Sermon by Pastor Mike Buttonnn

The Power of Grief
The Book of Lamentations

NRS Lamentations 3
²²The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end;
²³they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
²⁴ "The LORD is my portion," says my soul, "therefore I will hope in him."
²⁵ The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him.
²⁶It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.
²⁷It is good for one to bear the yoke in youth,
²⁸to sit alone in silence when the Lord has imposed it,
²⁹to put one's mouth to the dust (there may yet be hope),
³⁰to give one's cheek to the smiter, and be filled with insults.
³¹For the Lord will not reject forever.
³²Although he causes grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love;
³³for he does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone.

 

 Sisters and Brothers in Christ, may the Lord comfort your hearts and establish your faith in the Son who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen.

My mother worked hard to feed us a good, balanced diet. She knew what we liked, and when serving something that she knew wasn’t one of our favorites, she’d try to prepare it in a way that we would enjoy. But still there were a few times when I found things on my plate that I had a hard time swallowing, like brusselsprouts. Now I know there are some of you here this morning who are thinking, “What! You don’t like brusselsprouts?” It’s nothing personal. I hold no hard feelings against the vegetable per se, but when I was 8-years old, I don’t know. Maybe it was the name, or the way it looked or smelled, or something, but no, I just couldn’t. We didn’t have brusselsprouts often, praise God, but when we did, mom would put one on my plate and would say that was all I had to eat, just that one. I’d roll it around with my fork, hide it under the rice and gravy, and once even tried to feed it to the cat, but no dice. My mom would then start to cajole me, as in, “Try it, you’ll like it. It’s good for you.” My dad would chime in and say something like, “You know, Superman eats brusselsprouts. It’ll give you x-ray vision.” But no, uh-huh, I wasn’t buying, and that’s when mom would pull out the big guns, “Take a bite or you can’t go out to play.” I’d eat poison to go out and play, even a brusselsprout.

The people who put together our schedule of Sunday readings, called the lectionary, also try to feed us a good, balanced diet of Scripture. The lectionary’s goal is that over a three-year cycle, we’d hear, if not the whole Bible, then the whole range of Scripture. So every Sunday we hear a reading from one of the gospels, a companion reading from another New Testament book, often from the Apostle Paul, a psalm, and an Old Testament reading that typically reflects the theme of that day’s gospel. If you were to be in church every Sunday over the three-year lectionary cycle, you’d hear major sections of all four gospels, readings from every New Testament letter, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Book of Revelation, and big chunks of Old Testament, mainly drawn from Jesus’ favorite books, primarily Genesis, Deuteronomy, and the prophets, especially Isaiah. But like when we were kids at our parents’ tables, we occasionally find something on our Sunday spiritual plate of readings that’s, well, kind of hard to swallow. Today is one of those days. In the three-year cycle of lectionary readings, this is the only Sunday you’ll hear a reading from the Book of Lamentations. Why do you think that is?

Lamentations is kind of the brusselsprout of the Bible. As its name suggests, the Book of Lamentations is not an easy read. It is, for one, almost unremittingly grim. The lectionary committee that selected this morning’s lesson has lifted up what is probably the only passage in Lamentations that might actually qualify as uplifting. But otherwise, Lamentations, though only five chapters long, is a really hard read, particularly if you read it from beginning to end in one sitting. That’s because those five chapters are actually five psalms of lament, each decrying the destruction of Jerusalem.

In the year 587 B.C., after a long and deadly siege, the armies of Babylon breached the walls of Jerusalem, devastating the Temple and slaughtering key leaders who hadn’t already starved to death during the siege.  Ten years earlier Babylon had reduced the Kingdom of Judah to a vassal state in the Babylonian Empire, deporting most of Jerusalem’s elite to detention centers in the distant land of what is now Iraq.  When the remaining Judeans, under the feckless leadership of Zedekiah, attempted to overthrow their Babylonian overlords, the result was beyond catastrophic.  In merciless detail Lamentations recounts the utter devastation of Jerusalem – their seat of worship destroyed, their priests murdered, their prophets disgraced, their children dead or dying from starvation.  I quote:

My eyes are spent with weeping; my stomach churns;
my bile is poured out on the ground because of the destruction of my people,
because infants and babes faint in the streets of the city.
They cry to their mothers, "Where is bread and wine?"
as they faint like the wounded
in the streets of the city, as their life is poured
out on their mothers' bosom.  (Lamentations 2:11-12)

And that’s by no means the grimmest of the many grim descriptions of Jerusalem’s desolation. These scenes of death and destruction might by themselves put Lamentations in the same category as brusselsprouts, castor oil, and prune juice. But even more problematic, I think, is the theology that informs these heart-wrenching laments. In verse after verse, Lamentations insists, proclaims, and in some ways, even exults that God is the author of this ruin. Lamentations never even mentions Babylon, but over and over again, each of the five laments adamantly maintains that God has destroyed Jerusalem, God has toppled her Temple, God has burned her homes, and God has wiped out her people. Quoting from chapter 2:

