Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Last week’s Old Testament lesson placed us in the dust with
Job as he argued his innocence and cried out to God, “Why?” We spoke about the
challenge of sitting with someone who is hurting, grieving, struggling, and
being silent while waiting for the Lord’s timing to speak, and then to speak
with what we know of God’s grace and mercy, even in spite of what we see.
If last week we were taught how to sit with someone in their
grief and sadness, today’s Old Testament reading from Lamentations teaches us
how to lament.
I suspect most are not terribly familiar with the book of
Lamentations. If you’ve ever read the book, you might understand why. If you’ve
not read the book, the name itself, Lamentations, gives you a clue to its
content with its root word, lament. A lament is a verbal description of
suffering, affliction, and humiliation. It’s not whining, complaining just for
the sake of complaining. It’s stating what is true. Lamentations describes that
pain, no matter when or where it strikes. Simple examples are, “I am hurting,” “I
am sad,” “This situation is causing me terrible anxiety.” A lament is not
always a request for its removal; sometimes it’s a catharsis, an emotional dump,
pouring out the pain of the soul.
Lamentations is a tough, tough book to read and preach
because it’s a book of lament. We don't like laments. We don't deal well with
laments. We don’t like hearing them, we don’t like reading them, we might like
watching them on TV, but only if the actors are attractive. But then, sometimes
the movies get it right. In the movie The Princess Bride, when
questioned by the mysterious Man in Black about the death of her fiancée, the
Princess exclaimed, “You mock my pain!” Immediately, the Man in Black snapped,
“Life is pain, highness.”[1]
We would rather do almost anything than have to sit with someone who laments. I
think that was the biggest part of Job’s three friends. And, if we’re honest,
the same is true for us, at times, as well.
If you didn’t read Job last week, then tackle Lamentations
this week. It’s much shorter – just five chapters. Read these Spirit-inspired
words for God’s people and you discover this truth: suffering, and the
Christian’s cries and prayers to God in the midst of that suffering, have no
time constraints, because pain – emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual pain;
pain for the self, pain for family, pain for the world in which we live – has
no limit in breadth, width, depth or time. God’s people hurt – you hurt,
often in secret, often alone because you don’t want to trouble anyone, because you
don’t want to appear weak, because you are afraid to be that vulnerable to
others. Others lament loudly and openly, both to those around us and to God.
You hear it in the voice of Jeremiah, the Lamenter, as he
returns to Jerusalem. “How lonely sits the city that was full of people! How
like a widow she has become, she who was great among the nations! She who was a
princess among the provinces has become a slave,” (1:1). The beauty of the
city, the majesty of the city of David, the glory of the Temple of God was all
gone and the people – God’s people, the people of Israel, the sons and
daughters of Abraham – exiled into servitude. And Jeremiah laments.
But it’s not a mystery as to why this all happened. Jeremiah
knows – even the people know! This has happened because of Israel’s unfaithfulness
to God. “Jerusalem sinned grievously; therefore she became filthy…” (1:8a). The
Lord had been gracious, holding back His own anger against His people, patiently
calling them to repentance again and again through the mouths of the prophets. There
were times of repentance and renewal, times of faithfulness, but then the
pendulum would swing back, a little further each time, until the Lord declared
it was enough.
And, make no mistake, it was the Lord who did this. “The
Lord has afflicted her,” (1:5) Jeremiah said. We might not be comfortable with
such language, that God caused an affliction, a punishment upon His people; we
prefer to say God is passive in punishment, that He allowed it to happen. He
makes no bones about it, that the Lord has brought about this suffering, chaos
and destruction. The fire, the destruction, the death – He caused it all,
giving Israel what was deserved for her sins.
You can almost imagine Jeremiah wandering through the city,
walking through the once-proud walls, stepping over rubble, strewn pieces of
pottery and long-dead fires, passing by skeletons left to be buried by the dust
of the air because no one was there to cover them. He personifies the city: “Zion
stretches out her hand,” he laments, “but there is none there to comfort her,”
(1:17). And, then he comes to the high point of Jerusalem, to the pinnacle of
Mount Zion where the Temple stood, the sacred Holy of Holies stands, ripped
open and desecrated, the presence of God long since departed. “The Lord has
become like an enemy; he has swallowed up Israel; he has swallowed up all its
palaces; he has laid in ruins its strongholds, and he has multiplied in the
daughter of Judah mourning and lamentation. He has laid waste his booth like a
garden, laid in ruins his meeting place; the Lord has made Zion forget festival
and Sabbath, and in his fierce indignation has spurned king and priest. The
Lord has scorned his altar, disowned his sanctuary…” (2:5-6).
And, as Jeremiah turns and looks down the streets, and as he
smells and hears and touches and even tastes the destruction in the air,
Jeremiah laments, “Look, O Lord, and see!... In the dust of the streets lie the
young and the old; my young women and my young men have fallen by the sword;
you have killed them in the day of your anger, slaughtered them without pity,”
(2:20a, 21b).
