"Lament, Do Not Be Silent," a sermon by Dr. Steven Bishop, Assistant Professor of Old Testament, given on October 11, 2007, in Christ Chapel

Several years ago I had the good fortune to study in Jerusalem for a summer. During that time I was able to visit many sites related to biblical history and also experience modern Israeli life. I lived in an apartment smaller than the College Court apartments. I didn’t even have a kitchen! I lived in west Jerusalem on King George’s Road. My apartment was adjacent to an area called Ben Yehuda. It is a walking, open-air mall with cafes, bars, falafel stands and shops scattered around on streets closed to traffic and quite large. One of my first impressions of the area and King George’s street was how clean everything was. I quickly learned that every morning trash was collected from dumpsters and a street sweeper followed the collection trucks, so when I left my apartment to go to up to Mount Scopus I walked down pristine streets.

There was also a large park adjacent to my apartment. I could walk across the park and be in the Old City in about 20 minutes. I went through the Old City on a fairly regular basis and one evening I saw many Jews gathering at the Wailing Wall. They had their Tanakhs, and their prayer shawls and thin mats like the ones campers use. It was obvious they had come to stay the night. But what for? I learned that they were there to remember Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the month of Av. Jewish faith affirms that on the ninth day of Av in 586 BCE the Babylonians breeched the city walls, the Temple was destroyed and Jerusalem fell into the hands of her enemies. In an eerie coincidence, on the ninth day of Av in 70 CE the Romans breeched the city walls, the Temple was destroyed and Jerusalem fell, once again, into the hands of her enemies. The ritual consists of sitting at the Wailing Wall, the remnant of Herod’s Temple, and reading the book of Lamentations all night and offering prayers for Jerusalem.

The book of Lamentations was written in the wake of that first destruction and has all the heartbreak one would expect for a place that held within its walls the history, glory and dreams of an entire people now desolate. Standing before that wall and hearing the plaintive cries and prayers go up to God put me in mind of the timelessness of Scripture, especially when it deals with the raw experience of those who have suffered great loss.

How lonely sits the city

That once was full of people!

She weeps bitterly in the night,

With tears on her cheeks;

Among all her lovers

She has no one to comfort her;

All her friends have dealt

Treacherously with her,

They have become her enemies.

The roads to Zion mourn,

. . .

All her gates are desolate.

I thought of the history of Jerusalem and how the city has suffered greatly over millennia. Through invasions and crusades her fortunes have risen and fell. But I was there at the end of the 20 th century and the city was full of people and prosperity. Why was there a need to lament Jerusalem now?

Shortly after that time some of my classmates and I decided to visit Hezekiah’s tunnel. This is a water shaft built in the 8 th century by King Hezekiah to insure that the city could get water in case of an Assyrian siege. It is a marvel of engineering. Crews simultaneously began the work at the beginning and the end of the tunnel and met in the middle. However, our little excursion brought an unexpected revelation. The entrance point for the tunnel is in East Jerusalem, populated primarily by Palestinians. Walking into East Jerusalem was like walking into another world. I walked out of the bright and happy West Jerusalem into a dark, polluted East Jerusalem. Rotting garbage was piled on the sidewalks, the roads were littered with trash and potholes, water stood in putrifying pools whose stench was made worse by the heat and children and old men walked through the streets dirty and ragged. The Israelis who controlled local government refused to provide infrastructure services for the Palestinians living in Jerusalem. And now Israel has built a physical wall to separate themselves from those in East Jerusalem.

The children of Abraham cannot live in peace or extend the hand of humanity to one another. I began to hear the lament in a new key. Jerusalem still needed a lament to be offered up. The roads to Zion still mourn, the gates are still desolate because for so many in that city there is no one to comfort. There is no one to right the wrong that is perpetrated on so many of her citizens, or in biblical language her children.

Twenty one years ago Walter Brueggemann wrote an important essay titled “The Costly Loss of Lament”. He points out the power of lament is in its active attempt to confront and converse with God. The lament is not interested in explicating the ways of God or providing a theodicy to explain oppression and desolation. Its primary interest is in justice. Simply put the lament declares that the current situation is not right and that God must do something to put things right. The situation is out of balance and God must intervene and rectify the situation.

