Ep. 21 - “Practicing Lament” by Rebekah Eklund | Book Review
Episode Transcript
Ep. 21 - "Practicing Lament" by Rebekah Eklund | Book Review
[00:00:00] JC Schroeder: "Lament takes wordless, almost unbearable pain, and gives it a shape and a voice. It provides a structure to hang pain on."
[00:00:10] Hello friends. Those words are from Practicing Lament by Rebekah Eklund. And in this episode, I'm going to be reviewing this book and giving you some of my thoughts. Spoiler alert. It's a good book. I'm JC Schroeder, and this is Bite Size Seminary.
[00:00:27] So again, this book is called Practicing Lament and it's written by Rebekah Eklund. It was published in 2021. So just last year, if you're reading it in 2022 and it was published by Cascade Books. Now, Rebekah Eklund, I'm just going to read her bio that's on the back of the book. She teaches Scripture, theology, and ethics at Loyola University Maryland in [00:01:00] Baltimore. She's the author of Jesus Wept: The Significance of Jesus' Laments in the New Testament in 2015.
[00:01:07] This is a little book it's just around 100 pages. Before we get into kind of the core of the book. I just want to offer you some of my initial thoughts about the book, and then I'll kind of work through some of the key elements of the book. But don't worry. There's still going to be lots of great information and just beautiful writing in this book for you to enjoy and check out yourself. So spoiler alert. This is a fantastic book. I would heartily encourage you to go out and buy it and read it and to partake in what Rebekah Eklund talks about with laments as being a biblical practice.
[00:01:41] Now, one of the things I really like about this book is that one it's short, a hundred pages, but also it's not academic speak. Eklund is a scholar, but she writes on a very personal and relatable tone in this book. One of the things that I've tried to pay attention more and just appreciated more lately is just how the book is [00:02:00] written. I really like Eklund's tone in this book. It's just very honest. It's written very beautifully. Sometimes when you get these biblical studies books, you can just feel the author putting on airs or wanting to show off or something like that. And this book does not do any of that. It's extremely relatable and it's very honest, and it's just a really well-written book, very concise, which I really appreciate. And very I think ministering to the reader.
[00:02:31] It also is just a really fascinating topic that doesn't get talked about enough. Eklund shares a quote towards the end of the book, in which the author says "The American church avoids lament." Ooh, that's a true statement, I think. And it is a powerful statement and the, it shows the importance of a book like this that is very accessible to help us to re-establish lament, [00:03:00] not only in the American church at large, but in our own hearts.
[00:03:04] And this is the thing I really appreciate about the lament in general and how Eklund shows this of the biblical laments is that when we suffer, and we don't know how to lament. We don't have the vocabulary to know how to respond or process that experience or those emotions. So we're left, just kind of hanging in the wind, not knowing of how do I respond to this. That's the brilliance of the lament. And the joy that we have as Christians in reading Scripture is that God has given us these laments in order to process what we have gone through and express that to the Lord.
[00:03:45] But maybe I'm just getting ahead of myself on this topic. It's just an exciting book. That's just some of my initial thoughts. And now I just kinda want to give you sampling of some of the items that are found in this book. I'll work through each of the chapters, [00:04:00] but I'm just going to hit some of the key themes, and leave the rest for you to enjoy in your own reading as well.
[00:04:06] What Are Laments - Introduction and Chapter 1
[00:04:06] JC Schroeder: So there's an introduction and then there's five chapters. And it begins with this introduction about the need to learn how to lament is that it's something that we don't actually know how to do. Eklund talks about how lamenting takes practice. And we need to learn that skill in order to use it properly in our lives. So she kind of sets that up is that it's not something that we intrinsically know a lot about.
[00:04:34] Now as we move into chapter one, it's entitled Tearing Heaven Open. And in this chapter, she talks about what is a lament. How can we categorize it? What are its features and how does it function? This is where that quote from the beginning of the episode comes from on page two, "Lament takes wordless, almost unbearable pain and gives it a shape and a voice. It provides a structure to hang [00:05:00] pain on." That's the whole point. And so there are different components that make up a lament. And so there's an invocation. There's a complaint that is given to the Lord. There's a petition. And then the final element is one of trust. And this is one of the things that Eklund tries to emphasize here is that a lament is not something negative. It's not an act of faithlessness or of despair. But a lament, a biblical lament, is a prayer.
