Jerusalem, the great capital, was in ruins. The Babylonians were in control. It was the beginning of the famed Babylonian Captivity. All the symbols of power, wealth, prestige, and influence were gone. No wonder so many Hebrews were in despair and that songs of lamentation like the one we just read as today’s First Lesson were composed and long remembered.
Have you ever felt that way? Have you ever felt that life’s moorings had been cut loose? Maybe it was the loss of a dear loved one, a child gone bad, a once-bright promising career destroyed by downsizing. Perhaps it has been a life lived without a special companion for whom you have yearned or a life lived in the depths of poverty and despair without hope. In those instances your heart has probably cried out just like the author of Lamentations did elsewhere:
See, O Lord, how distressed I am; my stomach churns, my heart is wrung within me.... — 1:20
All our enemies against us; panic and pitfall have come upon us, devastation and destruction.... — 3:46-47
The old men have left the city gate, the young men their music. The joy of our hearts has ceased; our dancing has been turned to mourning. — 5:14-15
Have you ever felt those feelings? The book of Lamentations sheds profound light on how it feels when life gets hard. The book also calls our attention to what happens to people in societies when they are experiencing radical transition or deterioration — perhaps like ours. Hear these songs of lament: “All her people groan as they search for bread; they trade their treasures for food to revive their strength. Look, O Lord, and see how worthless I have become” (1:11).
People go begging for food in our society and all over the world. That does something to the human spirit. It makes the poor feel worthless. The lament continues: “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow...” (1:12). Is that not the way we deal with the poor most of the time? We walk right on by.
The prison population in America grows daily, especially among African-American males. Long ago Lamentations prefigured this dynamic: “... behold my suffering; my young women and young men have gone into captivity” (1:18b).
Family life is deteriorating in our society. Civility and respect are increasingly in short supply. Authorities are challenged. Witness the guns and the shootings in American public schools. The ancient laments ring eerily in our ears:
We have become orphans, fatherless; our mothers, are like widows. — 5:3
Slaves rule over us; there is no one to deliver us from their hand. We get our bread at the peril of our lives, because of the sword in the wilderness. — 5:8-9
Women are raped ... virgins in the towns ... Princes are hung up by their hands; no respect is shown to the elders. — 5:11-12
In a fundamental sense, times have not changed much. But is there no hope? Are we condemned merely to sing and live with the laments of Lamentations and Jeremiah? Can anything be done to set us free from all the hopelessness and despair? It will take a bunch of rebellious (Christian) malcontents.
Our other Bible lessons (2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10) give some clues about the mental and emotional make-up of a Christian rebel. But there is another Old Testament book, one very much like Lamentations, which teaches us an important lesson about what it takes to be a Christian rebel. I am referring, of course, to the book of Ecclesiastes.
If Lamentations is a depressing book, Ecclesiastes is no less pessimistic about life. It begins with a song of lament about the vanity of life, that all we do has no ultimate significance because it ends up in a grave which is eventually forgotten by all of your heirs (1:1-11).
I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me — and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish? Yet they will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity. So I turned and gave my heart up to despair concerning all the toil of my labors under the sun ... What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun? For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest. This also is vanity. — 2:18-23
All life is unjust, the Preacher of Ecclesiastes laments. But it is especially unjust for the oppressed:
Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. Look, the tears of the oppressed — with no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power — with no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead, who have already died, more fortunate than the living, who are still alive.... — 4:1-2
If you see in a province the oppression of the poor and the violation of justice and right, do not be amazed at the matter; for the high official is watched by a higher, and there are yet higher ones over them. — 5:8
Ultimately life feels like an aimless chasing after wind. What is a Christian to do in response to the hopelessness of the human condition? Where do we go from here? Have you ever been as low on life as Lamentations and Ecclesiastes are? If not, you should be. These books are correct about the human condition since the Fall. With Lamentations we should be weeping over our condition (1:2a). We should be crying about the endless cycles of poverty and oppression, the destruction of people (3:48). And with Ecclesiastes we might lament as well over the aimlessness of life, recognizing its uselessness, because in the end all we do and the skills we develop are the result of one person envying another (4:4). It makes no difference anyway, because both the wise and the fool die, and both are forgotten. Life is indeed a vain chasing after wind (2:15-17).
