NILS VON KALM says it’s time the church re-embraces the call to lament…
Melbourne, Australia
Early this month, the Australian Baptist Minister, Tim Costello, recently shared a deeply emotional plea for prayer and lament over what is happening in Gaza. With tears, Tim expressed his agonising sorrow at the death and loss that is taking place, with thousands of children having lost their lives, and Palestinian and Jewish families mourning the loss of loved ones.
Tim’s plea is a classic example of the Christian call to lament that we see throughout the pages of the Bible. Tim refers to Ecclesiastes, which tells us there is a time to be born and a time to die, and the Psalms, many of which cry out for God to deal with the wickedness in the world. “How long O Lord?!” is a common, desperate refrain from many pages of Scripture.
A stained glass window depiction of the prophet Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem in the Cathedral of Brussels, Belgium on 26th July, 2012. PICTURE: jorisvo/Shutterstock
I recently listened to a talk from the Korean-American Christian author, Soong-Chan Rah. He wrote a book some years ago about prophetic lament. In that book, he said that 40 per cent of the Psalms are psalms of lament, yet 95 per cent of the songs in the Christian Copyright Licensing International song list that many of us sing on a Sunday in church are praise songs. Just five per cent of the songs we sing are songs of lament.
“[M]ost of our worship on a Sunday morning is not reflective of what we read in our Bibles. Soong-Chan Rah also asks when the last time was that you heard a sermon on the Book of Lamentations. Possibly never. I don’t think I ever have.”
The takeaway from that is that most of our worship on a Sunday morning is not reflective of what we read in our Bibles. Soong-Chan Rah also asks when the last time was that you heard a sermon on the Book of Lamentations. Possibly never. I don’t think I ever have.
My friend, Jarrod McKenna, in responding to Tim Costello’s plea for prayer and lament, praised Tim for consistently being a voice for neighbourly love, flowing out of the love of God. Jarrod added that he prays for a time when such decency is not seen as “prophetic”, but instead is generally understood as the basic practise of Christian faith.
Now more than ever, the church needs to embrace lament as a normal expression of faith. When we do that, we will move further toward the Spirit of Christ and toward the reality that most of the world lives in. If we don’t, the Gospel will appear as irrelevant as it blends in to the prevailing culture. What happens then is that a church culture that is distant from suffering will focus on feeling good. The more it does that, the more it will lose its prophetic witness to a world that desperately needs the love of God that the church is supposed to represent.
The church in the West is too middle-class. In my city, the main Christian radio station talks about having a positive message of life. The company that runs them is even called Positive Media. There is nothing wrong with being positive in itself; positive thinking is very helpful in certain situations. But when it is divorced from suffering, it doesn’t know how to deal with the awkwardness of people’s lives. It all becomes too hard. It’s then much easier to sing another praise and worship song so we can feel “close to Jesus”.
The problem with that is that it doesn’t bring us any closer to Jesus because Jesus is always right with us anyway. He is not afraid of being right in the middle of our messiness. In fact, it’s His favourite place to be because that’s where we feel the need for love the most. And Jesus loves to give us love. It’s not about how we feel.
The more we are in touch with the raw, awkward messiness of life and relationships, the more we will grow into Christlikeness. That’s why it is so important to belong to some sort of faith community if you can. Following Jesus simply can’t be done alone.
Having said that, so many Christians have been horrifically burned by the church. It’s shameful the way that spiritual abuse has wrecked the lives of an untold number of people. That’s why it is so important that communities have arisen where people who have been burned can come together and support each other. It’s not meant to be a collective grudge fest of course, but we do bond most deeply through difficulty.
A healthy church is a community which focuses more on character than comfort. It is a community where the hard, awkward and messy details of our lives are faced with a courage born out of a saturation of support and compassion.
Contrary to the message we’re given by most mega-churches, the life of constant victory is not the Biblical pattern for the people of God. The Biblical pattern is one of constant struggle. There are definitely times of victory, but that is not the pattern.
The story of Job is a classic example of this. Job was a man who had it all and did it all. Yet he then lost it all. And he struggled. And he cried, and he debated, and he argued. And God was ok with all of it. When God spoke back to Job, it was as a loving parent, reminding Job who God was and that God could be trusted.
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Then there is the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel (Genesis 32:22-32). After a whole night of wrestling, Jacob ends up with a damaged hip and his name is changed to Israel, which means…one who struggles with God. The very name given to the people of God is “struggle”. It’s their identity.
Then Jesus, of course, as the new Israel was one who also struggled. He is prophetically described by Isaiah as a Man of Sorrows, familiar with grief.
Life is a struggle. If we’re honest, the work of grief in our lives is never finished. There is always more to uncover. It’s like peeling an onion. Just when you think it might be over, something else comes up. This is why we need each other; it’s why Jesus prayed that we as His disciples would be one and why He gave us the command to love each other, because we need each other.
We cannot do life on our own. The fallacy of us having an individual relationship with God and that that is enough is a fallacy for a reason. It’s just not the reality of life, and it’s not the message of the Gospel. Even Jesus needed His friends, as He demonstrated during his own intense grief on the night before he died.
If Jesus Himself needed others and openly expressed lament, then we as His followers are called to do the same. As we do so, we will be transformed into more beautifully loving, compassionate and kind human beings, in the very image of our beautifully loving, compassionate and kind Saviour.
