Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times

by Soong-Chan Rah

Even though many of us had been nurtured in the rich tradition of the African American church that taught us to sing songs like “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” “I Must Tell Jesus,” “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” somehow we had also lost our historic and spiritual legacy of being able to corporately lament.

She is specifically saying here that this is not a white only problem

Theologian Randy Woodley identifies this deeper engagement as the Hebrew word shalom, which is often translated simplistically as “peace.” Woodley asserts that shalom “is active and engaged, going far beyond the mere absence of conflict. A fuller understanding of shalom is the key to the door that can lead us to a whole new way of living in the world.”1 Shalom combats the dualism rampant in Western culture and is instead rooted in a more Hebraic “passion for equilibrium, a sense of system in which all the parts cohere.”2 Shalom, therefore, does not eschew or diminish the role of the other or the reality of a suffering world. Instead, it embraces the suffering other as an instrumental aspect of well-being. Shalom requires lament.

Laments are prayers of petition arising out of need. But lament is not simply the presentation of a list of complaints, nor merely the expression of sadness over difficult circumstances. Lament in the Bible is a liturgical response to the reality of suffering and engages God in the context of pain and trouble.

Worship that arises out of suffering cries out for deliverance. “Their notion of themselves is that of a dependent people crying out for a vision of survival and salvation.” Lament is the language of suffering.6 Those who live in celebration “are concerned with questions of proper management and joyous celebration.” Instead of deliverance, they seek constancy and sustainability. “The well-off do not expect their faith to begin in a cry, but rather, in a song. They do not expect or need intrusion, but they rejoice in stability [and the] durability of a world and social order that have been beneficial to them.” Praise is the language of celebration.7

The twentieth century witnessed fearful white Protestants yielding to the temptation to withdraw from the city and engaging in the exact opposite behavior demanded by Jeremiah 29:7 to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile.” There was an intentional abandonment of the city in favor of safety and comfort. Jerusalem was to be rebuilt in the suburbs.

also a with drawl from intergrated poor communies in rural areas as well increased isolation in safe and isolated suburbs

Jeremiah refers to false prophets who claimed that the exile would be short-lived and that Jerusalem would soon be restored. J. A. Thompson observes that “the false prophets had told the people that their stay would be short, and Jeremiah needed to assert that this was a falsehood . . . [the false prophets] were associates of diviners and dreamers (27:9). . . . It was an attempt to speed up the divine purposes. But Yahweh will not be hurried in his plans for his people.”

YHWH worship, on the other hand, held no such promises. YHWH does not operate like a vending machine nor does he follow a simplistic pattern yielding the exact outcome we want. Defeated exiles would be tempted to forsake the complexity of YHWH worship for the simplicity of hearing exactly what they wanted to hear. In difficult times or times of great challenge, the people of God are tempted to believe solutions that are easy to follow because they align with what they desire. Jeremiah 29:8-9 presents a warning to the exiles to not give in to the temptation of the easy but false answers advocated by false prophets.

Jeremiah 29 challenges these presuppositions and the simple solutions that tickle the ear of the typical American pastor. It is the same message that so many American Christians want to hear: they are still in control, there is no need for judgment, and there is no suffering. But easy answers that offer false hope are not solutions. Jeremiah 29 opposes two

Our nation’s tainted racial history reflects a serious inability to deal with reality. Something has died and we refuse to participate in the funeral. We refuse to acknowledge the lamenters who sing the songs of suffering in our midst.

The funeral dirge opening of Lamentations and the first three verses of Lamentations 1 remind us that grief that emerges from a very real and painful history must be acknowledged. Self-absorbed Christians who are apathetic toward injustice do not emerge from a vacuum. A deeply segregated church does not appear without history. In the United States, grief and pain related to race are often suppressed, and the stories of suffering are often untold. Our history is incomplete. The painful stories of the suffering of the African American community, in particular, remain hidden. Often, American Christians may even deny the narrative of suffering, claiming that things weren’t so bad for the slaves or that at least the African Americans had the chance to convert to Christianity. The story of suffering is often swept under the rug in order not to create discomfort or bad feelings. Lament is denied because the dead body in front of us is being denied. But the funeral dirge genre of Lamentations 1 requires the telling of the full story of death—the

The system of slavery was a system deeply rooted in spiritual evil that brought death to its victims. These stories reveal a deep flaw in our nation’s story. Human bodies were not treated as made in the image of God. These bodies and their stories remain buried in our national narrative.

