Alongside Babylon’s rivers we sat on the banks; we cried and cried, remembering the good old days in Zion. Alongside the quaking aspens we stacked our unplayed harps; That’s where our captors demanded songs, sarcastic and mocking: “Sing us a happy Zion song!” Oh, how could we ever sing God’s song in this wasteland? – Ps 137:1-4 (The Message)
In Psalm 137 we see a clear example of the role of the Lament in the lives of the Old Testament Hebrews. When they were taken into exile, God’s people suffered the utter destruction of the political and spiritual heart of their nation. In the book of Daniel, we read that the brightest and the best were taken as captives to the very centre of a dark pagan empire where witchcraft, sorcery and a variety of occult practices played a significant part in the power games of the government of the day. Judah’s inheritance, the next generation of leaders and influencers, were deliberately targeted for indoctrination. Imagine being a parent or grandparent in this hostile cultural context. To take away the emerging generation, was to take away all hope for the future of your people. Then to add insult to injury, your captures and oppressors develop a liking for the worship music of your homeland. They sarcastically demand that you perform the sacred songs of your ancestors for their amusement. If you put yourself in this context, it is easy to hear the raw, powerful and at times ugly emotion expressed so poetically in Psalm 137.
In the face of the events of the last 14 months in our nation, I believe in the need for believers in the UK to reconnect with the spiritual purpose of biblical lament. Public expressions of the kind of emotions expressed in this Psalm are not generally culturally acceptable here in Britain. Only at times of great national trauma or tragedy is any such display seen as acceptable. Even then, the expectation is of quiet dignified weeping and a quick return to “stiff upper-lip” and “keep calm and carry on”. Contrast this with many Non-Western cultures where loud and exuberant expressions of grief are not just the norm – they are expected. The flamboyance of the public expression of grief is a sign of how significant a loss the individual is to their family and community. A much loved person must be deeply, loudly and publicly grieved for. This was (and still is) the tradition of the tribal peoples of the Middle East. For the ancient Hebrews, political, cultural and spiritual loss needed to be expressed in the same way, on a national scale. Hence, we read of the tearing of clothes and the wearing of sackcloth and ashes. The Psalms and prophetic poems of the Old Testament form a body of literature used to express such grief and lament to God, at times of national repentance or mourning. They served the spiritual and therapeutic purpose of allowing negative (and potentially destructive) emotions to be poured out to God, rather than held internally or expressed destructively within the community. At times of great distress, the public lament drew the people together in unity and countered the tendency toward complaining, blaming and division. This significant spiritual function is almost completely absent from contemporary Christian life in the UK, yet it seems to be needed now more than ever.
Why am I pointing this out? Perhaps, because I am feeling the desperate need for this type of lament. I find myself needing to express a deep grief and sorrow for my nation and the loss of its spiritual and moral centre. This does not come from the place of bemoaning Identity Politics or the so-called ‘Culture War’. It is not a melancholic longing to return to ‘the good old days’, when Britain was a Christian country with Christian values. I am, by turns, horrified and terrified at the speed with which secular consumerism and individualism has become the main driving force for our contemporary culture. I am ashamed by the failure of the Church – which I have been a part of nearly all my life – to provide any significant resistance to these pervasive secular ideologies. As a nation, our response to the current global pandemic is a clear reflection of this.
As I acknowledge my anger and shame relating to the actions (or inactions) of the Institutional Church, I am forced to look inward and contemplate my own failure to resist or offer an alternative voice to the prevailing narrative. How easily over the last year I have compromised, how often have I consented to pervasive and destructive lies, or engaged in behaviour that profits myself at the expense of others? How often have I placed my need for an easy life ahead of the good of family, community, homeland or other nations? How many times have I allowed my complacency or fear to keep me silent, in times when I had the opportunity to be a dissenting voice for Jesus? In short, I must begin by acknowledging the level to which I have assimilated cultural norms that fly in the face of the example Jesus set for me to follow. Surely corporate repentance and lamenting must begin in the hearts of individuals. If not we risk focusing on the speck of dust in someone else’s eye, while ignoring the big chunk of tree lodged in our own.
So what triggered my thinking about the function of the biblical lament? As I look at what is happening in our society, how turning our back on God has led us to a place where we collectively struggle to discern truth from lies – real from fake. How in the absence of a foundational belief in the kind of values Jesus taught, has led us to be a deeply divided society that no-longer seems able to hold relationships together across social, political and ideological disagreement. In the face of frightening levels of social and political change, I find myself having to take a long hard look into some major gaps…
- The gap between objective and personal “truth”.
- The gap between words and practice in life of organisations and institutions claiming to represent Jesus.
- The gap between traditional values and contemporary culture.
- The gap between what I know God will do in our nation and what I see happening in my everyday experience.
The Quaker educator, author and poet Parker J Palmer refers to these mismatches collectively as “The tragic gap”.
“By the tragic gap I mean the gap between the hard realities around us and what we know is possible — not because we wish it were so, but because we’ve seen it with our own eyes… As you stand in the gap between reality and possibility, the temptation is to jump onto one side or the other. If you jump onto the side of too much hard reality, you can get stuck in corrosive cynicism… If you jump onto the side of too much possibility, you can get caught up in irrelevant idealism… These two extremes sound very different, but they have the same impact on us: both take us out of the gap — and the gap is where all the action is…”
There is a reason that the term “intercession” contains the prophetic picture of standing in the gap. To pray and worship in this way requires us to walk a delicate line. To refuse to take the easy route of slipping into either cynicism or idealism, is to be willing to hold an uncomfortable but creative tension.
When I ask myself how I will manage to hold this type of tension and choose to stay in the tragic gap for the long haul, I can currently find only one response. The same response that humans have had to tragedy throughout our history. The only healthy way to navigate tragedy is to accept its reality, and walk through the pain and grief it causes, to find new hope and new beginnings on the other side. As followers of Jesus, we have been equipped with powerful tools to assist us in making this difficult journey. It is my belief that lamenting is an underused tool in our kit. If the books of Psalms and Lamentations teach us anything, surely it is that our God is big enough to cope with the honest and raw outpouring of our grief. As we seek to stay “standing in the gap”, surely we need to be real with our Heavenly Father about the pain, confusion and frustration of doing so. Like a fractious child grizzling about some lack of fairness, only when we cry ourselves out and settle into Abba’s lap, will we hear His voice of peace calmly reassuring us that this will pass and all will be well in the long run. Only when we express our emotion and pour it safely into God’s ears, can we let go and let God lead us forward. Jesus, himself, set the pattern for us in this. As he stood looking out over Jerusalem one final time shortly before his crucifixion, this was his lament…
“Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Murderer of prophets! Killer of the ones who brought you God’s news! How often I’ve ached to embrace your children, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you wouldn’t let me. And now you’re so desolate, nothing but a ghost town. What is there left to say? Only this: I’m out of here soon. The next time you see me you’ll say, ‘Oh, God has blessed him! He’s come, bringing God’s rule!’” Matthew 23:37-39 (The Message)
Here at National Heart of Worship, we have answered a call to stand in the gap on behalf of our country and engage in a sacrifice of worship and prayer that comes from the place of Spirit and Truth. If we want to take on the challenge of singing God’s songs in the current spiritual wasteland of our culture, perhaps the place to start is with an honest and biblical lament.
Love this!…