Lamentations 3:22-33
2 Samuel 1:1-27
It seems fitting that we close out Pride Month with a slightly queer lectionary text, the passage that most strongly suggests that the relationship between David, son of Jesse, and Jonathan, son of King Saul, was not strictly platonic. It is, of course, in the context of David’s grief over the death of Saul and Jonathan, though the account comes from Davidic propaganda and feels more than a little disingenuous.We are meant to believe that David becomes the king through divine action only, though we know that his entire career is marked by treachery and sin, that he is a usurper, a coup plotter, a murderer.
Even this passage, filtered through that lens of Davidic legitimacy, flies in the face of decency. The messenger who brings David the war report, the crown and armband that will mark David as king, is murdered on David’s command when he admits to putting the mortally-wounded Saul out of his misery at Saul’s own request.
Though there is some ambiguity in the ancient Hebrew texts about the title “Song of the Bow,” it is worth noting that the text cites the Book of Jashar. This is not the only instance where scripture cites other scriptures we no longer have, lost or simply unauthorized.
We can say with relative certainty that David existed, despite the now discredited skeptics. Much of the history in 1st and 2nd Samuel and 1st and 2nd Kings, while told from the Israelite perspective, fits what we know to be true from archeology and sources in other parts of the region.
David’s grief, however, is uncertain. We do not know if it is performative or genuine.
I am inclined to believe that embarrassing and contradictory texts, ones that do not fit the prevailing narrative, probably contain a kernel of historicity, and this text is difficult and embarrassing. Even so, David’s public grief, like the accusations of Job’s supposed friends, offers us little that is true and useful.
Better, then, that we turn to our first reading this morning, a reading of mourning, from the Book of Lamentations.
First, the context: In the year 586 before the Common Era, the last bit of the once great Kingdom of David, a remaining mini-state then known as Judah, was destroyed by the Babylonians, Jerusalem and the Temple razed.
It was that conqueror’s practice to take the skilled and educated from defeated lands back to Babylon, and so the official story, in both the Jewish and Christian traditions, shifts east, where we find figures like the prophet Ezekiel and the folk-hero Daniel. Judah is depicted as de-populated, the few peasants left there as mixing with non-Israelite tribes, and therefore subject to dispossession when the Babylonian Captives returned.
Of course, this depiction of those remaining in Judah as unfaithful and deserving of exclusion is far from reality. Their erasure from Jewish history starts with attribution.
The Book of Lamentations is traditionally attributed to Jeremiah, for it was the practice during biblical times to attribute all texts to someone important, the reason so much of the Book of Isaiah was not written by Isaiah and so many of the letters of Paul were not written by Paul.
Jeremiah, according to tradition, had fled the destruction of Judah going southwest, dying in Egypt, not Palestine. This text describes the situation in Palestine from the viewpoint of someone on the ground. The Book of Lamentations actually comes from the very people who are largely erased from the Jewish story, those who were not taken into captivity.
The author, authors, or editors have produced a brutal piece of lyric poetry, not bad for a supposedly worthless and ignorant people left behind in the rubble and one-donkey towns of Judah. The violence is of Homeric proportions.
While they attempt in places to frame the defeat of Judah and the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple as divine will, punishment for infidelity, the text never settles on a single message, and does not suggest that their grief is in any way redemptive. Instead, we find sadness, anger, and tenacity.
This, I believe, is proper grief, the kind of grief we often experience, as tangled up as the Christmas lights we used to unpack the weekend after Thanksgiving. While we have technical terms like compound grief and complex grief, all grief is actually both of those things, compound and complex.
I first started thinking about the structure of grief when I was in high school after encountering the groundbreaking work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. If you do not know the name, you certainly know her ideas. She suggested five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Humans being humans, we wanted checkboxes, so we turned this into a linear set of tasks or markers. First you did denial, and when you got to anger, you were done with denial.
