Proper 22C. 2 October 2022. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
Lamentations 1:1-6. Her priests groan, her young girls grieve, and her lot is bitter.
2 Timothy 1:1-11. Recalling your tears…I am reminded of…a faith that first lived in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice….Rekindle the gift of God that is within you.
Luke 17:5-10. The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!”
O God of our weary years and silent tears, grant us the strength, the wisdom, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may and cost what it will.
Our first reading this morning was taken from the book of Lamentations, and I want to linger there a while because we so seldom read anything from this book of the Bible. Only once every three years do we hear any passage from Lamentations during our Sunday worship. It doesn’t surprise me that we don’t read from this book more often, because it’s a collection of five dirges, five poems of deep pain and suffering, of outrage and grief, of complaint and protest, in response to political calamity, social and economic devastation, and utter theological collapse. The poetry of Lamentations challenges the notion that religious life should somehow be spiritual but not political. I often think that anyone who believes that hasn’t read very much of the Bible, but the lectionary colludes by not scheduling many overtly-political readings.
In Hebrew, Lamentations is called The Book of How, because it begins with the word how, as in “how could this be happening” or “how long, O Lord?” The Hebrew word for how sounds like a sob with a hiccup (ei’ch). Set in the 6th century BCE during a time of destruction of the City of Peace (Jerusalem), this book is a text for all times of unfathomable suffering. The Book of How functions as a witness to pain and a testimony of survival. In Jewish liturgical practice, it’s read every year on the most mournful day in the Jewish calendar (9th day of Av), a day set aside to recall catastrophic losses from the destructions of the first and second temples, through the crusades, to the Holocaust. Significantly, though, the Book of How makes no attempt to answer the profound question of how.
The first four poems are written in the form of an acrostic with each verse beginning with a sequential letter of the mystical Hebrew alphabet (or aleph-bait) from beginning to end. First Testament scholar Kathleen O’Connor thinks that this is more than a mnemonic device, that the acrostic imposes order on the unbearable chaos and unimaginable pain being described. The form communicates that the suffering is total, all encompassing, from A to Z. [1] Unlike the Book of Job, there is no-one else to blame but the Holy One; no Satan; and (this is a lot of negatives), there’s no notion of no God (as in the Greek idea of atheism). [2] The various voices in the poems express rage, doubt, shame, trauma, and dismay. [3] Where is God? Has God abandoned them\; or has God contributed to their destruction? Although in the middle of the third poem there are glimmers of hope, the Book of How ends by describing a people utterly forsaken and rejected, who imagine that God must be angry beyond measure. We can see this as ancient and primitive, but plenty of people still wrestle with questions of theodicy: does God do evil or permit evil, or is God not always more powerful than evil? God never speaks in The Book of How, in spite of the raw despair and crushing grief being expressed by witnesses and sufferers.
I think of the famous gravestone sculpture of the angel of grief that William Wetmore Story made for his own tomb in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. Collapsed over a monument, the angel has her head on one arm, her other arm sagging in a perpetual posture of exhaustion and despair. I think of Psalm 137, which we just heard set by Palestrina: “By the waters of Babylon we sat and wept. On the willow trees, we hung up our harps.” Unable, unwilling to make music, the people weep; the angel of grief weeps. Indeed, in Jewish midrashim, God’s very self weeps, sometimes secretly and sometimes openly. In a midrash that tells of the people of Israel going into the night of the exile, every one of them goes in silence without weeping, as if they were unaware of the cause of their exile, of their offenses against the Holy One. God pleads with them to throw off the burden of silence and weep. [4] The midrash teaches that weeping is better than silence in the face of suffering and injustice.
Emmanuel’s former rector, my colleague Bill Blaine-Wallace has made the case for lamentation as a revolutionary, relational act, a testimonial by which testifier and witness are both changed. Bill calls lament “the seedbed of and catalyst for social justice movements,” and an interpretive lens through which to explore and understand the broad Judeo-Christian narrative of grief, which “invites and equips materially privileged people and communities to articulate the tyranny of wealth that has isolated [us] from and disguised [our] kinship with a hurting world.”[5] What Bill calls “the politics of tears,” I call “the sacrament of tears.”
If I look at our readings from 2 Timothy and Luke through that lens of lament, I notice that the writer reminds Timothy that his tears are evidence of a sincere faith, a faith that first lived in his grandmother Lois, and then in his mother Eunice. The letter urges endurance, courage, and attentiveness to kindling the flame of the Holy Spirit, which is in him.
