A sermon preached at David’s Community Bible Church
Millersburg, Pennsylvania
July 19, 2022
Life is hard.
My wife often turns to me after a phone call or an email has brought really tough news that someone we know is suffering and says it: Life is hard…
I often feel this way after reading the news. I close up my laptop or lay down my phone and murmur to myself or say to Karen or groan before God: Life is hard…
We’ve had our own, more personal reasons to recognize this Home Truth over the past two years. Each of us has had a cancer diagnosis. Karen and I have both undergone cancer surgery. Each if us is doing well, but we’re far more conscious of our own mortality … our own fragility … our own dust-to-dustness … than we were before ‘the C word’ entered our home.
Some of my dear Colombian students, wonderful, emerging Christian leaders, face unspeakable odds in life. You wonder how they even get up in the morning sometimes. As they confide in me about their lives … as I hear them out … as I seek for ways to put wind in their sails, I regularly come away from conversations shaking my head and saying it: Life is hard…
As I volley the illness and the bereavement and the tragedy that comes across the wires courtesy of the DCBC prayer list, I once again shake my head against this undeniable, grim reality: life is hard…
And I watch the gradual but steady passing of my personal generation of ‘local heroes’ from Lykens Valley. My own parents’ graves, freshly dug over the past four years not a hundred yards from use his morning, are surrounded by the resting places of my Sunday school teachers, my Dad’s baseball buddies who were always so good to me, and the parents’ of my friends from childhood and teenage years. Right out there!
Life is hard…
I suppose none of this should surprise those of us who are followers of Jesus, sons and daughters of biblical faith. We of all people should be the most clear-eyed about reality, the most in touch with how things really are, the least prone to look away from both the goodness and beauty and joy of this world that our Lord has made … and from its hard edges, twisted and deformed as they are by human rebellion.
Still, despite the confidence and stability our faith provides, life somehow beats us up. It arrives with a rude thud more often that we’d like and brings out of us … out of me, at least, that whispered recognition that … life is hard.
And I don’t think we’re caving into some kind of therapeutic wimpiness if we say so.
I have a little project going about the 22 men and women from Millersburg who never came home from World War II. I call it Valley of Lions: The story of the Millersburg 22 and the families who lost them. If I ever manage to retire, I hope to turn my little ten-year-old hobby into a book.
Do you realize that in the final eighteen months of the year, a family in this little town was getting a telegram notifying them that their son or daughter was Missing in Action or Killed in Action on the average of once every month. The final push into Germany in late 1944 and the first half of 1945 was really brutal. So far, I’ve tracked three of those awful telegrams arriving to little Moore Street alone. Moore Street, across the street and a few blocks down from what was my little Moore Street School, with the likes of Mrs. Heckert, Mrs. Wert, Miss Shomper, and Mrs. Lenker loving us forward.
I can’t imagine the darkness that descended on this little town from the time that Blaine G. Walter, Jr. was lost on Guadalcanal in 1942 to the days just after the end of the war when Josephine Strohecker died in Naples, Italy and 2nd Lieutenant William Jones’ plane exploded and crashed on landing as it took off from a Pacific Island on his way home after the war. He’d logged more than 900 hours across 43 bombing runs over Japan. And now the war was over … and he was coming home. Lieutenant Jones is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery beside his mother, his only survivor.
Life must have been incredibly hard in our little Valley of Lions during those years.
Life was hard. Life is hard. Probably life is always gonna’ be hard.
Or am I the only one who feels this way?
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Well, if the heaviness of this reality presses you down this morning … or if it has … then you’re not living something that’s contrary to the Lord’s people at any time.
The so-called psalms of lament provide us with words to pray when loss and sorrow are our lot.
And then there’s this one spectacularly vivid example of faith as it expresses itself in sorrow. We call it the Book of Lamentations.
It’s just five chapters long and easy to miss.
But we shouldn’t miss it. It’s there in our Bibles, waiting to orient us … to gather us in its sad arms … to teach us to wait without denying our pain.
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But let’s not float up on the surface this morning now that I’ve taken the risk of preaching a one-off sermon on loss and sorrow and how to conduct ourselves when those experiences overwhelm.
Let me take us deeper into the hardness of life. Let’s take this to a whole new level.
586 years B.C, the part of Israel that still clung to the name was all but wiped from the map. These people are actually known as Judah, but they’re all that’s left of Israel those six centuries before the time of Jesus. Jerusalem was is capital. When they wax romantic, they call their beloved city ‘Daughter Jerusalem’ or ‘Daughter Zion, the Beautiful/Beloved’.
