When the Whole Church Mourns

Today's Reading

Read Joel 1:13-2:17 — the prophet Joel calling the whole nation to a corporate fast. "Consecrate a fast; call a solemn assembly. Gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land to the house of the Lord your God, and cry out to the Lord." A locust plague has destroyed the harvest. The prophet does not call for innovation. He calls for assembly, fasting, and tears.

Read 2 Chronicles 20:1-12 — King Jehoshaphat hearing that three armies are advancing on Judah. His response: "Jehoshaphat was afraid and set his face to seek the Lord, and proclaimed a fast throughout all Judah. And Judah assembled to seek help from the Lord; from all the cities of Judah they came to seek the Lord." His prayer in the temple is one of the great corporate laments of the Old Testament, ending with: "We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you."

Read Acts 4:23-31 — the early church, after the apostles have been threatened by the Sanhedrin, gathering and lifting their voices "together" in lament and petition. The whole prayer is a single corporate cry to God, citing Psalm 2, asking for boldness. "And when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken."

Read Nehemiah 9:1-3 — the people of Israel, after the return from exile, "assembled with fasting and in sackcloth, and with earth on their heads," reading the Law and confessing their sins for hours.

Reflection

So far this week we have prayed laments mostly as individuals. Today we step back and notice that, in the Bible, lament is hardly ever just an individual practice. It is mostly corporate. It is what the people of God do together.

Joel 2 is one of the clearest examples. A locust swarm has destroyed the agriculture of an entire region. The prophet does not respond by writing self-help literature for the affected farmers. He calls a national assembly. "Blow the trumpet in Zion; consecrate a fast; call a solemn assembly; gather the people. Consecrate the congregation; assemble the elders; gather the children, even nursing infants. Let the bridegroom leave his room, and the bride her chamber. Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep and say, 'Spare your people, O Lord.'" Notice the radius. Elders and children. Nursing infants. The bridegroom and bride on their wedding night. Everyone. The community grieves as a community. The disaster is theirs together; the prayer is theirs together.

Jehoshaphat does the same. Three armies are coming, and he is — as the text says — afraid. He does not hide that. He proclaims a fast. He gathers the entire population at the temple. He prays a public lament that recites God's history with Israel ("Did you not, our God, drive out the inhabitants of this land before your people Israel..."), describes the present threat, and ends with one of the most disarming sentences in the Old Testament: We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you. That is corporate lament. The king does not pretend to have a strategy. The people do not pretend their fear is a private matter. The whole nation kneels at the temple and admits, together, that they are out of their depth.

Acts 4 shows the early church doing the same thing in a new key. Peter and John have been arrested, threatened, and released. The church responds by gathering, lifting their voices "together" — Luke uses a Greek word for unanimous, single-souled prayer — and pouring out a corporate lament built on Psalm 2. They name the conspiracy of "the kings of the earth" and the rulers gathered against the Lord's anointed. They cite the Scriptures. They ask for boldness. The Holy Spirit responds by shaking the building. The church, when it prays its grief together, is the most dangerous and the most blessed thing in the world.

Nehemiah 9 may be the longest single lament in the Old Testament — sustained for hours, on a single day, with the whole returned remnant standing in sackcloth, hearing the Law read, confessing sin, and tracing the entire history of Israel's failure and God's faithfulness. Notice that the corporate lament includes corporate confession. The people are not just grieving what happened to them. They are grieving what they have been.

Jonathan Edwards, in the middle of the Great Awakening, wrote a long argument for what he called "extraordinary prayer" — the kind of sustained, united, agonizing prayer that he believed was the precursor to every great work of God in history. His title alone is worth reading: An Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God's People in Extraordinary Prayer. Edwards believed that revival follows corporate desperation. "When God intends great mercy for his people, he sets them a-praying." He was reading his Bible carefully when he wrote that. The pattern is everywhere in Scripture: God moves when his people gather and cry out together.

What has happened to this in modern American evangelicalism? Most of our prayer has gone private. Personal devotions. Quiet times. Individual journaling. All of these are good. None of them is the same as a congregation, gathered, in tears, fasting, with the priests weeping between the vestibule and the altar. The category of corporate lament has nearly disappeared from the rhythms of our churches. Some traditions still keep Lent. Some keep Ash Wednesday. Most evangelical churches have nothing at all on the calendar that resembles Joel 2.

This is a loss. And it is felt most keenly by the grieving members of the church.

When tragedy strikes a community — a school shooting, a pandemic, a moral collapse in church leadership, a city in racial pain — believers in that community need somewhere to bring the grief that is bigger than any one of them. Without a corporate lament tradition, the grief gets atomized. Each member processes it alone, on their phone, in their car, in the silence between Sunday songs about how good God is. The church, which should be the body that holds the grief together, instead asks individuals to swallow it privately and show up smiling.

Tim Keller, who pastored in lower Manhattan through 9/11 and through more than one decade of public crises, taught his church the practice of city lament. He believed that to love a place was to learn to weep over it — like Jesus weeping over Jerusalem, like Nehemiah weeping over a city he had not yet seen, like the prophets weeping for nations they served. The city is a furnace, Keller said, where God's people learn to weep over a place rather than just at a place. A church that loves its city will lament for its city. That lament will be public, communal, and unhurried.

What might this look like in practice? It might look like a Sunday a year set aside as a corporate day of fasting and lament. It might look like one prayer meeting a month dedicated to praying through a lament psalm aloud, together, by name, for your city. It might look like building a few minutes of corporate confession and grief into the weekly liturgy — not as a guilt trip, but as honest space. It might look like the elders gathering, when a tragedy strikes, and modeling for the congregation what it sounds like to bring shared grief to God in shared prayer.

The early church shook a building this way. Jehoshaphat watched three armies destroy themselves the next day this way. The locust-ravaged Judah saw rain return this way. The pattern in Scripture is consistent: corporate lament is one of the things God uses to reset whole communities.

The modern church has nearly forgotten this. The Bible has not. The Holy Spirit, who has prayed with the gathered church for two thousand years, has not. The recovery is available. It only requires the courage to gather, the humility to grieve aloud together, and the faith that the God of Joel and Jehoshaphat and Acts 4 is the same God who hears his church today.

Going Deeper

Talk to your pastor or small group leader this week. Ask: when was the last time our church grieved something together? Could we set aside an evening — one evening — to read Joel 2, pray for our city, and hold a small corporate fast? Start small. The locusts in Joel were small too, and they brought down a kingdom; the prayer that answered them brought down rain.