Permission to Grieve: Lament as a Posture and Practice of Formation in a Culture of Denial

Introduction

Grief and Suffering in a Culture of Denial

The pastor, with a smiling face and well-meaning buoyancy at the end of the service, reminded the congregation as they began making their way to the exit that we all have victory in Christ, if we believe we will take ground. God wills that we are more than conquerors, in every part of life. As you go about your week, be reminded, and take heart that, the truth is, the best is yet to come!

It was a common refrain, exhortation, and benediction, framed as a mode of encouragement and reminder to all in the room that the God of the universe would never let them down and let no harm come to them if they placed their faith in God. I mean, life with Christ is meant to be enjoyed, not endured, right?

I heard this phrase often. Week-in and week-out. For a season, people around me would even hear me reflect my agreement with a hearty nod of the head, and supportive amen. Yet, after a while the perpetual reinforcement of and submission to uninterrupted success and victory with no mention of struggle, grief, or loss, the elements that help make us fully human, started wearing on me. It made me wonder if I was the only one who caught the incongruence between what was being said from the pulpit or the platform compared to the lived experience of some of those in the congregation—those who found a city like San Francisco a hard, difficult, violent, and often lonely city in which to live.

While lament is a difficult, complex, existential practice of faith-filled surrender, dissonance, anger, and sorrow, lament is also an appropriate and powerful response to pain, suffering, and grief. Soong-Chan Rah writes, Lament . . . is a liturgical response to the reality of suffering and engages God in the context of pain and trouble.¹ Such pain and vulnerability are partly why many in evangelical communities seem to find the Psalms of lament or the book of Lamentations difficult texts to relate to. Some followers of Christ do not allow themselves to be exposed to or have examples of painful, visible, and courageous vulnerability. As such, those in North American Evangelical faith communities live with an element of a passive narrative to pain and suffering that eventually equates to a thin veil of ignorant denial.

Kathleen O’Connor, in Lamentations and the Tears of the World, writes, For readers who live with denial, as the United States capitalist society requires, Lamentations makes difficult reading.² Covert despair or repressed hopelessness, as Douglas J. Hall explains, characterizes the atmosphere of North American and Western society.³ Unlike those who live on the margins of society—often described biblically as the poor, the widow, or the orphan—trauma and violence for many is hidden or denied as a coping mechanism used to deal with the complexities of life. This is a survival tactic used by many, for we humans know at a deeper level . . . that survival depends upon hope.⁴

Consequentially, the North American evangelical church,⁵ as a way to combat this existential reality, has seemingly substituted faith as certainty; doubt as unbelief; and anger with God as dishonorable and disrespectful. Even from the pulpit and platform, preachers and teachers often misplace lament as disrespectful and an ignominious practice that no longer has a place in a community’s or individual’s mode of worship. By removing the practice of lament as a central tool of worship in the formation of God’s people, the North American evangelical church engages in a willful, but unintended, posture of forgetfulness, what I describe as a willful non-remembering and a posture and practice of denial. This becomes, therefore, an expression of injustice for the privileged-passivity and forgetfulness of a privilege that perpetuates injustice.

When we read Scripture, lament and the expression of grief are common experiences. The Psalms, Jeremiah, and Lamentations—to name a few—give language and voice to grief, suffering, and loss. Lament is not counter to the Judeo-Christian way of life but needs to be remembered, reimagined, recognized, and embraced as a faithful, courageous part of the way of Jesus through the Christlike disciplines of prayer, worship, justice, witness, hope, and formation.

Turning contextually to San Francisco as a case study, how do followers of Jesus, in what many describe as one of the least Christian cities in North America,⁶ engage with the difficulties of everyday life if they are taught, reminded, encouraged, or equipped with an ecclesial worldview that being in Christ means we always win? Why does North American evangelical theology maximize a culture of fame, profit, triumphalism, and success, while all too often failing to engage in the creative suffering of God that is so pertinent throughout Scripture in the form of public and private lament? Could it be found in a thin understanding and expression of the gospel? Has the evangelical American church shifted away from a thicker expression of Jesus⁷ in public spaces and places? Has the North American church been distracted by its mission and so bifurcated its presence in the community from its pursuit of power, wealth, and political influence over and above the complexity of suffering, doubt, liminality, and grief? Has the cultural pursuit of American exceptionalism muted presence of sorrow, heartache, pain, and loss in the public and private expression of church? These are some of the questions I seek to address throughout this book.

A Growing Wedge

As I continued to explore the nature of grief and loss in the evangelical community in North America, lament was not and has not been a pervasive feature of San Francisco’s Christian expression, let alone its teaching or theology. In most cases, the voice of lament appeared to be muffled, muted, or eclipsed altogether in favor of a resurrection hope and an emphasis of fortitude in circumstances of suffering. Such battles were reframed as moments of and for character and/or spiritual formation. People would be laid-off from their jobs, be unable to find a husband or wife, be racially vilified, lose family to cancer, or see friends pass away from COVID-19.

