Proper 21, Year C, Old Testament
Scripture: Lamentations 1:1-6
This week our Old Testament passage takes us back in time to a period of tremendous grief and devastation. Lamentations was written following the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE as a series of five poems. Lamentations is a sort of survivors’ therapy – the author is working out the horror, sadness, and grief experienced through the trauma of the destruction in beautiful and illustrative acrostic poetry. Our portion of the passage today is the very beginning of the poem. The author writes in the third person and uses the image of a woman to portray the city of Jerusalem. The challenge of this scripture when using it in the classroom is to allow the poem to speak honestly to the children without losing the hope we know as Christians.