Andrew Park’s perspective on the theological concept of han arising from the Korean context provides insight into the experience of Jerusalem in Lamentations. Park defines sin as “the wrongdoing of people toward God and their neighbors. Han is the pain experienced by the victimized neighbors. Sin is the unjust act of the oppressors; han the passive experience of their victims.”12 Korean theologian Young-Hak Hyun further defines han as “a sense of unresolved resentment against injustice suffered, . . . a feeling of acute pain of sorrow in one’s guts and bowels.”13 Park’s distinction between sin and han points to the seeming incongruity of the depiction of Jerusalem as simultaneously the sinful adulterer and the victim of sexual assault. The language of sin as used by Western Christianity does not provide the necessary nuance to understand how a victim of sin experiences sin. “Traditional theology has emphasized one-sidedly the sin of all people, while ignoring the pain of the victim. Its doctrine of sin must be complemented by dealing with the suffering of the victim.”14 The shame experienced by Jerusalem cannot be addressed with the same methodology used to address individual guilt.

Han must be addressed on the level in which it operates. Andrew Park suggests “that with a vision of new relationships or the Hanless society, we confront the Han-causing elements and transform them.”15 The guilt of individual sin leads to individual confession, but the shame of han should lead to social transformation. As previously stated, Americans often have a difficult time addressing the issue of race. The tendency in the dialogue on race in the United States contrasts to the acknowledgment of shame in the book of Lamentations. American culture tends to hide the stories of guilt and shame and seeks to elevate stories of success. American culture gravitates toward narratives of exceptionalism and triumphalism, which results in amnesia about a tainted history. The reality of a shameful history undermines the narrative of exceptionalism, so it must remain hidden.

Praise, therefore, should follow lament. However, in a cultural context that upholds triumph and victory but fails to engage with suffering, praise replaces lament. We skip the important step of lament and offer supplication in a contextual vacuum. Praise, therefore, can seem hollow when neither lament nor petition has been sufficiently offered. Petition arises out of lament. The

Personified Jerusalem in this passage has nowhere to turn. In the cultural context of this passage, a widow left alone would be the object of pity. The type of woman described in this passage experiences great shame. She is destitute and forlorn. Even as she turns to others for help, there is no one to comfort her. This story is left unresolved.

one of the key expressions of Lamentations is that it “laments the humanly impossible task of comforting in the face of such tragic circumstances.”25 The inability to offer comfort should compel us to acknowledge our total inability and turn to God for the answers.

Lament presents the opportunity to call out to God for his mercy. It acknowledges the need for God’s justice and mercy that does not arise out of one’s own strength and ability. Lament challenges the church to acknowledge real suffering and plead with God for his intervention. The book of Lamentations raises an important question about the value of persistent lament. The evangelical culture moves too quickly to praise from lament. We do not hear from all of the voices in the North American evangelical context. Instead, we opt for quick and easy answers to complex issues. We want to move on to the happier message of success and triumph and cover up the message of those who suffer.

The crying out to God in lament over a broken history is often set aside in favor of a triumphalistic narrative. We are too busy patting ourselves on the back over the problem-solving abilities of the triumphant American church to cry out to God in lament.

Emmanuel Katongole emphasizes that “any resurrection of the church as the body of Christ must begin with lament, which is an honest look at the brokenness of the church. Without lament, we move on too quickly to reconstruction.”26 Lament calls us to examine the work of reconciliation between those who live under suffering with those who live in celebration. Lamentations challenges our celebratory assumptions with the reality of suffering.

It is appropriate for the lamenter to experience a level of disease and discomfort with the harsh judgment imposed upon Jerusalem. However, lament also acknowledges God’s right to judge humanity. God abhors sin, therefore the prophet should also abhor sin. The prophetic role is to point out and call out sin, not just in the individual context but also in the corporate context. The faithfulness to point out sin is also an implicit faithfulness in God’s desire to restore. He has judged rightly and he will restore rightly. Are we willing, therefore, to accept God’s righteous and appropriate judgment?

A city lament brings the story of the city to its actual material setting and reality. The city is not an object to be fixed or manipulated—it is the concrete reality of lives and souls that live in the city.

the city on real terms. A funeral dirge is offered because the city has died. The city is described in real, concrete terms. Jerusalem is mourned not because it is an abstract ideal, but because it is home to God’s people.

