2 Samuel 1:1,
17-27
The Necessity of Lament
July 2, 2006
Rev. Elizabeth Macaulay
I was involved
in an interesting discussion the other day.
My conversation partner was a woman of
some eighty years. She has been a leader
and pioneer in her field and I respect her greatly.
She was talking
about something that was very important to her.
She had arranged that I be invited to her
birthday party. And she wanted me to
know that the invitation I received for her Birthday was not created by her,
and in fact, she was a little embarrassed about it and wanted me to know that.
The reason?
The invitation was plastered with the
image of the American Flag. Since this
woman’s birthday is in early July, the person throwing the party thought it was
a natural thing to have that image prominent on the invitation.
The woman I breakfasted with has struggled
mightily with her sense of being a
citizen of the
Part of her distress, I believe, lies in a
very real need we each have. A need that
is being discouraged in this day and time.
She lives in a
culture -our culture - that shuns lament.
We live in a culture that seems to want us
to believe that if we engage in lament - an outcry of grief prompted by our
sense that lives lost through violence on any soil for whatever reason - we are
somehow unseemly.
We live in a time where lament is deemed
unpatriotic. We live in a time where
questions are somehow subversive, and our need for speaking both for and
against our beliefs is so charged with dangerous energy that we often keep our
thoughts and most heart wrenching questions to ourselves.
And they fester there. And they lead us into despair. And they create a wedge between us and those
we cannot know because between us is silence where there could be relationship.
In today’s scripture reading, David held
out to the world the brokenness of his heart.
The grief he felt because the realities of war had marched into the
sanctuary of his heart relationships.
And he wanted God and his community to
know his grief. And he wanted the
healing grace of letting fly right out loud the intensity of his heart ache.
Stephan Levine is a grief counselor who
has written extensively about grief. He
wrote a book called Unattended Sorrow after 9/11 because he knew that
the power of unexpressed grief would be a long term and detrimental product of
our shared national sorrow.
On this day when we consider what it is to
live in our nation as followers of Jesus, I commend his words to you:
“Unattended sorrow degrades whole cultures
that insist on the suppression of painful feelings. It creates a thinly disguised foreboding that
slowly sublimates into a materialism capable of destroying the spirit of most
religions. It’s a melancholy that
atrophies nerve endings, making it difficult to touch or feel. . ..
This cultural numbing creates a
politically infantile worldview that can’t see beyond its own immediate needs
nor comprehend that anyone else feels pain as much as we do.
It reinforces the least in us. It forgets itself in violence to ourselves
and to others, and sours our worldview.
Its legacy, from generation to generation, is the war-torn heart. It abandons its veterans, giving them
shamefully inadequate support and care.
It makes big war but has little idea of how to serve the peace. It casts a cold eye on its most heroic
servants. It leaves its dead on the
battlefield.” (Page 82)
Why this sermon
on the necessity of lament as we celebrate our nation’s independence?
I want for us as we enter this holiday
time to be able, as good Americans, to hit our knees and open our hearts to our
real need to lament. Surely we will
enjoy parades and fire works and teeny weeny doughnuts but in the midst of the
grand hurrah, I pray that we also remember:
Kyle Miller of
Many who have come home from
There are untold people, flesh and blood
creations of a loving God, who are devastated by the violence of this war that
is not a war.
So on this day, how can we not
lament? How can our souls be whole if we
remain barricaded against this pain?
We are a great nation. Under God.
And we are a nation brought to birth by
those who lamented injustice and oppression.
Following in their footsteps, and in the
footsteps of our brother in faith David, we seek the wisdom to know that
nothing ought muffle our outcry when blood is spilled. It matters not the cause. What matters is that our hearts are willing
to pause and pay attention to the pain.
And, speak that pain and share the ways that pain has taken up lodging
in our souls.
The first step
in healing is naming and claiming the pain.
It’s like the
Dr. Seuss book The Lorax.
The narrator
tells the story of economic greed that leads to environmental devastation.
The
Lorax is the story of a creature that spoke out time and time again the
pain of creation as it is slaughtered by the greed of the people that use the
land without respect.
Finally, there
is nothing left. Except the last seed of
the Truffula tree.
The Onceler, he who has abused the land,
gives the last remaining seed - the seed that has the power to grow a future -
to a young child. Sharing with him the
utter crucial need for each one of us to care.
The Onceler gives the seed with these words:
UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better. It´s not. SO...
Catch! calls the Once-ler. He lets something fall.
It´s a Truffula Seed. It´s the last one of all!
You´re in charge of the last of the Truffula Seeds.
And Truffula Trees are what everyone needs.
Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care.
Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air.
Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack.
Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back.
We need to grow peace and we need to grow
a nation that remembers the glory of its founding vision.
In order to do
the work of growing the future, we need to be allowed the powerful healing of
lament.
Knowing that our souls must sound. Knowing that our God hears. Knowing that it is the way to our healing.
Let lament ring. Let healing commence. Let freedom ring. Amen