The Way We Respond To God In Our Grief Matters: Lament As A Practice Of Hope
B Y E L I A N A P A R K
How many of you know that God is good all the time? And that all the time God is good? See, you know that because you have a story, or maybe you’re here because you heard a story of a good God whose goodness never runs out, and are seeking a story of your own. Today we are going to journey down the depths we don’t tend to swim in. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the story of Ruth is one of redemption. And what that usually means is that something or someone needed redeeming in the first place.
Ruth 1:16-22 says, “But Ruth replied, “Don’t ask me to leave you and turn back. Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live, I will live. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. Wherever you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord punish me severely if I allow anything but death to separate us!” When Naomi saw that Ruth was determined to go with her, she said nothing more. So the two of them continued on their journey. When they came to Bethlehem, the entire town was excited by their arrival. “Is it really Naomi?” the women asked. “Don’t call me Naomi,” she responded. “Instead, call me Mara, for the Almighty has made life very bitter for me. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me home empty. Why call me Naomi when the Lord has caused me to suffer and the Almighty has sent such tragedy upon me?” So Naomi returned from Moab, accompanied by her daughter-in-law Ruth, the young Moabite woman. They arrived in Bethlehem in late spring, at the beginning of the barley harvest.” This is the Word of the Lord.
For most of you, I know we have not yet met. And while I’d love to sit with each of you and hear your story, I think I can make a pretty good guess that every single person has walked through or is walking through a time of grief and suffering, or knows someone who is. We feel as Naomi felt…why has God caused me to suffer and sent such tragedy upon me? Whether it’s a phone call we wish we hadn’t picked up, prayers that seemingly went unanswered, bad things that happened to good people, relationships that hurt us, sickness, loss, death…at almost every scale, personal and public, local and global, grief is a part of our shared human experience, which is the great paradox of it all, because it is in our very grief where we feel the most alone, isolated, and hopeless. And yet, this is where there is no greater news than that of God’s closeness and company, his friendship and hope.
Grief is messy. It’s complicated and challenging and oftentimes cruel. And then one day, grief, in its dark and claustrophobic cocoon metamorphoses into a threshold of hope. How does that happen? Well that is what we’re going to explore today.
I became fascinated with stories when I was a little girl. My grandfather passed away when I was little, and so while I came to know him in a few memories of my own, he came alive in the stories that were passed down to me. I heard stories of how when he prayed, it shook the house with his booming voice that called boldly on the name of the Lord. So when I pray, I listen for his boldness. I heard stories of how his smile was so large and his laugh so wide it made those telling the story laugh too. I like to think I inherited at least a portion of his joy. When we hear stories, it connects us across time and space, because there are traces of all of us in the stories we tell and the stories we share. For the last five years of my life, as part of this special community in Las Vegas, I have had the deepest honor of sitting with and hearing a lot of people’s stories. And you know what I find in every single story? Grief. And it’s grief that has helped people see themselves more clearly…and also to see God more clearly where he seems hard to find.
When we meet Naomi, her story begins in the messy middle of sojourning and mourning. Her name means “delight,” but delight is hardly what we find. So, let’s call her Delight. Delight lives with relentless suffering. Year after year, tragedy after tragedy, it seemed unending. Delight is chased out of her hometown by famine. Delight experiences the most painful deaths of those closest to her, Delight loses everything, Delight no longer has a reason to smile or laugh or sing. No wonder Delight changes her name. So when she returns to her homeland, she reintroduces herself as Mara, which means bitter. This is the new story Delight tells. That she has been transformed and marked by tragedy. And I love that God doesn’t interrupt her here. This is important for his daughter to do. It’s important for Delight to know the taste of deep bitterness and still choose to seek the sweetness of God in it all. In short, the story Delight tells is that of the Gospel. That there was pure delight, but where we often reside and find one another is in the bitterness. But, that's not the end of the story because God. And so each of us can see ourselves in her story. And I think someone in this room might need to hear that there’s not only permission, but a loving invitation to come as you are in honest vulnerability, with your messy brokenness and chaos and anger and bitterness. Jesus says, “Come, all those who are weary…” Isn’t that all of us? If God is Lord of all, then he is Lord of our pain too.
Grief makes us rewrite our own stories, but lament rewrites our grief.
