Lament: Prayers at the End of Our Agency
A Sermon by Zoe Matties based on Psalm 27
“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to you, O LORD.”
Amen.
A few weeks ago, when I was asked to preach, I took a look at the lectionary readings and was pleasantly surprised as I read through Psalm 27. You see, nearly every weekday for the last four years, I have spoken the words from Psalm 27 out loud as part of a morning prayer practice at work. I know the words to this prayer so well I could recite them by heart, but (and I am slightly chagrined to admit this) it took me until that very day to realize they came from this Psalm.
The prayer that we use is from the Northumbria Community, a New Monastic community inspired by the ancient Celtic tradition. These are the opening words from the community’s daily morning prayer:
“One thing I have asked of the Lord,
this is what I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life;
to behold the beauty of the Lord
and to seek Him in His temple.”
A number of questions came to my mind as I contemplated these words. What is it that I am truly saying as I pray these words each day? What is the house of the Lord? Where is the house of the Lord? What does it mean to dwell there? And what does it mean to seek God in God’s temple?
A number of years ago, Tim and I had the chance to go to Greece. We flew into Athens and traveled to the little apartment we were renting. It was just our luck that the apartment was directly below the Acropolis, and from the rooftop patio, we had a perfect view of the tall limestone columns lit up in the night. The Acropolis, which houses the remains of several ancient temples, sits on the top of a large flat mountain in the very center of the city. It is a stark and unavoidable feature in the city’s landscape. I wonder, is this the kind of place the Psalmist was thinking about? Or did the Psalmist mean heaven? That’s often where people have said that God lives.
In order to answer my questions, I realized that I needed to know some context about the time when the Psalm was written. I turned to the book Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters by the Old Testament scholar Iain Provan. In the book, he writes that temples in the ancient Near East were designed primarily as residences for the gods, not places of worship. They were built on places that were considered sacred and were arranged and decorated to mirror the order and fertility of the cosmos as a whole. Not only that, but they were considered the very center of the cosmos, and all goodness emanated outward from within the temple.
To the ancient mind, there was a close connection between temples and the cosmos. So, it isn’t too surprising that Near Eastern texts concerning the construction of temples show a similarity to Near Eastern texts concerning the creation of the world. And this includes the creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2.
In Genesis 1, God creates an ordered world by speaking creation into being in a series of seven days. On the final day, God’s presence fills creation, and God rests. Later, when God gives Moses the blueprint for the tabernacle, it was also a blueprint of the universe created in Genesis 1. The tabernacle was the temporary temple used by the Israelites until they built a more permanent temple. The tabernacle, and later the temple, were built and dedicated through a series of seven speeches and seven days.
In Genesis 2, we get another picture of creation. In this story, God places human beings in a beautiful garden and walks with them there. Similarly, the temple built by Solomon was decorated in a way that symbolized the Garden of Eden. It was filled with imagery of creation and the tree of life. It was thought of as the place where God dwells with God’s people.
Temples represented in microcosm what the good and ordered world created by God was in macrocosm. Put another way, the cosmos was one large temple that God created for Godself as a dwelling place. This provides the answer to my first two questions about our passage in Psalm 27: What is the house of the Lord? and where is the house of the Lord? Creation is God’s temple and is the place where God lives with God’s people.
Now, what of my third question: What does it mean to dwell in the house of the Lord?
Let’s go back to temples for a minute. Temples in the Near East held images of the gods they represented—think big old statues representing the god’s likeness. But in Genesis 1, it is the human who is the image. God places the images of God (the humans) into God’s temple-cosmos, which happens to also be a beautiful garden. In Genesis 2:15, we learn that the human’s job was “to till and to keep” this garden. The Hebrew word for till can also mean work or serve. It is the same word used to describe the role of priests in the temple. The human’s role was to serve, as a priest might, in the temple-cosmos. Provan writes, “From the Biblical perspective… the work of human beings in God’s world is religious work. We are to look after sacred space—the dwelling place of God—on behalf of the one who created it.”
The New Testament builds on this tradition of connecting temple, creation, and the dwelling place of God. The book of John starts by saying that “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” The Greek word for “lived among us” is the same one used for tent and tabernacle. So, we could say that “the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.” Or, as Eugene Peterson puts it in The Message, “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.” With the incarnation of Jesus, not only is God’s dwelling the entire cosmos, but it is also right here among us, in every particular place, and within every particular being.
As Jesus was born and lived in a particular place, at a particular time, alongside particular creatures, so we are called to live in and look after with love and attention the particular times and places we have been given. In attending to the places we find ourselves in, we will surely “behold the beauty of the Lord,” as the Psalmist says. However, we also live in a world tainted by brokenness, and if we are dwelling attentively, we will inevitably encounter sorrow. I think that if we are to dwell well in our place, we must learn to grieve as God does when any part of God’s temple-cosmos is harmed.
