What if you found a spiritual tool that could help you navigate through your feelings of confusion and pain towards peace and redemption? That's exactly what we'll be unpacking in our latest episode of the Rethinking Christianity podcast. We delve into the profound concept of lamenting, that age-old Christian discipline where we reflect on our internal world and the circumstances that surround us. We discuss the chaos that life often throws our way and how lamenting provides an avenue to bring these tumultuous emotions before God, a vital aspect of the Christian life.
What if you found a spiritual tool that could help you navigate through your feelings of confusion and pain towards peace and redemption? That's exactly what we'll be unpacking in our latest episode of the Rethinking Christianity podcast. We delve into the profound concept of lamenting, that age-old Christian discipline where we reflect on our internal world and the circumstances that surround us. We discuss the chaos that life often throws our way and how lamenting provides an avenue to bring these tumultuous emotions before God, a vital aspect of the Christian life.
Welcome to the Rethinking Christianity podcast, a home to conversations focused on rethinking, challenging and engaging with Christian thought. You can visit us on Instagram and Facebook at Rethinking Christianity podcast. I'm your host, blake Fine, and thank you for tuning in to today's episode. Hello everyone, hope you are doing well. Thanks for tuning in to today's episode.
Speaker 1:I want to go ahead and apologize for the audio quality of the episode. It is a sermon that I did a year ago and the audio on it isn't great, but I've tried my best to fix it where you can at least hear what I'm saying and understand what I'm saying. I apologize for that. It's a sermon, so it's a little different than our normal episode where I'm doing an interview or I'm sitting down and just talking about some ideas that I have. But what I wanted to do I have a bunch of sermons that I've done in the past and I wanted to upload one this week just to take a little break from putting out content. That is an interview and me talking. This sermon was one I did of July last year on the idea of lamenting and lamentations. It is interesting to think about because it's not something that really gets talked about and it's not something that I think we look at as maybe like a spiritual discipline. But lamenting, i think, is a really vital part of reflecting on our own lives, reflecting on the lives around us, reflecting on the things going on around us. The point that I'm making this message is, as we lament, as we wrestle with chaos and brokenness and things that are hurting us and others, that we bring those to God and then we reflect on what can we do about it, because a part of the Christian life and following Jesus is this idea of participating in redemption, by participating in the kingdom of God and living out what Jesus has called us to do. Lamenting is one of those things that brings us to a place of, i think, recognizing where we can do that, where we can participate in that. I think that lamenting is very important and I hope that this sermon is helpful. It's something I did a year ago, so my thoughts on some of this might be a little different now, but overall I think the idea here is good and again I apologize for the audio quality, but I hope that the sermon on lamenting is helpful and you find some value in it. So thanks again for tuning in to Rethinking Christianity. If you have any comments or critiques, hit us up on Instagram. Also, follow us on Instagram. That way you can keep up to date with everything that we're doing. We also have a newsletter that you can subscribe to, and that is in the link in the bio of our Instagram. So again, thanks for tuning in, and here is the sermon that I did from about a year ago on lamenting How are you doing? good, you all look good.
Speaker 1:So this morning we all come from different places in life and we all come from different like things that we're going through, and so what we're going to kind of look at this morning, i think, is something that we all kind of deal with and as we, we're going through the Bible and over the last couple weeks, you know, we've been going through Job, we've gone through Ecclesiastes and we've gone through, like, the Proverbs, we've gone through Psalms and all of these books I really love because they all kind of deal with like real human emotion Do you all relate to. Sometimes, when you like read the Bible, there are certain parts where you're like I really don't get this, i don't relate to this at all. Like, do any of you all feel that? Are you all great? Okay, so like for me when I read it, like there are a lot of times where I'll read the Bible and I'm like I have no idea, this doesn't relate to me in any way, but these portions of the scriptures like Ecclesiastes and Lamentations, which we're going to look at today, i read those and I'm like, okay, i can kind of get behind this. I relate to some of these words, like I feel these things at times. So what I want to do today is we're going to look at Lamentations, but before we kind of get to that, i want to talk about chaos.
