The Lost Language of Lament

The Lost Language of Lament

What do you do when your legs are cut out right from under you? Do you soldier on? Stiff upper lip? Crawl in a hole? I'm not sure there's always a right answer for immediate responses to pain and suffering, but the Bible offers tremendous wisdom and grace about how to navigate grief in the book of Lamentations. In Lamentations, we see Jeremiah (often called "the weeping prophet"), responding the the fall of Jerusalem. The city he loves has been destroyed, and many of its citizens sent into exile in Babylon. Lamentations is a series of five poems expressing Jeremiah’s grief and pain. During the season of Lent, we're going to walk through Lamentations together, with an eye toward learning the language of lament. We'll learn the benefit of calling out the pain and suffering in the world as a form of protest against it. We'll learn that it’s okay to process pain, grief and anger in the presence of God and his people—in fact, we'll learn that it's better to do this with God and his people rather than apart from them. Along the way, we'll see the ways that lament can give voice to our confusion, offering us rich language to flesh out the questions of "Why?" and "How long?" that we ask when in the face of suffering.