It was in these seasons of sorrow and distress that require the practice lament as an appropriate and God-hopeful response. Yet, the reaction to such moments of despair, loss, or grief is often a concoction of empty platitudes or rosy reassurances that fail to give voice or recognition to the reality of the individual’s or community’s situation. Dan Allender writes, Christians often assume our conflict with God was finished when we converted. . . . But the battle is not over with conversion—though it is the decisive victory that assures the outcome of the war, it is hardly the last and final fight.⁸ It was becoming clear that the local faith community, in San Francisco—and across North America, had misunderstood the value and impact of lament as part of individual and corporate Christian formation. For a city like San Francisco, I began to wonder if the absence of the theology and practice of lament in public and private settings contributed to the growing wedge between the church and the city.

San Francisco: A City like No Other

San Francisco comprises thirty-six neighborhoods and, pre-pandemic, had a population just shy of 875,000 people.⁹ The pandemic caused a population decrease, where multi-billion-dollar tech companies moved interstate, and the impact of homelessness on the city became increasingly visible.¹⁰ In late March 2022, the San Francisco Standard reported, Between April 2020 and July 2021, the city’s population declined by 58,764 residents, according to new figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. San Francisco’s drop represents a 6.7% drop in population and places the city second only to New York County (better known as Manhattan) as the county with the greatest drop nationwide.¹¹ Such a shift in the population was emblematic of some of the changes experienced in the city throughout the pandemic. As the pandemic continued, it became increasingly obvious that the local church did not have the language, tools, theology, or practices to help the people and its community express their experiences effectively. The absence of lament was one of these tools.

Christopher B. James in Church Planting in Post-Christian Soil writes, Worship and mission are complementary centripetal and centrifugal forces . . . which envisions mission as both evangelism and service.¹² He continues, Envisioning church as a contrast community of disciples . . . has a special utility in an environment in which the general culture gives little support to Christian values.¹³ While many churches maintained a cadence in the lead-up to the pandemic, it was becoming evident that such praxis was lacking the deeper elements found in discipleship and deeply formed and vulnerable practices, like lament, that many people were craving.

Akin to conversion, there can be no lament without surrender. To lament, writes Allender, is to cry out to God with our doubts, our incriminations of him and others, to bring a complaint against him—is the context for surrender. Allender continues, Surrender—the turning of our heart over to him, asking for mercy, and receiving his terms for restoration—is impossible without battle. To put it simply, it is inconceivable to surrender to God unless there is a prior, declared war against him.¹⁴

To declare war against God is not a common phrase one would hear in an evangelical setting. Whether it be too aggressive or be perceived to be a practice that fails to bring honor or reverent fear to God, to lament is to wage a warlike, violent allegation of abandonment to God. To echo Emmanuel Katongole, to lament in the midst of suffering . . . takes the form of arguing and wrestling with God,¹⁵ and so becomes a way of naming what is going on, of standing and of hoping in the midst of ruins.¹⁶

This work of this book is designed to equip ministry and church leaders to reimagine the posture, practice, ecclesiology, and theology of lament in the local church. Articulated intentionally as a theopraxis of lament, this enterprise is compelled by the vision that the local church is called to be just peacemakers (or shalom makers) and bridge-builders in their everyday engagement with the people and the city they are called to love and serve. In moments of despair, heartache, loss, or anguish the local church is called to seek God’s wisdom, sit with, and contend for others in times of liminal uncertainty, and help provide space and language for and permission to grieve. To lament, in such moments, is to help people trust God when everything seems lost.

In the first part of this book, I introduce the theology and practice of lament in the context of the wider evangelical church in North America. Once situated in this cultural frame, within the North American evangelical milieu of triumphalism and success, this book explores the posture and practice of victory and overcoming up and against the current culture and climate of San Francisco, CA. Lastly, I explore the conflicting currents of Christian faith and expression within the city of San Francisco and so frame the relative cultural and theological inversions that currently make these two realities missionally contrary to one another.

Secondly, I review works related to the posture, practice, and theological formation of lament for the church. In the first section I address the role that lament plays in the lives of those who say they follow Jesus. In section 2 I exegete Lamentations using the works of O’Connor, F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Nancy C. Lee, and Carleen Mandolfo to focus and frame the origins, flow, and function of lament in the lives of everyday followers of Jesus. Finally, I examine in section three various sources pertaining to the praxis of lament that serves as theological and practical patterns for public witness in missional contexts of injustice and biblical peacemaking.