Brueggemann points out that two things are lost when we lose lament. The first is the loss of “genuine covenant interaction”. A genuine covenant involves two parties. Both parties enter a covenant with obligations and promises. They make commitments to one another in the making of the covenant. When one party is silenced because it believes that the other party is unavailable, unwilling or unable to act, there is no more covenant. There is only a one-sided monopoly of silence. Lament claims, by its very act, that God is available and still engaged in the covenant relation so that God can be appealed to with the expectation that God will act.

The second loss is “the stifling of the question of theodicy”. By this he does not refer to ontological questions about God but to the legitimate questioning of justice on earth. He rightly claims that Israel is not interested in questions about the nature of God but in questions of justice. The laments do not muse about the being of God but on the acts of God in relation to the world. Justice is the concern of the lament. Life isn’t right and God, as covenant partner, is capable of responding and correcting that which is wrong.

I would add one more casualty when we lose the capacity for lament, and that is a loss of our humanity. To live in this world and not be deeply troubled by the things that are wrong, by the oppression of the weak, the marginalized and those without resources of power on their side is to lose what it means to be human. Engaging in lament puts us in solidarity with those who suffer under this world’s systems.

When we view lament as a necessary and legitimate practice, and more especially when we engage in lament we take seriously our part in the covenantal relationship we have with God. We lay claim to our responsibility and privilege in the dynamic of relationship. To cry out a lament is to make a faith claim. As Brueggemann puts it, “Our understanding of faith is altered dramatically, depending on whether God is a dead cipher who cannot be addressed and is only the silent guarantor of the status quo, or whether God can be addressed in risky ways as the transformer of what has not yet appeared.” A lament’s hope is on what has not yet appeared, on what seems like an impossibility. A lament puts us face to face with injustices that seem insurmountable and profess faith that God is interested and capable of bringing justice. The power of a lament is that it is cried out from a position of weakness, loss and a frightening realization of our lack of capacity in the face of great wrong.

This week I have been made more aware that racism continues in our society. Steve Coll wrote in The New Yorker this week about the Jena 6 and the pervasiveness of racism. As he points out the states where blacks have the highest rate of incarceration include South Dakota, Wisconsin, Iowa and Vermont—among the whitest states in the Union. Some of these states are considered liberal, in addition to being prosperous. Yet the rate of incarceration is out of proportion to the population due to an implicit racism. On Tuesday a Columbia University professor, who is also African-American, arrived to work to find a noose attached to his office door. Hurricane Katrina brought out in stark relief the problems in our society of class and race. Those who suffered most in that natural disaster were by and large poor and people of color. At the time it happened there was some national lament but such things quickly fall out of our collective consciousness.

Closer to home, racism and classism are evident in the form of gentrification in East Austin forcing people out of their homes due to the increase in property taxes. For many of these African-American and Latino/Latina families these homes have been in their families for generations. They have solid community networks and long term friendships. These homes are the legacy they pass down to their children to insure that they have a place to live. Now they are forced out farther into the suburbs and away from the communities that gave their lives stability. Some see it as progress to replace those old single family homes with shiny new condos, but for those who are displaced it is another instance of those with means trampling the lives of those without means. The road to Zion still mourns, and her gates are still desolate. There is no comfort in sight.

We need to reclaim lament as we stand with those who are oppressed because of race, class, sex or sexual orientation and call upon God to intervene. This does not mean that we don’t act. This seminary has a holy history of action by standing with those condemned to death row, with the homeless and recently with the Jena 6. But lament reminds us that God is not absent. We can appeal to God, cry out to God, demand God act in righting the wrongs that are so prevalent and so much with us.

When we reclaim lament we will affirm our covenantal relationship with God, affirm that God is interested in justice and reclaim our own humanity as we stand with the weakest and least of our society. We must cry out to God for the road to Zion still mourns and lives lie desolate with no one to comfort.