Reading: Lamentations 1-2, Psalm 28

Graveyards full of flowers. Ornate and beautiful caskets. Gardens commemorating wars. Heartfelt songs about the loss of loved persons and loved nations. The human response to tragedy, death, and loss seems to have a universal response hard coded in our DNA: we create something. Why surround the graves of our ancestors with beautiful gardens? Perhaps because they are peaceful, but I think even more because they are alive. Planted seeds one day spring into life from the ground. One need not be a believer in the creator God to see the parallel- a hope that the dead ones we lay in the ground may one day do the same. Though burials have reduced in favor of other methods of disposing of dead bodies, the cultural rituals we perform with ashes often work the same way. Humans respond to death by crying out for its opposite. Creation.

The book of Lamentations is such a creation. Tradition tells us that Jeremiah wrote this poetic grief processing immediately following the fall of Jerusalem. I always imagined him sitting on a hill watching the city burn, composing the opening lines. Since the book never says who wrote it, and it is stylistically different from the book of Jeremiah, there is some debate over who actually wrote it. Perhaps Baruch, or another unnamed scribe or prophet who saw Jerusalem fall. The immediacy and knowledge of events seems to indicate the author lived through the time leading up to the siege, and experienced it personally. Me, I’m sticking to my image of a haggard and emotionally exhausted Jeremiah penning the laments while the city burned. The Hebrew title of the book is literally a wail of grief. We would normally translate it something like alas, but the word carries a lot more than English is really capable of expressing. Imagine someone wailing over their dead child in wordless grief. That is the title of this book.

There are five distinct poems, two of which we read today. These are acrostic poems, each verse beginning with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In the first, the author recounts the awful state of the city Jerusalem. He makes no excuses for the disobedient actions of the people which led to such destruction. In fact, he embraces it, admitting that it was their sins that brought God’s judgment down on them. He ends the poem calling for an equal judgment on those who inflicted the destruction on the city. The second poem turns to the ultimate cause of their plight. The God of Israel, and he alone, is their judge. The author puts God exactly where he deserves to be: at the center of everything that has happened. There is no question in the author’s mind that God is sovereign over the Babylonian conquerors as well as the fallen people of Israel. There are no appeals to the Babylonian gods, who appear quite triumphant at the moment. This writer refuses to give credit for the great tragedy of his life to anyone but the creator God.

The next poem will grapple with the tension that the people of God have always faced in times of tragedy and loss. God has brought on terrible tragedy, and God is our only hope in the face of it. The Lamentations are an emotional working out of the problem that the book of Jeremiah and the fall of Jerusalem have created for the people of Israel. How will God’s promises to us come to pass now? How will David’s throne last forever? Just how faithful is our God, anyway? It’s easy to see God as faithful when he delivers you from invading armies, but what about when he delivers you to them instead? These are the questions that the people of Israel now have to deal with, and the book of Lamentations is one of the ways they do it.