Cries of the Heart (Jeremiah 8:18-9:1)

“My joy is gone; grief is upon me; my heart is sick.”

The first verse of the passage we read this morning from the Book of Jeremiah reminds us that while the failures of Judah’s kings and the violence of Babylon’s invading army drives the book’s plotline, the prophet’s story is ultimately one of human loss and grief.

After all, Jeremiah was a spiritual leader to a people who were witnessing the destruction of everything they held dear.

Homes were destroyed, freedoms stolen, lives lost, and even though Jeremiah saw God at work in those events, he still gave voice to the hurt and pain he and his neighbors were experiencing.

O that my head were a spring of water

and my eyes a fountain of tears,

so that I might weep day and night

for the slain of the daughter of my people!

Sentiments like these are about as far removed from weak sauce optimism as one can imagine. This is, instead, a lament born of the love for, solidarity with, and the shared experience of a people in pain.

Jeremiah is one of the Bible’s most prolific authors of lament–he literally wrote the book on the subject, Lamentations–and lament is one of the Bible’s most prolific forms of prayer.

A lament is a prayer characterized by anger, grief, or sadness, that often includes questions of God, often stinging questions, questions like; “Why hasn’t the health of my people been restored?”, “How long will you hide your face from me, O Lord?”, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

Above all, lament is honest. It’s prayer that doesn’t pull any punches, but lays it all out there for God to hear, usually as a variation on this theme–“I’ve heard it said and have come to believe that you are a loving and powerful God, but if that’s true, then why does what we’re going through hurt so much?”

Laments are cries of the heart and they are the backbone of our Faith. Without them, there’s no covenant, communion, or relationship with God, only fate and fatalism.

A community without lament, loses its sense of right and wrong and grows deaf to the call to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.”

As Walter Brueggeman notes, “when lament…is censured, justice questions cannot be asked and eventually become invisible and illegitimate.” (p. 107)

Weak-willed and insecure tyrants only want to hear praise, but the Almighty God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ invites real and honest catharsis.

“Pour out your hearts to God,” instructed the Psalmist because God welcomes our laments.

As common as prayers like these are in the Bible–as many as 65 of the 150 Psalms are laments–a lot of faithful people really are not good with the idea of giving honest expression to their struggles or with being around people who are. It makes them uncomfortable and elicits a misplaced or even idolatrous effort to fix everything.

I remember with gratitude the number of friends and family members who were just “there for me” when my wife Laura died, who didn’t try to say too much, who created a loving space where I could just do the work of grieving. That support meant everything to me.

Less meaningful were platitudes that, even if well-intentioned, came across to me as “Your grief is making me uncomfortable so please don’t do it anymore.”

“God just needed another angel.” I only remember hearing that one time and thinking to myself, “What kind of S.O.B. god would take my son’s mom just to add one more to an infinite multitude of angels?”

That, I would argue, is an example of the weak sauce optimism that Jeremiah wants us to avoid.

I read an essay by a woman named Krys Burnette this week about the death of her mother. Her words resonated with me, especially what she took away from a discussion with her mom’s pastor.

Krys explained how the pastor asked her and her brother if there would be any children at the funeral. “Since when are kids a deal breaker at funerals,” she wondered, but after talking to him about the way children grieve, Krys realized that rather than keeping them out, the pastor wanted the children in the family to attend.

His question was ultimately a question for self reflection — what are we protecting children from? Are we protecting them or are we, the adults, avoiding the difficult conversations about death? Are we the ones afraid to speak about our feelings, to show emotions, or become vulnerable in front of the children in our lives?

She continued,

The Bible and Christianity teaches us about the life and death of Jesus and that death, no matter how someone dies, is the most natural, and most certain part of life for all living things. Like anything in life, he said, the younger we learn these lessons, the further we can carry them through our journey in life. The more compassion we can have for each other, the more understanding we can have for each other as we grow.

Krys summarized this experience with the wit woven throughout her work.

Sure [the pastor] was talking about a child’s experience of death and mourning, but I mean, come on. Let’s copy/paste and put that right into our manual for “adulting” am I right?

Of course, she was right, and not just about “adulting” and grieving, but about a bedrock principle of Chirstian community.

“Weep with those who weep,” wrote Saint Paul, because when we silence the cries of hurting people, when we try so hard to protect those we love from life’s sorrows that we impede their ability to truly live and grow, when we allow propriety, or discomfort, or emotional fragility to short circuit the grieving process, we cause harm and fall short of the abundant relationships God’s grace makes possible.

I often repeat something my ethics professors in seminary once said, “Whenever I hear an old married couple say that they haven’t had an argument in years, it tells me that somebody gave up a long time ago.”

The same, I think, can be said about lament and prayer.

Whenever a Church makes no room for honest expressions of lament, or anger, or heartache, whenever a wounded soul is told “your grief is making me uncomfortable so please don’t do it anymore,” it’s evidence that that Church gave up on prayer a long time ago.

But if we’re willing to enter into lament’s crucible, if we’re willing to be honest about the brokenness within us and to bear witness to the brokenness we’ve observed, if we will “pour out our hearts” to God, then gracious mercy can flow through this covenant, this communion, this relationship between Creature and Creator.

“Where the cry is not voiced, heaven is not moved and history is not initiated,” wrote Brueggemann, but “where the cry is voiced, heaven may answer and earth may have a new chance.”(p. 111)

The promise of the Gospel is that, through Jesus, who wept with his friends Mary and Martha when their brother Lazarus died, God enters into and heals the human experience, all of it, even death.

There’s a reason we sing “Where, O death, is now thy sting?” on Easter Sunday.

You see, the breadth of that promise is greater than the notion that, as believers, you and I get to go to heaven when we die.

Rather, the promise of the Gospel anchors us in God’s steadfast and abiding presence and invites us to be our honest and authentic selves–to be a people who will lift our hearts in praise, who will bow our heads in prayer, who will open our hands in service, and who will bawl our eyes out in sorrow and anguish for this hurting world and its hurting people.

When we silence the cries of hurting people, when we try so hard to protect those we love from life’s sorrows that we impede their ability to truly live and grow, when we allow propriety, or discomfort, or emotional fragility to short circuit the grieving process, we cause harm and fall short of the abundant relationships God’s grace makes possible.

But when we confess our need to lament and choose to “pour out our hearts” to God, mercy may flow, heaven might move, and a new creation will be born within us.

Let it so be with us today.

Thanks be to God for this Good News. Amen.