by Jill Lin
Our modern world is extremely uncomfortable with sorrow and guilt. We no longer mourn in public. We are very awkward around sickness, death, or injury. We don’t know what to do with sadness, depression or messiness, or quite frankly with just being less-than-perfect. We hardly know how to apologize or respond to an apology. We are expected, or expect ourselves, to appear reasonably happy and Instagram-worthy at all times.
Women often feel particular demands to be happy and put-together all the time.
For many women, family or cultural expectations to make the “joy” happen at special holidays or seasons can be strong. Outside of home, if we are anything less than smiling or gracious at work or at church, we are easily written off as angry or aggressive – or worse.
In church-circles that can come with a superficial understanding of what it means to “rejoice always”, as if it meant to always plaster on a smile and pretend everything were ok. Many modern church services don’t regularly include practices like silence, lament and confession, though they are still common in liturgical churches. We are often like the character Joy in the Pixar movie “Inside Out”, trying to make Sadness stop being sad, believing, falsely, that she serves no good purpose. We are simply uncomfortable with sadness. We are not supposed to be sad, and so we often paste on that expected smile instead. As the Casting Crowns song asks:
“Are we happy plastic people
Under shiny plastic steeples
With walls around our weakness
The smiles to hide our pain?”
Demanding that we be cheerful and pleasant all the time can wear on the soul. Because sometimes we want to cry. Sometimes we are angry. Sometimes we are afraid. And sometimes we know we are complicit or guilty of sin ourselves. Sometimes crying and ashes and sackcloth feel needed in a world that wants us all Instagram-worthy, smiling and put-together.
Lent allows us to be real.
Lent invites us to acknowledge the “world in sin and sorrow pining” that Jesus was going to die for. The Bible calls this type of sadness lament. The world may be uncomfortable with lament, but the Bible is not. It even contains a book of “Lamentations”. In fact, the Bible tells many stories of those who suffered and cried out to God in their own misery or on behalf of the misery in the world around them. In the Psalms, and the books of Ecclesiastes and Job, in the lives of Hagar, Naomi or Joseph, we see the people of God acknowledge their sadness and suffering. And we see plenty of suffering in the life of Jesus himself.
Lent invites us to lament the brokenness of the world.
It is a time to recognize that in this fallen world sin and mortality is our reality. Instead of jumping ahead to Easter – for yes, joy is coming – Lent invites us to sit with the sadness and lament. We don’t have to paste on a smile. This world is broken. We grieve. We lament.
When we see the news of wars breaking out, face global pandemics, hear of school shootings, read the obituaries, see another young black man dead after a police stop, hear a friend’s diagnosis or receive our own, watch beloved family members break up, see the aftermath of a natural disaster, worry about pollution, see the exploitation of workers, witness or experience poverty, feel the sting of betrayal, mourn the death of a loved one … such things drive us to tears not to smiles.
Lent invites us to reflect on this brokenness, this world so broken that Jesus came to die for it.
When we lament, we cry out to the One who understands firsthand what it is to live in the fallen world he came to die for! Jesus’ own life found Him “a man of suffering, and familiar with pain … despised, and we held Him in low esteem” (Isaiah 53:3).
He was a refugee, misunderstood by family and friends, poor, unjustly arrested and painfully and publicly executed. He suffered. When one of his closest friends died, Jesus wept. Jesus, the God of the universe, cried.
When he saw moneymakers extorting wealth from the people who were trying to make sacrifices for worship, He turned over the tables in the Temple in anger. When he looked the Cross in the face in the Garden of Gethsemane, he was in such anguish he sweat blood. Tears, sadness, fear and anger at injustice and suffering are not weakness. They are a reasonable response to our mortality and our broken world. When we lament, we do so in the company of Jesus!
Lent tells us we are safe to cry out to God in lament.
Lent also invites us to confess our own struggles with sin. Perhaps we struggle with bad habits, bad tempers, or feelings and behaviors rooted in greed, envy, lust or pride. Perhaps we have done things we dare not name and caused others great pain. We know we have done wrong, whether “by what we have done” or “what we have left undone”, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it. Lent invites us not only to lament, but to confess.
James chapter 5 reminds us that we confess knowing that those who confess are forgiven. We aren’t asked to excuse or explain our sin, pretend it never happened or smile it away – those things are not confession, though they are common practices of the world in the face of wrongdoing. Nor do we have to earn our way back to God’s good graces.
We are invited to confess and to receive forgiveness. For we can only truly, fully receive that forgiveness into the darkest corners of our souls and find the freedom it offers if we are willing to confess.
Lent invites us to do this.
As we journey to the Cross that paid for our sins, Lent gifts us a time to be vulnerable before God and receive the forgiveness our souls need. What a gift!
We are also invited to confess the sins of the world. Those evils we lament we can also confess. This sits uncomfortably with us in our individualistic culture, but is a scriptural concept. The receiving of ashes on the forehead on Ash Wednesday reminds me of the picture described in Nehemiah 9:1-2:
“…, the Israelites gathered together, fasting and wearing sackcloth and putting dust on their heads. […]. They stood in their places and confessed their sins and the sins of their ancestors”.
They lamented and confessed not just what they did as individuals, but what their generation had done, and also the sins of their ancestors. We, too, must be honest about the ways the church has been and is complicit in the sins of the world, the way we as individuals and as communities and nations perpetuate or are complicit in society’s injustices, poverty, and discrimination. We can only fully experience forgiveness if we confess. We can only bring light into darkness if we are willing to recognize where the darkness lies. Lent is a time we are invited to recognize where the darkness is, lament it and confess it. Only then will we and our communities embrace Light into the dark spaces.
Lent gives us space to confess with honesty.
Lent is a time to prepare to remember the Crucifixion. So how can we not take time to lament and confess the state of the world and the state of our hearts, when these are the things Jesus died for? How can we not lament the world that inflicted suffering on Jesus himself? How can deny ourselves the need to lament the brokenness, when Jesus himself lamented the sorrows around him and the suffering he faced? How can we not confess our sins, so that we can experience the liberating forgiveness Jesus died to give us?
“Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, …. He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.” (Isaiah 53:4-5)
Lent makes space for this lamentation and confession. It allows us to face the hard realities of this world. It give us permission to be sad at loss, angry at injustice, afraid of pain. We start Lent with remembering our mortality: “You are dust and to dust you shall return”. We end with the Crucifixion.
Lent acknowledges the fallen world we live in and our own part in it.
We don’t have to pretend. Lent invites us to be real.
And we need this! As Joy realized in “Inside Out”, Sadness does indeed serve a crucial purpose. Without contemplating the brokenness and fallenness of the world, the reality of sin and its effects, we see no need for a Savior and scarcely realize the amazing grace found in His Crucifixion. In which case, Easter’s joy will be as hollow as many of the chocolate eggs we eat.
Lent invites us to lament and confess. Let us do so with honesty and vulnerability. The joy of Easter will be the greater for it!