So much that represents God keeping his promises is anchored in that city. The king in the line of King David. The Temple, where the Lord is encountered as nowhere else. The priests, charged with moderating the relationship between this sometimes dangerous God of Israel and the people who locked themselves into covenant with him. The sacrifices, that all-important, God-given mechanism for maintaining access to the Lord and closeness with him.
It is in every sense of the word the promised land. Every building, every stone, every family who manages to get to Jerusalem every year or from time to time is participating in something that the Lord has promised and delivered. Jerusalem is for the sons and daughters of the Exodus from Egypt no ordinary place.
And then, decades—even generations—of warnings from the prophets and political/religious battles about whether the Lord would actually allow Holy Jerusalem to be lost, it happens. The Babylonian Army, its lines fattened up by all kinds of hired mercenaries, descends on Jerusalem. They tear down its temple. They level its royal houses. They turn the place of sacrifice into dust. They kill many of the priests and put the rest in manacles. They catch the fleeing king, but they don’t kill him right away. First, they gather up his sons and snuff out their lives one by one as he is forced to watch. Then they put out the king’s eyes, so that the last thing he will ever see is the reality that none of his sons will ever sit on his throne again.
Then they carry off the nobles who’ve survived to Babylon to disappear into the mists of loss and tragedy, just like every other deported people of the time eventually disappeared and were forgotten.
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Psa. 137:1 By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
Psa. 137:2 On the willows there
we hung up our lyres.
Psa. 137:3 For there our captors
required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
Psa. 137:4 How shall we sing the LORD’s song
in a foreign land?
Psa. 137:5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget its skill!
Psa. 137:6 Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy!
Psa. 137:7 ¶ Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem,
how they said, “Lay it bare, lay it bare,
down to its foundations!”
Psa. 137:8 O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,
blessed shall he be who repays you
with what you have done to us!
Psa. 137:9 Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!
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Now we’re talking loss. Now we’re talking sorrow.
We call this disaster ‘the Exile’. It is to the Old Testament what the death of Jesus is to the New Testament. And the Jews’ unlikely return to the land seventy years later is to the Old Testament what the resurrection of Jesus is to the New. We are talking about a national death … and eventually, a national resurrection.
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I wonder sometimes, when I’m trying to convey to my students the absolute horror of the Exile what modern events we could compare it with without cheapening either the one-of-a-kind experience of Exile or the modern comp we’re using to try to bring it home.
Probably the Jewish experience of the Holocaust, 1933-1945, compares, though the numbers are far larger. It’s no accident that many Jews prefer to use the same term Sho’ah that the biblical prophet Isaiah employed to speak of the biblical exile. Sho’ah means ‘storm’ or ‘destruction’ or both.
Maybe—and I say this carefully—Ukraine would be a modern comp if, God forbid, Kiev were to be leveled, Ukraine’s ability to self-govern erased, and all attempt to maintain a Ukrainian identity were successfully stomped down. Let us hope and pray that never happens. If it were to happen, maybe then we’d find it easier to get close to the darkness of the biblical Exile.
But let me just say this: our petty discomforts and injustices and our more modest and very real losses don’t come close. However, what they do share with the Jewish experience of exile is loss and sorrow. You and I both know, in some inescapable degree, what those things mean. And if you’re too young to know what I’m talking about when I use words like ‘loss’ and ‘sorrow’, well, I have hard news: One day you will.
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I mentioned the book of Lamentations. In fact, it’s the book that provides our Scripture text for today.
I love that a book like Lamentations gets included in our Bible, alongside other ruffians like the Book of Job, the Psalms of Lament, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs. These are not easy voices to listen to. They challenge and they prod sometimes far more forcefully than they console. But all of them are God’s own Word to us and we do well to linger over them from time to time.
We don’t know exactly who wrote the five chapters of this little book. What we do know is that they were penned in the aftermath—probably the immediate aftermath—of Jersusalem’s destruction. The lines of this poetic biblical text speak to us of what it meant for Israel to lose so very much. I’ve described Lamentations to my students as one, long poetic scream. That’s what it is.
Let me warn you about Lamentations. The writer is sure that God is behind the calamity. He describes the Lord through most of this poem as his enemy, as Israel’s enemy, as fallen Jerusalem’s enemy. He’s equally sure that Jerusalem has deserved all this. But he thinks the Lord has been awfully severe … even savage … in meeting out justice to his people and he wonders how much longer it will go on. He doesn’t know if he can take any more.