In today’s Gospel portion, the apostles ask for more faith because Jesus had given them some impossible directions about how to deal with frequent, continuous sinning against them by other disciples. Just before the passage we heard today Jesus said to his disciples:
Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to anyone by whom they come! It would be better for you if a millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea, than for you to cause one of these little ones to stumble….If another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive….[so far, hard but good, but then this] And if the same person sins against you seven times a day and turns back to you seven times and says, “I repent,” you must forgive.
The apostles must have been thinking, “Oh, come on!” And I don’t blame them; I have a hard time forgiving the same person even twice in one day; forget seven! No wonder they are asking for more faith.
What Jesus said next (in what we heard today) invokes mischief and nuisance, because mustard is like kudzu. It’s hilarious to describe faith that way (unless you’re a gardener or landowner; then mustard, like kudzu, is no joke). All you need is a tiny amount of faith to do amazing and seemingly impossible things. Jesus knew that they all had at least this much faith, because, after all, they were showing up, weren’t they? Usually, bigger is better; but Jesus seems to be telling them that they don’t actually need more faith. A little tiny bit goes a long way; even a tiny amount can wreak a good kind of havoc! A mulberry tree could be uprooted and thrown into the sea. This might not sound nice to us, but a mulberry tree with its notoriously extensive roots was a working metaphor, in Jesus’ tradition, for Babylon, which was a comprehensive reminder of an occupying and oppressive government (a way of saying Rome without saying it).
According to Nicholas Perrin, who has just published a new commentary on Luke, “Jesus’ promise regarding the mulberry amounts to a carefully veiled invitation for the apostles to [dig up] the tenacious roots of the Roman Empire.”[6] Jesus is saying, “Stop worrying about how much faith you or anyone else has. Stop fretting about not having more.” Even if the measure of your faith is smaller than the mustard seed, you have plenty. The unspoken message is, if your faith is bigger than a mustard seed, great! Don’t lord it over others; just get to work! Use the faith you have to act in ways that uproot injustice!
So if more faith isn’t needed in order to forgive, what is? Humility, attentiveness, and compassion (suffering with). Even the tiniest amount of faith must not ignore the reality of pain. [7] It’s so hard to forgive people for not being the way we think they should be. It’s so hard to forgive ourselves for not being the way we think we should be. It’s so hard to forgive people for not behaving the way we wish they would behave; and it’s so necessary to our wellbeing and the wellbeing of the wider community. When we are humble, attentive, compassionate, and forgiving, we are just doing our job, according to Jesus. This is how we are to behave if we are owned by the Holy One (by Love) rather than being a slave to wages, power, possessions, or, even worse, resentment, which is poison.
Imagine the healing and reconciliation possible when we are able to be humble, pay attention, be compassionate, and participate in feeding and freeing people who are hungry or oppressed. Imagine the healing and reconciliation possible when we are able to ask for and give pardon, when we are able to lament with those who are crying out.
I want to go back to the idea that using every letter of the Hebrew alphabet in the poem of lament represents complete and total despair. My former teacher, Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, in his Book of Letters writes: [8]
A tradition recounted in the thirteenth-century Kabbalistic text…teaches that one letter is missing from our present Hebrew alphabet and that this letter will only be revealed in the future….Every defect in our present universe is mysteriously connected with this missing letter, an unimaginable consonant whose sound will create undreamed of words and worlds, transforming repression into loving.
Kushner imagines that the mystical letter already exists, that the missing letter is right in front of us when we pray.
- Kathleen O’Connor, “Lamentations”, The New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001), v. 6, p. 1018-1024.
- Walter C. Bouzard, www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1734
- O’Connor, op. cit., p. 1022.
- www.jhom.com/topics/tears/god
- http://www.taosinstitute.net/Websites/taos/Images/PhDProgramsCompletedDissertations/Blaine-Wallace%20-%20dissertation-final.pdf
- Nicholas Perrin, Luke: An Introduction and Commentary (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2022).
- Catherine Cavazos Renken, “Between Text and Sermon: Lamentations I,” in Interpretation 67 no 2 Apr 2013, p. 194.
- Lawrence Kushner, The Book of Letters: A Mystical Alef-bait, 15th anniversary 2nd edition (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1975 and 1990), p. 13.