Lament is a language that changes how we communicate with God. Lament powerfully expresses complex feelings and situations.

Welcome to Pivot, a podcast for church leaders, co-sponsored by Luther Seminary Space Lead and Lead.

Welcome to Pivot. Today's podcast is on lament. I am Terri Elton from Luther Seminary.

and I'm Scott Cormode from Fuller Seminary.

And I'm Louise Johnson and I work with LEAD. Last week we talked about loss and interestingly when we were beginning to plan this podcast, we thought about loss and lament together. And as we continued to discuss and pray about and think through those pieces, we came to understand that they really, and particularly in this time, that they really needed to be distinct episodes, that there was something more to lament that deserved

its own space because I think it begins to capture the raw, the anger, the enemies, the abandonment, the loneliness, the powerlessness that I think we long to give expression to. And so I'm really just delighted that we're doing this segment on lament because I, for one, feel like this is a material I could stand to think through right now.

I'm so pleased that we're going to be talking about lament. Lament has changed the way that I talk to God. The more that I've thought about it, the more I've realized that most of what I need to say to God has to have some kind of lament as part of it if I'm going to be honest. And my understanding of lament has been shaped by an Old Testament professor named John Golden-Gay. Golden-Gay has done all sorts of technical work on

lament and on the Old Testament, but his description of it in his own life is really powerful. He describes lament as shaking your fist at God and saying you promised things wouldn't be this way. He tells a story of when in his middle age and his marriage his wife was contracted or came down with multiple sclerosis and over time she became

non-communicative. She was confined to a wheelchair. But John would take her and bring her to class with him, bring her to faculty meetings with him, brought her everywhere with him. And then every evening, he would pray lament on her behalf because she could no longer do it. He would cry out to God and say, things are not supposed to be this way. This is not what you promised. Well, eventually his wife

past and years later he ended up remarrying and his new wife happened to have a daughter who worked in the refugee camps in Darfur with people who are in immense suffering. And so now every evening they pray lament on behalf of the people of Darfur. And what I love about this is we got one example that is so deeply personal. There's nothing more personal, nothing more intimate than the relation of a husband and a wife and a husband speaking to God for a wife who can no longer speak.

Yet at the same time, we've got something that's playing out on a national stage or international in Darfur. And so praying across all the time zones and all the land. And it feels like in this COVID moment, that is exactly what we need. We need something that is deeply personal because we're all trapped at home together. And at the same time, something that is immense that can handle the weight of an international crisis. Lament.

captures all of those things for me. That's why it's so powerful in this moment.

You know, Scott, last week we talked so much about listening for people's longing and losses. And as I listen at this time, even in my own house, we have graduates who don't get to celebrate. We have milestone birthdays that nobody gets to congregate. We have weddings that have been canceled. The list goes on. So we can identify those.

longings and losses and what goes underneath that, but where do we go with it? And this is what is challenging to me right now as a church leader. Where do we go when people say, I am so angry? Or we talked about grief. You can see the different stages of grief that people are going in for people that know those theories, but now what? Or even that sense of I thought God was like this.

and God has disappointed me. And you hear that and you go, I try and listen, but how do I help them? How do I help myself take that someplace? What do I do with that? That story gives me a practice and yet it's still disconnected for me. What does it mean for me to take all of those longings and losses and put them someplace?

think one of the things I've noticed now being back in the Midwest for several years is that I think collectively as a church, we have a culture of kind of silencing those things. And it's particularly poignant here in the Midwest. And I think sometimes if I have to read another Facebook post about how I'm supposed to look for the good in the day, I think I'm probably going to lose it. And I think one of the things I really loved about

living in Philadelphia was a different kind of culture. And I'll never forget moving there and going to my first student services meeting. I was an associate director of admissions and it was like watching a chaotic tennis match. People were all talking at the same time. There were lots of gestures.

There was yelling and there was a very animated exchange of ideas. And they said things like, you're wrong. That just can't be right. We can't do it that way. It was expressive and it was raw. And I have to admit coming out of the Midwest, I was pretty stunned by that. But I really learned to appreciate it because I didn't have to wonder what somebody was thinking about something. There was something about that kind of expression that

convey that kind of trust in your colleagues.

me,

the message of the Psalms of lament is that God can handle your honesty, even and especially when you are angry at God. We are used to the kinds of bosses that we have, authority figures, who can't handle our honesty, and so we have to hide our anger from them. I think almost the prototypical Psalm of lament for me is Psalm 139.

Now, most people scratch their head when I say Psalm 139 is a psalm of lament because it's not in most of our churches. We edit it. What does it say? The first 15, 17, 18 verses of Psalm 139 are, have searched me and know me, you know me by going out and by coming in. I am fearfully and wonderfully made, wonderful are my works and are thy works and my soul knows it very well. It's all the message of the first 17 verses is

God, you know me better than I know myself, so I might as well just be honest with you. And then we have the two verses in the Psalm that we usually skip when we read it in our polite churches. And those verses say, that you would slay the wicked. And it's not just, that you would slay the wicked. The point is, that you would slay the wicked, and I have names for you. The whole point of the Psalm is, God, I want you to kill people for me. And then the last bit of it is, search me, God, and know my heart.

