“It’s O.K. to cry,” is pretty standard popular psychology advice. It also happens to be true. We seem to hear about men who supposedly still embrace some sort of macho male etiquette which forbids weeping or about women in business who do all they can to suppress tears for fear of displaying weakness. But my guess is that most adults do in fact regularly shed tears and, while they are perhaps embarrassed about in some social settings, most do not feel it wrong to cry.
At the same time, it is probably true that references to tears and weeping are much more prevalent in the culture of the Bible than in our own. Most people of that time were unembarrassed to shed tears or talk about their sorrows in public. In the famous shortest verse of Scripture we see it said of the Lord Himself, “Jesus wept.”
The biblical figure most associated with tears is probably Jeremiah. He had plenty to cry out. As God’s man presiding prophetically over the fall and destruction of Jerusalem in 587 B.C., he had plenty to cry about. Rembrandt’s painting shows him bowed in sorrow beside the burning, broken, and looted city of Jerusalem.
Our reading from Immerse: Poets this week includes a little book traditionally attributed to Jeremiah, Lamentations. Serious scholarship is about 50/50 on that attribution. Christian Scripture places Lamentations just after Jeremiah, basically accepting the tradition, but Hebrew Scripture puts it between Ruth and Ecclesiastes, leaving the authorship question open.
There is no doubt, however, that the book’s subject is lament over the fall of Jerusalem, contemporaneous with Jeremiah. For Jews the book is still read on Tisha b’Av, a summer day of fasting remembering the destructions of both the first and second temples.
For this Sunday’s sermon, I’ve chosen a text from the center of the book, Lamentations 3:19-51. It starts and ends with sorrow, but in the middle are words of hope, including some words in verses 22 and 23 made incredibly familiar by praise songs and hymns.
My hope is that a little time with this sad little book will remind us of the prominent place lament and tears have in God’s Word and also in God’s structuring of our lives. Jeremiah or whoever is very clear in verses 40-45 that the sorrows of his people have at least part of their origin in God Himself. Let us not be afraid to go to God with our own tears for what happens to us and to those around us.