Lament tells the true story. That God is still God, that our grief is deeply bitter, that things are not the way they should be, and the insistence that there must be something better coming. Naomi demonstrates to us that we can come before the Almighty God with our entire emptiness because of his perfect wholeness. In short, this is lament.
Lament means “to wail.” When’s the last time you or someone you know wailed? In our Western culture, wailing is rare. If you fall, don’t cry, stand up strong, brush the dust off, and move on. If you must shed a tear, make it short. If you see someone cry, make them laugh. Right? Psychologists say, “When a person's sensory threshold is crossed, tears release pleasure hormones, oxytocin and endorphins, to restore stability — emotional equilibrium.” In God’s Word, I see this idea of restoration, stability, equilibrium…as steadfastness, or hesed love. God’s covenant, enduring, faithful-when-we’re-faithless kind of steadfast love. See, I love that this story of lament is in Scripture because God knew that participating in who he is means practicing his hesed love with our community in all circumstances.
Christian psychiatrist Dr. Larry Crabb has a helpful framework to identify and understand different life stages called the Iceberg Illustration.
At the top the iceberg, the part above water that you can see, is what’s called the Managed Life. The fundamental question asked here is: How do I look and feel good? The focus of those living in the Managed Life is to live by a set of principles to essentially stay looking and feeling good. This is where we often meet one another. Think about first impressions, introductions, and the summaries of our stories we rehearse to one another.
Right below the surface is called the Wounded Life. The fundamental question asked here is: What can I do to get back to looking and feeling good? When you live here, your main focus is to do whatever it takes to solve the pain or problem quickly and efficiently to get back to looking and feeling good. This is where we meet Naomi. Deeply wounded, and I believe, searching for something better.
And then, at the very tip of the iceberg, in the depths and the darkness of the waters, is what’s called the Formed Life. It’s here that one begins to ask, “What is God doing through this and in me?” When you’re here, you allow the Holy Spirit to do his work through the pain. And this is where we find Ruth. Suffering is a pathway to transformation, a lens through which we see, interpret, and live. And sometimes, it distorts reality. This is why it’s paramount that we bring our suffering to God, and ask him, “How do you see this?” Because what suffering can do, with God’s help, is actually keep us rooted in his reality, his hope, his love. And this is what we see Ruth do - tether herself and Naomi to God.
In Ruth we see a proximity of presence. We need people like Ruth who will stand in solidarity in our suffering, and to become like Ruth. Ruth’s name means friendship, or companion, and that is precisely who she is. This is important because we don’t simply see ourselves in each others’ stories, we see God. This is not simply Naomi’s story or Ruth’s story, while it is. This is a story about God. God not only desires that we cling to one another in the midst of suffering; God himself will not leave or abandon us in our pain. Pastor and author Glenn Packiam, says, “Lament is not only for the suffering; it is for solidarity with the suffering. We love our neighbor when we allow their experience of pain to become the substance of our prayer. This, after all, is what Jesus did for us.”
Now, why do I share this? Because all of us are on this kind of journey. And so were Ruth, Orpah, and Naomi. Remember, it’s not only Naomi who has lost much - Orpah and Ruth also have. In them, there are three expressions of grief: the bitterness of Naomi, the settling of Orpah, and the clinging of Ruth. Which woman do you become in your grief? At one point or another, I’ve become all three.
The first time we, the audience, see Naomi weep and wail is when she is with her daughters. And I just want to pause for a moment to realize the gravity of their grief. Why does it matter to have mentioned their weeping now and not when they lost everything in the beginning?
I wonder if it’s because this is when it becomes Naomi’s story, and not just Eli-Melech’s. And her tears so desperately told the story of God’s heart breaking for his daughters. Their journey was marked by tears…maybe your journey is too. Lament is the first time we hear their voices, and in their voices, see their hearts, and in their hearts, catch a glimpse of God.