Try me and know my anxious thoughts and see if there be any hurtful way in me and lead me in your everlasting way. In other words, the last bit of it is God, if they ain't right, fix it. So the message of Psalm 139 is, you know me better than I know myself, I might as well be honest with you. I want you to kill people for me. If that's not right, fix me. There is a rawness to that Psalm. There is an honesty, there is a trust to that. In Silicon Valley nowadays,

they have a phrase that they use where they talk about the importance of candor. Candor is to say that if I'm doing something and we're working together on a project and you think I'm wrong, you better tell me because it would be like me knowing that I'm about to walk out into the street and be hit by a bus and you didn't say anything. Now, the kind of candor is also the kind that says I may be wrong. Let's talk about this together. And so we talk about it.

But the point is there's a candor that says, I'm going to tell you just what I'm thinking, and I'm going to invite you to tell me what you're thinking. And that is a statement of trust. It's not an attack. It's a statement of trust. The raw honesty that God invites is a statement of trust. God, I trust you enough that I can be honest with you. my goodness. Talk about being fearful and wonderfully made. my.

I think it's not only an act of faith, but it's an act of courage. To lament is an act of courage. And I find that when I get to that place, the last thing that I have to give up to really lament is how I understand who God is. There's a way in which lament calls on us to let go of who we expected God to be, and in some cases, even who God promised us that God would be.

And that's a really tough thing to let go of because then you're really at the bottom. You're really in the pit, I think, when you get to that place where you just have to let go of domesticating God. It was a number of years ago now that I had to preach on Job. And I read this great article by Thomas Long who talks about the story of Job in this way, right?

that Job and his friends had a certain expectation about how God would operate. In other words, if they tried not to sin, they tried to be righteous with regard to the law, and if they sinned, they offered the appropriate offerings in response to that, to a swage God, and then God was supposed to provide a great blessing in response to that obedience. And of course,

to the law.

the story of Job that all falls apart. Job is about as righteous as they come and even offers, even gives offerings in case one of his children sinned. The text goes out of its way to talk about Job's righteousness. But then of course, all of these terrible things, the fall Job. And his friends come along one, two, and three, right? And they're telling him about

how they're insisting that this way of understanding God has to be right because they're not ready to lament. They're not ready to let go of their own version of how God ought to operate in the world. And of course, God isn't terribly, you know, pastoral when it comes to dealing with Job in this, but God makes it clear, right? God says to Job, if you can play with Leviathan like a sparrow.

then you can tell me how I should operate. But until then, I'm God and let me be God. And I feel like lament has that element, right? That we have to let go of even our own understandings of who God is and how God ought to operate. And I think in these times of chaos, we wanna kind of cling to those systems and ways of understanding God. But I think the final act of lament.

calls us to let go of that and to trust God.

As we think about what to do with this, for me, one of the pivot moments is to rethink pastoral care. Often when I think of lament, I put it within a personal experience or at a pastoral kind of one-on-one response. But I think in these times when the loss and longings are so wide and deep that the proper way to deal with lament

is to recognize its communal nature. So I have a colleague that I co-wrote a book with, Chaim Herring, who is a Jewish rabbi and he teaches me a lot about the part of the Old Testament that I am not, haven't spent so much time with. And one of the things we were talking about recently was about lament and the communal nature that lament has for the Jewish people.

that not only does lament happen for this time, whatever is happening in front of us, but it reminds us and it connects us to the lamenting that has happened across time and literally across the world. And so that has challenged me to rethink of lament as not only the time when I can bring whatever is on my heart to God,

but also the communal nature of how we as a body need to have practices around lament that remind us of the hurts in the world. lets us put our sufferings somewhere and it connects us to those suffering in this time and in other times and God's steadfastness even in the midst of all of that.

love this idea that lament is communal. It's because worship is communal. I think we should learn to worship the way the Psalms worship God. If look at the Psalms, about half are Psalms of praise and about half, it's a little less than half, are Psalms of lament. Yet if you look at our worship services, they are not divided in that way. What we

do is we do all this praise stuff that's almost designed at times to distract us away from the honesty of the suffering. Yet we are called to praise with those who rejoice and lament with those who suffer, or rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. I think every worship service should include times where we praise, because whether or not I am feeling the need to praise right now, I owe God my praise.

and I owe the community of faith to be able to participate with those who are feeling the need to rejoice. And I think every worship service should include times of lament, because whether or not I'm feeling the need to lament right now, somebody around me is, and I'm going to stand with them. As Louise mentioned when we talked about Job, God owes us nothing. We don't get to stand up to God and say, you owe us an explanation, but God invites it.

