THE LOST LAMENT?

Here are some notes from a talk we had at our Easter SGWC Forum,

THE LOST LAMENT
In the aftermath of the Dunblane massacre in Scotland, John Bell of the Iona community attended a clergy conference. Listening to clergy who had faced the liturgical challenge of responding to that awful day he was stunned by the honest assessment of one minister who said,

‘It was on that Sunday that I realised we had lost the ability to lament.’

As a church have we lost the abiblity to lament? Do we know how to lamnet? Are we real in our worship?
For instance after 9/11 or 7/7 it was hard to find songs that would help people to express their pain and sorrow over such a tradegy. National Tradegys and personal tragedies are unfortunatly part of life this side of heaven, how do we make space in worship for responding to those experiences of disorientation?Perhaps this a good time to think about it with the global credit crunch, levels of unemployment, the recession and current climate crises…

THE NOW AND NOT YET
Worship is a tension between an expression of the ‘Friday voice’ and the ‘Sunday voice’ The ‘Sunday voice’ is one of celebration and victory because of the resurrection. The ‘Friday voice’ is one of sorrow and lament at the pain and suffering endured on Good Friday. This reflects the tension of the Kingdom Of God, the now and the not yet. His kingdom has come – we can find new life in the resurrection ‘Sunday voice’ yet His kingdom has not yet fully come – we still see pain and sorrow in the present age ‘Friday voice’

The difficulty is holding the two together in tension at the same time – we naturally want to resolve the tension. Churches like ours probably resolve the tension so that the ‘Sunday voice’ drowns out the ‘Friday voice’. We rightly celebrate the victory and achievement of the crucified Christ at Easter but gloss over the pain and suffering of the cross which resonates in the pains and sufferings that all of humanity experience in the present moment.
It’s the ‘Friday voice’ that we want to explore this morning.

BRINGING ALL OF LIFE AS WORSHIP
We in Western culture can live in a ‘culture of denial’ about suffering, we seem to be able to suppress it and carry on regardless. The people of Israel had a far more healthy attitude: they didn’t ignore it and they didn’t make it an issue of God; they viewed it as God’s problem! All of life was to be brought before God in prayer and worship, not just the good bits! The times of disorientation as well as those of orientation…In fact, 1/3 of the Psalms are Lament Psalms – coming out of those times of disorientation  is the same true of the Songs of Fellowship/Spring Harvest/Soul Survivor?

Worship in Israel took place right in the middle of the real world, do we somehow leave/escape the real world to worship? The spiritual in Scripture is found in the midst of the physical, not apart from it – ‘embodied spirituality’ ‘The God who Responds to the Cry’ becomes the ‘Suffering God’: It was those Psalms and that ‘embodied spirituality’ that Jesus lived in. As Jesus is hanging on the cross, he cries out ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me’, quoting from Psalm 22. Throughout Scripture the theme is not one of people crying out into an abyss, but of crying out to a God who responds to the cry – ‘My God, my God…’:
Exodus – heard the cries of my people and come down…
Abel – blood cried out from the ground…
God reveals Himself as the God who hears the cry of the oppressed
On the cross, Christ becomes the oppressed, the marginalised, the sufferer and takes up the human protest against it:
Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us, “Only the suffering God can help.”
And Alfred North Whitehead calls God the “fellow sufferer who understands.”

PSALM 22 AND THE LAMNET FORM.

‘You can not have a serious theology of the cross without a serious practice of the lament psalms’  (Brueggemann)

Common Structure (e.g. Psalm 22):
Plea (vv.1-21):
Address (vv.1-2)
Crisis/complaint (vv.6-8,13-15)
Petition (v.12,19-21)
Motivation (vv.9-10)
Praise (vv.22-31)
[Assurance of being heard]
Vow of commitment (vv.22,25)
Doxology (vv.23-31)