Longing & Lament
The questions we ask in life tend to reveal what we wish to see, both in our own lives and in the world around us. Hayley looks to the story of Jesus healing a woman in a crowd (Mark 5:25-34) to explore how our questions of longing bring about new possibilities. (Art: Threnouses, 2005, by Zoie Lafis)
SPEAKER NOTES
Message
Longing & Lament
Questions Intro
- We are back in our series around question-asking this morning.
- Over the past couple weeks we have been chatting about how communities are strengthened by asking questions together
- We gather and are united around the questions that we ask, not necessarily our answers
- We polled the people - you all - to collect some questions that you’re currently asking in life.
- Last week, Vince acknowledged the existential tone to our questions - that we are a community that does not feel the need to hide our existential dread.
- He brought us to the work of Soren Kierkegaard and a helpful phrase that we’re going to return to today, that when we are ship captains on the existential seas (my own wording, not Kierkegaard’s), faith is risk with direction. Risk with direction (hold onto that)
- And today I want to shift our attention to another tone that I have noticed in our question asking.
- Again these questions from our community of:
- why is there suffering?
- what can we do?
- why is there hatred?
- Underneath our questions, I see a deep longing and a tone of lament. And we’re going to explore that today.
Today’s intro
First, I want to start with another poll - this time with a hand raise. Always feels risky to me but this is a simple enough question, shouldn’t have to think too hard. Raise your hand if you are tired.
People I interact with here, socially, family, things I see online.
There’s almost this inherit sigh when asking about someone’s day, how are you doing?
- We still have that knee jerk reaction of “I’m good, how are you?”
But even there, our non-verbals tell a different story: A lot of us are exhausted right now.
Author Glennon Doyle talks about how anxiety is the product of paying attention.
Maybe you’ve felt the spin of your anxiety, the constant drive to respond quickly and urgently to each, new, ridiculous news piece, the everyday demands right alongside that existential dread.
Take a deep breath, let out that sigh. It makes total sense that we are tired right now. We are paying attention and there is so much to pay attention too.
It can be oh so tempting to fall into a place of collapse, shut down.
- In fact our nervous systems may be doing that as a protective force without really asking for our permission.
Longing for a different reality, lamenting what is, may seem like an added layer contributing to our exhaustion.
And yet, I’d argue that embracing our longings is actually our ticket out of apathy, a comfort in the exhaustion
Longing, that deep sigh, is present in our question asking anyway.
When we embrace our longings and lament, we care for our grief and fears, we commit ourselves to investing in change.
Our longings keep us moving forward.
Today: Longing, lament, the gospel story of Jesus and a bleeding woman
Longing
Question for you to consider: what are you longing for right now? What are you longing for?
I’ll share mine - I am longing for healing. I am longing for clarity and direction. I am longing for an end to violence and destruction.
Keep this in mind as a helpful, momentary check in, simple question - what am I longing for today?
- I’ve had a really helpful shift in my own understanding of expressing my longings, especially in prayer or when I think of the presence of God in what I am longing for.
- Growing up in an evangelical setting, I absorbed this idea that God held the magic answers, exactly what was needed, and that could be accessed by faithfulness and prayer
- To put it simply: it’s Believing that God is in control
- But a God that’s in control has to be a withholding God
- Because (as we’ve talked about in our community before) if God is in control, when things that we long for do not come to be - in our own lives and on a greater scale - it must be because God is withholding healing, justice, restoration.
- In fact, maybe God is causing the suffering as punishment or to teach us a lesson
- (No one quote me out of context there)
- So then our longings become a pleading with a distant God, a puppet-master in the sky.
- A helpful shift came for me in college when I realized I could actually, solidly believe that God is not in control. And language that I eventually picked up from BLC that Vince has led us in before - is leaving behind the image of an all-controlling God and instead looking to the all-loving and influencing God.
- This is not a distant God we plead with. This is a God that joins with us in longings and lament and partners with us in bringing about new possibilities for healing and justice and restoration.
- And I want to acknowledge the ache of embracing that God is not in control.
- I promise you that “God is in control” is not as comforting or helpful as we may have heard or previously believed.
- I understand fully why it may be a landing place.
- But when we are face to face with tear gas and kidnappings, ongoing genocide, the blocking of aid, basic rights violated over and over, how can we say God is in control here?
- Though I do not believe in a distant or withholding God, one of my most prayed prayers has stayed consistent my whole life. It’s revolutionary, it’s: “please God please God please God please.”
- It’s the image of God that meets me in this prayer that has shifted. Because now I hear my own longings amplified not potentially ignored.
- This is the reality of a co-suffering Christ, a God who weeps, who joins us in saying this is not how things should be!
- A God within our longing, who hears us in our lament
Transition
Lament
The grief we experience and witness is immense and even so, I believe we must keep hoping anyway.
We can’t ignore or override the feelings that arise - the grief and sorrow, the pain.
Having hope does not mean abandoning what we instinctively feel. Lament holds together the ache and the possibility
Author Glennon Doyle (mentioned earlier) puts it this way:
“Sadness is the distance between our inner vision of how beautiful things could be and what is visible to us on the outside — in our families, in our communities, in our world, in our lives. If we did not have a beautiful vision, we would not feel so sad that the beauty is not yet manifest in reality.” Glennon Doyle
When we lament, we acknowledge the depth of the sadness AND we refuse to let it consume us, to let it prevent us from pressing on. A dialectic.
Continuing to long for what could be, even as we experience grief.
Because our lament needs to hold both.
I remember a while back reading one of my now favorite books, This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley.
