Today we complete our Lenten series on prayer, by tackling the one area that most of are not good at and the one that many of us want to avoid and that is lamentation. We are certainly good at complaining and making a big deal out of little things, but that is not what lamentations are about. While breaking a fingernail or our favorite sports team losing might be reasons to be upset, they are not truly lamentable. Lamentations are about those things which touch us deep down in our souls, which bring us to the depths of despair, which put us on our knees, literally or figuratively, which have us not only questioning but even cursing our existence and sometimes even cursing God.
“How lonely sits the city that once was full of people!” is how Lamentations begins, “How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations…. She weeps bitterly in the night with tears on her cheeks...” The she that is being referred to here is Jerusalem and her mourning comes in 587 BCE after the Babylonians had destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple and taken the leaders into exile. This was one of the most important and the most traumatic things to happen in Judaism, indeed the form of Judaism that we know, and that Jesus knew, probably would not exist without this event. As destructive and traumatic as 9/11 was to us as a nation and to our psyche as a people, 9/11 does not really compare to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. Picture that event and magnify it by a factor of ten, and you might begin to get a picture of what this meant. All the promises that had been made to the people by God seemed to have been destroyed, wiped away, in one devastating act, and it left the people wondering what had happened, why it had happened, and what the future held?
Tradition holds that the prophet Jeremiah wrote Lamentations, and Jeremiah is known as the weeping, crying or suffering prophet, and his writings certainly reflect that. They are difficult to read, and thus not preached on very often, not only because they are sometimes hard to understand, but more because they are sometimes brutal in their message, as we heard from this morning’s passage. Now while Lamentations is usually said to have been written about the time of the destruction of the temple and the exile, there is actually nothing which dates it to this period. Instead, it is a lament that could just as easily apply to the Holocaust as it could to the time of Jeremiah, and it can also apply to the times in which we have needed to offer lament in our lives.
