This week, I saw an ad on the internet from an antiques dealer selling a lachrymatory — a “tear catcher” — supposedly from the first century CE.

Tear catchers, I learned, were small glass bottles with long stems and a wide mouth, designed to catch human tears, and were then left at burial sites in Ancient Judea as a sign of respect and love for the departed.  

It’s troubling to think of such an object as something for sale, particularly because the sacred mysteries of grief and memory, letting go and holding on, seem far too precious to be traded, even when the tears are not our own. 

It feels as if, in a deeper sense, they should be ours, too. 

Along those lines, all of this week’s lectionary readings remind us that practices of lament are an important part of faithful witness. 

Maybe that’s Scripture’s way of teaching us how to remember that while time may evaporate tears, our work under God is to dry them. 

First of all, by bringing them to God.  

Habbakuk says: “I will stand at my watchpost and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what he will say to me, and what he will answer concerning my complaint” (Habbakuk 2:1). 

Meanwhile in Luke, when the apostles ask for their faith to be increased, Jesus speaks sternly about mustard seeds and the danger of entitled expectations—ways even the most religiously punctilious can seek to avoid wrestling with the questions that heartbreak and injustice push us to lift up.  

The psalmist writes from a place in which grief and injustice, and questions about where God might be in the midst of it, can’t be denied.  

It is a bold reminder that God is so often to be found precisely where the easy answers and the lukewarm affirmations cease.   

This is the place where the Real, “full of grace and truth,” must finally arrive.