As Promised
Lamentations of Jeremiah 1:1-6, 3:19-26
How lonely sits the city
that once was full of people!
How like a widow she has become,
she that was great among the nations!
She that was a princess among the provinces
has become a vassal.
She weeps bitterly in the night,
with tears on her cheeks;
among all her lovers
she has no one to comfort her;
all her friends have dealt treacherously with her,
they have become her enemies.
Judah has gone into exile with suffering
and hard servitude;
she lives now among the nations,
and finds no resting-place;
her pursuers have all overtaken her
in the midst of her distress.
The roads to Zion mourn,
for no one comes to the festivals;
all her gates are desolate,
her priests groan;
her young girls grieve,
and her lot is bitter.
Her foes have become the masters,
her enemies prosper,
because the Lord has made her suffer
for the multitude of her transgressions;
her children have gone away,
captives before the foe.
From daughter Zion has departed
all her majesty.
Her princes have become like stags
that find no pasture;
they fled without strength
before the pursuer.
The thought of my affliction and my homelessness
is wormwood and gall!
My soul continually thinks of it
and is bowed down within me.
But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
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.’
The Lord is good to those who wait for him,
to the soul that seeks him.
It is good that one should wait quietly
for the salvation of the Lord.
I just saw folk-country musician I really love in Cambridge this past Thursday, Willi Carlisle; he has a beautiful song that begins and ends with the lyric “This morning a miracle happened as promised / The rising of the world’s closest star.” I thought of this lyric when I got to chapter 3, verses 22 and 23—“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, / his mercies never come to an end; / they are new every morning…”.
So the last verses of this passage are hopeful, but the first part— oof. The book of Lamentations is ascribed to Jeremiah, but the actual authorship is unknown; nevertheless, this first part of what Carol read for us today is right in line with the rest of Jeremiah’s weeping and mourning. It’s right in line with his constant mournful disbelief of the destruction of his promised land, even though it was prophesied. Remember from a couple weeks ago—the only way out his through, and we have to get through all this weeping and wailing before we can get to the good stuff. You’re probably sick of all this weeping and wailing, all this destruction and despair, right? I know, I am too! It’s kind of draining writing about this stuff every week, I ask myself every Monday, oh my God why did I decide to do Jeremiah and Lamentations, what is wrong with me? But here’s the thing—this whole sermon series on Jeremiah and Lamentations—it’s a lesson in patience… which also means it’s a lesson in hope. And I say this because hope in the context of today’s scripture is almost interchangeable with the concept of patience, and with the action of waiting.
And hope is such a beautiful word! It’s what we have when all else fails, it’s what stops us from giving up, it’s what buoys and sustains us in difficult times. But remember last week I quoted from the theologian R.E. Clements: “Genuinely God-given hope is [not just] an inner psychological confidence that ‘all will be well.’” Because I don’t know about you all, but I can’t just think that all will be well and be filled with hope. I can’t just take a deep breath and think that everything is gonna be okay when it sometimes feels like the world is crashing down around us. This, Church, is because hope takes work.
Thinking about hope in this way got me thinking of Christian theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous and groundbreaking concept of cheap grace. “Cheap grace,” says, Bonhoeffer, “means grace sold on the market like the cheap wares of a bargain husker… Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system.” So it’s this concept of grace that doesn’t actually take work or sacrifice. It’s the idea of grace that is nothing but a by-the-numbers system, grace acted out in some rote rituals you don’t really think about— and is therefore meaningless. He goes on to explain cheap grace’s opposite: “Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a person must knock.” I think the same goes for hope in this context—it’s something we have to work for for it to have any meaning. It’s something we have to be very intentional about, and something that we have to be very patient with.
And listen— this world doesn’t leave much time for patience. Therefore, world doesn’t leave much room for hope. There’s a darkly funny lyric from the 1977 Talking Heads song “No Compassion:” “They say compassion is a virtue / but I don’t have the time.” Sadly, this lyric seems to be true for a lot of people. There’s just no time to care about other people, there’s barely any time to care for ourselves. We’re stretched too thin, we’re worn down, we’re burning out. Who has time for compassion, for hope, when we have deadlines, when we have to drive to kids’ various sports, when we have to budget our fuel for this Winter? Truly, who has the time? Who has the emotional capacity? This lack of time we have, this isn’t an accident, this is by design. No, I’m not saying your kid’s soccer coach is in on some vast conspiracy; what I am saying is that we live under a system that commodifies your time; this is a world that that values your work productivity, the money you make for others, above all else, this is a world that, as I talked about in my Labor Day sermon about a month ago, will try to squeeze every last bit of energy and time out of you, so that the status-quo remains, so that there is no time to take the rich down a peg, no time to work together for a better system that benefits all people, no time to care about the invisible people struggling like to get by while many of us are struggling ourselves in our own ways. If we go by today’s scripture passage, and hoping and patience and waiting are almost synonymous, we’re in rough shape, because we just don’t have the time.