[00:05:35] So all of the laments in Scripture, and you have a ton of them, especially in the book of Psalms, all of those laments are directed directly to God. And the majority of them end in trust to God. Where the author makes that turn of decrying their situation, calling out to the Lord, pleading for the Lord to act, [00:06:00] but then it ends in, but I trust you. But I lean on you. You are my rock and my fortress. So chapter one is all about orienting us into this new genre. And this idea that lament is not something that should be avoided. It should be embraced and is a gift from the Lord to us as an act of helping us with our suffering and with our pain and giving that to the Lord. This leads us into a greater trust and a greater ability to love him, serve him, and trust him.
[00:06:33] Jesus Wept - Chapter 2
[00:06:33] JC Schroeder: Then in chapter two, it's entitled "Jesus Wept." And the point of chapter two here is that lament is not just an Old Testament concept. It's not something that is just in the Psalms or just in the book of Lamentations. It's just something for Israel. But this is something that is very much a part of all of the Bible, including the New Testament. Eklund talks about how Jesus has sort of two facets or uses [00:07:00] of laments in the New Testament. One as a prophetic intercessor, where he intercedes for his people. And that was a function that we see in the Old Testament of the prophet lamenting and interceding on in that lament for the people. But then also Jesus suffers himself leading up to the cross.
[00:07:18] The title of the chapter comes from that passage in John 11, where Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus. This is just a small, personal aside. As a kid that we always use that as a joke, or I always use that as a joke of what's the shortest verse in the Bible. Jesus wept. Haha. I got it. But that is just such a powerful, powerful idea that Jesus, knowing that he's going to heal Lazarus, that he's going to raise him from the dead still weeps at the suffering of those around him. As he looks at Mary, he looks at Martha and he looks at people, he sees their suffering and he weeps because of it. He's not indifferent to their suffering. So Rebekah Eklund talks about this and the compassion that [00:08:00] Jesus has and the lamenting that he himself has, but it's not just his own weeping at the tomb here, but that this is part of many features of his life on this earth that are told in the Gospel.
[00:08:14] So she talks a lot about his different quotations in the times leading up to the cross of the Old Testament, when he quotes Psalm 22, Psalm 31, and talks about how those are acts of lament that Jesus takes from the Old Testament Scriptures and presents in his own situation as he moves to the cross. She has this great quote on pages 33 through 34, where she talks about kind of the dual nature, if you will, of Jesus associated with lament. She says this "Jesus is God's answer to Israel's laments." Then skipping down a couple of lines. "In the gospels, Jesus appears on both sides of the lament. He laments and he hears. He [00:09:00] weeps and he dries the tears." And then she continues this towards the bottom of page 34, when she says this, "The one who lamented now hears prayers of lament." And because he suffered, he is able to minister to those who also suffer. Right, that's what the author, to the Hebrews says. And w just what a wonderful God that we have, is that he doesn't push off our suffering or isn't annoyed by it, but he welcomes it.
[00:09:32] Your Kingdom Come - Chapter 3
[00:09:32] JC Schroeder: In chapter three, she talks about this living in-between the now and the not yet. The title is called "Your Kingdom Come." And she describes how we as believers hope for God's kingdom in the future. But we don't experience it at least fully right now. And so we're in that now period, but we long for the not yet period. So she talks [00:10:00] about how our emotions can fluctuate in this now time as we wait for God's kingdom. As well as our experiences of doubt. And how that relates to our faith.
[00:10:12] And her contention in her argument that she mentioned at the beginning of the book. And now she's really pushing more even here is that lament is not faithlessness. It shapes our emotions and responses to God. It is in itself an act of faith. So lamenting is not something bad. It's actually something good. She has this quote on page 40. She says this "Like all activities, lament shapes the person who laments. It inclines them in a certain direction. Lament inclines toward hope. It leans toward the light while still in the darkness. It takes doubts and fears over God's silence and shapes them into prayer. Lament insists that God does not disdain or turn aside these challenges, but receives [00:11:00] them as offerings." So she's pushing against a little bit of the culture that maybe a lot of us have is that we only want things to be happy. We don't want to deal with someone's sorrow. We don't have to deal with someone's pain or see that or experience that. And so we just long for happiness and the picture that we present to each other when we go to church or when we're with each other is that everything's going great when things maybe are not. She'll talk about this more in a later section of the book, in the communal sense and the communal use of lamenting. But even in our own internal idea, we can press aside with avoiding lamenting, avoiding our suffering and just diving into other things. Uh, that maybe are not bad, but they distract us from what we're going through. And she argues that lamenting is a positive act towards trust in the Lord and him [00:12:00] using that to reshape us in the midst of that pain.
