A Necessary Lament

4 minutes of your time please

Yesterday, I went back 23 years to my office at the church I was serving in Sioux Falls.  Not literally but it feels almost like it could be.  I was in my office and Aaron, our youth director, poked his head in the door and asked if I had heard about the explosion at the World Trade Center in New York.  A few moments later, I got a call from my dad saying that a plane had crashed into one of the towers.  By the time I pulled up an early version of CNN.com, the second plane had hit the 2nd tower.  Our church had our regular staff meeting that morning and we rolled in the big TV on a cart and watched as the towers burned and stories were coming out about an explosion at the Pentagon.  Our senior pastor at the time invited us to pray and so we muted the TV while we all prayed for what was taking place.  When we opened our eyes after Amen was spoken, we saw that the south tower had collapsed and that a 4th plane had crashed in rural Pennsylvania.  Thirty or so minutes later, the north tower collapsed.  9/11 had taken place.

Yesterday, I was deeply moved by

Nadia Bolz-Weber

’s sharing about 9/11  and a practice of lament that she has followed for the last several years.  This practice is listening to a recoding of a traditional Jewish lament crafted by Rabbi Irwin Kula. Rabbi Kula crafted this lament from transcripts of some of the voicemail messages left by victims of the attacks.  If you are not familiar with what this kind of chant sounds like, it might be jarring at first but take 4+ minutes and listen to the whole of the chant and you’ll get the feel of the power of this type of lament.

In his writing along with the audio, Rabbi Kula shares that he set these transcripts to one of the chants that go along with the book of Lamentations in the Hebrew Scriptures.  I read this reflection just minutes after I had done my Bible-in-a-year reading for the day which covered the first three chapters of Lamentations which are brutal to read.  If you have never read the book of Lamentations, take some time to do so.  I have often heard quoted these words from Lamentations 3:21-24

But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
“The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.”

Beautiful!  Inspiring!  Hopeful!  But we don’t often quote verses just before it which say:

He has made my flesh and my skin waste away;
he has broken my bones;
he has besieged and enveloped me
with bitterness and tribulation;
he has made me sit in darkness
like the dead of long ago.
He has walled me about so that I cannot escape;
he has put heavy chains on me;
though I call and cry for help,
he shuts out my prayer; (3:4-8)

Or these words that come later in chapter 5:10-15

Our skin is black as an oven
from the scorching heat of famine.
Women are raped in Zion,
young women in the towns of Judah.
Princes are hung up by their hands;
no respect is shown to the elders.
Young men are compelled to grind,
and boys stagger under loads of wood.
The old men have left the city gate,
the young men their music.
The joy of our hearts has ceased;
our dancing has been turned to mourning.

And there’s much more like those.  These words are heart-rending to read and take in. So much easier to ignore these words and focus on those beautiful four verses of God’s mercies, presence, and hope.  But that is dishonest to the honest lament of the writers of Lamentations.  We cannot get to the hope without going through the lament and grief.  And to ignore those painful words is dishonest to the laments that we can lift today similarly whether they are our own words of lament or whether they are the words of countless people who lives speak the same.

Going back to 9/11...in the days that followed, our congregation and many others (Christian and other faiths)  led services of grief and lament.  But those prayerful words began to get lost in the feelings that metastasized into a thirst for vengeance, retribution, and revenge that quickly continued to metastasized into public wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and covert wars all over the world.  In the months and years that have followed we have seen the same over and over. Lord in your mercy.

And then today.  I was driving home from Ft Thomas and got a message from a local rabbi friend who shared that the congregation he serves had to evacuate and call the police because of a bomb threat that was thankfully a hoax.  But this isn’t the first one for them - this is one of several others they’ve received this year.  And no matter how many empty threats there are, they need to treat each as if it was legit because what if that is the one that was real?  My heart broke for him and his congregation and the many other Jewish congregations who deal with the same week after week as well as other faith congregations who face the same.  Lord in your mercy.

We are not a week since the shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia where two students and two teachers were killed.  Since that day, three police officers and the suspect were shot in Milwaukee, five people were shot outside Washington DC, five people were shot in random highway shootings on I-75 in Kentucky by a still-at-large shooter, one person was killed and 4 others wounded in a bar in Pennsylvania, five people were wounded in a shooting at a fraternity house in Florida, and four were killed in Amarillo, Texas when a man killed his wife and two children before shooting himself.  Lord in your mercy.

Two weeks ago we grieved the killings of six of the Israeli hostages in Gaza and also grieved the deaths of hundreds more Palestinians in Gaza whose names most of us will never know.  More continue to die in Ukraine and Russia, in Congo, in Chad, and the list goes on. Lord in your mercy.

Honestly, I could keep going but I cannot.   But I lament from 23 years ago to today.  I lament for places far from where I live and places just around the corner.  Lord in your mercy.

As hard as it is, read the book of Lamentations and enter into the suffering of those who wrote it so long ago and let their words be yours as you lament for the pain and grief of our world today.  Listen to Rabbi Kula’s voice  using the words of victims of 9/11 in deep lament for their deaths and representative of the deaths of so many others.   Lord in your mercy.

About the photo today.  I don’t know what happened with this photo.  The time stamp is from 1:40am this morning.  I know I got up briefly at that time but don’t remember picking up my phone.  I must have and when I did I somehow must have photographed something.  It is a confusing image.  A haunting image.  An unresolved image.  An image of lament?

Lord, in your mercy.