Spiritual Complaint

The Theology and Practice of Lament

Bier, Bulkeley

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781498271127
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Personal and communal tragedies provoke intense emotions. In Scripture such emotions were given expression in complaints or laments. Such laments are the most frequent genre of psalm and are also found in the prophets and elsewhere in the Bible. The book of Lamentations is even named for this human response to tragedy. Yet neither lament nor complaint seems to be widely practiced in churches today, except at times of extreme communal catastrophe. Bringing together biblical scholars, liturgists, and practical theologians, this book begins to provide bridges between these worlds in order to enrich our ability to respond appropriately to personal and communal tragedy and to understand those responses.

1

A Lament for Christchurch

Colin Buchanan

God our Father, creator of heaven and earth and all that is in them;you have given us a fruitful and beautiful land,and we inhabit it as your creatures, dependent upon your goodness, and yet knowing our own frailty.

Lord, the earth has shaken, the ground has quaked,terror has struck, and our hearts are dismayed;our buildings are down, and friends, neighbours, and family-members have died;much of the city we loved is in ruins;people are missing, families are homeless, after-shocks continue,and our easy confidence in life has gone.

Lord and Father, we lament the city’s fate before you;we who have trodden the ground in assurance, and built our homes, and driven our cars, and played our sports upon it,we now mourn the city’s loss, and grieve that we can trust the ground no longer.

Yet, Lord, this is your world, and you are sovereign over it, and even the hairs of our heads are numbered by you.

Let us learn of you, but give us space and time to do so;help us to come to terms with disaster, and yet find your hand of love within it.

And while we grieve, we thank you for the selfless labours of rescue workers and volunteers,we commend to you the bereaved, the injured, the homeless and all who suffer;we rejoice at the unstinting help of many from far and near;and we seek from you the will and the way for the city to recover,for life in it to flourish, for memories to be healed, for every loss to be made good.

Lord, deal gently with us as we mourn; and so reveal yourself to us that we may in time put darkness and loss behind us and walk whole and healed.

Lord, we believe: but we have staggered at this earthquake and all that it has done;restore now our trust in you and lead us out of darkness into your marvellous light.

part one

Foundations

2

Does Jeremiah Confess, Lament, or Complain?

Three Attitudes towards Wrong

Tim Bulkeley

The claim by Shakespeare's Juliette “What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” is often quoted to claim that naming is arbitrary. Yet what we call things matters. For our classifying, and hence our naming, in part defines what we can and will perceive. This chapter investigates three approaches to naming the genre present in the speeches commonly known as “the confessions of Jeremiah” in order to uncover three responses to the dark times. While these are different they also often coincide and collaborate as our spirits respond to disaster and hopelessness. I will also suggest that to read these “confessions of Jeremiah” we need to move beyond any of these neat descriptors, and perceive the interweaving of the attitudes they represent in the narrative unfolded by these texts. In doing this we will distinguish not only the literary shape or form of the texts we discuss, but also their attitude to the “wrongs” to which they respond.

Lament expresses sorrow, mourning, or regret. Such expressions are a universal response to events or situations that seem, to the speaker, wrong. The connection of this response with “mourning” is appropriate, for death and bereavement are an extreme and irreversible form of “wrongness” in our world. Furthermore (at least in the cultures that produced the texts collected in the Hebrew Bible), expressions of lament in other contexts often borrow language and imagery from the realm of death and bereavement. In particular the individual laments in the Psalter often express the psalmist's trouble as bringing them near to death.

Laments are not merely the commonest genre of psalm in the book of Psalms, but elements of lamentation are also found widely in the prophetic books. Westermann, in his study of the basic forms of speech found in the prophets, noted the “death lament over Israel” in Amos 5:1–3 to be a classic example of a form that was widespread in the prophets and particularly developed in Jeremiah.1 Indeed, he drew attention later to the way the corpus of the Latter Prophets begins with Yhwh lamenting (in the opening chapter of Isaiah).2 Such laments were a way of formulating an announcement of judgment. They picture the future state of the people or state being discussed as if they were dead. There are also often in these books texts that lament in ways that Dobbs-Allsopp suggests reflect the Mesopotamian genre of “city-lament” (such city-lament material is found in both the oracles against nations and against Israel and Judah in the prophetic books and most notably in Lamentations).3 Such speech reflects the sadness of an afflicted people, rather than that of the deity witnessing the decline and punishment of a chosen people. These two movements, while both lament or mourn a loss, make use of the lament in quite different ways. In the first case the intent is to accuse, while the second is more like the psalms and appeals for divine aid in redressing the wrong.

In making this move to seeking redress of the “wrongness” this second use of lament in the prophets, like most “lament psalms,” begins to move to the second of our attitudes. For in order to appeal for help and redress one must, at least by implication complain about the state of affairs to be redressed. Indeed “complaint” is one of the standard components of a lament psalm.

Within discussion of the genres of psalms often two related moves are made which recognize another attitude to disaster, very different from lament, yet closely related to it—complaint. Like lament, complaint recognizes that something is wrong, but instead of merely recognizing and bewailing that fact, complaint goes on to lay blame, and even by implication at least to appeal for redress.

Sweeney, in his summary of the genres found in prophetic literature following standard form-critical categories, distinguishes “Communal Complaint Songs (Volksklagelied, Klagelied des Volkes)”4 and “Lamentation (Volksklage, Untergangsklage, Klaglied, Klage).”5 As this approach presents things, in complaints the calamity is still in prospect, thus here a plea for help is a dominant feature, while laments express sadness after the event and the plea is either subdued or absent.6 While this before and after distinction seems to make good a priori sense, I want to argue that the fundamental difference between the two genres, whether in the prophets or elsewhere, is not timing but attitude.

The German expressions Klage (complaint, lament) and Anklage (charge, accusation or r...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: A Lament for Christchurch
• Part One: Foundations
• Chapter 2: Does Jeremiah Confess, Lament, or Complain?
• Chapter 3: The Unique Contribution of Lamentations 4 in the Book of Lamentations
• Chapter 4: Lament Personified
• Chapter 5: The Enemy Lament
• Chapter 6: Blurring the Boundaries
• Chapter 7: The Profit and Loss of Lament
• Chapter 8: The Doubtful Gain of Penitence
• Part Two: Reflections
• Chapter 9: Wrestling with Lamentations in Christian Worship
• Chapter 10: Liturgy and Lament
• Part Three: Explorations
• Chapter 11: Learning to Lament in Aotearoa
• Chapter 12: Framing Lament
• Chapter 13: Public Lament
• Chapter 14: Lament in an Age of New Media
• Part Four: Refraction
• Chapter 15: In Search of the Shulamith in the State of Israel
• Bibliography