Lament is about listening to the stories of brokenness and anger, giving value and voice to people who suffer all around us. Lament is refusing to turn a blind eye. Lament is choosing to align ourselves with the grief and suffering of others. Lament speaks truth and lament holds onto hope that God is here and God will heal. 

As we continue in the social justice stream of Christ-like practice*, our practice of lament is asking us to look again. Friends, let’s look again at the injustices plaguing our neighborhoods and newspapers. Let’s look again when we’d rather just get on with our just-fine lives. Let’s look again when we hear ourselves talking more about the looters than the murderers. Let’s look again when we keep trying to convince ourselves we’re not racist. Let’s look again when the stories of death are threatening to fill our heads with gory images of bloodshed and brutality. 

Let’s look again, like Rizpah did, upon the rotting bodies of her dead sons as the wild animals tore away at their flesh day by day. Her boys were impaled on the mountain of the Lord in some ludicrous effort to appease those in power. (You can read about the unbelievably unjust deaths of these seven men in 2 Samuel 21). 

I listened to Austin Channing Brown describe Rizpah’s practice of lament in a sermon at the Evolving Faith Conference (Climbing the Mountain of Injustice). Rizpah chooses the way less traveled, the way of lament, the way of people sayings she’s crazy. She chooses to climb up that mountain and look on the injustice with her own two eyes day after day.

“She stares at death and determines that it has redefined her life. She is pissed and her anger is not wrong…Her anger points to what is wrong and to what could be made right. Anger is not destructive, it is instructive.”

ACB

It’s not going to be easy, this work of social justice. But the way of Jesus, the way of compassion, is saturated in lament, choosing to look again and again and again.