This week I welcome guest blogger, Jeff Byerly. Jeff is my friend, pastoral colleague, ThD classmate, and traveling partner! He and his wife Tasha have two daughters, a son-in-law and new grandbaby!
What in the world is going on these days?
I remember sitting in my doctoral studies just a few years ago … prior to Covid … and listening to a lecture on various historical periods. The professor introduced a word into our discussions that I had not heard in any previous history class.
That word was ZEITGEIST … a German word that translates as the spirit of the age. Zeit translates as “time” and geist as “ghost or spirit.” Thus, we get a spirit of the age, OR a prevailing societal mood.
In class, we were transported back to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln just prior to the Civil War. Lincoln tried fiercely to hold the Union together, but there was a powerful societal mood permeating the nation’s landscape that no law or presidential action could diffuse. The power of this zeitgeist was too much for Lincoln to divert and the country entered a Civil War.
Consider these words from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address:
“On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”
In class, we then proceeded to look at periods of church history through new perspectives as we considered the effects of powerful zeitgeists that would create deep divisions during the European Reformation that would allow for Christians to persecute one another and even allow for deceptive and violent behaviors.
Earlier, I mentioned the pivotal time of Covid. There seems to be a life prior to Covid and a life since Covid and may I say a lingering zeitgeist—a societal mood that makes us question: How in the world did we end up here?
Whether you agree with my analysis about a current zeitgeist or not, I doubt that many would deny the wearisome effects of recent events in our world.
So the question I want to address this morning is: What are we going to do with these lingering wearisome feelings?
As we consider this season of Advent, where we turn our attention upon the work of God through the Incarnation of his Son—Jesus, how do we begin to sort through our diverse understandings through a new lens or frame that reveals the profound realization of “God with us?”
To do this, I want us to consider lament.
What is Lament? Lament is an appropriate response to the evil we see in the world.
Lament is a passionate expression of grief, often in music, poetry, or song form; the grief is most often born of regret, or mourning.
Because laments draw attention to what’s wrong in our world, they often present our pain, confusion, and anger with raw intensity.
Fortunately, for us, we have several Psalms within the Scriptures that are considered as laments. They usually have a similar pattern and often feature some provocative expressions, because they are emotionally charged from the grief they describe. We will look at two such psalms this week.
In any case, laments are appropriate responses to the evil we see in the world—even those psalms that seem more extreme by calling down a curse or judgment upon another. We will look at one like that—categorized as an imprecatory psalm—first.
Lament is an appropriate response because, with lament, we can be honest before God. This gives us a constructive outlet for our misery. We do not need to stuff our feelings. Nor do we need to hide our complaint from God. With lament, people can remove their cheerful masks to uncover the bitter wounds that need to be exposed to God’s presence and perspectives.
When we follow the pathway of lament, we can actually find a better course for understanding and coping with the anguish that we may experience. Our perspective turns from our gloomy and dour circumstances toward a hope-filled future!
For this reason, the first week in the Advent blog series will turn our hearts toward lament in order to turn our heads upward toward God’s perspectives. In the next post, we begin by looking at an imprecatory psalm.
Engaging Scripture 
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