Instead of stages, which are discreet, we might be better served to think of these as the moods of grief or locations of grief, changeable, the soul caught up in a high energy whirlwind, spinning, ascending and descending in turns, re-inhabiting locations of grief, but slowly coming to ground as the system loses intensity, at least when the system is working properly, no two whirlwinds being quite alike. The grief does not disappear so much as it becomes part of the landscape, a disturbance and a mark we sometimes notice, sometimes don’t.
I would have done well to remember these lessons the first time I was at a deathbed as a chaplain, summoned in the middle of the night to the Intensive Care Unit of a Boston hospital. It all happened so quickly, and I have remembered it through the lens of constructing my own theology of pastoral practice so that the encounter has taken on surreal characteristics, the dying man more bloated and grayer than seems possible. And all I wanted to do was fix things, to put the encounter in a properly labeled box and tape it shut.
I couldn’t fix the fact that the patient was dying, was dead by the time I left them. But I could offer the family easy answers, cheap answers, and so I handed them a Bible open to 1st Thessalonians, Chapter 4, thought to be the earliest letter of Paul and possibly the first Christian writing we still have. It is traditionally used at funerals, and seeks to reassure the living that those who die in Christ will rise up on the Day of the Lord, meeting the descending heavenly host. It was meant to reassure that first generation, since the death of believers before the Second Coming did not yet fit into their theology.
I knew that it did not mean what the grieving family would hear in the text, that their deceased loved one would be waiting in heaven. Never mind that I knew nothing of the life of the man who had died, whether he would go to heaven if that is what actually happens. Never mind that I can only guess at the abundance of God’s grace, and am actually agnostic about life after death.
That text immediately came to mind because I had been assigned that exact passage in a seminar on Thessalonians being taught by the world’s foremost expert on the Pauline epistles. I would present on the text in direct translation from the Greek within the week.
But like the friends of Job, I wanted to make the grief make sense, to wrap it up, absurdly to somehow make the family feel better so I did not have to sit with them in their pain, or carry any of it with me when I left.
Afterwards, I promised myself I would never do that again, never offer easy answers, never discount doubt and grief, but would simply be present, would lean into tenacity, just like the authors of Lamentations.
God did not want more angels and so use Adam Lanza to slaughter first graders at Sandy Hook Elementary, kids who would have graduated from high school this year, so there is no making sense out of that tragedy. The war crimes committed on October 7th, 2023 had nothing to do with God’s will or justice, and the crimes against humanity that have happened ever since are in no way sanctified. These are monstrous horrors, and we must tell the stories of these monstrous horrors every day, reminding ourselves that they are still happening, and we must resist.
But it does not take a monstrous horror to trigger our grief, does not even take death, for grief is simply an emotional and spiritual response to negative change, to loss, and we can grieve for a church community that no longer looks like it once did, for the diner that was part of our childhood, and if we are not careful, might grieve for democracy itself.
And we are not alone in grieving. The hard line we have drawn between ourselves and other animals is a lie we have told to protect ourselves, from our finitude, from our co-identification with those animals, for while we fantasize about seeing Sparky in heaven, we have no desire to encounter this morning’s bacon in heavenly porcine form.
Elephants grieve. Apes grieve. And I suppose, in their own way, there is complexity in their grief. They may not know why their mother is dead, but if we get right down to it, neither do we.
We can explain away the physical processes, but we do not know why holy mystery and serendipitous creativity landed on a system that is a constant churn of tenacious life and the constant closure that is death, why we are such a brief and unpredictable flash, why we can be life-givers and death-bringers, sometimes a little of both, why we must spend time on the burning ruins of the Temple, soot-faced and tear-streaked, and why we find again and again the goodness of God in this world and in the fickle and fragile creatures that walk with us on the way.
When I lived in the city, I frequently worshiped at St. Thomas on Fifth Avenue, one of the few remaining churches in the Anglican choral tradition, and it was that congregation that received the oft-quoted words of the late Queen Elizabeth, as we grieved the losses of 9/11. “Grief,” the Queen wrote, “is the price we pay for love.”
And really, that is where I am going to leave it, with love and a sermon that, like its subject, does not get tied up with a neat bow, but tails off into distraction, losing a little energy, just as it should.
Amen.