And I was struck by Cole’s portrayal of lament. That our contemplation and imagination are vital parts of our protest, our demands for the recognition of dignity. She writes:
“In lament, our task is never to convince someone of the brokenness of this world; it is to convince them of the world’s worth in the first place. True lament is not born from the trite sentiment that the world is bad but rather from a deep conviction that it is worthy of goodness.” Cole Arthur Riley
Clinging to “the world is bad” will not get us very far but it’s that worthy of goodness piece that will lead to lasting change
Asserting goodness and worth and dignity should not be radical. And yet it can be.
We carry one another forward when we’re willing to be open and honest about both sides of the dialectic — this is what I’m grieving AND this is what I’m hopeful about.
It’s not a but - I’m sad about this but I’m hopeful about this— we don’t have to offer a silver lining
Wanting to remain hopeful doesn’t mean we cover up or downplay the anger and sadness.
To hold both together, I’m struggling AND I’m continuing on, My heart is breaking AND I believe in goodness — that is our lament. That is what will sustain us rather than exhaust us.
When it comes to honoring our longings, I’m reminded of the necessity of community, and I had this image come to mind
I remember in my earliest days of choir being taught about stagger breathing - any singers, or musicians familiar with this?
With stagger breathing, as you’re singing or performing music with a group, this a technique to avoid gaps in the singing/sound, holding out a note for a longer amount of time
Rather than taking a collective breath together, each singer breathes as they need to and then comes back in singing again. This creates continuous sound that’s sustained.
Love this image for how we can care for one another and care for ourselves in the grief and sadness of our lament.
At the times when my voice breaks, when I need a moment to breathe, I can depend upon my neighbor to keep singing.
For those at the epicenter of trauma, of violence there can be a reliance upon those who have more privilege to carry the sound. Voices held steady together
Mark 5:25-34
Thinking about longing this week, I immediately thought of a story in the gospels of Jesus encountering a woman who was in need of healing. And I’d love to draw our attention there now:
And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. 25 Now there was a woman who had been suffering from a flow of blood for twelve years. 26 She had endured much under many physicians and had spent all that she had, and she was no better but rather grew worse. 27 She had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, 28 for she said, “If I but touch his cloak, I will be made well.” 29 Immediately her flow of blood stopped, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. 30 Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my cloak?” 31 And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’ ” 32 He looked all around to see who had done it. 33 But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. 34 He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
- One thing I love about this story is that the healing comes from the woman’s own initiative.
- She is the one who reaches out to touch Jesus’ cloak.
- Though life has been consistently painful and hard, depleting her of all her resources while she has stayed sick, grown worse even — she believes in the possibility of healing.
- She believes in the possibility that there is more beyond her pain.
- When Jesus responds to her “Daughter, your faith has made you well” he’s not acknowledging her “perfect, unwavering belief” in him.
- The qualifier before this interaction is just that she had heard about Jesus.
- The healing didn’t happen because she fully, wholeheartedly believed Jesus would heal her. She had hope. And she took a risk.
- And we’re back to that phrase Vince brought us to last week: faith as risk with direction.
- The woman in this story is persistent and resilient and she risks with direction. It’s because of that risk that she partners with God and new healing is made possible.
- This is not a passive miracle — this is a joint effort.
- She takes a risk and becomes an agent of her own healing.
- She does not ignore her longings or stay in a place of defeat. She longs for a life free of her pain and suffering and she works to make it so. Her faith — her risk with direction — heals her.
- Sometimes we may be the woman in the story, longing for our healing and this interaction can be inspiration. We can be in pain AND believe healing is a possibility. We can lament AND hope.
- I also have a wondering today, even just as caution against always reading ourselves in as the protagonist, the miracle-receiver:
- I think sometimes we are the crowd — either ignoring or unaware of the woman hemorrhaging in the street.
- Yes, this is an empowering story of a woman risking in the direction of her own healing and, where is her community? Did they not know of her suffering? Did they believe she was beyond help? Why weren’t they advocating for her healing as well? Where is their risk?
- And this has me wondering- Who’s pain am I ignorant to? Where is my risk? Who am I to deem a situation hopeless when it is not my blood in the streets?
- Is my belief that I can’t do enough adding to numbers in a crowd making more work for the vulnerable to access healing?
- Being a faithful community is not about unwavering belief, it is about asking together “How do we collectively risk in the direction of justice?” “How do we position ourselves trusting that hope and restoration are possible?”
- I’m reminded of this in the words of Sonya Renee Taylor, author of the book The Body is Not an Apology:
- “A lot of people don’t do this work because they’re like “It’s so hard.” Of course it’s hard. It’s tiring. Sometimes it’s expensive. It’s lonely. It can be frightening. It’s all of those things. But it’s like that anyway. You are lonely and frightened and fearful and exhausted right now, believing you’re not enough. So if you’re going to be that anyway, if you’re going to do that anyway, fall forward toward your liberation.” — Sonya Renee Taylor
- So many of us are exhausted. Things are really hard, maybe even feeling impossible at times.
- We are anxious from paying attention.
- And. We don’t protect ourselves through nihilism or fatalistic thinking. We can’t demonize these more difficult emotions like dread and anger and sorrow and fear.
- We owe it to ourselves and our communities to refrain from closing ourselves off. Our openness to lament and hope go hand in hand
- Our longings are our way forward, together. They keep us grounded and aware
- If your own pain is at the forefront of your life right now, what would it look like to honor the change and healing you are longing for?
- If witnessing the pain of others is at the forefront of your life right now, what would it look like to remain committed to lament and action?
- How do we make a conscious effort to fall forward toward liberation and care for one another in the process?
- So many questions, I’ll keep asking them!
As we pray to close I want to guide us in a breath prayer centered on the longings we may have right now.
Inhale: name of God
Exhale: something you are longing for
Mother God…Comfort me
All-loving God…bring us peace
Spirit of God…guide me