Speaker 1:How many of you would like agree that life is kind of chaotic at times? Like would you all agree with this statement? Life is chaotic, y'all all agree with that, okay? so as I was thinking about this, i was trying to think like how and I just googled it, i didn't come up with this definition but like how is chaos defined? Chaos is defined as complete disorder and confusion. How many of you feel like your life feels like that sometimes? Complete disorder and confusion. What's ironic, a lot of old kids are raising your hands now I'm just playing. So it feels like that at times and I think that this can be defined for like life in general, like just like everyday life. But I think it also can be defined like defined like when there are situations that happen and it seems chaotic when things we see happen that are not right seem chaotic. So, like when there is disorder, when bad things happen, it's chaotic when, like, things that don't make sense happen. It's kind of when we see like injustice in the world around us, it seems chaotic because it's confusing and it's disorderly.
Speaker 1:See, for me, like when I think about, like, if I were God, if I were running the world, i would try and make sure everything is how it needed to be right. How many of you would say, like, why? You ask the question, like, why are things the way that they are? And I ask that question a lot, and I think we will all embrace moments of chaos and suffering, right? So we will all embrace those moments. Like we'll have those moments where, like, we come face-to-face with those situations and those questions where we ask why is it like that, or why is this happening to me? Or we will observe moments of chaos and suffering And so, like, if you have, i want to ask a question and I'm going to kind of try and ask questions for you to think about this morning And questions for you to kind of like wrestle with, because I think it's important for us, as we follow Jesus, to think about how we respond to that statement that we all agreed with.
Speaker 1:Like life is chaotic And in the midst of that chaos there are things that don't make sense, there are things that a lot of times kind of hurt and there are things that we see that hurt and there are things that we go through and we deal with that are not fun And there is a way to respond to those things. And if you have already embraced these moments, what was your response? Like moments of chaos, just like it can be, like hardship or health issues or just things you see out in the world. Like anytime I get on social media, i feel like I see the chaos of the world, right? So how did you respond? Think about for a moment like what was your initial like gut response? So I'm going to tell a story from when I was kind of growing up.
Speaker 1:So when I was growing up, i grew up kind of middle class and things were pretty like comfortable for me. In around 10th grade I started playing football and I was a linebacker I'm just kidding I played kicker, so I was the kicker for the football team. And so when I joined this football team, i went to school with a very diverse group of people. So, like our school was like, we had a lot of Hispanics, we had African-Americans, we had whites, but for me, up until that point, most of the people that I was around outside of like school were like people that looked like me, people that were in the same social classes as me, people that were like living the same kind of lives as I did growing up my whole life. And when I got on the football team, i began to like be around like guys that were completely different than me, and this was because, like the way in which they grew up.
Speaker 1:So in my town, in Cordill, georgia, there is a railroad track right through the middle of the town And if you go over to the other side of the railroad track, that's the other side of town And that's what people would say, and this other side of town was a higher population of African-Americans and it was a higher population of poverty. And before I started playing football, i didn't really engage with that side of town. And so for me, my viewpoint of life was like one way, i only viewed life in one kind of way. And so I started playing like football. And what would happen is, once I got a car and I was able to drive, my teammates would say hey, blake, can you give us a ride home? We don't want to ride the bus. It takes forever to get home from practice. And I was like, sure, whatever. And so I began taking some of these guys home.
Speaker 1:And when I began to realize, as I would take these guys home, i would pull up to these little small houses and I would begin to think, like you have like six brothers and sisters, like are y'all all living there? And I began to realize more and more like, oh, people aren't living like I'm living. Like people on this other side of town are living like in poverty and in hardship and in situations There were round things that, like guys like when we were in high school, shouldn't have been around, like. And so I made pretty good friends with one of these guys and he would like, even after he graduated, he'd hit me up and asked for rides because he didn't have a car and I would take him different places. And I remember one time I took him to go get his haircut. He got his haircut by this random guy in this rundown house on the other side of town. And I remember going into this house and like there was like no furniture, it was just like two bedrooms and there was like a mattress on the floor and he had a barbershop chair in like in his living room.
Speaker 1:And like the more I engaged with like these kind of situations when I would go to the other side of town, i began to like there was this very uncomfortable feeling that I would get, and it was because I began to think like it shouldn't be like this, like life shouldn't be this way, like this seems unjust to me. Why are these people like so poor? Why are these people living like this? Why are things? why don't they have the comfortability that I have? Why have I been given comfortability? And so I embraced the moment of, like the chaos of life which resulted in, for some people, poverty.