Grief is a very human response to the absence of something good: a someone, a someplace, a sometime. We like to move on and quickly from feeling the weight of this departure, but maybe lament helps us learn what it’s like to truly be human. When we are brave enough to grieve, we confront the fragile brokenness of living on a broken earth, and leave with a longing for the wholeness of God. Grief is an awareness of what went missing and the pursuit of finding it once more in new and awakened ways. And God knows we need companions on this kind of journey…those kinds of people who would simply offer their steady presence in our chaos, and see us in it, and then, when ready, walk us to hope again. In my moments of deep pain and grief, I longed for this because I saw this kind of presence in the person of Jesus, who did not shame or hurry my pain, but reminded me that his love is so wide and deep and long that he cries with me too. And it is this truth that has helped me to embody Jesus’ compassion to those around me.
So, back to Naomi. She has nothing left for her in Moab, so leaving isn’t the hard part; leading is. As the matriarch of the family, Naomi realizes that the last thing she can do for her daughters-in-law is distance herself. In her mind, proximity to her leads only to pain. After all, she bears the familiar face of those Orpah and Ruth had lost. And yet, she is the one in this part of the story who is able to lead them into God’s very presence. So, they begin on a journey that would lead them back to Judah (verse 7). What this really meant was that it is the road that would lead them back to God… But, verse 8, on the way, all Naomi can see is where their story ends if they remain with her. She sees it fit to push them away with love and kindness. Even with good intentions, you can miss God’s intention for you and the people around you.
Why does lament matter? Because human life is patterned by delight and bitterness, by moments of feeling that God is absent and afar and hard to find, and rejoicing when we acknowledge his Presence, his nearness, his friendship. It means that pain will happen and each time is an opportunity to be formed, to find Jesus, and to forge community. In John 16:33, Jesus himself says, “I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world.” It is the promise of suffering. But greater than that, it is the promise of what God already did with our suffering: that God so creatively transforms nothing into something beautiful that will give him the glory.
He transforms our emptiness to places and people full of Him.
Do you remember what Naomi said? “The Almighty has made life very bitter for me, I went away full, but the Lord has brought me home empty, the Lord has caused me to suffer and the Almighty has sent such tragedy upon me.”
The emptiness Naomi felt, she believed it was her grave, when it was really God’s grace.
And He has grace for you today. Psalm 126:5 says, “Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy.” Lament is the prayerful practice of hope in the wake of suffering. C.S. Lewis says, “Nothing in you that has not died will be raised from the dead.” Pastor and author Tyler Staton continues to say, “If you bury your pain rather than grieve it, it goes on living right where you buried it. And if you buried it within you, then that means that pain is living where God wants to bring about resurrection life.”
God also transforms our isolation to intimacy. Think about it. You’re only really honest and vulnerable with the people who are closest to you. In other words, we’re often at our worst with those who deserve to see us at our best. I won’t waste the depths of who I am on a stranger, but I will bear my soul to my dearest friend. And Jesus is this dearest friend. Lament forges our relationship with God. My mom used to say the joy of the Lord is like a trampoline: the deeper you go, the higher you jump; the deeper you experience the hardships of life and find God faithful in it all, the greater and more real your joy becomes.
He also transforms our pain to his promise. To lament is to address who we’re lamenting to, to have the freedom to name what must be tamed, to ask boldly for God to act, and to trust in him. This kind of lament is also worship. To worship is our whole being responding to God. And that’s why lament is also worship, because lament requires our whole being to respond to God. We see this in Jesus. Jesus endured through suffering to stand in solidarity with us. He didn’t just die so we wouldn’t, but to know how to truly live when we feel like we couldn’t.
When we pray a prayer of lament, we declare that suffering does not get the final say. Naomi’s story journeys from delight to bitterness, and is restored in a deepened, unshakeable delight.
Now at the end of the road to Judah, they return to Bethlehem, the House of Bread, at the beginning of barley harvest. This small detail is significant. The beginning of barley harvest signifies springtime, first fruits, a cause for celebration and great joy for a people well acquainted with famine and poverty and hunger. Ruth will have work, Ruth and Naomi will have community, they will have a cause for celebration; food for their famished soul. There is wisdom in the seasons, and a kind benevolence to God’s attention to detail in his perfect timing.
No season is wasted in the Kingdom. God as the Great Gardener teaches us the wisdom of the seasons - to nourish and make beautiful that which is the gift of now. I want to share a portion of this essay that I have returned to over and over and over again in moments of my life when the season I’m in feels tirelessly long. It feels like an endless summer, or an unending winter, and I am anxious for what’s next. As you read, take note of what stands out to you in each of the seasons and to identify what season you are in today. What might God be saying to you?