Most of us are of Germanic or Czech roots. We are
notoriously stoic with upper lips that have been stiffened by generations of European
and American stoicism. So, do yourself a favor. When you read Lamentations –
and, again, I encourage you to do so; it’s so important that the Holy Spirit
saw fit to include it’s brief 5 chapters in the Sacred Scriptures – when you
read Lamentations, do it slowly. Do it deliberately. In fact, read it out loud,
mumble it if you have to, without worrying what others might think, because
that’s how ancient Hebrew poetry was meant to be utilized: out loud, so the words
could be fully experienced, the feelings emoted, the pain and the grief they
carry delivered to the soul.
I used to tell people who were struggling and suffering to
NOT read Lamentations – they needed to read something more joyful, like the Gospel
of John, or the book of Phillippians. I don’t do that anymore. I tell people
who are wrestling with the hardness of life to read Lamentations, because it teaches
us how to lament faithfully, as people of God. Wait, you say, we know how to lament;
we do it all the time. But, do we? Conventional wisdom teaches us that lamenting
is all about woe is me. We’re good at
wailing, whining, hollering, carrying on and pitching a fit to gain attention.
But the object of this is often the unholy trinity of me, myself and I. The
world’s idea of lamenting turns us inward, to try to find answers to our grief
from within. But, if we look to ourselves in the depths of despair, our
strength is about like sand in the water or dandelion puffballs in the wind:
worthless, meaningless, hope-less. If my faith is based on my faith, and my
faith is fading fast, that is not of much value. Even Jeremiah agrees: “My
endurance has perished; so has my hope from the Lord.”
So, Jeremiah, with his Lamentations, he teaches us how to
have hope in the midst of our afflictions, our suffering, our humility. Instead of pointing
at me, myself and I for the answers to our sorrows, Jeremiah the Lamenter
points us to God and to His promises. He laments to God, “Remember my
affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall. My soul continually
remembers it and is bowed down within me, but this I call to mind, and
therefore I have hope…” (3:19-21), and then he speaks the words of our text.
Open your bulletin; look at these words with me, look where
hope is placed. Look at the words:
steadfast love – whose love? The Lord’s! - it never ceases; mercies – whose
mercies? The Lord’s - that never end; His mercies are renewed every morning;
great is your faithfulness. Our translation next reads, “The Lord is my
portion.” A better way to understand that is “The Lord is my everything.” The
Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul who seeks Him. It is good
that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. Over and over,
Jeremiah points to God, turning, returning to God and what He knows of God and
His goodness. The Lord may have caused this to happen to Israel, yet Israel’s
hope is in none other than God and His love for His people.
Again, St. Paul will say that suffering produces character,
and character produces hope. God uses suffering to purify His people, to restore
His people, for His purpose. In suffering, everything else is stripped away,
except Jesus. Christ is brought into sharp focus. Christ gives hope. That is
the only hope. To have that hope in the midst of that kind of loss, when you’re
wandering through the rubble, stepping over corpses, remembering what was and
seeing what is, to have that hope takes faith of incredible proportions.
For Jeremiah, and the ones returning from Exile, it would be
faith in the promises of God to come, even while standing among a destroyed
city. Israel would have to wait, raising their lamentations for the salvation
of the Lord. You and I, we sit, too: in our homes, in hospitals; sometimes in
the office of a banker, or lawyer, or doctor; sometimes in a crowd but often in
solitude; at the grave of a dearly departed, and we offer our laments. Don’t
just cry out “woe is me,” and focus on your misery. Ground your lament in the
hope of the One who not only hears, but who bore the laments of the world upon
Himself. Jesus would sit alone in near silence, speaking only seven times from
the cross, as the sins which caused the laments of the world were placed upon
Him. He was whipped, beaten, and insulted, and exiled, He bore the wormwood on His
shoulders and sipped gall from a raised hyssop branch while separated from His
own Father. We hear our Lord’s own lament beginning in the Garden, “Father, if
it is possible, take this cup from me,” culminating with “Ali, Ali, lamma
sabacthani – My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
And, the Lord, “The Lord will not cast off forever,” (3:31).
“It is finished,” remember? On the third day, the One who was cast off, cast
down, and cast away was raised to life by the Father who once rejected Him.
And, in accepting that sacrifice, and in giving His only begotten Son life
again, we have hope, hope for life – life now, even in our laments, and life
into eternity when we will lament no more. Jeremiah teaches us to lament, in
hope, through faith in Christ Jesus who lamented for us and in whom we rejoice.
“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies
never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him”
(3:22-24). Those words, once spoken by a prophet in lament over a destroyed
city, are now spoken by us. Those words and promises ground our life in times
of lament, they form our worship with joy, they locate our witness to a world
that does not understand, and they direct our hope, through faith, in Christ.
And they remind us how good it is to wait quietly for the salvation of the
Lord. Amen.
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