SCRIPTURE: Lamentations 2
TEXT: THEME: God expects us to take time and space to process trauma. INTRODUCTION The Bible is a collection of people’s stories with God. It records our human lives and our discoveries about God's character. One of the brilliant qualities of the Bible, is that it does not just record our successes and triumphs, but it also records our failures, sorrows, struggles, betrayals and pain. It is God’s dwelling with us through all the parts of our lives. In it, we can see God's healing, compassion, patience, forgiveness, love and life giving ways. Lamentation is such a book, where as the result of our failure, the Holy City of Jerusalem was invaded and destroyed, resulting in many of its residents being exiled to live in Babylon. 750 miles away as the crow flies, it is a 1,700 miles walk along the rivers. SCRIPTURE The second chapter in Lamentations is like the 1,700 mile walk. It is a space between the grieving in Jerusalem and finding ourselves displaced in Babylon. It is a space in sorrow before we begin crying out to God again. This is a space for us to wallow in self pity, to mourn our loss, to complain about what has happened to us, to get angry, to blame others and God, and to deny any responsibility so we don’t have to feel any worse than we already do and to be the victim of our own story. This is what it means to be human. The verses represented in the scripture reading illustrate very strong feelings. This is about what we feel. Its okay, we are human, we do this, sometimes when we are at our worst. But this is not all that we are. This is God letting us have our moment, until we decide God isn’t actually to blame and we shouldn’t have acted that way. This represents our knee jerk reactions to calamity, our monkey brain or amygdala fight or flight reaction. This is before our prefrontal cortex or Spock brain kicks in. Child psychiatrist John Rosemond talked about the “strong willed child.” He said that there is no such thing. I sort of suspect he actually meant that there are parents who are not very good at parenting. So when a child is angry and says that they hate us, then stomps away to their room locking the door…he says to take the vacation. Let them be, let them stew, be angry and after awhile, when they calm down and they need us again, they will come back. This is what is recorded in this passage. The people of God are angry at God and have stomped away to their room, blaming God for ruining their lives. 1God is angry at us and we are humiliated that all of these things have happened to us, with no thought our how we might have contributed to the situation. 4God has become like an enemy to us, by not preventing this attack, it is as if God was attacking us. If you are not for us, you must be against us. The tent of the daughter of Zion, is the temple of the children of God. 7There is no worship in the temple. It has been destroyed, What they do not see is that there was no worship of God happening there anyway because they had taken up to worshiping other gods. It wasn’t defiled by enemies, it was defiled by their betraying hearts. No worship of God, No leadership from God, No governance according to God’s ways, they turned away from God, but are not sorry about what they have done and blame God for the result of their folly. 11The grief and hunger they experience is emotional and physical but they are also spiritually starved. 14The counsel that they received was false. These prophets told them only what they wanted to hear, or what would continue to keep the prophets employed. They did not challenge their faith, or encourage them to grow. They were useless, misleading them in thinking that they were fine, when they were not. 16Their enemies have risen to make fun of them. Mock them and gloat over their demise. What was it in the way that Israel was living that made them to have so many enemies? Was it arrogance, greed, pride, selfishness, prejudice, self-righteousness? 20Then in the turning to God, it is almost as if saying: Look what you made me do. Don’t you know who you are doing this too? Not taking any responsibility for their actions or the consequence of their behavior. They have forgotten where their entitlement and privilege came from. 22They feel that God is to blame for not defeating their enemies. It is as if God had given their enemies an invitation to come and kill their children. APPLICATION God is big enough to be blamed by us for the bad stuff that happened in our lives. How do we move from blame to taking responsibility for our contribution to the situation we are in? What are we feelings in the space between disaster and hope? We need time and space to process events in our lives. After the fires in Lahaina and Kula, we spent time listening to the stories that people held. This gave them time and space to put their story together, to begin to articulate what happened to them and how they felt. This helped them get in touch with what they were feeling. Right or wrong, this is how they perceive what had happened and how it made them feel. The space after the disaster, to the time when we feel hope, is where our story get processed. As tell our story, we begin to know what we are feeling. This is where our listening can help identify the feelings being expressed. Sometime we don't know what we are feeling but others observe it. If we know how we are feeling, then we can decide if we want to continue to feel this way. Having time and space for sorrow, crying, blaming, knee jerk scenarios are our first response. Our presence, listening, moving towards normalcy, identifying feelings, are helpful for someone who is in the between space of disaster and hope. CONCLUSION In our story God is dwelling with us. There is a flip side to the story from Disaster to Babylon. The story that shows our actions that lead to the disaster. The story of how we felt one way because we didn’t have all of the facts correct. The story of how our feelings changed with a new perspective, a change in behavior or greater understanding. If anything, this says that we are people who are in process. Humans who we could get stuck in blame, anger, self-pity, grief, sadness, shame and helplessness. Keep processing, God has more for us beyond the space of lament.
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