The Lord has destroyed without mercy all the dwellings of Jacob;
in his wrath he has broken down the strongholds of daughter Judah;
he has brought down to the ground in dishonor the kingdom and its rulers.
He has cut down in fierce anger all the might of Israel;
he has withdrawn his right hand from them in the face of the enemy;
he has burned like a flaming fire in Jacob,
consuming all around.  He has bent his bow like an enemy,
with his right hand set like a foe;
he has killed all in whom we took pride in the tent of daughter Zion;
he has poured out his fury like fire.
The Lord has become like an enemy;
he has destroyed Israel;
He has destroyed all its palaces, laid in ruins its strongholds,
and multiplied in daughter Judah mourning and lamentation. (2:2-5)

 

To those of us who believe in a loving God of infinite mercy, these words seem to confirm our deep suspicions that the Old Testament is, after all, sub-Christian and more concerned with punishment than redemption.  But really, nothing could be further from the truth.  While Lamentations is, I admit, notoriously hard to swallow and difficult to read, it is also, like the brusselsprout on the 8-year old’s plate, something that’s finally good for us and our faith walk, even if we only nibble at it.  Let me explain. 

In the ancient world war was a test, but not just a test of who had the  bigger or better army.  War was also a test of who had the stronger god.  When a people went to war, their god went with them, as is amply attested throughout the Bible.  When on the banks of the Red Sea the children of Israel rejoiced in their victory over the Pharaoh, they sang,

The LORD is a warrior;
[literally, “a man of war”]
the LORD [Yahweh] is his name.
"Pharaoh's chariots and his army he cast into the sea;
his picked officers were sunk in the Red Sea.
The floods covered them;
they went down into the depths like a stone.
Your right hand, O LORD, glorious in power—
your right hand, O LORD, shattered the enemy.  (Exodus 15:3-6)

In like manner, when one of the disciples drew his sword to keep Jesus from being arrested, Jesus restrained him, asking, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 12:53).  Jesus, in effect, is saying, “My father has shock troops that could mop the floor with these Roman legions.”   So, naturally, in war, victory was reckoned the ultimate proof that your god was bigger, better, and stronger than your enemy’s god; on the other hand, if you lost, there was nothing else to conclude but that your god was inferior and therefore ultimately unworthy of praise. 

In crushing Jerusalem the Babylonians drew that exact conclusion, that their god Marduk was superior to Israel’s God Yahweh.  But the problem went deeper than just Babylon’s gloating.  The total ruin of Jerusalem had also convinced many in Israel that Yahweh had failed, that their LORD lacked the juice, the mojo, the power to prevail in a contest against a foreign god.  And rather than pin their hopes on a loser god, those same Israelites were now ready to cast their lot with a new god who could win their wars and do them some good. 

To this argument the Book of Lamentations does not cede an inch.  On the contrary, Lamentations counters that far from being weak and defeated, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has executed his divine judgment on Israel for their refusal to repent and turn from their sinful ways.  Not Babylon, not Marduk, not their low, mean neighbors from across the border in Edom, but the LORD God Yahweh has vanquished Israel.  In the starkest possible language, Lamentations insists, “We have transgressed and rebelled, and you [LORD] have not forgiven.  You have wrapped yourself with anger and pursued us, killing without pity; you have wrapped yourself with a cloud so that no prayer can pass through.  You have made us filth and rubbish among the peoples” (3:42-45).  Though sharp and hurtful, these same words include the seeds of hope for a hopeless situation:  namely, that the God who has judged will also relent, that the LORD who has torn will also heal.  The empire that rejoiced in Israel’s disgrace will itself suffer the consequences of their spite, and the people who snickered over Israel’s nakedness will themselves be exposed.  Amid all the death and destruction of desecrated Jerusalem, Lamentations can also proclaim, in the words of today’s First Lesson:

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. (3:22-25)

But how do we reconcile this God of justice with the God of mercy?  Is the God of the Bible the implacable judge or the suffering servant?  Could we imagine God trampling out the vintage of the grapes of wrath even as his rod and staff they comfort me?

The Bible tells us that our God is a God of absolute justice:  that the daily atrocities we shrug off, ignore, or otherwise dismiss as someone else’s problems are to God utter calamities that enrage God and provoke the fiercest wrath imaginable.  But the Bible also tells us that God loves this his creation with a passion that surpasses all human understanding: that God’s love will suffer any pain, endure every humiliation, and undergo any heartbreak to protect, defend, and save the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.  How do you reconcile these opposites?  How do you explain God as both just and compassionate, righteous and merciful? 

God is not bi-polar.  God doesn’t go from mean God to nice depending on the weather.  God is not Dr. Jekyll one minute and Mr. Hyde the next.  If you want to see where God’s love and justice meet in perfect harmony, you have to stand beneath the cross of Jesus.  Only there, in the mystery of the cross are the demands of justice satisfied in total love, and love’s demands consummated in total justice.  Only in Jesus. 

In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.