Tim and I moved into our home in 2018. In the year that followed, we proceeded to get to know the particularities of our new home, like when the tulips would come up in the spring, and whether or not we would get apples on the tree in the front yard. In October 2019, just before Thanksgiving, the city of Winnipeg had a freak snowstorm with freezing rain, gusts of wind up to 80 km/h, and up to 35 cm of snowfall. It was one of those disasters that feels both unusual and ominous—a sign of the times. The storm damaged houses, downed powerlines, and took a particularly brutal toll on Winnipeg’s trees, 30,000 of them. An unseasonably warm fall meant the trees still had their leaves, which allowed moisture-laden snow to cling to branches like concrete, snapping limbs and downing whole trees.
One of those trees was the beautiful old elm in my front yard. This storm delivered its death sentence. A significant branch was broken off in the storm, leaving a gaping wound in the trunk. Over the next two summers, canker worms devoured its leaves, leaving it weak and stressed. Climate change added to the strain. When Dutch Elm Disease found the tree, it was unable to resist the invasive fungus carried by the Elm Bark Beetle. I came home from work one day to see the dreaded orange dot sprayed on its trunk, a sign that the city would soon cut it down, and I mourned.
You see, this tree, and all trees for that matter, perform daily acts of wonder and mercy for us and the rest of creation. They are a refuge, a playground, a source of nourishment and shelter, and they provide the very breath in our lungs. One large mature tree can provide the day’s oxygen for up to four people. We breathe for each other: their oxygen, our carbon dioxide. We are not as separate as we may think. If we lose trees, we lose everything.
The loss of my tree is a small grief, but it is nested within a much larger grief—one that many of us carry in these days of biodiversity loss and changing climate. Studies say that up to 90 percent of young people today feel at least moderately anxious about the ecological crisis and 75 percent say the future is frightening. Experiences of climate anxiety and eco-grief have risen exponentially in people of all ages. Theologian and priest Hannah Malcolm writes in her edited anthology Words for a Dying World, “Our grief about a dying world—however all-consuming it might feel—is not about death in abstraction. We grieve the death of particular things, whether creatures or places.” She continues, “We mourn the death of the world because it is where we come from. But we do not come from the same places. We cannot emphasize our creatureliness without understanding our locality. We are finite, belonging to a particular community, and that finitude is not a barrier to our flourishing, but a gift.”
Hannah Malcolm, Words for a Dying World (London: SCM Press, 2020), xxx-xxxi.
Loving the world means being willing to let it break your heart. I think Jesus knew this better than most people. In the gospel lectionary reading, which we didn’t hear this evening, Jesus offers one of several heartfelt laments for his home found throughout the book of Luke. He cries, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” These are words said in love, and in heartbreak.
The season of Lent encourages us to enter a time of penitence and fasting. It invites us to sit with grief for a little while. As disciples of the “man of sorrows, well acquainted with grief,”2 there is much we can learn about lament from our teacher.
In the passage from Luke 23 that was read this evening, Jesus’s words to the weeping women give us some insight into the role of lament in times of crisis. As Jesus is carrying the cross to his death, a great crowd follows, including a group of wailing women, some of whom may have been professional mourners—a common practice at that time. Jesus redirects their grief: “Do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.”3 He names the suffering to come, the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans, and calls them to repentance. In doing so, Jesus joins their lament and invites them to see the larger tragedy unfolding around them. This is not just personal grief, but communal grief over an empire that thrives on systems of violence and oppression.
In what ways might Jesus direct our sorrow today? Perhaps He would say, don’t weep for me, weep for your siblings whose homelands are being swept away by the rising tides. Weep for your fellow creatures who perish under rushing flood, and burning forest.
The writer Kyle Lambelet writes, “Laments are prayers at the end of human agency. They confront the reality of our situation in recognition that things are not as they should be.”4 Lament does not demand joylessness, nor is it the same as despair, which assumes we already know the end of the story. Rather, lament is a form of truth-telling, a refusal to look away from what is broken. Lament allows us to see the world as God sees it: as beloved. While lament can be expressed individually, when expressed in community, we are reminded that we are not alone. It can be a powerful act of solidarity with those who are suffering and a way to upend the status quo. One powerful outcome of lament is repentance, which means a change of direction, a turning towards God who is still creating, sustaining, and redeeming the world.
As compost transforms death and decay into life-giving soil, expressions of lament can create fertile ground for action. It can point us toward the work of repair, restoration, and reconciliation with our fellow creatures, and our Creator. Tim and I intend to plant a new tree in our front yard this summer. We know that climate change brings uncertainty, and that we are bound up in harmful systems, but we are committed to dwelling well in our place in the temple-cosmos. We also haven’t reached the end of our human story. We are in the “messy middle”5 and there is work yet to be done. My prayer is that as we learn to weep for our world, we also learn to dwell in it and care for it with the same tenderness God does. This is courageous and hopeful work.
Amen
Hannah Malcolm, Words for a Dying World (London: SCM Press, 2020) xxx-xxxi.
Kyle Lambelet, “My Grandma’s Oil Well,” In Words for a Dying World, ed. Hannah Malcolm (London: SCM Press, 2020), 29.