Speaker 1:And these were my like, sometimes my responses like it sometimes angers me. Sometimes I do that out of empathy. It makes me sad. There's grief, there's anxiety, there's disappointment, there's fear, there's loneliness, there's all these different, i think normal responses to things that we see that do not seem right, like how many of you can relate? Maybe you've seen something out in the world like whether it be like poverty or injustice or whatever and you immediately have that response to like I wish I could do something about that. And so that is what we're kinda getting at this morning, and the question that I wanna ask is is there a right or wrong way to respond to the suffering or the injustice of the world around us? Is there a right or wrong way to respond to this?
Speaker 1:And the book of Lamentations is about a response to hardship. The book of Lamentations is about this response to hardship, and Lamentations is a really interesting book. It's a collection of Hebrew poems that focus on the grief, the pain and suffering that come out of living in Jerusalem after Babylon eventually captured, plundered and destroyed it. So what has happened in the Old Testament up to this point is that God's people have been disobedient. God allows the consequences of their disobedience to take place, which eventually what we see in 2 Kings 24-10,. It says at the time, the officers of Nebuchadnezzar, who is the king of Babylon, advanced on Jerusalem and laid siege to it.
Speaker 1:And what we find in Lamentations is we find a response to all of this stuff that's going on. And to give kind of a visual like this is like we read these stories in the Bible. It's very easy for us to be disconnected from, like the humanity and the things that are going on in these stories, but what goes on in the story of Israel being siege by Babylon is death, hardship, famine, and the people that are writing in Lamentations are crying out to God, asking the question of why? Why is life chaotic? Why are things happening? Have you abandoned us, god? And to give you kind of a visual like we can kind of see this is what I'm sure it looked, probably a lot worse than this, but they destroy the temple, they take the things from the temple, they destroy everything that Israel has built at this point, everything that God has promised them through their covenant with him. They have taken And Babylon has taken Israel, and what Lamentations reveals is experiences of warfare, siege, famine and death. And so what we find in Lamentations are these words of people that are wrestling and dealing with that question of like is there a right way to respond to the suffering that I'm going through and the suffering that I see around me And when we like deal with this, when we read these words, i think these words can speak to us today because I think, like for me, when I saw, like the other side of town, for me, right, like when I would begin, i eventually found Christ and I began to follow Jesus, i began to like pray to God like what, like I would go to God with honesty, we're gonna get to that. So let's look at Lamentations.
Speaker 1:Lamentations, chapter three, and an interesting fact about Lamentations. This has not got nothing to do with this sermon, but it's just cool to me. So, lamentations, did any of y'all ever do a cross sticks in literature? right, anyone do a cross sticks? Do y'all know what those are? Nobody, okay.
Speaker 1:So in Lamentations, every single chapter corresponds to first line of every single verse. It starts with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet. So it's just an acrosic, it's a poem, and so it's beautifully done and it's very intentional, because these words are coming from a place of emotion and intentionality to God. So Lamentations three, one through six. If you're ever on Jeopardy, maybe that'll come up.
Speaker 1:So I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of the Lord's wrath. He has driven me away and made me walk in darkness rather than life. Indeed, he has turned his hand against me again and again, all day long. He has made my skin and my flesh grow old and has broken my bones. He has besieged me and surrounded me with bitterness and hardship, and he has made me dwell in darkness like those long dead. Real, encouraging words for you this morning. So these words are coming from a place of a troubled heart. They're coming from a place where they don't know what to do. They've seen everything that's going on.
Speaker 1:Chapter one of Lamentations kind of gives you an outline of all the destruction that's going on. There's all this illustrations and poetry that describe how Babylon has come in and destroyed everything. And then what we see is in chapter three. There is this anonymous author, a man, that speaks about how he feels, how his heart is responding, and he's asking questions to God and he's describing how he is dealing with it. And let's look at these words again. I just want us to really look at like.
