Venting or Lamenting

Luke 13:31-35

Second Sunday of Lent:  February 24, 2013

“Can I just vent for a minute?” 

I have a friend who has heard this from me more than once…and vice versa.  She’s a safe person who I can vent to without concern that what I say will be passed on to others, or that what I say will be judged.  And she will give me tons of sympathy and encouragement.  She might even help me figure out how to address whatever it is I’m venting about – but mostly she is just there to listen.

These are good friends, I think.  And I think I benefit.  It’s cathartic.  I suspect it keeps me from venting to the wrong people at the wrong time.  Saying things out loud can sometimes be helpful in terms of figuring out my emotions, sorting through them and tempering them.

But here are a couple of things I know about venting that aren’t helpful:  It is self righteous.  It can feed my skewed emotions rather than mitigate them.  It rarely clarifies or refines my thinking – it does not allow much room for sophisticated debate and learning.  And it is almost always misdirected.

It’s misdirected because the feeling that leads me to vent is born in a place deep within that’s not about the current situation.  It may be fueled by the current situation – the object of my vent may be emblematic of the core problem – but it is not the source.  I vent because I’m frustrated about the human condition – the brokenness in this world that I can’t, no matter how hard I try, fix.  I vent because that frustration is intolerable to feel.

Because I’m human, or maybe just because I’m me, that frustration – that I’m not going to feel – needs another target, so when someone or something comes along that embodies a brokenness I am frustrated about, all my helplessness, all my anger about that, gets directed at that one person. Or rather, misdirected at that one person. 

When we misdirect such feelings at people, it rarely leads to what some might call, “good Christian behavior.”  Without recognizing what is truly going on in ourselves, compassion is hard to reach, empathy even harder, and it’s almost impossible to improve the situation that has triggered it all in the first place.

And all of this is bad enough when I’m venting to my friend about something or someone else.  We all know how much it’s compounded when the vent goes straight to the vent-ee. 

This passage today has often been interpreted as Jesus doing a little venting.  He’s railing at Herod and Jerusalem to the Pharisees who had come to warn him about Herod.  He pulls no punches, and makes no glorious concession of forgiveness.  He is angry, he is pointed, and he vents about Jerusalem.

It’s the self righteous, judgmental, Jesus.  He’s not from Jerusalem – not one of them.  He has never even been there.  He’s out roaming the countryside loving all those who don’t live in Jerusalem.  He’s healing people, exorcising demons, and doing it all while blaming Jerusalem for the very problems these folks face.

Maybe.  But what if Jesus isn’t venting.  What if he’s doing something very Jewish like:  Something called lamenting.

The key lies in what form this passage takes.  I think what we have in this passage is an incredible poem; a poem that uses specific words, people, places, to point to a larger reality that can’t exactly be describe in literal terms.  This poem, all of its words, point to something beyond the recalcitrant Herod, Pilate, and people of Jerusalem.  These are not the objects of Jesus’ misdirected anger.

He is not venting – he’s putting into words a pain that everyone feels when they look at the hurting around them.  This isn’t literally about Jerusalem, like Jesus is upset about them and them alone.  It’s a lament, and Jesus represents the entire human condition – and it’s very Jewish.

These laments are everywhere in the Hebrew bible, and they are some of the most powerful poems we have.  “By the rivers of Babalyon, we sat down and wept,” cried the people living in exile from their homeland.  “Absalom Absalom!” wailed King David when his own army killed his son, who was fighting on the other side of the battle.  “My God my God why have you forsaken me” calls out the Psalmist from the depths of pain.

These are poems.  They are poetic laments.  And they’re powerful not because they are about specific people at specific times.  It’s not about the people sitting by the river that day crying in Babylon.  The lament of exile is powerful because we know we sit by the river sometimes. 

The cry of David weeping over the loss of his son is no different than the Greek tragedies that connect us to the truth that our weaknesses – our human frailties – can bring about the worst of unintended consequences.   My God my God why have you forsaken me is not just about what one writer said when his life sucked.  It is the cry of every person, every human being, Jesus included, when we feel abandoned by a God who is supposed to love, heal, fix, make better.  It is our cry.

This poem in the gospel of Luke stands firmly in its own tradition, and is as beautiful, powerful and painful as the ones that went before it.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem!  The city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!  How often I have desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing.”

This is lament:  It is the lament I should sing instead of venting to my friend.

One major difference between lamenting and venting is what is going on in your heart.  When I vent, I am hard of heart.  When one laments, their heart is broken open.  Jesus loves the people.  He yearns to gather them like a hen gathers her brood.  His heart is breaking – I swear I can almost hear it…like a glass that shatters on the floor.  “Jerusalem, Jerusalem.  The pain you cause, the damage you do, it breaks my heart because I know there is something better, something more: for you, for all of creation.   