God invites our anger. If the message of the Psalms of lament is that God can handle our honesty, even when we're especially angry at God, the fact that God put all of these lament Psalms into Scripture as a model for us is a way to say that God invites our honesty. And without that honesty, we cannot have community. so the honesty that God invites for us has to be just as

as Terry was saying, has to be Camilo.

Scott, you were naming some practices you've helped congregations do with this. Would you share a couple of those examples as we think about takeaways from this?

So as part of a project I've been working on with innovation and youth ministry and young adult ministry, we've been doing a number of things where we've been using Christian practices to help them innovate their way forward. And one of the Christian practices we've been using is lament. So let me give you two or three examples where churches have tried this. One is youth ministry in Colorado. What they did is they went back from a conference that we had and they built a wailing wall.

They built it out of styrofoam blocks and they painted it brown. And then every Wednesday night when they had their youth group meeting, they gave their youth little slips of paper and little golf pencils. And they said, you can write whatever you want, roll it into little things and slip it into the wall. And you can know two things. One is we will not judge you for it. And two, we will pray with you. And they ended up at first with just some pretty, you know, innocuous kinds of things.

But as people became more more brave, they wrote the most raw things. the adult congregation found out about this. And they said, we want a piece. And they ended up bringing the Wailing Wall into the adult worship service at one point and using that. Now, of course, we can't gather like that right now. But it would be very easy to create a virtual Wailing Wall where people could

roll up little slips of text or little slips of something and send them to some kind of a space where they would know two things, they would not be judged, and they would know that people in the congregation would pray for them. Another church in Florida, the youth group was mostly middle schoolers. And if you've ever been around middle schoolers, you know it's really hard to be a middle schooler. And so they thought lament might be helpful to them.

But it's hard to explain lament to middle schoolers. And so what they did is they created a mad lib structure. The lament Psalms have a nice structure to them. And so what they did is they had four statements. And they would have the statement, and then they had a little empty space where they got a piece of paper and they could just fill in the statements. The first was, God, I don't understand blank. And then students would fill that in. And the second sentence is, God, please fix blank. And students would fill it in.

God, I trust you with my future even if," and the students would fill it in. And then the last was, God, I will praise you even when, and they would fill it in. And at first, the young people wrote about things that were far away and not scary to them, things that didn't really impact them. And then sometimes they would write about, please heal this person or that. But after they got experience with this for five or six weeks, they started writing about the lungs and losses of what it meant to be a middle school.

And that became a way in which they could invite these middle schoolers to speak honestly before God. We had one of these conferences where we talked about this stuff literally the weekend before all of this COVID stuff broke. And we had a congregation that was going back and was going to be working on lament. And they figured they had about 12 months until they were really going to be able to implement it, something like that. And then all this COVID thing broke. And I met with some of the congregation over Zoom a couple of weeks later.

And the first thing one of the young adults said is, this lament stuff is gold. I can't stop talking to my friends about it. We need a language where we can tell God exactly how we feel and to tell him that we trust him. Lament can change the way that we talk to God.

Scott, really love that and the prospect of doing that with grownups makes me think too about preaching and teaching right now. And I think somewhere, you know, I've lived a lot of years in theological education, I somewhere along the way I got the message that I was supposed to be a kind of apologist for God. I was supposed to be able to explain the things that God did or did not do that were painful for people.

to be able to offer those and cogent ways that people could understand. But I think more and more as we walk through this COVID crisis, I'm beginning to understand that that apologetic bone isn't very helpful. And I wonder if in preaching and teaching, if things like lament become our friends, become our tools, become our ways of leaning into what it means to give expression to God, to trust God right now.

with all of the pain and all of the fear and all of the loneliness and all of the anger that we're feeling. So I think that could be a really helpful model even for preachers and teachers is to help people from the pulpit begin to think about what would it look like to lament and then not to offer an apologetic.

We actually did that in the congregation that I'm a part of. And I had just been working with lament and we had been doing our own lament. We'd taken the pattern that Scott talked about and we had written it in our own words. And so I did an exercise for the congregation and in preparation for that, I shared it with some staff. It just so happened that it was at a day in my life where I got some really bad news in our family and

I got home that night and I opened up my email and one of the staff people, the music person, had taken the example that I had done, the lament that I had done, and had said, I haven't written a song in a while, but your words inspired me. And so she took my lament and made it into a song. And I listened to it at the end of that hard day and it was like God's

love and mercy was showered on me. They were words I had written, but they were not my words anymore. They were bigger than me. They were a community surrounding and loving me in a time that I didn't have it to do on my own. I think lament is something that we need to lean into in this time, but we need to pivot it from a personal thing to a communal.

practice.

Thanks for joining us for this episode of our Pivot podcast. For more leadership resources from LEAD, you can go to waytolead.org or from Faithlead, go to faithlead.luthersam.edu.