, I touch their faces, I cry and pray with them. However, most of us live in a world in which these are non-people. If Christians could only get to know them, to walk with them through their lives and deaths as true neighbors and friends, laments would gush forth daily.
John,
Thanks for your focus on Habakkuk and Lamenting. You helped me rediscover the richness of this book especially during such a trying time of our ministry……