Lament


For many football fans in the United States, today is a day to lament their team's loss.  This seems to me a small sort of lament but a lament not the less.


I was actually thinking about lament today. The collection of Psalms in the ancient Hebrew writings contain many songs and poems of lament - more than any other genre.  In listening to scholar NT Wright teaching about laments, he said this:

When we lament, we do so without a sneaky feeling that we know how God is going to work it all out so it's all right really.  Point of lament?  Look at the way the world is and we look at what we believe about God and we see an apparent radical mismatch. And we then simply hold that mismatch before God and say, "Here it is. I don't like it. I don't know why but this is what's going on right now."

Lament comes with a sense that this is where we're going to stay because we are going to go on believing in God even if it almost feels as if God doesn't believe in us anymore. Hold the present situation before God in sorrow and we lament for God's rescue.

Sometimes we find ourselves at a spot where we're not ok and things are not right in the world and in those moments we can acknowledge all that and put it before God trusting that He'll come through somehow.


What do we lament today?

18 Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later. 19 For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. 20 Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, 21 the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. 22 For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23 And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children,[j] including the new bodies he has promised us. 24 We were given this hope when we were saved. (If we already have something, we don’t need to hope[k] for it. 25 But if we look forward to something we don’t yet have, we must wait patiently and confidently.) 26 And the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. For example, we don’t know what God wants us to pray for. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words. 27 And the Father who knows all hearts knows what the Spirit is saying, for the Spirit pleads for us believers[l] in harmony with God’s own will. 28 And we know that God causes everything to work together[m] for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.

-Romans 8:18-28 


Photo by Eric Ward on Unsplash 

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