[00:12:03] She also talks about does God cause suffering in this chapter. And what does it mean to endure suffering? Uh, that we find in those calls to endure suffering in the New Testament. So, I don't want to take away from what she says in this chapter. I think it's very nuanced and very helpful way of thinking about, so I would encourage you to look at that section as well.
[00:12:25] Penintence and Protest - Chapter 4
[00:12:25] JC Schroeder: In chapter four, she deals with two kind of subsets of laments, one of pennitence, of asking for forgiveness and one of protest. She says that we're most familiar with these pennitent laments, where we're asking for forgiveness. And so she doesn't spend as much time there because we're more familiar with that. And then she spends a bit more time talking about protest laments. And there are different types, and she deals since our we're less familiar with those, she details more of those.
[00:12:58] And she has a very [00:13:00] helpful and nuanced discussion about these difficult topics regarding protests and especially the cursing Psalms or the imprecatory Psalms and how we can approach those. And how we can appropriate them. As well as some really helpful caution against their misuse. And one of the key aspects that's been influential in my thinking about these cursing Psalms specifically, is that the emphasis on them is not that they are directed against the enemy. They're spoken against the enemy, but that these are laments that are spoken to God. They are prayers to God. So when the Psalmist or when the lamenter is invoking a curse on his enemies, he's invoking that to God and asking God to act and to provide justice.
[00:13:51] So I think that helps reframe some of these difficult passages really, really well. I think, it doesn't solve [00:14:00] every problem, but I think it just helps us to think about these passages a bit more clearly and carefully. And so she has a really helpful simple language, which I need and a really helpful advice and some caution about how they can be used and how they should not be used.
[00:14:19] Lord Teach Us to Mourn - Chapter 5
[00:14:19] JC Schroeder: And then finally in chapter five, entitled "Lord Teach Us to Mourn." She talks about how we avoid lamenting in our American church context. And so here she moves to the use of lament, not just personally, but communally as well. And how learning, how to lament teaches us to deal with our anger. And that if we don't do this, and if we don't practice these laments or the lament Psalms in a church setting, that failure could lead to pushing pain and suffering, and those who suffer, outside the experience of the church. When they really need care.
[00:14:58] So if a [00:15:00] person is deeply suffering and church's always just happy and there's no expression of sorrow or lamenting, how can that person who's suffering, be welcomed and enter into that church experience. That's her contention here. So when we push aside lament, we are at risk of putting aside hurting people from our church.
[00:15:23] She also has this really powerful quote. Is that when we have this kind of American Christian culture of everything is happy and we're always praising and praising is good, but if we're only and always praising, then it can lead us to even thinking that everything is great and that can move us away from that hope of the Lord's future kingdom. And so she says this on page 82. "Because lament can be a protest against the way things are. It's absence suggests that the way things are is perfectly fine." So her point [00:16:00] here is that if we're not lamenting, then maybe we're thinking that this world is pretty great and it's moving us away from our hope in God's future kingdom.
[00:16:12] She has this additional quote on page 90, where she says, "lament is a form of truth telling." we can appreciate the situation that we're in. We can praise the Lord and thank the Lord for what he has given us. But we also need to recognize the brokenness of the world. And the lament helps remind us of the brokenness of this world. She also makes this point on page 87, where she talks about that if we're not lamenting, we're not seeing people suffer and we're pushing that out. And if we're not seeing people suffer and we're not entering into their suffering, then are we actually practicing mercy and showing compassion and mercy towards others? So the laments, her argument is, the laments help us to see others, to suffer with [00:17:00] others. And is a move towards showing mercy and living out the character of the Lord to the lost and broken.
[00:17:10] Conclusion
[00:17:10] JC Schroeder: So there's a lot to this little book. It's a beautifully written book. It's powerful. It's a great reminder of kind of a lost sub genre of Scripture that we don't pay attention a whole lot to in our communal settings, and maybe even in our personal settings. So Practicing Lament by Rebekah Eklund. I would heartily recommend it. I don't really have any negatives to this. Maybe that's bad. But I have just hardly enjoyed it. It's a short, easy read. It's not expensive. And I would encourage you to check it out.
[00:17:45] That's all I have for today. If you enjoyed this episode, hopefully you go check out the book. As well as if you'd like share it with a friend that might also enjoy this book as well. As always you can receive episodes emailed [00:18:00] directly to you. You can sign up on my website at www.bitesizeseminary.com and you can connect with me on Facebook and Twitter. Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next time.