Of Forests and Tres. Lamentations

Plopped right in the middle of the writings of prophets is a book titled "Lamentations."
It's a book of complaints. 
Of confession, accusation and yet, somehow, hope.

LAMENTATION. 

From Latin lamentationem,

"wailing, moaning, weeping,”

The book in the original Hebrew language is called Eichah, the first word of the book. It means “how?” The book flows from a word, and finds its identity in, the questioning of pain, grievance, sin experienced and caused. Right in the middle of prophecies about all Israel was to be, and what God is doing in their midst, is a collection of grieving, moaning and asking How? How can this be?

As a group, consider together that which needs grieved, confessed, felt and thought of clearly and empathized with. But only in coming out the other side with a stronger appreciation for the hope we share.


Thaw

• What most stayed with you from Sunday?
• What grievances, frustrations, disappointments and pains do you carry with you habitually?

Leader note: You may wish to point out that these are things which happen to us, or that we caused in others. We often carry a little of both.

Read (various readers, or take turns in circle)

• Lamentations 1:1-5
• 1:11
• 1:13
• 1:16
• 1:18
• 1:19
• 2:11
• 2:15-16
• 3:1
• 3:4-5
• 3:10-20
• 3:21
• 3:22-26
• 5:1

Discuss

• Thoughts?
• What is the significance of both God and humanity committed to remembering in the end?
• Read verses 3:22-24 again. What value might it have in a book about grieving and disappointment that the literal central passage of the book reads this way?
• Why might it be important to confess while complaining?
• Why might it be important to be hopeful while despairing?

Apply

• How can you make a remembrance of the goodness of life, and of the Source of life, the center point of your disappointment? What works against this?
• Is there something in your life you have never grieved? Why do you think this is?
• Have you ever done the work of allowing God to show you what's real beneath how you've gotten used to explaining your pain?

Leader note: This is a bit tricky to work through for many people. The idea here is that many of us are so used to using only the rhetoric of pain, or the most illustrative ways of explaining our suffering, that we haven't thought about how we are actually doing or what really happened. "She stabbed me in the back." "He was a terrible father." "I never amounted to much." "I treated him like $%^&*" The examples are endless. In each, there's something of substance, veiled by words that are, at one point, not as real as they've come to seem. Help the group value a precision of words in their grieving, and even in their confessing, that helps get at what really happened so that real grieving,  real apologies and reconciliation and hope, can occur. But it may be wise to table this work until later if you don't feel your group has been together long enough to trust each other to do it in a group setting. Allow it to happen organically if you can, and as a leader, only as you have done the work yourself.

• How might our remaining hopeful in our own pain be a way of being a loving person?
• What does lament have to do with serving others?