God's Lament (Jeremiah 8:18-9:3)

The miners from Chile have been much in the news and much on our minds.
The whole world has been in their corner.
And many of us have given a thought or two or more to what it must have been like to have been 2000 feet down in a dark, dirty, hole without much food or water.
How would I have handled that?
How would you have handled that?
Would I have felt God-forsaken?
Would I have shouted out my anger at God and man?

Have you ever felt like life was teetering
On the edge of chaos—held together by a thin thread
Tears, anxiety
Hovering just below the surface
Fear, grief, trepidation

Heart sick
Joy Gone
Utter dismay

Isolated, alone,
Angry, crushed

Have you ever breathed Lament from every pore of your being

GOD HAS

Hear now the powerful lament of God from the prophet Jeremiah 8:18 -9:3

This is the word of God for all people—Thanks be to God

From the mouth of Jeremiah we hear the words of our suffering God.
We hear the disappointment, the agony, the weeping for God’s children who have turned away.

In our hearing, we yearn for a verse of Hope
And in our yearning
We are given permission to express the Gut Wrenching parts of our life.

In God’s Lament, we humans,
We who are indeed created in the Image of God
Are Freed to express all that is within us


Freed to have no barriers, no secrets
Freed to have all things spoken and exposed to God

Mary can say, “Lord, if you have been here, my brother would not have died”
And others could say, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying”

They could bring God in Christ to tears, but they were free to express all that was within their hearts.

God can hear our every thought. Our prayers can open all of our life to God.
We don’t have to act nicely in God’s presence.
We don’t have to appear better off than we are,
to put on joyfulness when our hearts are broken,

When we feel alone and forsaken God will hear us.

If God’s speech is Raw—Ours can be too

Our lament, our doubt, our questions—
Even our Anger bring no danger to our relationship with God
They are ingredients that enhance our relationship with God
Because these are real.




These ingredients bring full-flavor to who we are
As we live in the potter’s hand,
As we live in the hands of the one
Who will make us whole.

The beauty of Lament is that it is real
Reflecting the true realities of life

The freedom of lament
Is that in giving voice to our anguish
We realize that we are not alone in our pain

When we hear the pain of God
We can perhaps find something that reflects life as we know it
Life as we are experiencing it

In our songs of Lament
Those around us enter with us
God enters with us
And through our cries
The possibility of hope is Reborn
When our cries are heard—When someone listens
The journey toward healing begins.

The prophets and the psalmist assure
That the depth and raw-ness of our pain
Can be given directly to God
We have the promise that God is never absent.
God enters our pain-no matter what we may be suffering




And the God who enters our pain
Is the same God
Who saw his only son tortured.
Who watched his only son die.
Who cries for a people who turn from him.
The God who enters our pain –with us
Is the God who knows suffering.

The tears of God that we read about today
Are tears for a wayward people.
And they are tears for us

God sees our suffering—coming just down the road
Our suffering because of our choices
Because we turn away.

God sees where we are headed
And a fountain of tears is not enough to express his sorrow

It must feel a bit like watching children and grandchildren struggle into adulthood

We are vulnerable in our watching.
What happens to them hurts us.
Sometime what happens to them hurts us more
Than anything we could bring on ourselves

When life’s pain stems from terrible decision, we feel helpless.
What happens to another hurts us and we lament.

God watches us struggle—struggle to grow
God sees where we are headed
And a fountain of tears is not enough to express God’s sorrow.

God hurts because God’s children hurt.
God hurts because we hurt.
We hurt ourselves and we hurt each other.


And in Jeremiah’s time God’s hurt is increased
Because not only did the people of God—the children of God
Make terrible decisions
But they are also indifferent about it.
They just do not seem to care

Have you ever wanted to shake someone till their teeth rattle?
As you watch them arrogantly
Choose a path toward destruction?

But we can not make others strong with our strength.
We can not make others wise with our wisdom.
Strength and wisdom have to be discovered and developed, and have to be learned—not given.

Each person having to discover in his own way.
Each having to give birth to his own strength.
Each having to give birth to his own wisdom.
And to endure the labor of that process
Labor that often, -maybe always, involves pain

God is watching the people of Israel
As the people of God teeter on the brink of Chaos
And God cries.

