Personal and communal tragedies provoke intense emotions. In Scripture such emotions were given expression in complaints or laments. Such laments are the most frequent genre of psalm. Yet neither lament nor complaint seems to be widely practiced in churches today.
We need to rediscover lament to heal and hope again. We've lost the practice of lament. Most people don't know how to process personal or communal mourning and instead struggle to honor their tears, vulnerability, and the full weight of these disillusioning times.
In prayer all experiences may be brought to God in openness and trust. Yet lament seems to introduce notes of mistrust into a relationship properly characterized by confident faith in God and His will. Sustained attention to lament presents a challenge to theological reflection in reminding it of the acuteness of the experience of suffering and evil.
Seeking to advance the scholarship on the sudden change of mood, this book presents the other movements in the Psalter the reverse movement from praise to lament, return to lament after praise and alternation between the two."
"Denial might help to alleviate pain for the short run, but eventually lament must be faced and expressed. Learning to lament honestly to God is the surprising path to learning about real joy"--
The Psalms as Christian Lament uniquely blends verse-by-verse commentary with a history of Psalms interpretation in the church from the time of the apostles to the present. Examining ten lament psalms, including six of the seven traditional penitential psalms, covering Psalms 5, 6, 7, 32, 38, 39, 44, 102, 130, and 143.
There is no more urgent theological task than to provide an account of hope in Africa, given its endless cycles of violence, war, poverty, and displacement. In the midst of suffering, hope takes the form of "arguing" and "wrestling" with God. Such lament is not merely a cry of pain--it is a way of mourning, protesting, and appealing to God.
Not only is lament one of the most common forms of prayer in the Old Testament, it's also woven deeply into the fabric of the New Testament and the Christian way. Lament is the cry for all those who ache over the way things are but aren't content to let them stay that way. It's the prayer for all the ways that the kingdom has not yet come, in the hope that God's justice and peace will prevail--someday.
This study explores Psalms as scripts for lament-guides for how to express feelings honestly, in ways normally not permitted or expected within Christian community. In this 5-week study, discover the fullness of God when we allow our lives to become about him healing us and not about us controlling or managing our way through life.
This book examines the dialogic structure of biblical psalms of lament. What emerges is a theology that gives voice to the tension that existed between faith in a god who practices flawless "hesed," or covenantal loyalty, and the experience of God's failure to uphold his side of the bargain.
The American church avoids lament. But lament is a missing, essential component of Christian faith. Lament recognizes struggles and suffering, that the world is not as it ought to be. Lament challenges the status quo and cries out for justice against existing injustices. A Resonate exposition of the book of Lamentations.
This rich volume calls attention to the loss of lament in our churches, what this loss is costing us, and what might happen if we spoke and prayed the full spectrum of biblical faith languages. Drawing from his own daily struggle with, chronic pain and years of reading and teaching the Psalms, Pemberton leads readers on a quest to recover a lost ancient resource for people of faith-the language of lament.
Our Hearts Wait, meditates on the emotional range of our longings and gratitudes in the psalms, revealing how this bold outpouring of our full selves to the divine has effects far beyond introspection. He traces how the language of the psalms offers a template for liturgies that shape not only our collective worship and communities, but the worlds they create and sustain.
At once a lament-psalm and a love song, Grief's Liturgy records Gerald Postema's work and worship of grief upon the loss of his wife, a year's work aided by the companions--poetry and prayers, icons and images, music and silence--that sat patiently with him.
Patricia Joy Huntington reflects that loneliness does not only consist of the heartfelt absences of a friend, partner, spouse, or child, but rather stems from a radical breach in one's life journey. In this conceptually rigorous and warmly poetic book, Huntington develops a unique philosophy of receptivity and an original portrait of redemptive suffering.
In a life full of highs and lows, choice and challenges, the words 'and yet' can change everything. We are surrounded by darkness and yet there is light. We feel we are lacking and yet God provides. We are broken and bruised and yet there is hope.
Drawing on the tradition of African American preaching, he locates the Spirit's activity in the sermon in two primary places; First, in celebration, the joyous acceptance of God's gifts to the church and to the world. But equally as powerful is the expression of lament, the lifting up of our sorrow, grief, and suffering.
Reading Romans as Lament examines how and why Paul uses such a high volume of Old Testament lament in his letter to the Romans. Lament is not merely a poignant cry of distress, but a distinct form of prayer scattered across the pages of the Old Testament. It contains a distinct literary footprint and theology. Although often overlooked, Romans contains a great deal of this prayer form through its various lament citations and echoes.
Focusing on the premise that "worship is not pain denial," this book seeks to reveal the dearth of soul care within modern corporate worship, and the multidisciplinary approach needed to build and implement a more thorough approach that calls and enables believers to weep with those who weep, to bear one another's burdens, and continue Christ's ministry of reconciliation.