As you continue to read, you’ll dive into and develop a theological foundation for the posture, practice, and position of lament in the role of discipleship and peacemaking for evangelicals in North America. Firstly, I position lament as the central, missing practice in Christian formation in evangelical faith communities. Secondly, I recognize lament as a protest against the world as it is and the brokenness that is inevitable with the human condition. Lastly, I situate lament next to American evangelicalism and highlight its theological incompatibilities, witnessing to the imperative, yet absence, of lament in evangelical formation. I then frame some practical goals around a pilot discipleship group within the context of lament, the city of San Francisco, and Christian community. Through research questions, we’ll explore with participants in this pilot discipleship group how lament is perceived as a practice of formation, witness, and communal justice. The goal of this pilot discipleship group is to frame lament as an incarnational impulse out into the city that calls for the participation of those who follow Jesus. The design and strategy of this pilot discipleship group is framed around a holistic formation model.

Lastly, I provide a detailed outline of the strategy and assessment of this pilot discipleship group program designed to form faith communities through the practice of lament. I assess this pilot discipleship group program using a combination of qualitative and quantitative modes of assessment that include discussion groups, survey questions, Likert scale questionnaires, and interviews that asked participants to be reflexive in their experience and formation.

Post-pandemic, one becomes curious if the North American evangelical community has created space for and given time to deep reflection specific to its thin, truncated response to social and physical isolation. The practice and presence of lament helps communities of Jesus respond more effectively and appropriately with those they are proximal to in their city. It is imperative that those who say they follow Jesus use their social imaginary, associated with lament, to help faith-based communities bridge the growing gap between the local church and its local community in cities like San Francisco. This is the hope and pursuit of this book.

1

. Rah, Prophetic Lament,

21

.

2

. O’Connor, Lamentations and the Tears,

4

.

3

. Hall, Despair in Pervasive Ailment,

91

.

4

. King, Letter from Birmingham Jail,

189

.

5

. Public Theologian D. J. Smit in his essays regarding the church highlights six specific expressions that make the church unique to other organizations or institutions globally. Throughout this book I will be leaning in to his terminology, while focusing on the evangelical community and, where required, delineating this with the church in San Francisco, California. Smit describes these six expressions as (i) Ecumenical (either local, regional, or international); (ii) consisting of a denomination; (iii) a community of faith or believers in the form of a congregation; (iv) the posture and practice as a God-worshiping community; (v) a group of individual believers in community (as expressed in one’s personal, private, and public lives); and (vi) the church as believers (individuals and groups) participating in social initiatives and actions, together with others. Smit, Essays in Public Theology.

6

. James, Church Planting.

7

. In

2012

, just prior to his passing, my mentor and friend, Glen H. Stassen, wrote what many believed to be his seminal work, A Thicker Jesus: Incarnational Discipleship in a Secular Age. In it Stassen writes, "In A Thicker Jesus, I am asking two questions: (

1

) how to find a faithful and solid identity for faith and ethics; and (

2

) how that identity can be a compass in our rapidly changing and interactive age" (loc.

179

). Speaking about leading theological writers and thinkers of the twentieth century, such as Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Clarence Jordan, André Trocmé, Muriel Lester, and others, Stassen continues, They all wrote with a thick, historically-embodied, realistic understanding of Jesus Christ as revealing God’s character and thus providing norms for guiding our lives. They did not reduce Jesus to a thin principle or high ideal or only doctrinal affirmation without solid grounding in his actual history. They all wrote with a holistic understanding of the Lordship of Christ or sovereignty of God throughout all of life and all of creation. They opposed a two-kingdoms or body-soul or temporal-eternal dualism that blocks God’s guidance in Christ from applying to a secular realm. They all wrote with a strong call for repentance from captivity to ideologies such as nationalism, racism, and greed. And their actions, their actual practices, fit their written theological ethics (loc.

444

). Throughout this book, when speaking of a thicker Jesus, within the purview of lament, I will be referring to and leaning on Stassen’s perspective. As teachers and leaders in the evangelical, North American church begin to witness to a thicker Jesus in their everyday practices of worship, I believe which lament will no longer be forgotten or misunderstood or misappropriated, but be remembered and reestablished as a Christian discipline and practice imperative to the formation and reimagination of the body of Christ in public and private spaces and places.

8

. Allender, Hidden Hope in Lament, para.

8

.

9

. Thompson, Yep. SF’s Population Decline.

10

. Thompson, Yep. SF’s Population Decline.

11

. Thompson, Yep. SF’s Population Decline, para.

4

.

12

. James, Church Planting,

76

.

13

. James, Church Planting,

76

.

14

. Allender, Hidden Hope in Lament, para.

7

.

15

. Katongole. Born from Lament, xvi.

16

. Katongole. Born from Lament,

48

1

Lament

Wisdom Language of Grief and Suffering

What is most needed is what is most unacceptable—an articulation that redefines the situation and that makes way for new gifts about to be given

—Walter Brueggemann

A mentor of mine, a cisgender woman of color, affirmed to