Lamentations

March 01, 2026

Teacher: Pastor Dave Brown

A healthy spirituality is always an honest spirituality.

Healing begins when hidden pain is brought from darkness into the light of God’s presence and the care of a trustworthy community.

My eyes fail from weeping, I am in torment within; my heart is poured out on the ground because my people are destroyed, because children and infants faint in the streets of the city.

— Lamentations 2:11

What can I say for you? With what can I compare you, Daughter Jerusalem? To what can I liken you, that I may comfort you, Virgin Daughter Zion? Your wound is as deep as the sea. Who can heal you?

— Lamentations 2:13

A healthy spirituality is always an honest spirituality.

The hearts of the people cry out to the Lord. You walls of Daughter Zion, let your tears flow like a river day and night; give yourself no relief, your eyes no rest. Arise, cry out in the night, as the watches of the night begin; pour out your heart like water in the presence of the Lord. Lift up your hands to him for the lives of your children, who faint from hunger at every street corner “Look, Lord, and consider: Whom have you ever treated like this? Should women eat their offspring, the children they have cared for? Should priest and prophet be killed in the sanctuary of the Lord? “Young and old lie together in the dust of the streets; my young men and young women have fallen by the sword. You have slain them in the day of your anger; you have slaughtered them without pity.

— Lamentations 2:18-21

Pray as you can.  Not as you can’t.

— John Chapman

A healthy spirituality is always an honest spirituality.

Laments are prayers that erupt from wounds, burst out of unbearable pain, and bring it to language.  Laments complain, shout, and protest.  They take anger and despair before God and the community.  They grieve.  They argue.  They find fault…Although laments appear disruptive to God’s world, they are acts of fidelity.  In vulnerability and honesty, the cling obstinately to God and demand for God to see, hear, and act.

— Kathleen O’ Conner

God’s silence in Lamentations leaves wounds festering, open to the air and possibly to healing.  The benefit of exposed wounds is that they become visible and unavoidable.  Left exposed, they require us to see, acknowledge, and attend to them, and then perhaps there can be energy to attend to the wounds of the world.

— Kathleen O’ Conner

A healthy spirituality is always an honest spirituality.

For you were once in darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord. Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. It is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light.

— Ephesians 5:8-12

It is easier to let God heal my sinfulness than it is to let him heal my woundedness.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

John 1:5

A healthy spirituality is always an honest spirituality.

Healing begins when hidden pain is brought from darkness into the light of God’s presence and the care of a trustworthy community.