Lament as Healing — 29 June 2025

Lament as Healing

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Jeremiah 9:17-22
Thus says the Lord of hosts:
Consider and call for the mourning women to come;
	send for the skilled women to come;
let them quickly raise a dirge over us,
	so that our eyes may run down with tears
	and our eyelids flow with water.
For a sound of wailing is heard from Zion:
	“How we are ruined!
	We are utterly shamed 
	because we have left the land,
		because they have cast down our dwellings.”
Hear, O women, the word of the Lord,
	and let your ears receive the word of the Lord’s mouth;
teach to your daughters a dirge
	and each to her neighbor a lament.
“Death has come up into our windows;
	it has entered our palaces
to cut off the children from the streets
	and the young people from the squares.”
Speak! Thus says the Lord:
“Human corpses shall fall
	like dung upon the open field,
like sheaves behind the reaper,
	and no one shall gather them.”

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Who gets to decide how long someone should grieve? This seems like a question no one would ever ask, yet our responses to a person’s grief often reflect our own discomfort in the face of grief and assumptions of what is enough. In a world where we expect life to be easy if we have done everything right, grief becomes something we pathologize and seek to fix as quickly as we can. 

As I consider the current conversations about what names places should bear, who our country remembers and honors, how history is taught and especially which history is shared, this question seems to be at the root of it. Because the history in question is events that some people grieve, both those memories and the grief they cause are called into question. Who gets to decide how long someone should grieve? Who gets to decide when we all should be over it?

Grief is a funny thing. When we deny it, our grief comes out in ways we don’t expect. We know the stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, as if grief were a linear experience, so that as we move through each stage, we can think “check” that one is done, on to the next stage. It makes it feel as if we can predict the shape of our grief and how long it will take us to move through to the other side.

Yet, anyone who has experienced grief knows that it doesn’t work quite that way. Whether our griefs are large or small, things past or anticipating the things to come, personal or communal, the experience of grief can be a tangled mess, with no clear way through. Others’ expectations that you move through it quickly or tidy up your grief so it doesn’t bother them can make it even harder to process. When we stuff down our grief, when the world around us moves on and thinks we should too, it comes out at others as anger or consumes us as despair. And yet, when we can bring our grief into the public space as lament, it can ultimately be healing for our whole society, not just the individuals.

In our first reading for today, we heard Jeremiah call the people to lament. Jeremiah prophesied in the Southern Kingdom, which was also known as Judah. The events recorded in the book of Jeremiah span the 620s to the 580s BCE and there was plenty to lament. Israel, or the Northern Kingdom, had been taken captive by Assyria the century before. In the early 600s, Babylon had invaded and occupied Judah. Several times, Judah revolted and Babylon responded with force. With each response, leading citizens and members of the upper class were deported to Babylon until, near the end of Jeremiah’s writing, Jerusalem was destroyed, including the palace and the temple.

Anyone could see that events seemed dire, but the official line was that everything was okay, the kingdom of Judah was as great as it ever was. In that reality, Jeremiah’s call for lament was a challenge to the powers that be. The women are called to be truth-tellers and lament the death of a people, as the land is occupied and finally decimated and Judah is carried off into exile.

Doesn’t this insistence that everything is fine sound familiar? From the highest to the lowest, you can find people who believe everything is fine and, if there is any problem, it comes from the terrible people who want to say that everything is not fine. There is no place for our country’s troublesome history that causes people to grieve.

Womanist theologian Cole Arthur Riley wrote, “I am most disillusioned with the Christian faith when in the presence of a Christian who refuses to name the traumas of this world. I am suspicious of anyone who can observe colonization, genocide, and decay in the world and not be stirred to lament in some way. For all the goodness of God, my ancestors were still abducted from their homes, raped, and enslaved. I will not be rushed out of my sorrow for it…In lament, our task is never to convince someone of the brokenness of this world; it is to convince them of the world’s worth in the first place. True lament is not born from that trite sentiment that the world is bad but rather from a deep conviction that it is worthy of goodness.”

“When we weep for the conditions of this world, we become truth-tellers in its defense. People who can say, This is not good. It is not well. People who have seen the face of goodness and refuse to call good and curse by the same name.”

While we may lament what feels to be impossibly broken, God tells us that goodness is possible, that brokenness will not last forever. When we lament, we can speak an authentic word of good news to the brokenness as we call for change. And when we can lament our losses together, God’s presence is borne in those who hold us in our grief, and through them, God creates a space for hope to break in. 

Reflecting on why lament was so important to the prophets, theologian and author Brian McLaren wrote, “Whenever you think of what you’ve lost, you weep. Your tears keep alive the folly of your people in not listening to the prophet’s warnings. Your tears keep alive your rage against the cruelty and domination of the Babylonians. Your tears keep alive a desire for change to regain your freedom, to return some day to your homeland… To help us meet and bear reality, the prophets say, mourn privately and lament publicly.… Feel the surge of divine grief, the groaning of the Holy Spirit deep within you, and let those groans of loss become the groans of labor so a better world can be born from our failure”

Witnessing the lament of others points out the brokenness of our world, calling attention to the ways people are hurt or disregarded. And witnessing lament calls all of us to action. For it’s not just the responsibility of those who lament, of those who are hurt, to advocate for and make change, but for all of society alongside them.

When others are moved by a lament and join in, both lamenting and acting, God is there. We believe that the promise of the Christian life is not a life without trouble or difficulty, but that the promise is one of presence – that God is present with us through everything, good and bad, high and low, easy and hard. 

At times when God’s presence feels like a distant promise, people drawing close and being moved by the things by which God is moved – weeping for the things God also weeps for – God’s presence is made visible. The promise of God’s presence is fulfilled through the people of God.

When we see people linger in lament, we worry that they are in despair, that depression has taken over yet lament is ultimately a call to hope and a belief that God will make all things right. It only becomes despair or depression when a lament is emptied of all hope. 

Riley wrote, “Lament is not anti-hope. It’s not even a stepping-stone to hope. Lament itself is a form of hope. It’s an innate awareness that tells us exactly what we are meant for, and whenever confronted with something contrary to this, we experience a crumbling. And in the rubble, we say, God, you promised. We ask, Why? And how could we experience such a devastation if we were not on some mysterious plane, hoping for something different. Our hope can be only as deep as our lament is. And our lament is as deep as our hope.”

When we deny grief, when we deny lament, we also deny hope. In our lament, there is space for God to answer. God promises a time when “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” When God “will wipe every tear from our eyes.” When “all things will be made new” in the ultimate goodness that we trust God intends for our world. Amen.

Notes

Note 1: Women’s Bible Commentary, Jeremiah by Kathleen M. O’Connor, p 179

Note 2: This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley, p 98

Note 3: This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley, p 97

Note 4: https://cac.org/daily-meditations/public-lament-2023-04-16/

Note 5: This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley, p 101