Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

Proper 22 Year C
Deacon Richard Buhrer

I have a button on the bulletin board in my office at the hospital. It is the familiar red circle with the slash through it. Behind the circle on the button are three letters: BMG. I got this at an organizational workshop that I went to a number of years ago and it stands for “No bitching, moaning or groaning!”

There’s also a poster from Nike on the inside door of my office that pictures a paraplegic man climbing a mountain. It has Nike’s motto on it: Just Do It! Implying, of course, no whining allowed.

I’m also mindful of Mike Myers in the “Austin Powers” movies playing Mr. Bad who tells everyone with bad news: “Tell it to the hand.”

I suspect that we all sometimes find other people’s whining and complaining a little tedious and a little less than attractive some of the time. But nonetheless, in the first reading today we encounter a Hebrew convention that raises complaining to a high art form. That is the Hebrew poem known as a lamentation. A lamentation is a prayer poem of loud anguish and complaint addressed to God. The Book of Lamentations in the Bible is credited to the prophet Jeremiah and that is why we are reading it today (since for several weeks we have been focusing on the life and ministry of that great man). But the Lamentations were in fact written many years after Jeremiah’s death. But the art form itself is very ancient, far predating Jeremiah. Parenthetically, it is customary to read the Book of Lamentations in the daily office during Holy Week each year.

Now, I think that lamentation as a form of prayer is something that is fairly foreign to us. I don’t know about your family but in the family where I grew up, complaining wasn’t encouraged, especially to my father and it was in fact, shall we say, actively discouraged. I, at least, tend to translate that into my relationship with God. We also have the example of Jesus in the garden praying “Not my will, but Thine be done.” I think we feel compelled to imitate that prayer and try skipping over “If it be Thy will that this cup may pass from me” that preceded it.

When faced with great suffering and evil, women and men of our generation are inclined to doubt the existence of God. Suffering and evil thwart our ability to believe in the existence of a loving God and tempt us to see the world and the entire Universe as empty and essentially chaotic. We turn inward or rage pointlessly, despair and prepare to die without hope.

The authors of the great lamentations of the Bible had a very different experience. They expressed their pain, they described the horrors they were confronted with and somehow by honestly expressing their feelings they arrived at faith—God would indeed save them through unknown, unimaginable means and somehow restore the world to order and balance.

The first reading today describes the state of the city of Jerusalem after the Babylonians had sacked it: “How lonely sits the city that once was full of people.” Today’s psalm also reflects this ancient tradition of prayer: “By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept when we remembered you, Jerusalem….” The final verses of the psalm are especially ripe with pain and anger: “Remember the day of Jerusalem, O Lord, against the people of Edom, who said “Down with it, down with it! Even to the ground! O daughter of Babylon doomed to destruction, happy the one who pays you back for what you have done to us! Happy shall he be who takes your little ones, and dashes them against the rock!”

There’s no holding back there, no being nice, no concern about offending God, just raw human anguish, pain and grief. Today we try to just get over it and if we can’t, we medicalize grief and anguish like this and call it “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

But there is in Scripture, a long-standing tradition of prayer of this sort. Over and over again, in the psalms this pattern of prayer is found. Strident, detailed complaining to God about the loss and suffering that his chosen ones have experienced. The books of Job and Ecclesiastes are great examples of this pattern of prayer. Job prays “Cursed is the day I was born” and Qoheleth (the Hebrew name that is rendered as Ecclesiastes, he of the assembly) cries “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!”

Jesus himself used this pattern of prayer on the cross. In the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, we read that near his death Jesus “cried out in a loud voice,” although it might be a better translation to say that “he screamed” and then said “My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?” He was in fact intoning the first lines of the twenty-second psalm, one of the greatest lamentations in the scriptures.

Saint Teresa of Avila was traveling when her carriage foundered in the midst of a flooding river, endangering her life and that of her servants. She heard God saying to her: Teresa, this is how I treat my friends. To which she answered, Then it’s clear why you don’t have very many!

There is also a story from the concentration camps that the Jews convened a rabbinical court and brought suit against God for being unfaithful to the Covenant he had established with Israel. The arguments went back and forth and at the end the senior rabbi announced the verdict: God was indeed guilty of abandoning his Covenant with his People. He then announced in a matter of fact way that it was time for evening prayer.

The great wonder of really engaging in a prayer of lamentation, really pouring out one’s grief and disappointment and sorrow and loss to the Father of mercies, is that through the process of doing this the person praying discovers faith, trust that God will bring things right, will heal the loss and ease the grief in Her own time and Her own way.

That is why I think it is important for us to challenge ourselves not to skip this step—not to try to go directly to resignation without passing Go and without collecting $200. The reason is that it simply doesn’t work—it is a form of self deception, even worse it may be an attempt to deceive God and make Her think we are more evolved than we really are (or can become, if we do it Her way).

The great wonder for me about lamentation is that it is really about trust. I did not complain to my own father because I did not trust him not to lash out at me for doing so. To complain to someone we love is in fact a deep act of trust because it implies our belief that that person won’t abandon or desert us for complaining. Even to conceive of doing so, implies a great deal of faith in the person to whom we are considering addressing our displeasure. So being willing to complain to God, to be willing to shake our fists and say to him “This really sucks!” is to award him the gift of our trust. That is a gift that God esteems greatly and will cherish and reward in its time.

The Gospel today is also in a way about trust. Jesus begins by challenging his disciples to practice superhuman forgiveness: If your brother offends seven times a day every day and asks for forgiveness, you must forgive him. The disciples then cry out for help: Lord, increase our faith. To which Jesus replies, in essence, “don’t worry, you already have enough faith.”

The gospel ends with a parable that is very dear to me personally. Who among you has a slave who when he comes in from the fields say to him: sit down and eat and take your rest. No you say to him: put on your apron, fix and serve my dinner and then you can rest. The wonderful smiling irony of this parable is that this is exactly how God does and will treat us: On my holy mountain is a banquet of rich spiced food and fine spiced wine.

In the parable, however Jesus is recommending an attitude of trusting humility: When you have done well say: What an unprofitable servant I am, I have only done my duty!

When things go ill, shake your fist and let God know how upset your are, when things go well, say what an unprofitable servant I am, I have only done my duty. In either case, what we are expressing is faith in the love of God and trust in Her mercy to us. Let’s pray to be faithful to that love, to trust it and God, and to lay our troubles and our triumphs at God’s feet. AMEN.