I wonder if you’ve ever felt like this. I have. The cause of our sorrow … of our loss … may be different than the stubborn rebellion of Jerusalem in this writer’s day. But the consequences may feel very much like what he describes.
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What are we to do in the darker chapters of our pilgrimage? How can we live faithfully in the shadows of sorrow and loss that afflict us? How can Lamentations be a word from the Lord to us this morning?
Let me read (again?) our text for today. I must tell you that it’s the brightest spot of all five chapters. It’s the climax of some very steep hiking. The road from chapter 1, verse 1 up to this pinnacle I’m about to read is pretty steep. And shortly after this passage, things descend again.
Yet these verses allow us to see the truth and the hope to which this biblical author, writing as though he is Jerusalem itself, has battled. The verses read like this:
Lam. 3:19 Remember my affliction and my wanderings,
the wormwood and the gall!
Lam. 3:20 My soul continually remembers it
and is bowed down within me.
Lam. 3:21 But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
Lam. 3:22 The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
Lam. 3:23 they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
Lam. 3:24 “The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.
Lam. 3:25 The LORD is good to those who wait for him,
to the soul who seeks him.
Lam. 3:26 It is good that one should wait quietly
for the salvation of the LORD.
What I want to express to the people of God from the Word of God today does not depend completely on these eight little verses. Yet it takes the hope that is expressed here in this pinnacle of the entire book and it looks backwards in the book … and forwards in the book to get a grip on what Lamentations means to followers of Jesus today.
In this spirit of peering at the whole book through the lens of its finest verses, let me offer you four Biblical words of exhortation for when darkness and sorrow have become your companions:
- Say it out loud!
- Say it to God!
- Say it all!
- Then do the next thing.
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The ‘it’ I’m taking about is the reality of my suffering.
Sometimes we’re squeamish as Christians about naming before God just how bad things have become for us. We feel we shouldn’t offend God or that we should not feel as badly as we do.
The Biblical witness doesn’t share that reluctance to speak out of our depths, to name our sorrow, even to use strong words to present before God what we have experienced.
A book like Lamentations invites us to say it out loud.
By the time we get to Lamentations 3, verses 19 and 20, the author has been crying out before God about what he calls there ‘my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall’ for two and a half chapters. He’s been pouring out his heart in the strongest possible words, remembering, as he says here the very depths of his affliction.
His lament … his complaint … is honest and open and authentic and very, very real.
He takes risks in the way he names the cause of his pain. He is not ‘too careful’ or ‘too precise’.
He says it out loud!
He says it like the many psalms of lament, given to us so we’ll have words to pray in our darkest moment.
He says it like Jesus on the cross, when he prays aloud the words of Psalm 22, ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’
He says it out loud.
I believe his honesty is a crucial part of his healing.
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But note a critical element in all the lamenting that the Bible places into the hands of the Lord’s sons and daughters. This lament, from start to finish, is taken to God himself.
All that this writer has to say, he says it to God!
He knows that God can take it. He understands that the only sin that lurks around at moments like this is not saying offending things to God but rather abandoning the conversation with God. That’s the thing that’s to be avoided, not strong speech to God himself.
Scripture invites us to trust sufficiently in God that we can take all that we are to Him in prayer. And the invitation doesn’t get switched off when the only thing we have to offer him is groaning … and tears … and even, like the author of Lamentations, anguished screams and hopelessness.
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Third, Lamentations teaches us—it seems to me, anyway—that in moments of great suffering it’s important that we say it all.
Now here I want to take you on a little bit of a detour. Don’t jump off the train on me. I need you to stay engaged while I try to explain something about the book of Lamentations.
As one of my teachers at the Moore Street School used to say to us when she wanted us to pay attention and not drift off, Put your thinking caps on!
The book of Lamentations is an acrostic.
There, I used a technical term, something that an old prof like me tries to avoid when preaching. But if you’re a dentist or an engineer or a lawyer or a machinist or a farmer or an executive assistant, you know the value of technical terms. You don’t want to have to make up words every time you refer to an important point. You just wanna’ say it.
So here’s a new word for some of you: ACROSTIC.
An acrostic is an alphabetical poem. The psalms and the book of Lamentations and much of the Bible are poetry. That simply means they’re constructed with very special attention to how words work. That’s what poetry is.
So it’s no surprise that a book of laments called Lamentations would be poetry … that it would care very much how words work and construct them so that they work in the way the author intends.
What is surprising is that Lamentations is an acrostic.
So what’s an acrostic? Well, I’ve already said that an acrostic is an alphabetical poem.