With this high level of abstraction, it is easy to scapegoat individuals and move responsibility to the other rather than admit personal responsibility. When a mass shooting of children at a school occurs, we will claim that this horrible action is the result of just one crazed gunman rather than consider the possibility of a socialstructure problem at work. Some will argue that it does no good to consider social action when clearly this action can be blamed in its totality on just one individual. But we do not consider that doing nothing to prevent future tragedies in the face of a national tragedy demonstrates the sin of omission. We practice this same abstract thinking in our relation with the rest of the world. We write checks to end human trafficking but lack concern for how our demand for cheap, disposable clothing generates a larger system of exploitation. We forget that hunger in Africa has any connection to the history of Western colonialism from which we in the West have significantly benefited. We are oblivious to the need for corporate responsibility to address colonial abuses in the previous centuries. We are able to abstract our justice efforts from the material reality of the history of injustice in the relationship between the Western colonizers and the colonized who still suffer the ill effects of a colonial history. We abstract injustice, allowing ourselves to believe we no longer have a direct hand in it. We make injustice impersonal; if everyone is resp...

The people of God made significant assumptions about their privileged position. They assumed a level of protection that arose from their sense of exceptionalism and privilege. Lamentations reminds us that privilege needs to be acknowledged but cannot be assumed. Lamentations reveals the tendency of a sinful people to have an elevated view of themselves. Prior to the city’s destruction, the residents of Jerusalem viewed themselves as an exceptional and privileged people. In American Christianity, the same tendency toward privilege also exists. There is an underlying belief that American Christians have been the standard-bearers of Christianity for several centuries. There is a sense of being the exceptional church, resulting in the missionary endeavor and vision. This favored church status has led to a belief in a favored nation status. But this sense of American exceptionalism and even the sense of exceptionalism for the American church cannot be justified through Scripture.

Lamentations reveals the folly of Jerusalem’s self-perceived exceptionalism. Their belief that they were the center of worship because they were exceptional in some inherent way was debunked when the temple was destroyed.

The absence of explicit hope in the book of Lamentations does not diminish the existence of a very real hope underneath the surface of real suffering.

The church has the power to bring healing in a racially fragmented society. That power is not found in an emphasis on strength but in suffering and weakness. The difficult topic of racial reconciliation requires the intersection of celebration and suffering. The Lord’s Table provides the opportunity for the church to operate at the intersection of celebration and suffering. In 1 Corinthians 11:26, we are reminded that we have the opportunity to “proclaim the Lord’s death.” In remembering Jesus’ suffering on our behalf, we discover our mutual and common dependence on the body of Christ broken for us. It is not merely the symbolic act of the Lord’s Table that unites us, but the commitment to that broken body and the actual embodiment of unity. The suffering narrative that informs the Lord’s Table is essential for the unity found in the body of Christ. The necessary condition for the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, therefore, is lament. Lamentations recognizes that hope can arise in the midst of suffering because of God’s faithfulness. Celebration can arise out of suffering, but lament is a necessary expression of that suffering. In a triumphalistic world, Lamentations makes no sense. The theology of celebration will always be more attractive than the theology of suffering. But if lament were offered to a suffering world, the hope that is woven into lament offers the possibility of genuine reconciliation.

Many non-Western cultures operate out of a corporate shame orientation. Shame does not limit sin to an individual action but focuses on one’s identity. Shame arises out of a corporate context and one’s relationship to that corporate context. Therefore, shame is not absolved by simply confessing sin; it requires a transformation before the community and accountability within that context.

Recently, I attended a conference on Native American theology. One of the white participants at the conference suggested that we do away with words like Christian and evangelical because they have too strong of a negative connotation. He claimed that we needed to reject the words and the baggage that comes with those words. A Native American theologian responded that doing away with those words would prove to be convenient for the majority culture. Not only would the words be wiped away, but the responsibility for the negative history of those communities could also be wiped away. Sin would not be accounted for. Some want to do away with cultural differences and wipe away the long historical problem of race.

God’s love is best revealed as a reflection of his fidelity.

How God feels and acts toward us does not arise from our ability to behave in a certain way, but upon his fidelity to his own word and his unwavering loyalty.

Spiritual renewal emerges as God’s people engage in a corporate confession of sin, and sincere repentance moves the community toward a changed and renewed life. Historically, spiritual renewal movements are sparked by confession and repentance. Richard Lovelace points out that the preconditions for renewal involve the awareness of the holiness of God’s justice and the awareness of the depth of sin in our own lives and in our community.7 Confession propels the community to imagine a world beyond their current state of sinful existence. Lament that recognizes the reality of brokenness allows the community to express confession in its proper context. Confession acknowledges the need for God and opens the door for God’s intervention. Confession in lament relies on God’s work for redemption. This section of Lamentations 3 continues the theological turning point of the book. “If God is indeed so good and so merciful, and if the people have sinned, the natural next step is that the people must repent and then they will surely be forgiven.”