Speaker 1:This is pure honesty, and I think it's healthy for us to read the Bible and see the honesty of the people that are dealing and wrestling with God, because I think it's so important for us as we, in our spiritual life, are honest with God and go to God with who we are, not who we may be pretending to be, but going to Him with full honesty. He says I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of the Lord's wrath. He's saying God, you're the one doing this, you're the one that's causing this wrath. God, you have driven me away and you've made me walk in darkness rather than light, that there is no light in my life right now. All I see is darkness, all I see is hardship, all I see is pain, and I don't understand. Indeed, he says God, he has turned His hand against me, not just once, but again and again. God, you keep doing this to me all day long. These verses speak like from a troubled heart, a place of hardship, and in lamentations we see this honesty and we see this like outpouring and this outcry, this like hard, these hard emotions and these feelings We see in lamentations 3 later on in chapter 3, same chapter, lamentations 3, 17.
Speaker 1:I have been deprived of peace. Have any of you ever felt that way? I have been deprived of peace. I have forgotten what prosperity, i have forgotten what happiness is. I don't understand anything, and so what He's dealing with is things that I think we all deal with, we wrestle with. We all have come to places where we have either dealt with like injustice and suffering and pain up front in our own personal lives, or we see it in the world around us, just like this author. He has dealt with it personally, where his land has been destroyed, where he lived has been destroyed, and he's seeing the suffering around him And for him there's no hope. For him there is no like peace and he doesn't know what to do. And have you ever felt like these same emotions, like, have you ever had places in your life where you have felt these emotions, where I feel deprived of peace? I have forgotten what happiness is. And if you haven't and I hope you don't have to, but more often than not, like in life, you will deal with those emotions, those feelings, as though God was against your life. And I've had those moments.
Speaker 1:When I was 16 years old, my parents got divorced, my dad was addicted to like all kinds of drugs. It was alcoholic. I saw things that I should not have been seeing, i was around certain types of people that I should not have been around, and I remember like continually feeling these emotions inside of me and I was always pushing them down And I felt like I was so angry with God. I was like God, you know, people tell me that you're a loving father. The only kind of father I know is one that's doing horrible stuff And so I've dealt like I personally have dealt with these things, and when we go through these moments, i think it's important for us to be able to understand that God is the one that we should be able to see embrace how we feel.
Speaker 1:We should embrace how we feel, just like that's the author in Lamentations does. We should embrace how we feel, because I think it's so important to our spiritual formation and our spiritual life as we follow Jesus. In response, we should go before God from a place of honesty. There is a place in our prayer, like for protest, for questions and even anger. In Lamentations, we see like they're not happy, they're dealing with things, they're wrestling with things. When you pray, when you go before God, when you are dealing with your own suffering and you see the suffering of others, like for me, like when I went to the other side of town and I saw my friends that were living in poverty and things that didn't make sense to me. As I became a Christian, i began to go before God and say why is this like this? What can I do about it? Why don't you fix this? And I think that's how we ought to pray in honesty.
Speaker 1:And Henry Nalent says this dare to feel your losses, dare to grieve them. Name the pain and say, yes, i feel real pain, real fear, real loss, and I'm going to embrace it, i'm going to deal with it up front. I think that's important. I think we need to do that In the journey of faith. We must take time to lament In our journey of faith. We should not be people that push down our emotions. We should not be people that avoid, like the pain and the suffering. We should be people that should be people that see it And it does something to us, that it draws up empathy, rather it be for other people or dealing with the pain that we personally are going to.
Speaker 1:The question that we have to ask is that where do we move towards as we lament, as we're feeling these things? Where do we go from there? And I think it's a place of remembrance in our grief. There is a time for grief and there is a time to like deal with that pain and deal with that hardship and deal with that suffering. There's also for us, as followers of Jesus, a time to remember why we have hope in the midst of that. There's a time for us to remember it.
Speaker 1:And what's beautiful about lamentations is we see this like God that's coming to God with everything that he's got And then, out of nowhere, we see the only words of hope. In lamentations, there's only words of hope, and it goes like this lamentations 321 through 26. And it's almost like out of nowhere he goes. Wait a second. Yet I call to mind and therefore I have hope Because of the Lord's great love for me. We are not consumed, for his compassion never fail and they're new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. I say to myself The Lord is my portion. Therefore, i will wait for Him. And the Lord is good to those whose hope is in Him, to the one who seeks Him. It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. One of the most interesting things I see in these verses is does he ask for the circumstances to change? He doesn't ask for like I need you to change what's going on. What does he say? He said because of the Lord's great love, we are not consumed And the Lord is my portion. Therefore, i will wait for Him And the Lord is good to those whose hope is in Him, to the one who seeks Him, and is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. His hope is not in circumstances, his hope is not in that life would change, but his hope is simply in his faith to God himself.
