Lamenting the state of the world

 In The Message, Eugene Peterson introduces the book of Lamentations by saying that:

Lamentations is a concentrated and intense biblical witness to suffering. Suffering is a huge, unavoidable element in the human condition. To be human is to suffer. No one gets an exemption…Lamentations, written out of the Exile experience, provides the community of faith with a form and vocabulary for dealing with loss and pain.

As usual The Bible Project has a very helpful introduction to the book 

 

I have started reading  The Message of Lamentations: Honest To God

by Christopher J H Wright.

Three other reasons to study Lamentations include

1. We honour those who suffer by listening to them. We honour the residents of Jerusalem in 587BC, by listening to Lamentations.

2. For most of humanity, past and present, suffering (poverty, disease, death, violence) is the norm, not the exception that it is for present-day affluent Westerners. Lamentations helps us engage emotionally with that suffering. As Paul, said "if one part of the body [of Christ, the universal church] suffers every part suffers with it."

3. It enables us to wrestle with the real theological questions associated with the tension/paradox/contradiction of God's goodness, God's sovereignty, God's judgement, and the suffering of the innocent.

Chris Wright preaches on Lamentations 1 and 2 (sermon part one and part two) in the first of a three-part series, "Learning to Lament", at All Soul's Langham Place, London.