While we all have different ways to grieve, grieve we must when loss arrives. We tend to embrace a "sad is bad" worldview when grief and lament are ways God wired us for healing and reliance on Him.
I learned the lesson quickly.
When I served on staff as a music minister, my pastors would always tell me to start the service with “something peppy” (or some variation on that theme).
When I preached on the Lord’s Supper and leaned into the truths found in 1 Corinthians 11:26-34 about approaching the Table in a worthy manner, else one would suffer the consequences, a deacon approached me advising me to not be so “down” when talking about the Supper.
When a friend of mine died of suicide, the family could not understand why, a mere three weeks after this devastating act, the wife was still struggling. “It’s been three weeks, after all! Why is she still having a hard time?”
Our Baptist tradition has lost the ability (and the desire) to lament: lament over sin, lament over death, lament over the brokenness of the world.
Lament.
Have we forgotten that Jesus lamented the death of Lazarus (John 11:17-37)? He wept over the sin and brokenness in the world He created and that took his friend (John 11:35). While we praise God that He is the resurrection and the life (John 11:25-26), this does not remove for Jesus or for us the ability to grieve.
The Psalms are laced with lament (Psalm 6:3; 130:1; 88). In fact, Psalm 88 is a psalm with no resolution. All other laments find their resolve in God’s presence and justice, yet Psalm 88 keeps the reader in the sadness of the psalmist.
Over the next two weeks, I will officiate four funerals. I understand the tendency for many to call them “celebrations of life.” Yet, may we have a piece in there—a significant piece—where we see the need to lament and grieve. That’s how God wired us, reflecting on the brokenness of the world even as we find comfort in the one who overcame the world (John 16:33). We must do both.
(The GotQuestions.org site has an excellent article on lament.)