God cries for a community headed toward Death
A nation where communal integrity is Destroyed

God’s people have forgotten
That they are accountable for each other
And responsible to each other
I’m afraid this is true, not just for the people of Israel, but also for us.

We are indeed keepers of our Brothers and Sisters
All our brothers and sisters around the globe
The poor, the homeless, the hungry
The jobless, the unwanted and the unloveable
The forgotten, the lonely, the hurting
The hated and the enemy

God’s people have forgotten that
We are inter-dependent and inter related
What happens to one—happens to us all
There are no independent, isolated actions
Our attempts to get ahead—may push someone else behind.
Our moves toward arrogantly imagined selfish goals may
Put a stone of stumbling in the path of the Kingdom of God.

Not only in Jeremiah’s world, but here and now as we read the news of business and politics, and society,
We can see that God’s people have forgotten that God alone is Lord
Of our lives and of all things.

As a result of all this forgetting
We see ourselves attempting to shape the world
According to our vision—not God’s.

Have the people of God forgotten true life
And in the process chosen death?

We choose death
When we try to organize life into neat packages
That we can control.

We choose death
When we reject our basic inter dependent, inter-related nature.

We choose death
When we fail to fully listen to the faithful voices around us
When we fail to be accountable and responsible to the will of God.

We choose death
In our idolatry as we seek control
As we take truth and bend and shape it to our own purposes.
What do our business dealings say about our faith?
What do our purchases say?
What does our use of our most valuable resource(time) say?
“They have grown strong in the land for falsehood
And not for truth and they do not know me.. says the Lord”

Hear Jeremiah speak to us, to you and to me.

God’s own people have forgotten to know God
And in their forgetting have chosen death.

And God Laments
As we twist and shape the world for our own glory.

God Laments

Maybe we too need to lament.
Maybe we need to lament the loss of communal integrity.
Maybe we need to lament
The despair that we cover with self-sufficient autonomy
Maybe we need to lament
Hopelessness that we cover with stoic independence.

Or maybe we simply need to bring our basic, human need for God
To a conscious and named level.
Maybe we just need to cry out—revealing
Our exhausted spirits
Our broken relationships,
Our damaged families, and communities
Our viewed, witnessed and experienced violence

Maybe we just need to cry.

Dare we name our brokenness.
Dare we refuse to white-wash truth and reality.
Dare we fully embrace life as Christ intends us to live.

Our God cries for us

The beauty of crying out—the beauty of lament
Is that it is real and reflects the true realities of life

The freedom of crying out—the freedom of lament
Is that in giving voice to our anguish
We realize that we are not alone in our pain.

God cries
And in the pain of God
We can find reflections of ourselves.


Thru all cries—thru all lament
The possibility of hope is reborn.
When cries are heard
When someone listens
The journey toward healing begins.

Scripture assures us—our experience assures us
The experiences of the faithful around us assure us
That the depth and raw-ness of our pain
Can be given directly to God.

We don’t have to make it pretty, or nice, or politically correct for God.

We have the promise that God enters our pain—no matter what.
Through-out history the faithful have marched to the throne of God and cried out their pain.

Our only hope is to march ourselves to the throne of God and in loud lament cry out the pain that lives in our souls.

God, in accepting our lament, brings us to be strong, strong in faith,
strong in utterance,
strong in insistence,
strong in risk-taking




Our prayers of lament teach spiritual survival
Here is what to do in the pit of hopelessness:
Cling to God, even when God has seemed to slip away from you.
Yell at the top of your collective lungs.
Hold tightly, mercilessly, and with every ounce of strength to hope in Christ.
Shout and scream at our Lord and Savior..
That’s it
Don’t hold back.
Complain, protest, resist.
Reach into yourself to claim your experience and your capacity to see and name reality.


Jeremiah serves as a model survivor.
Stick to God with absolute loyalty.
Put doubts and rage and betrayal before God’s face.
Lay it out so you can see it yourselves and can see the deep, unending wound and isolation.
It is exactly laments’ bitter complaints and assaults on divine justice that, paradoxically, make them a perfect vehicle of fidelity.
Fasten on to God with all your strength in the midst of catastrophe.
Keep the relationship alive.
Keep communication open.

Think of the miner, months down in the depths, knowing how unfair this was.
Did you hear one of them say, “I held God’s hand”
We must hold on to God no matter what
And God will hold on to us—no matter what

Halleluah, Amen