Exodus 16:2-15 and Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45 | Jonah 3:10-4:11 and Psalm 145:1-8 | Philippians 1:21-30 | Matthew 20:1-16
Grumbling must be hardwired in us. We grumble that someone takes our favorite tennis court or table in the pub, even though there are plenty of others available; when the grocery store doesn’t have our favorite brand of mayonnaise, or the Italian restaurant is out of our preferred house chianti. Our baseball team scores four runs but leaves the bases loaded, and we grumble that it should have been six or seven. We grumble when it rains on the weekend, and when it doesn’t rain during the week. Admit it: you’ve got your favorite pet peeves; listing all of mine would exceed the word limit for this post.
We might call this week’s lectionary “grumbler’s paradise.” Freed from slavery in Egypt and having been recently in an oasis — with seventy palm trees and twelve springs, no less – the Israelites grumble about the food in the desert, declaring it worse than slavery. Jonah grumbles about God’s forgiving the repentant Ninevites. The vineyard workers, unemployed when the day begins, grumble about their pay, because some of their coworkers get the same for shorter hours.
Grumbling gives voice to base dissatisfaction, a “mere reluctance to be pleased” in Samuel Johnson’s memorable phrase. It is the least ennobling of three distinct attitudes towards discontent or loss. Mourning expresses authentic grief. We mourn the loss of something important to us: the deaths of our loved ones, or those that have touched us (Dolly Parton, Wendell Berry). We mourn the end of a career, or the closing of a cultural institution. Mourning goes much deeper than grumbling, and, unlike grumbling, can encompass both sadness and a wistful joy in the memories of what has been lost. Mourning carries a moral dignity with it. Grumbling never does.
Lament may include mourning, if it’s focused on something irretrievably lost, but it’s more than that. Lament is not an emotion, although it is in part the expression of emotion. Lament is not simply wailing and gnashing of teeth, because lament without action is little more than destructive self-pity. Expressions of distress are the beginning, not the end of lament. Many of the psalms, of course, express lament (although those in this week’s lectionary do not.)
The practice of lament enjoys a bit of a revival, going back to the onset of Covid days. Walter Brueggemann[1]and N.T. Wright[2], to name two, got theological reflections on the pandemic to print at warp speed. Their books shared a premise that the world was in a sort of exile, to which the appropriate Christian response was lament, in its fullest sense: not just vocalized grief but actions small and large to minister to the world around us and pave the way for something new and better.
The pandemic provoked grumbling, mourning, and lament. We grumbled that we had to wear masks in public, or that we couldn’t go to the gym. (Tellingly, this one often came from people with well-stocked home gyms.) We mourned for those that had died, but also for institutions and values that we feared were gone forever. And we lamented our predicament, while at the same time getting to work turning our food pantries into home delivery and changing our pastoral conversations from in person to online.
Now, we face a cultural context even more dire than the pandemic. We occupy what seems to be a virus-infected world: wars without end, climate and habitat devastation, the virtual collapse of political civility, the intentionally cruel treatment of immigrants, disabled, LGBTQ, and people of different faith confessions, leaders more interested in lining their pockets than leading, a lust for power that will stop at nothing, even the rigging of elections. We might call these viruses greed, hatred, irresponsibility, suspicion, megalomania. Or perhaps like the shape-shifting Covid virus, they are all the same disease manifesting in different ways, where we are most vulnerable. The “othering virus,” we might call it. Invidius allivirus.
Once again, we are again exiled, from each other, just as surely as we were during lockdown. We are even more exiled from the world, which threatens to become unlivable from heat, fires, and storms. And we are exiled from our true selves, because all around us we hear hateful, cynical programmatic nonsense that no one really believes but is impossible to ignore. And there is no vaccine, no Paxlovid, for this virus.
So what is to be done? I suggest we look back to the pandemic, when many of our neighbors were at their best. When there was no cure, and both the medical profession and the larger community transformed into a sort of universal hospice in the face of this horrible disease, providing companionship, care, and support, hoping for the healing that is never beyond God’s power but for reasons beyond us all sometimes show up in this but not that case.
We do not know whether our culture today is in its death throes, or simply critically ill, fighting to survive. Either way, we can’t save it; only God can do that. But there is holy work to be done as we await whatever comes next, whether that is a resurrection of our current existence or the arrival of a new one.
How? Provide palliative and pastoral care to our neighbors that are injured by the tooth and claw of the old order as it wildly strikes at anything and everything. A lawyer acts more like a pastor than an advocate when she accompanies clients to immigration hearings that may turn into arrest set-ups. Homeowners do it when they go to the hardware store to buy supplies for their remodeling contractor who is scared to go because of the ICE presence, rather than just hiring another contractor. Churches do it when they open their doors as cooling stations for the homeless and those without air conditioning. This is what distinguishes lament from grumbling, and these are hints of the new order.
And we speak out. We do not grumble, but we vocalize our lament. We resist by refusing to endorse with our silence the powers of the infected world. The lawyer makes the equitable argument that the judge should rule according to her conscience, thereby registering one more protest that our courts have been turned into centers of power, not justice. We tell ICE agents that they are not permitted to enter our places of worship.
And we speak out not just to authority, but to those around us. Hatred almost always comes coupled with fear, and it frequently comes out as a programmed response, the belief of an ancestor or a news commentator or a social media troll. So if someone in your study group starts to preach suspicion or fear of immigrants or LGBTQ persons, just ask him, “what are you afraid of?” When a neighbor at a weekend cookout rattles off the received wisdom of the old order — that interest rates and stock market returns measure the health of some fiction called “the economy;” that uncontrolled borders threaten our safety; that the petroleum industry has to be maintained until sometime in the indefinite future that never seems to come; that the church has to remain politically neutral so as not to offend the conscience of any member (even those that don’t have one) — we ask gently “you don’t really believe that, do you?” Or better yet, “but what do you think?”
So don’t focus on trying to cure the world. Focus on care for the little bit of it in your neighborhood. We can’t be cultural cardiologists, but we can be hospice nurses for the cultural wounded around us. Instead of grumbling, mourn, or better yet, lament. Then rise from the mourning bench, and resist the forces of darkness that surround us and join the work crew that makes straight in our desert a highway for the return of our Lord.
[1] Virus as a Summons to Faith, (Eugene OR: Cascade 2020)
[2] God and the Pandemic: (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020)