SCRIPTURE: Lamentations 1
TEXT: THEME: Giving ourselves grace to grieve our loss. INTRODUCTION Barbara Brown Taylor, a former pastor, educator at Piedmont College, and public theologian spoke about how our world is carrying a lot of unmourned grief. Our world has experienced so many kinds of losses. Just last week the shooting at the end of the Kansas City Chief’s parade triggered old sorrows brought about by gun violence. Our American culture doesn’t give us adequate opportunities to grieve. We don’t stop to reflect, to feel pain, placing an event like this into a larger context, we jump quickly towards revenge which is not mourning. Sometimes we need a retreat where we can scream with drums, or attend a really good funeral, or participate in a march advocating for the stop of losses due to abuse, but our culture does not offer a stylized way to deal with the corporate grief we feel as a community. She suggests that the church offer Ash Wednesday and the 40 days of Lent as a way for our community to deal with our unmourned grief with an opportunity to lament, confess sins, and sit in the sins of our community. This led me to the book of Lamentations. I have never preached from it before and I found a resource from Fuller Seminary called Lamentations in Lent. It seemed a bit much for the next 5 Sundays in Lent, so I thought maybe I’d join Iao UCC bible study in Mark. So I took Iao’s invitation to join them at 7pm. The Gospel of Mark will have us journey with Jesus up to the events of Easter but that wasn’t what I wanted to do so I went back to Lamentations. As I read the its passages I found that its poetry were touch points for the thoughts and emotions we are carrying about the Lahaina and Kula fires. I’ll be preaching from the first few verses of Lamentations 1 but have worked the other verses of the first chapter into the liturgy of our worship service. SCRIPTURE Lamentations speaks to our human condition. Our hearts are articulated in the words of this poem. From its verses I took the feelings that were communicated and attached some of our current feelings and events. As you listen to the retelling of this lament, do the same and attach your own feelings, thoughts, stories, to reflect, meditate and mourn. This is the beauty of poetry. 1Lahaina: sits in ashes, Once filled with people, now uninhabitable and empty. She has become like a widower. Once a princess among resort towns, she is now dependent upon handouts, subsidies, FEMA, grants, agencies and others to support her. 2Sorrowful, her tourist friends are gone, their playground is gone. Some try to take advantage of her despair. 3Her Livelihood is gone. Those who could–have left, locals are sheltered without jobs, security is gone, some are surviving to stay close to home, to ward off opportunist. 4The first Missionary outposts mourn. The Kalawina ministers behind the scenes. Our hope in God lies within. 5She is subject to insurance companies, building permits, the core of engineers, EPA standards, infrastructure and utility concerns. It is easy to think God is the cause of all of this. That is not true, God has not caused this, Rather God is with us in all of this and even with our children. 6Ambivalence towards Lahaina’s children drives the forces of power, money and politics towards quick fixes. This will be a long journey. 7All we have left are the memories. Even our mementos are gone. The touchstones to the past, the reminders of our history, the ancestors are gone and the artifacts of our stories. Don’t listen to those who try to take our heritage from us. 8what has happen to her bring sadness. It is so embarrassing. 9We are Mortified. We have been so short sighted, only doing what was needed in the moment without thought to its long lasting effect. We have no pride to preserve. “Lord look upon our despair and our shame.” 10what has been most dear to us has been taken away. Our boundaries have been violated. 11The treasures we have escaped with, we use for sustenance. Lord look upon our desperation. 12Tourist come and gawk at our misfortune. How sad, how poor, how houseless. 13The fires were relentless and complete. Everyone was affected by its wrath. 14Sometimes when things are difficult, it is easy to blame God for what we have done, or for things that have happened to us. Forgive us. APPLICATION The lament gives us time to consider what has happened. Identify how we feel, and even consider how we might have contributed to part of what had happened. We can admit our part, make plans to change our behavior so we don’t find ourselves in this situation again and see what we can do to make things better. The feelings we have are important. We may not understand them right away and need to give them the attention they need so we can identify them, explore why we feel that way, discover their roots and decide if we want to continue to feel like that or not. Too often we move towards quick solutions that are rash and don’t deal with the feelings we have, just burry them. When we are able to name these feelings it helps us to know what we are dealing with. Prayer, silence, engaging in a lamenting prayer gives us space to consider these things. Sometime we may need the help of a therapist who can help us to identify what we are dealing with and give us tools we can use to deal with our feelings. Praise music, the Psalms, and coffee with a trusted friend are other tools at our disposal. CONCLUSION On Friday Eddie and I spoke with an insurance adjuster about the repairs to the sanctuary roof and water damage inside. They surveyed the outside of our building with a drone and the inside with a 360 degree camera. Their AI software will identify all of the places in need of repair. They said there is a good chance that we will be able to get the funds that we need to do all of the repairs that need to be done. We need to be in pray that the insurance company will partner with us to make these repairs and keep our building going for the next 150 years. The interior work may be extensive. We may have to invite ourselves to worship at Iao UCC while they set up scaffolding to work on the ceiling. I can feel my anxiousness building. Remember the 4-8-7 breathing? We need to feed oxygen to our brain to think clearly. (And breath in the Holy Spirit). Sitting uncrossed with our feet flat to the ground and hands in our lap, helps us to feel grounded and maybe even sense the presence of the Lord being our foundation. There is lots of work to do, besides everything else we are already doing. But God hears our cries and journeys with us through all of this. Then down the road, I anticipate, we will celebrate, as people being able to return home to Jerusalem. To Lament is natural. We all feel loss in our lives from time to time. God is not foreign to our sorrow and is a companion who will not abandon us even when the road is difficult. God is a good listener, is patient with us especially when it is taking a while for us to get our bearings and knows that our feelings are important and will always be there to help us.
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