Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times

by Soong-Chan Rah

In every age and in every region of the world, the church needs to be concerned for the biblical sense (what does this particular book of the Bible mean?) and its cultural significance (what does it have to say to us in our particular setting?), never confusing the two but always relating them.

While these works are extremely important, there is an increasingly urgent need for pastors who feel at home in the biblical text to bring that text home to today’s Christ-followers. They do this by interacting with the text expositionally, placing it within the context of contemporary daily life and viewing their personal stories in light of the original context and unfolding drama of ancient Scripture. There is also a need for people who feel at home in contemporary culture but who are foreigners to Scripture to inhabit the world of the Bible without abandoning their own context. God would have us live in both worlds.

So often we go around Scripture to Jesus or we stop short at Scripture and fail to penetrate it to get to Jesus’ heart—which is the Father’s heart too. Instead, each of us needs to depend on God’s Spirit to discern how our culturally situated words and stories are included in the biblical metanarrative, and to learn how to bring God’s Word home to our hearts and lives in a truthful and meaningful manner.

The triumph-and-success orientation of our typical church member needed the corrective brought by stories of struggle and suffering.

The tendency to view the holistic work of the church as the action of the privileged toward the marginalized often derails the work of true community healing.

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.

Psalms that express worship for the good things that God has done are categorized as praise hymns. Laments are prayers of petition arising out of need.

Lament in the Bible is a liturgical response to the reality of suffering and engages God in the context of pain and trouble. The hope of lament is that God would respond to human suffering that is wholeheartedly communicated through lament.

The American church avoids lament. The power of lament is minimized and the underlying narrative of suffering that requires lament is lost. But absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder. Absence makes the heart forget. The absence of lament in the liturgy of the American church results in the loss of memory. We forget the necessity of lamenting over suffering and pain. We forget the reality of suffering and pain.

The “have-nots” develop a theology of suffering and survival. The “haves” develop a theology of celebration.

Christian communities arising from celebration do not want their lives changed, because their lives are in a good place.

Lament recognizes the struggles of life and cries out for justice against existing injustices.

The balance in Scripture between praise and lament is lost in the ethos and worldview of American evangelical Christianity with its dominant language of praise.

Promoting one perspective over the other, however, diminishes our theological discourse. To only have a theology of celebration at the cost of the theology of suffering is incomplete.

How we deal with the reality of shame and death often reveals our relationship with others who suffer.

How we respond to the possibility of God’s sovereignty in the midst of suffering reveals our ability to engage in the depth of lament.

the lament that we offer should reflect our understanding of God at work, even in the midst of suffering.

Despite its age, Lamentations offers us a prophetic critique of what passes for gospel witness in our time.

The reality of death and the ongoing cycle of life and death remind us that through it all, YHWH1 remains Lord over all. The question is not whether there will be death, but how we will understand and address this reality.

God’s people were tempted to flee and disengage from the world around them in response to their reality, but Jeremiah 29:4-7 challenges God’s people to not take that option.

The people of God are to seek the peace of Babylon and not to disengage with the ready-made excuse that Babylon is a wicked city.

Divination reflects a desire to know and control the future by removing uncertainty.

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.

The suburban churches embraced the pragmatism and applicability of church growth principles. This movement, popular in white suburban churches in the latter half of the twentieth century, adapted business and marketing principles in order to appeal to the masses and spread the word.15

American evangelicalism has created the unique phenomenon of church shopping—viewing church as yet another commodity and product to be evaluated and purchased.

Pastoral leadership in the church relied on business models of strong leadership over biblical values of servant leadership.

The church growth movement applied in the suburban context called for the formation of ministry arising from a market economy, becoming a fully capitalistic venture.

Jeremiah 29 opposes two of the options available to the exiles. They should not withdraw and hide from life in the city (even in the heart of the wicked city of Babylon); nor should they listen to the answers they want to hear—the simple solutions—from the false prophets.

By rejecting these two key temptations, the acceptable alternative becomes lament.

Lament is honesty before God and each other. If something has truly been declared dead, there is no use in sugarcoating that reality. To hide from suffering and death would be an act of denial. If an individual would deny the reality of death during a funeral, friends would justifiably express concern over the mental health of that individual. In the same way, should we not be concerned over a church that lives in denial over the reality of death in our midst?

Han is the pain experienced by the victimized neighbors. Sin is the unjust act of the oppressors; han the passive experience of their victims.”

The guilt of individual sin leads to individual confession, but the shame of han should lead to social transformation.

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.

The church should become the place where the fullness of suffering is expressed in a safe environment. Liturgy, worship, leadership, small groups and other aspects of church life should provide the safe place where the fullness of suffering can be set free.

The voices of suffering women in the book of Lamentations offer an important counternarrative to the triumphalistic tendencies of God’s people in the United States.

American evangelical inability to move beyond Christian triumphalism arises from the inability to hear voices outside the dominant white male narrative.

How an individual reflects biblical masculinity should not be culturally derived or based upon the oppression and suppression of women.

We have a deficient theology that trumpets the triumphalistic successes of evangelicalism while failing to hear from the stories of suffering that often tell us more about who we are as a community.

Instead of looking for success formulas derived from masculine triumphalism to build our churches, we should seek to understand the heart of prayer and lament.

Lament leads to petition which leads to praise for God’s response to the petition.

The intervention of God in some way permits the move from plea to praise . . . [and] the proper setting of praise is as lament resolved.”

Lament serves the purpose of providing a necessary step toward praise.

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.

The appropriate response would be to express presence and an expression of lament alongside the sufferer rather than explain away the suffering.

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.

Lamentations challenges our celebratory assumptions with the reality of suffering.

A triumphant and success-oriented narrative limits the twenty-first-century American evangelical theological imagination.

The dismantling of privilege requires the disavowal of any pretense of exceptionalism.

God’s actions are not capricious, but instead his actions reveal a constancy and integrity of character and ultimate faithfulness to his own words and to the covenant.

YHWH’s integrity in enacting proper judgment should lead to the recognition that his integrity will also be evidenced in the process of restoration.