Biblical Sushi
Raw but plenty seasoned
Let all their evildoing come before you, and deal with them as you have dealt with me because of all my transgressions; for my groans are many, and my heart is faint. (Lamentations 1:22)
Words of lament have been in my face and in my ears (and, as I read Psalms aloud, on my lips) this week.
My Evening Prayer lessons took me through Jeremiah. That book is a heaping helping of emotion.
Jeremiah is known as “the weeping prophet,” for his intense laments of the wrath of God that he was called to announce to his people. He didn’t want his prophecies to come true. In his case, being able to say, “Told ya so” was pure agony. Not to mention that his message earned the hostility of just about all who received it, and the book records the prophet’s pained laments about God sending him on a thankless mission.
There’s anger in Jeremiah as well. Lurking in our vocabulary is Jeremiad, the prophet’s name turned into a synonym for a diatribe, rant, harangue or attack, delivered at great length. And Jeremiah unloads on the stubborn evil of his people, and on his frustrating God as well.
Grief with a pour over of anger. That’s what got me to the sushi image. It’s raw, but it’s not lacking in spice.
Soon after Jeremiah, the evening readings moved to the Book of Lamentations. How’s this for an opening? How lonely sits the city that was full of people! How like a widow has she become, she who was great among the nations! She who was a princess among the provinces has become a slave. (1:1)
Raw lament right away, but as I’m noticing, that raw base gets spiced with anger in short order. That same first chapter of Lamentations ends with the call for revenge in verse 22, Let all their evildoing come before you, and deal with them as you have dealt with me…
The notorious Psalm 137 showed up as well. It begins with the raw, moving lament of a people defeated and carried away captive, By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered you, O Zion. As for our harps, we hung them up upon the trees that are therein.
But that lament also adds spice — many gentle readers will say way too much — as the Psalm ends with a plea for the captors to suffer all of the ugliest violence they inflicted on their captives. O daughter of Babylon, wasted with misery, happy shall be the one who rewards you as you have done to us. Blessed shall he be who takes your children and throws them against the stones.
Along with these lessons, I’ve been trying to work through a recommended book that takes on our culture’s (and the church’s) insistence on everything producing happiness, all the time. Seems like an encouragement to lament. But I’m not linking it here because a) I haven’t finished and b) the author is giving me fits with a wordy writing style and — forgive my snobbery — mixed metaphors like “standing on their shoulders to thread the needle” and reundancies like “creating a strawman to use as a punching bag.” Yes, I lament; sad because his good concept is hard to get at through the overwriting and angry because of the stylistic distractions.
And if all of this wasn’t enough to keep me focused on lament, a coworker shared a powerful (and too personal to reveal here) testimony to how prayers of lament helped transform her life.
What I’m finding is that all of this material has moved me to lift up lament for the church. Raw sadness for its struggles, and no little anger for the indignities it suffers. My Bishop called us to begin Lent with several days of fasting, on behalf of ourselves, the church, and our part of God’s world. I found lament working its way into my prayers over those days.
Tonight I found myself offering a more personal lament, shades of Jeremiah; raw sadness about situations and anger about God’s lack of solutions after considerable seeking on my part.
Which turns me toward my Lord’s lament from the cross, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Jesus offered up Psalm 22:1) It is the greatest lament ever lifted in the cosmos — the rawest pain and the spiciest anger.
And while it gathers up the grief and anger of our sin-afflicted lives and world, it also prepares us to open up to the hope expressed in another of my evening readings, Romans 8:31-39,
What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written,
“For your sake we are being killed all the day long;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Let us learn to lament. Let us join ourselves more and more to the man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, who is praying for us with the love from which nothing can separate us.