In Forgive Us, my coauthors and I present the necessity of corporate confession for effective Christian witness. At this moment in history, the American church is often ridiculed or portrayed as unforgiving and ungracious. Could the church offer a counter-narrative, not of defensiveness or derision, but of an authentic confession and genuine reconciliation? . . . It is antithetical to the gospel when we do not confess all forms of sin—both individual and corporate. The reason evangelicals can claim to be followers of Jesus is because there has been an acknowledgement of sin and the seeking of God’s grace through Jesus Christ that leads to the forgiveness of sin.10 Authentic witness that arises from lament requires a level of confession that has often been neglected. Confession must operate on all levels to bring healing and hope for forgiveness.

Even as evangelicals discover and recover these important biblical themes, many want to use these themes to grow their church or expand their influence rather than participate in the enactment of God’s justice. The term justice is too casually thrown about without the corresponding sacrifice. We want the popularity associated with being justice activists, but we don’t want to lament alongside those who suffer. Instead of a justice that arises from the lament of the suffering, justice is misappropriated as a furtherance of the narrative of celebration. American Christian justice leaders are applauded for their self-sacrifice, which allows for a furtherance of Western exceptionalism and even an exploitation of justice as a career-building move. The uplifting of privileged individuals who use justice to expand their own influence serves a narrative of triumphalism rather than engaging the narrative of lament. There are too many examples of justice misappropriated and even thwarted.

God’s people are often tempted to engage in relativism when it comes to God’s judgment. The go-to excuse for sin is to compare one’s own sin to the sins of others. “I may be materialistic but at least I work hard for my money, not like those ‘welfare queens’ that I hear about.” “I sometimes forget to recycle, but the real problem is how China pollutes the atmosphere with their factories.” “My uncle is the real racist in the family. Compared to him, my denial of white privilege is not a big deal.” But the severity of the sin of others is not the standard by which our own sin is to be judged. Injustice impacts the entire system. The lamenter cries out that human standards are woefully inadequate. Lamentations 2 established that it

One of the problems of dealing with corporate sin is the inability to connect individual responsibility for sin with the reality of corporate sin. For example, the easiest way to distance and absolve oneself from the issue of racism is to claim an individual innocence from personal prejudice.

A theology of celebration has the luxury of being able to objectify God, and because suffering is kept at a distance it is not necessary for the presence of God to be immanent. God can be a distant abstraction whose praise is expected. For example, Westermann notes that when Western theology speaks of God’s salvation or of a God who saves, God thereby becomes objectively tied to an event, and thus emerges a “soteriology.” The Old Testament cannot pin God down to a single soteriology. It can only speak of God’s saving acts within a whole series of events, and that necessarily involves some kind of verbal exchange between God and man.11 Lament as dialogue challenges the notion of an abstract relationship with God.

In many of our justice endeavors, we often believe that our task is to speak for the voiceless. But maybe we need to follow the book of Lamentations and move the ones who suffer to front and center. The prophet-narrator has much to say, but the real movement and progress is that we hear the actual voice of those who suffer. The people pray for themselves. Oftentimes, in corporate prayer meetings, we offer prayers on behalf of the suffering; even when an individual is present, that individual remains silent while others pray.

We will pray for bigger churches, larger budgets, slimmer waistlines, more purpose in our lives, but we do not pray in recognition of the deepest suffering in our own lives or in the lives of others.

Lamentations 5 is a stark reminder that suffering is not a passing condition that provides a mere bump in the road toward celebration. We must plumb its depths.

How does the body of Christ, the church, move from bodily passivity to body activity? This activity does not necessitate a certain type of political action, but it does involve the commitment to move toward the actual embodiment of Christ in the world. Without compromising the specific calling of the church, how do we understand an active body of Christ as it interacts with the body of the city? If the perception of the human body shapes the body of the city, then the way the church understands itself as the embodiment of Christ should transform our interaction with the body of the city.

Lamentations provides a necessary corrective to the triumphalism and exceptionalism of the American evangelical church arising from an ignorance of a tainted history. This creates theological dysfunction exacerbated by the absence of lament. The counternarrative to a culturally captive narrative has been silenced with the absence of lament.