Let’s look at verses 25 and 26 here, and let’s replace the words wait with hope, which we can, according to Hebrew scholars— “The Lord is good to those who hope for him, / to the soul that seeks him. / It is good that one should hope quietly / for the salvation of the Lord.” And let’s also remember what Bonhoeffer said about real grace—it’s the “gospel that must be sought again and again…”. It seems a little contradictory, right? It is good to hope or wait quietly, and yet we must actively seek God. Grace must be actively sought. But quietly doesn’t necessarily mean passively. Because waiting does not have to be passive. Waiting is an action. Hoping is an action. Honestly, this congregation, with all of your quiet, humble, stoic New England sensibilities, you all show this quiet, but active waiting and working for better world so well—continuing to work to keep this community together after the siege of covid, as the capital C-church is dying. You’re not sitting passively waiting for it to end, just waiting to see what’s next—you’re quietly and patiently working to figure out a better way for us to be the church in the world. I had a conversation with one of your recently, and we were talking about church attendance, church in general, what it looks like now, what’s changed in the past two, three years, and questions abound— is this just how it is now? Will we just flail forever trying to discern what our relevance is in a world that has been changed by the pandemic, in a world where church membership is declining every day? I don’t fully know what a relevant church looks like today, but I do know that you’re all being incredibly patient and open-minded with one another, with me, with this community as we figure it out together. And I also know that that patience and that work also means that you all have hope—that you have hope in one another, in this community, in God’s plan, in God’s new covenant.
“The thought of my affliction and my homelessness / is wormwood and gall! / My soul continually thinks of it / and it is bowed down within me. / This I call to mind, / and therefore I have hope…”. So in verse 21, the Bible translation we generally use for our readings, the NRSV adds a “but” before “This I call to mind.” That “but” isn’t actually in there, for some reason the translators thought it would make more sense—but it’s so much more powerful without the “but”—because it means the writer isn’t saying ‘Even though all this bad stuff has happened, I still have hope;” rather, he’s saying “Of course I have hope when I think of my afflictions, when I think of all these horrible things.” Because the only way out is through, the only way to get to the good is through the bad. The overall theme of the Book of Lamentations is that we lament the old ways, we lament what has been lost, and we look forward to what is coming—we look forward to the new. We hope. We wait. We work.
And so this writer is mourning the loss of the promised land, he’s grieving the horrors of war, he’s thinking of all his afflictions, his loss of his home, and yet—he sees that “the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, / [that God’s] mercies never come to an end; / [that] they are new every morning.” Which brings me back to that song lyric “This morning a miracle happened as promised / the rising of the world’s closest star.” I wonder if we can learn something from this—I wonder if we can use this as a strategy or as a guideline to remain active, to remain hopeful in such a cruel world—I wonder if, regardless of how dire or hopeless things sometimes seem, I wonder if regardless of how little time this world gives us for hoping and waiting, I wonder if every morning we can recognize that this miracle happened as promised. That the sun has risen, the world is still spinning, and therefore there are new mercies to be found and felt every day.
The powers that be want to keep you down—they want to keep you too tired to practice compassion, too tired to be hopeful. They want to chip away at every minute of your free time so that you’re not left with any time to wait, to work or to hope. A couple years ago, I preached a sermon for our combined Thanksgiving service about the celebrations that erupted in Philadelphia after the long awaited results of the 2020 election were announced; as it turned out, many of these celebrations were planned— they were planned because people expected this battleground state, this contested and divided place to erupt in violence regardless of what the results were; and so community organizers they planned these acts of joy because, as Philly pastor Nicolas O’Rourke was quoted as saying, “When there’s so much hate and so much resistance to truth and justice, joy itself is an act of resistance.”
Now, as some of you know, I’m a new dog owner, and I learned the other day that a dog’s gaze can actually reset your nervous system a bit when you’re in a bad place—it releases oxytocin and begins a really calming positive feedback loop. And I’m telling you this because this is a small and simple way to find joy and hope in a world that doesn’t want you to hope. Because as always, so we don’t get overwhelmed, we start small. When it feels like we’re out of time, when it feels like we only have the energy or the capacity to worry, when we become paralyzed by fear, by anxiety thanks to cruel economic conditions, violence here and abroad, look into your dog’s eyes. If you don’t have a pet, take some solace in the simple fact that the sun rose this morning. We can look out our windows and take in the beauty of autumn. It all sounds so simple, but these small actions take work in a world that does not want to give you the time. These small actions take intention in a world that doesn’t want you to have time to hope.
So I hope we remember that these difficult and uncertain times, with patience, and intention, and hard work, will lead to better days; and in the midst of this work, I hope we can take the time to find joy and find hope in small moments every day; and I hope that can motivate us to work for a world in which we no longer have to work so hard to find that hope, to work for a world where we truly do have the time to care for one another; where we have the time to not just survive, but to thrive and to be safe and comfortable and loved. To get us started on that path, let’s remember that this morning a miracle happened as promised—the rising of the world’s closest star. And that God’s mercies never end; they are new every morning. Amen.
