The Practice of Communal Laments, Reorientation to Jesus’ Cruciform Love
A Conduit for Sanctification, Evangelization, and Consummation of God’s Kingdom
An Abstract by Myunghee Lee
Throughout history human beings from any social, cultural, and religious backgrounds have practiced laments to the effect that they would process their sorrow derived from injustice, immorality, exploitation, and oppression of any type. In doing so communally, they have appealed to divine or human intervention by means of prayer and song in the hope of the transformation of the society. Psalms of communal lament and protest songs of Korean “Han” exemplify such universal practice of the communal lament with their own specificities. From the theoretical and/or theological overviews of Psalms of lament and Korean “Han” and the analytical studies on five psalms of communal lament and five Korean protest songs, a conclusion is induced: The practice of communal laments, including those from both biblical and non-Christian contexts, will serve as a conduit for the sanctification to Christian community, for the evangelization of the unconverted, and for the consummation of God’s Kingdom through the reorientation to Jesus’ Cruciform love.
As God commands His people to learn to lament, Christians should practice laments with honesty, innocence, and concreteness by reading, praying, singing, and composing laments. Consistently practicing laments shaped in the form of Christ’s three-step salvific lament, orientation — disorientation — reorientation, Christians, faithful to Christ, will be able to align their affect with Christ’s holy affection, His Cruciform love. Practicing laments in the conflicting dynamics between faith in God and adverse experiences in life through three movements — articulating disoriented situations, submitting them, and relinquishing their initiative to God, lamenters will be able to develop the covenantal relationship with God and cultivate Christian virtues. Extending the practice of laments to those from non-Christian contexts with inclusive attitude will reveal that their laments are expressed in a vacuum with no salvific resolution, thereby leading evangelizing endeavors to come into play. Communal lamenters, as innocent victims to social, economic, and political vices and advocates of Kingdom values, will be able to reorient themselves to the eschatological promise, the kingdom of heaven, while encountering the fullness of the passion of Christ, the most sublime lament, by practicing laments with consistency in both centrifugal and centripetal directions.
The preceding was an abstract of a research paper written by Myunghee Lee as a part of MUMIN 7513 Research in Worship History: Old Testament, a Ph.D. Seminar in Worship at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. If this topic interests you, feel free to click the author’s name above and request a copy of the research paper.
