Richard Davenport
June 30, 2024 – Proper 8
Lamentations 3:22-33
I don’t know if it has been slow news over the last few weeks, or perhaps it’s a difference in how news gets delivered, or perhaps it’s that these things really didn’t happen as much as they used to and this is all a sign that the world is nearing the end and Christ’s return really is just over the horizon. Whatever it is, I feel like there have been a lot more natural disasters over the last couple of years, and even more so over the last several weeks. Tornados are just everywhere, tearing everything up and destroying. Towns leveled. People dying. Entire lives and livelihoods just wiped off the map.
I know these things have always happened to one extent or another. It’s been a while since we had one of the really bad hurricanes bulldozing through Texas, so we thank God for that. Still, I wonder why it feels like it’s all through the news lately.
You sit and watch the footage of the devastation and wonder what that would be like. You stand there at the edge of the wreckage and see everything you owned now flattened and scattered across town. Maybe you lost someone in the storm too. Maybe you lost everyone.
What do you do with that kind of loss? I’ve never had the prospect of having to rebuild from nothing. I can only imagine the emotions that must be going on through all of that. It’s those kinds of situations that lead people to despair, to seeing everything as futile and ultimately pointless. Why build a life if it’s just going to be flattened? Why have a family if they’re all just going to be whisked away in an instant? Why trust in God if he allows these kinds of things to happen, or worse, actively sends them at you?
These are all reasonable questions. What really is the point if this is where it all ends up? Of course, you don’t have to have completely lost everything to still encounter disasters of one sort or another. You still find situations where everything you’ve worked for, everything you’ve counted on suddenly is taken from you. You’ll have to uproot your life and start over from nothing, or at least close to it.
The book of Lamentations is written by someone who speaks on behalf of the people. He speaks on behalf of the nation, what’s left of it at any rate. The land has been overrun, conquered by a pagan nation. Jerusalem, the pride and joy of the nation, was conquered and in ruins. King Nebuchadnezzar had carted off all of its treasures and all of its people. Israel had been reduced to nothing but a ragged band of exiles.
This whole situation had some unique circumstances. Unlike many of the big problems that can sometimes afflict us, wars, natural disasters, plagues, and so forth, their conquest at the hands of the Babylonians had a very specific reason attached to it. The people had forsaken their covenant with God. They had signed their name to the agreement and then had broken the agreement. Breaking the covenant carried penalties. God had been trying to dissuade them for quite some time, to bring them back, so that everything could again be as it should be, but to no avail. Now it had all been taken away from them.
They didn’t have a right to complain about it, but that didn’t mean they weren’t going to do that anyway. It’s been kind of a hallmark of Israelite life to complain about things, all sorts of things. It was their tendency to jump right to despair even though life hadn’t actually gotten that bad.
Though the Babylonian exile wasn’t intended to drive them to despair, that’s certainly where they could have ended up. We aren’t generally given the luxury of knowing exactly why some disaster has struck. When a fire burns your house down, a terrible disease takes a loved one, a tornado takes off with all of your worldly possessions, you probably aren’t going to have an angel explain why you in particular were the recipient of this disaster. There probably won’t be any vision from heaven laying out all of the sins that led you to that point. Much like Job, it will just be a thing that happened and you’ll never really know why.
It would be a very strange person who could look at that sort of destruction and just shrug his shoulders. “Easy come, easy go.” I know Job said something similar toward the beginning of his book, but that sentiment didn’t last. Pretty soon he was accusing God of gross injustices toward him. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect. It’s the kind of thing that would probably cross your own mind in his situation.
Have you been there? Have you been brought down into the dust? Even if you haven’t experienced the kind of loss Job did, or that the Israelites have, loss of all sorts is just a part of life. You might not have lost everyone in your family, but even one death is tragic, even one can change your whole life, a terrible car accident, an illness or injury that perhaps isn’t fatal but still requires a long treatment and recovery period, a lost job, a forced transition that you didn’t plan for.
Any of these things can be enough to cause you to question. Any could be cause for despair. Watching some significant portion of your life, your time, your memories, your love, all end in ruins, is sure to get you thinking, is sure to make you wonder. Why? Why me?
All of us are prone to playing the blame game. It’s the first thing humans did when life got off track. Pointing fingers, accusations, drawing unfounded conclusions, all things that add up one right after the other. Eventually that all gets back to what must be the root of the problem, the Creator Himself, who created us and the world and everything in it.
The author of Lamentations gives voice to all those who suffer. There is sadness. There is grief. But there is no despair. Instead of despair, there is praise and trust. Instead of hopelessness, there is the awareness that God is still present and still acting on behalf of his people. Instead of seeing everything as darkness and gloom, they see how God’s love is stronger and that it will reveal itself in the end.
We fall into gloom, despair, and misery, not because God puts us there, but because we allow ourselves to succumb to it. The feeling that the world and all of the evils in it will win, that we will never be free from it, that nothing can save us from it, and that we are doomed. If we come to think that God cannot save us, then we are lost. Not because he is powerless, or because he doesn’t love us, but because we have told him to leave us alone, to not even try, because we have told him that nothing he does will amount to anything.
The Israelites who cry out in Lamentations are sad. The reasons for their grief are evident all around them. No one downplays that. No one tells them to just grin through the pain. No one says their sadness isn’t real. It is very real and very understandable. Their lives have been turned upside down. Their sadness makes sense. Their response, well, that’s a little different.
In spite of their grief, their response isn’t to hurl accusations at God or to decry the injustice of it all, claiming to be the victims of divine malpractice. Instead, they praise God. They praise him for his goodness, his mercy, and his love. Though everything in their life may be fallen down around them, God is still there and has not abandoned them. He is still walking right beside them and will continue to do so no matter what might be going on in their lives.
It’s a testament to God’s love that the thing we accuse him of doing so often is the very thing we never have to experience. We will never be separated from God. Jesus already took that on himself. Hanging on the cross, all of the pain and loneliness he felt gave voice to the words that often come to our minds, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus takes that, the end result of our sin and carries it himself. He took that separation, that isolation, that loneliness, that grief, all so that you would never have to know what it feels like.
Even in the midst of these terrible tragedies, we need God’s grace, all the more because we are tempted to think God doesn’t love us at all and wants us to suffer. But his love and grace are such that he doesn’t leave us, even though we accuse him and malign him, even though we treat him as if he has left us.
Christ comes and fulfills his mission just this will never happen. God forgives you on account of Christ, wiping your sins away so that you will never be barred from God’s presence. All of the worst things you can imagine have already been done…to Jesus. Jesus has felt and experienced everything you’re going through and more, even death. All of it has been overcome. All of this done to show you can nothing you face now is beyond God’s power to overcome and that he can and will do so. What that might look like in that moment isn’t given for us to know. But we know with certainty where our lives will eventually end up. Our place in God’s kingdom is assured and none of the sorrow of this life will follow us.
The Israelites of Lamentations are in a bad place and living through hard times, hard times that won’t get better anytime soon. Many of those who go into exile will die there in Babylon. Still, they praise God. His promise to love them never fails. His grace is certain. His presence is eternal.
Praise him for his grace. Praise him for the love that would cause him to send his Son to take on everything you are facing and more. Praise him for overcoming all of it. Praise him for joining you to the life of his Son through baptism, so that he will carry you through everything you face. Praise him for washing you clean, so that you may find peace with him in his kingdom. Praise him, now and always, because he calls you his own in baptism, and he promised never, ever, to leave you nor forsake you.