Speaker 1:And the author of Lamentations calls to mind the great love of God And then the Hebrew. He uses a word called Hussed, and it's a love like comes from commitment. It's a love that's based on commitment. He knows that his God, even in the midst of this, is committed to Him, committed to His people. And we see the same thing for us as followers of Jesus, that if we believe in the covenant of Jesus right, that we have been invited to follow Him and we have been saved by Him, that we have the same hope.
Speaker 1:In the midst of our grief and lament, can we make room to remember the love of God In the midst of, in the very middle of it. And that's what in Lamentations 3, right in the very middle of all this hardship and pain that he's like releasing to God. He remembers. I call to mind why I have hope And this is what I think we should do. I'm trying to be practical. There are two things that I think we should do. We should lament in honesty as we observe the world around us. I think when you go and you pray this week, if you take time to pray honestly, go before God, like you don't have to be well-behaved when you pray. You can go before God. He already knows what you're thinking anyways, so you might as well reveal it to Him. And we should remember God's commitment to redemption. As we lament, god is committed to redeeming our world And He's already done it. We are simply invited into participating in that And that's what Jesus invites us into. He invites us into the Kingdom of God right here today, to participate in that.
Speaker 1:As we lament, let us remember how Jesus entered into the sufferings of the world. Jesus entered into this world as it was. He came, he lived as a human And what did He do? He, head on, dealt with people that were sick, people that were broken, people that were hurting, and He was with them. He entered into this world And He healed their temporary issues and things like that. But what we find eventually is that Jesus, he laments Himself in the Garden of Gethsemane, he goes before God and He prays and He's like I don't know if I can do this, but if you will be done, do it. And when He's on the cross, he's got God. Why have you forsaken Him? Why have you left Him?
Speaker 1:And Jesus, he is a part of this great redemption for us today That as we're living and as we're seeking Him and as we're following Him, that we see those things like. For me, when I saw that other side of town, right, i was called to love those people. I'm called to be there for those people. I'm called to do something. If I can do something about that, do something. There's so many great things that we can do in this community to like, embrace the injustice around us and bring about, like, the redemption of Christ, because we have been redeemed right, and so how can Jesus' resurrection change our perspective on the state of the world? We don't have to live in hopelessness, right. We don't have to live like in this midst of just, like I don't know what's going to happen.
Speaker 1:I have no hope for the person writing in Lamentations. He writes those verses and He writes those statements and He writes these things coming from a place that I think we all can relate to. And the question that I think we have to ask ourselves is how am I going to respond as we lament, right? How am I going to respond as I lament and deal with like these emotions and these things? For those of you this morning that are dealing with like this Things in your life, are you going to God and like, in honesty? Are you going to God with, like, what you're truly wrestling with? Are you being honest with him? Are you telling him how maybe you're angry with him? Are you telling him how I don't really like the way the world is around me? How are you responding? Are you going in honesty? And then, when you see the injustice in the world around you that maybe draws up those like emotions and those things that make you ask a Question of like, why are things this way?
Speaker 1:We are invited by Jesus to do something about those things. We are called to to give to the people that are hurting. We're called to walk alongside the people that are broken. Galatians 6 to us literally tells us like to carry the burdens of those that are with us and For us, like as followers of Jesus. This is what we're called to do. We're called to one recognize and observe and deal with suffering and lament about it, be honest with God as we pray and wrestle with that, but then also Do something. We are called to participate in the kingdom today And so this week, when you deal with the suffering, when you pray, when you, i go before God, will you go in honesty and will you do something about the suffering and the hardships that you see around you, or we simply stand by?
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to Rethinking Christianity. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social Media or leave a rating and review. To catch all the latest from Rethinking Christianity, you can follow us on Instagram at Rethinking Christianity podcast, as well as on YouTube and Facebook. Thanks again and I'll see you next time.