At This Table

Lamentations 1: 1-6, page 581
How deserted lies the city, once so full of people!
How like a widow is she, who once was great among the nations!
She who was queen among the provinces has now become a slave.
Bitterly she weeps at night, tears are upon her cheeks.
Among all her lovers there is none to comfort her.
All her friends have betrayed her; they have become her enemies.
After affliction and harsh labor, Judah has gone into exile.
She dwells among the nations; she finds no resting place.
All who pursue her have overtaken her in the midst of her distress.
The roads to Zion mourn, for no one comes to her appointed feasts.
All her gateways are desolate, her priests groan, her maidens grieve, and she is in bitter anguish.
Her foes have become her masters; her enemies are at ease.
The Lord has brought her grief because of her many sins.
Her children have gone into exile, captive before the foe.
All the splendor has departed from the Daughter of Zion.
Her princes are like deer that find no pasture; in weakness they have fled before the pursuer.
Sermon
October is pastor appreciation month, and even though I am one, I don’t think this is a very good time to be appreciating pastors to be quite honest.
The Pope has continued to receive harsh criticism for not confronting the evil of child abuses by clergy, and for maybe even knowingly ignoring the plight of the victims, maybe even turning a deaf ear to their cries for justice.
October is also a month when we will be giving extra attention to the Bishop Eddie Long who stood in the pulpit last Sunday morning, “looked out over the thousands assembled to hear him speak, and talked of his congregation as a family that gave him great comfort in a time of pain.”
There’s something wonderful about that, I think. There’s not much better than family to back you up when you need them – and there’s not much better when the church is that family – but there is something sinister when the church is rallied around Bishop Eddie Long, promising their support of him, labeling his accusers as liars, calling their testimony a betrayal, when those accusers are a part of that church family as well. In demonizing them a church family turns its back on four of its brothers. Four young men who may well have been injured beyond repair by a man whom they trusted as a father, their voices are not heard but ignored. As victims, victims that they very well may be, they are not comforted but silenced.
In the words of Jay Bookman, who wrote an opinion column on the subject for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, “As family counselors and child-abuse specialists can testify, that’s not surprising. The dynamics at New Birth [Missionary Baptist Church] are painfully similar to those in families all across the country… In a church as in a home, it can be far less painful to suppress the claim than to demand accountability from those with power.” And so, to avoid even the thought that the pastor they see as being so close to God might be a wolf in sheep’s clothes, a conclusion that would threaten the very foundation of their church and their faith, the victims’ testimonies are doubted, their voices silenced, and their words that may well be the truth that seeks to topple a system of abuse by the hand of a powerful man are ignored.
The book of Lamentations is an often-ignored book. It’s words are not easy to hear speaking as they do of suffering, but we must listen to this voice, for in ignoring any voice of lamentation, be it children abused by priests, or young men accusing a respected figure of wrong doing, ignoring the voice of the downtrodden allows the injustice that they suffered to continue, allows for systems of oppression to go on oppressing, allows for all the wrong in the world to never be made right.
That the book of Lamentations is even here in the Bible seems a miracle, but it is read today as it has been read for years, in the hopes that the system that the prophet Jeremiah prophesied against, the system that God allowed the Babylonians to topple, the system that resulted in 70 years of exile for the Israelites, would not be repeated.
This book is read today to help us to question the way things are that we might avoid the failures of the past, as Laminations is a song written from a place you never want to go, a destination you never want to end up in, it is a warning – your path may be leading you here, and here is where you do not want to be.
Hear these words of warning – do not ignore its voice.
But too often we do – and lost in a place we don’t want to be we wish we would have listened.
The hierarchy of the church, rather than hear the testimony of the abused wanted to go on believing that Priests were not capable of such crimes, and now hundreds of children have been violated.
And what destiny awaits New Birth? Rather than hear the testimony of the abused, many seem to want to go on believing that their pastor is as holy as they want him to be, and how many more young men will have to be violated before it stops?
Then there are the voices that cry out in the world – the hungry children cry out – but do we hear their voice or go on down the path that we are set on going down?
The orphans of war – will we hear their voices that question our violence?
The sick without care – will we hear their groans or go on living as though everything were fine?
The solider with nowhere to go and no one who understands – will we stand by him as we once did or leave him to fend for himself once he’s done what we asked him to do?
The battered and the beaten who demand that we question our lives, wonder how if the way things are results in their pain, than is this the way things have to be?
We would too often rather go on living our daily lives than question where our way of life is taking us; we too often silence the voices of descent because they put our way of life into question; but their voices are warnings: “You do not want to keep going down this road.”
The voice of Lamentations is a warning, just as the cross stood as warning to Rome. As the great critique of Empire – what you call peace is not peace, what you call justice is not justice, your system, how can you call it righteous when your system put Christ to the cross?
And his words are here for us now.
That when you think that the cries of the world are not worth hearing, he reminds you that we are all part of one body.
When you think that you are all alone, he reminds you that we all eat from one common loaf of bread.
When words of suffering make you too uncomfortable and you are tempted to ignore them, he calls you to drink from the cup, poured out of his blood.
Today we celebrate world communion, celebrating the great feast of the Eucharist together with Christians from one corner of the globe to the other, and we are called to hear their voices that cry out to us, calling us to change our ways that the world might not be broken up into friends and enemies, but united as brothers and sisters in Christ.
His voice at this table calls us back to righteous living.
His invitation to you is to come and be made whole.
I’ll close with a Franciscan Benediction:
May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom, and peace.
May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.
And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.
Amen.