I ask again: What can we Christians do when life gets hard, when we experience life like it really is? The logical answer is, “Nothing.” Maybe suicide. It would be better had we never been born. Heroically (or is it foolishly) the biblical witness does not surrender to this hopelessness and chaos. Ecclesiastes teaches us to go ahead and eat, drink, and enjoy our work (2:24). (Again we are reminded what a God-send work is.) “Go; eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart ...” the Teacher of Ecclesiastes says (9:7a). Where does he get such courage? Both he and the author of Lamentations as well as all our assigned Bible lessons point us to a merciful, loving God as the source of such (rebellious) strength. We can eat with enjoyment and drink wine with a merry heart, the Teacher of Ecclesiastes says, because “God has long ago approved of what you do” (9:7). In Lamentations it is sung that:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end.... — 3:22
For the Lord will not reject forever. Although he causes grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone. — 3:31-33
In our Second Lesson (2 Timothy 1:8-10), Paul likewise claims that he could only endure his imprisonment for the Gospel because he could rely on the power of God’s grace by which God called us before the foundation of the world. Faith in a loving God, even in small quantities, is a great, grand embolding thing. That is Jesus’ point in his remarks about having faith the size of a mustard seed, in our Gospel Lesson (Luke 17:5-10).
When we break it down rationally, the “yes” that our Bible lessons say to life in the midst of all life’s chaos and hard times does not make sense. That is hardly surprising given the paradoxical character of Christian faith. As usual the sixteenth-century reformer Martin Luther put it very well in one of his sermons. He wrote:
13. To this I reply: I have often said that feeling and faith are two different things. It is the nature of faith not to feel, to lay aside reason and close the eyes, to submit absolutely to the Word, and follow it in life and death. Feeling however does not extend beyond that which may be apprehended by reason and the senses, which may be heard, seen, felt, and known by the outward senses. For this cause feeling is opposed to faith and faith is opposed to feeling.1
Christians are people who go against the grain, who rebel. When it becomes obvious to reason and experience that life is chaos, that it is harsh, that it is unjust and so we may as well submit to the powers that be, Christians say, “No,” to these conclusions and work for justice and meaning in the world.
In describing the Christian life in this way I am reminded of reflections about being a rebel against injustice and chaos that the great French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus once uttered. Here’s how he described our rebelliousness:
What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion....
In every act of rebellion, the rebel simultaneously experiences a feeling of revulsion at the infringement of his rights and a complete and spontaneous loyalty to certain aspects of himself. Thus he implicitly brings into play a standard of values....2
Therefore the individual is not, in himself alone, the embodiment of values he wishes to defend. It needs all humanity, at least, to comprise them.3
Camus himself was not a Christian, but he is clearly in touch with what is involved in Christian rebelliousness. Christians are people who say, “No,” to the laws in life, to life’s apparent meaninglessness, and to the oppression we encounter. They do not rebel for the sake of their own well-being, but for the sake of all their neighbors. In doing this, Christian rebels are counter-cultural. As Martin Luther King, Jr., said so many times, Christians are to be “maladjusted.” Hear Dr. King tell it:
Every academic discipline has its technical nomenclature, and modern psychology has a word that is used, probably, more than any other. It is the word maladjusted. This word is a ringing cry of modern, child psychology. Certainly all of us want to live a well-adjusted life in order to avoid the neurotic personality. But I say to you, there are certain things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon all men of goodwill to be maladjusted.... So let us be maladjusted, as maladjusted as the Prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, “Let justice run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream....” Let us be maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth, who could look into the eyes of the men and women of his generation and cry out, “Love your enemies. Bless them that curse you. Pray for them that despitefully use you.”4
The next time life gets hard for you, the next time you chafe over injustice, rebel! In the Name of Christ, protest. Assert the meaningfulness of life through word and deed, even if you are not very sure of your ideals. Get in the trenches and work for justice (organize, protest), even if it looks like a lost cause.
Some people of goodwill rebel that way, but they don’t stand a chance ultimately. You and I do not have the courage it takes to be “maladjusted” in Dr. King’s sense. We can only do it, we only have the confidence and strength to do it, because of the power of faith (Luke 17:6).
Come to think of it, our faith in itself is not what gives the courage to rebel against the evils of life. It is the love of God that provides such courage, a confidence like Lamentations says in a God whose steadfast love never ceases (3:25), who does not willingly afflict or grieve us (3:33). With a loving God like that, the next time life gets hard and leads you to question life’s meaning or the viability of seeking justice, Christians, you will not be able to stop yourself from rebelling. Christians are rebels, because we have a counter-cultural God who confounds the world’s chaos! The chaos in your life is not God’s will, and so the chaos and emptiness in life will not prevail!
1. Martin Luther, Christ’s Resurrection and Its Benefits (n.d.), in Sermons of Martin Luther, ed. John Nicholas Lenker (8 vols.; reprint ed.; Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1988), Vol. II, p. 224.
2. Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1956), pp. 13-14.
3. Ibid., p. 17.
4. Martin Luther King, Jr., The American Dream (1961), in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1986), pp. 215-216.