Lament is how you live between the poles of a hard life and trusting God's goodness. Lament is how we bring our sorrow to God--but it is a neglected dimension of the Christian life for many Christians today. We need to recover the practice of honest spiritual struggle that gives us permission to vocalize our pain and wrestle with our sorrow. Lament avoids trite answers and quick solutions, progressively moving us toward deeper worship and trust.
Lament recognizes the existence of evil and suffering--without any sugarcoating--while simultaneously declaring that suffering will not have the final say. In the midst of your darkest times, you will discover that lament leads you back to a place of hope--not because lamenting does anything magical, but because God sings a louder song than suffering ever could, a song of renewal and restoration.
Andre Resner urges the church and its preachers to engage in the linguistic practices of lament and proclamation as well as the embodied practices of justice-making and justice-keeping as counter-testimony to those powers that have been served notice in Jesus' life, death, and resurrection that their end is near. The reflections offered here model the kind of honest speech and risk of life to which the gospel calls its adherents.
The brokenness of this world inevitably invades our lives. This book is about finding words to use when life is hard. These words are not new. They are modes of expression that the church has drawn on in times of grief throughout most of its history. Yet, the church in the West has largely abandoned these words--the psalms of lament. The result is that believers often struggle to know what to do or say when faced with distress, anxiety, and loss.
Biblical prayers of lament wait for us at this crossroad of loss and newness.Prayers of lament are marked both by loss and by the inexplicable silence of God. Everything we believe about God's justice and goodness is placed in doubt by his hiddenness.
Several articles discuss lament within the psalms, including the function of appeals to pathos, lament's compensation for monotheistic piety, and the need for more attention to the laments' poetry and rhetoric to understand their meaning.
An analysis of the category of the psalms of 'lament', arguing that this conventional grouping encloses two quite different kinds of psalms. Not only are there the psalms of 'plea', which affirm the praise of God and belong theologically on the side of faith, but there are a darker group, the psalms of 'protest' or 'complaint', which depict God as absent or hostile.
This volume gathers an international collection of essays on biblical lament and Lamentations, illuminating their genres, artistry, purposes, and significant place in the history and theologies of ancient Israel. It also explores lament across cultures, both those influenced by biblical traditions and those not, as the practices of composition, performance, and interpretation of life's suffering continue to shed light on our knowledge of biblical lament.
The authors of Rachel’s Cry address the problem of coping with personal suffering and systemic injustice by using psalms of lament. Their central thesis is that the proper use of prayers of lament can bring a rebirth of hope.
This work explores the rhetorical identity of the "I" in the lament psalms of the individual, with a particular focus on how the psalmist negotiates moral agency and constructs identity within the cultural, theological, and ideological assumptions and relational structures embedded in the language of the laments.
No collection of poems has ever exercised as much influence on the Western world as the Book of Psalms. The attraction is surely the personal element that pervades these poems, which describe the human situation in all its complexity. Though the Psalms are perhaps the most familiar portion of the Hebrew Bible, they are also among the most difficult to interpret.
Provides a new & valuable introduction to the Book of Psalms revitalizing the reader's understanding & appreciation by clearly drawing out the meaning of the psalms while demonstrating their abiding religious significance & their relevance to present day concerns. Some of the topics include: *Communal psalms of Lament* Individual psalms of trust *Liturgical psalms* Translations of some 50 psalms along with extensive commentary on each.
Lament, mourning, and the transmissibility of a tradition in the aftermath of destruction are prominent themes in Jewish thought. The corpus of lament literature, building upon and transforming the biblical Book of Lamentations, provides a unique lens for thinking about the relationships between destruction and renewal, mourning and remembrance, loss and redemption, expression and the inexpressible.
Given the recent interest in the emotions presupposed in early religious literature, it has been thought useful to examine in this volume how the Jews and early Christians expressed their feelings within the prayers recorded in some of their literature.
Reading Biblical Poetry in The Jewish Study Bible by 
Lament in Film and Film as Lament by 
The Motif of the Weeping God in Jeremiah and Its Background in the Lament Tradition of the Ancient Near East by 
Abstraction on a Lament : Psalm 13 as Poured Paint by 
Psalms as Thanksgiving and Lament by 
Lament : the Therapeutics of Complaint by 
Assuming the Body of the Heir Apparent : David's Lament by 
The First Generation - Psalm137 : Complex Communal Laments by 
Theopoetry of the Psalms - Individual Laments by 
Psalm Studies : Awen and the Psalms of Individual Lament by 
The Affective Potential of the Lament Psalms of the Individual by 
“Theodicy in the Psalms” in Theodicy in the World of the Bible by