So Jesus laments.  But notice lament is not resignation.  As he moans over the world’s insistence on self destruction, even as he recognizes that this will not change in his lifetime, he continues his work of healing – healing those he comes across every day.  He knows the reality of the world, and he still heals people when they are prey to it.  He moves on, even knowing the world he laments is going to get him – it gets us all. 

When something is so contrary to God’s ways in the world, and we are powerless to do anything about it, we have to do something.  And venting is often what we choose.  Because it’s too much to lament.  The pain of lament is too big.  It means adding ourselves to the list of those who cause, participate in, and suffer from, the brokenness.  It means recognizing that the person we’re angry at is just another “me;” different clothes, different gender, different color: same brokenness.  And lament takes our broken heart into the world to heal those right in front of us – talk about something we’d rather avoid.

I swear to God, I’m not kidding when I say that I had at least three times this week when I was convicted by my own sermon.  At least – those were the ones I noticed.  Before I knew what the sermon was going to be, I had encountered three situations that I planned on responding to.   And in each case, the response was to vent, not lament.

It was so frustrating…it was like everywhere I looked I was doing exactly what I was about to preach against.  In fact, it got to be so ridiculous that I had to tell myself, “Okay, Kirsten, you are only human.  You get to vent yourself silly on two of them, but you have to try this “lament thing” on the third.”

I had begun a letter.  It was a vent.  Now, of course, I didn’t think it was venting when I started it.  I thought it was a beautiful, articulate, letter that said things everyone should hear and understand – especially, of course, the offender.  I thought I was standing up for the little guy; I thought I was saving the next person from harm because my beautiful, compelling letter would get this person to change – and make them fee bad about what they did. 

But make no mistake, it was a vent.  And I wasn’t going to show it to my friend and then delete it from my computer.  I was going to address it, put a stamp on it, and throw it in the mailbox…and feel self righteous as I did.  This was a serious issue; real people were being hurt; it demanded a response of some kind…not resignation.  (I probably don’t have to tell you, self righteousness is one of the things I struggle with in this journey called life.)

But a bit clue that I was just venting should have been that I didn’t derive nearly as much satisfaction thinking about how those “next people” might feel when I had saved them from something, as I did from imagining the person’s response as they read the letter.  You think my anger was a bit misdirected?

My emotions weren’t ultimately about the person I was writing to.  This was about a world that includes hurt and abuse, oppression and violence, barriers to love and pathways to hatred.  This person was definitely participating in, and perpetuating, such a world.  But so do I.  It’s the world we live in, and we’re all broken…and that should be breaking my heart open.  But it didn’t.  The pain of that is too big – so I put more cement around my already hardened heart – and no one was going to win on this one.

So I practiced.  I took this letter – this vent – and tried to make it a lament.  I found a moment of quiet, sat in my room, and thought not about the situation and person that had angered me, but about the situation I was really angry about.  I cursed at it, shouted at it, asked my loving God why such things existed.  I didn’t pull punches.  I talked about the ugliest stuff.  And I tried to let my heart break – and it did…a little.  And then, I grieved…I grieved over how a world that suffers because of all of this.

And then I thought about this person I was writing to, and he had gone from being the target to someone in as much need of healing as I, and everyone one I thought I was fighting for.

At times, we’re Jerusalem.  We – our participation in, creation of, suffering in this world.  And so we are to be lamented for all the pain we cause.  And we’re the folks Jesus heals and exorcises.  We have parts of ourselves and our spirits that have been crushed, diminished, twisted because of Jerusalem and all her ways.  And we’re Jesus; the body of Christ.  We have a heart that breaks for the hurting and suffering and we reach out to heal as best we can.  And at times, if not always, we are all of those at once.

But no matter who we are, where we are in the story, we are all in this world.  It’s beautiful, it has it’s glorious moments, it is filled with wonderful people who help, solve, heal, hope and sacrifice everything for the good of others.  But it is broken…there are many things we can vent about.  When we see how contrary things are to God’s ways – we can vent.  We can vent to each other.  We can vent to the ones we see as the problem.  We can vent on TV and in the newspapers.

But a world that is so beautiful, created by a God so good, is better than that:  it’s worthy of more; it’s worthy of lament.

During Lent this year, we are trying to confess with a bit of a different understaning of confession from what we usually think of.  The thins we name – confess – are not the sins.  The sins are the barriers that arise between us and God because we aren’t honest about who we are…about the world in which we live.  In confession, in honesty, those barriers – the sins – might just fall before our very eyes.

On these cards each week we are taking a few minutes after the sermon to, if we so choose, write a confession that we will nail to the cross.  This is yours – it’s for you…please do only what is helpful.  Some will write something out, others will think in their heads and symbolically hand in a blank card representing the thought, others will just use the time to meditate and listen for the spirit. 

Where do you see God’s work in the world being thwarted?  Take some time:  What or who is causing you and others pain?  Do you vent about this, or lament?