Seasons by Parker J. Palmer:
“Seasons” is a wise metaphor for the movement of life…The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all – and to find in all of it opportunities for growth.
AUTUMN
Autumn is a season of great beauty, but it is also a season of decline. What does nature do in autumn? She scatters the seeds that will bring new growth in the spring – and she scatters them with amazing abandon.
I am rarely aware that seeds are being planted. Instead, my mind is on the fact that the green growth of summer is browning and beginning to die. I am drawn down by the prospect of death more than I am lifted by the hope of new life.
In the autumnal events of my own experience, I am easily fixated on surface appearances – on the decline of meaning, the decay of relationships, the death of a work. And yet, if I look more deeply, I may see the myriad possibilities being planted to bear fruit in some season yet to come.
In retrospect, I can see in my own life what I could not see at the time – how the job I lost helped me find work I needed to do, how the “road closed” sign turned me toward terrain I needed to travel, how losses that felt irredeemable forced me to discern meanings I needed to know. On the surface it seemed that life was lessening, but silently and lavishly the seeds of new life were always being sown.
WINTER
Winter here is a demanding season – and not everyone appreciates the discipline. It is a season when death’s victory can seem supreme: few creatures stir, plants do not visibly grow, and nature feels like our enemy.
A gift is the reminder that times of dormancy and deep rest are essential to all living things. Despite all appearances, of course, nature is not dead in winter – it has gone underground to renew itself and prepare for spring. Winter is a time when we are admonished, and even inclined, to do the same for ourselves.
SPRING
Though spring begins slowly and tentatively, it grows with tenacity. The smallest and most tender shoots insist on having their way, coming up through ground that looked, only a few weeks earlier, as if it would never grow anything again.
Spring teaches me to look more carefully for the green stems of possibility: for the intuitive hunch that may turn into a larger insight, for the glance or touch that may thaw a frozen relationship, for the stranger’s act of kindness that makes the world seem hospitable again.
SUMMER
Abundance. The forests fill with undergrowth, the trees with fruit, the meadows with wildflowers, the gardens with vegetables…
In the human world, abundance does not happen automatically. It is created when we have the sense to choose community, to come together to celebrate and share our commonality. Here is a summertime truth: abundance is a communal act. Community not only creates abundance – community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world might be transformed. In summer it is hard to remember that we had ever doubted the natural process, had ever ceded death the last word, had ever lost faith in the powers of new life.
Now, I wonder what could happen in this community of four seasons: How might your relationships deepen with God and with one another because you make space for one another to lament honestly and rejoice deeply? There is a lot of pain present in people, whether it’s shown or withheld, and only a kind and loving God would not let your pain go to waste. It is worth the hard work of seeing one another with the compassionate eyes of Jesus. And, I wonder what could happen beyond this community because of this people, unafraid to face suffering together, and boldly, brightly become a Jesus-kind-of-hope to a hopeless and dark world.
Remember, lament is our whole being responding to God in places of pain, so that we live a life of praise.
See, when Jesus returns and every knee bows and every tongue proclaims that He alone is Lord, we will live a life of praise forever. And so I wonder if when Jesus said, “pray on earth as it is in heaven,” if he meant that lament could be our very practice of ushering in heaven on earth here today.
Here are 3 ways to keep exploring the practice of lament:
Continue to reflect on the season you’re in. Ask God to give you wisdom for the season. Revisit this practice of lament seasonally, as you can simply grieve the season that has just gone by.
In what ways do you need to hold delight and bitterness together? What comes to mind? Pray through a psalm of lament or write your own lament with the following prompts:
God you are… (Remember who you are crying out to…)
God I am… (Be honest! Let your honesty honor God. He can shoulder your pain…)
God help me… (We need God always. Ask him specifically for his help…)
God you are… (End the way you began by remembering the truth of who God is…)
We all need community. God designed us for community! And fewer things deepen relationships like the communal act of lament through suffering. Who will you be Ruth to, or who will you invite to be Ruth to you? In other words, the word “compassion,” means to suffer with. Who will you suffer with, and who will suffer with you?
May the compassionate tears of Jesus comfort you today, and give you the strength and hope to be his people of compassion to those around you. Amen.