That means that the writer starts out with a line that begins with the letter ‘A’. Next, he writes a line that begins with ‘B’. Then ‘C’. What do you think his next line would begin with?
In reality, sometimes it’s 3 or 4 lines that begin with ‘A’. Then 3 or 4 that begin with ‘B’.
Now we can’t see this in our English Bibles, because he wasn’t writing in English. He was writing in Hebrew.
So we miss out on this acrostic thingy. But he didn’t. He was deadly serious about it.
Now here’s the thing: Acrostics — alphabetical poems — fit well and work well when the topic is a happy one. In the psalms they show up when the psalmist is praising the order or the beauty or the productivity of creation … or of God’s law.
Happy themes, right? Well-ordered, predictable topics, right? That’s where an acrostic — an alphabetical poem — makes hay. Because the fit between the order of the topic and the order of the poem play very nicely together.
Are you following me?
Now here’s another thing: Sorrow, loss, and catastrophe are nor ordered events. Psychologist, sociologists, and just any of us who cares to think about it for a moment will explain that sorrow and loss are disordered moments. They are at the opposite end of human experience from the carefully configured construction of an acrostic … an alphabetical poem … with its almost obsessive dedication to order and design.
When one of the Millersburg mothers took that telegram from the postman in 1942 (Blaine Walter) or 1943 (Richard McBride) or 1944 (Ray Kohr, Asa Romberger) or 1945 (Gene Lentz) and read the words she hoped she’d never see, that was not an ordered moment. When you collapse in tears before the grave of your husband or wife, that’s not an ordered moment. When your spouse walks away, that’s no ordered moment. When millions of Ukrainian mothers climb onto evacuation trains with children and pets in tow and their husbands and fathers left behind, that is not an ordered moment.
When Jerusalem the Promised went up in pillars of smoke and clouds of ash, that was not an ordered moment.
So why does the writer of this biblical lament choose the most highly ordered form available to him for his long shriek before the God whom he hoped was hearing his prayer?
Well students of this book—and I am one—have come up with some interesting explanations. I’d like to share two of them with you this morning.
One explanation says that this prayer comes in this form because it obligated the pray-er to name every painful fact as he sat in Jerusalem’s ashes and expressed a people’s grief to their God. A to Z. One at a time. Nothing left out.
I think this makes some sense, and it leads me to my third piece of instruction that I believe Lamentations hands to us this morning: Say it all!
When you’re praying out of the depths, name everything. Whether it’s your own sin, an unjust abuse you’ve suffered, the loss of a loved one. Take a page from the writer of Lamentations and walk through it in conversation with God. First A, then B, then C…
Say it all.
But there’s another way to understand the strange use of an acrostic to express the worst possible grief and loss.
When you’ve been run over by a freight train, and you don’t know what to do, try this: Do the next thing.
No matter how small, no matter how ordinary, no matter how insignificant in the face of your pain, just do the next thing.
Look, my life has been a good life and God has blessed me beyond words. But like many or most of you, life has at different times chewed me up and spit me out. I’ve seen dreams die. I’ve had people walk away. You know, it’s nothing dramatic, but it’s my life and I have my quota of scars just like you do.
I’ve come to believe that the way faith manifests itself after loss is trusting God that there’s a future by taking a brick and starting to build the future. One tiny, measly brick at a time. It doesn’t sound very spiritual, does it? But I think it’s post-traumatic faith in action.
And I think it may well be what the writer of this Biblical lament is doing by saying to himself (and centuries later, to us), today I’m gonna’ work on ‘A’. Tomorrow I’ll get up, I’ll shower and shave, and then I’ll set to work on B. This is how the future is born. This is how we partner with God in creating a future when everything we’ve experienced suggest there won’t be one.
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But if everything I’ve shared this morning up to now represents reliable, biblical instruction on how to live and survive our loss and our sorrow, then I’ve managed to save the best part for last.
The best part is the God who accompanies us in our loss. Strangely, he is often silent when we feel like we need to hear his voice more than we ever have. But the biblical witness assures us that he is still there.
Let me read a portion of our text again:
Lam. 3:21 But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
Lam. 3:22 The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
Lam. 3:23 they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
Lam. 3:24 “The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.
Lam. 3:25 The LORD is good to those who wait for him,
to the soul who seeks him.
Lam. 3:26 It is good that one should wait quietly
for the salvation of the LORD.
In these most amazing verses, the pray-er of this long lament discovers that there is in fact reason to hope in the Lord and to wait for the Lord.
If you’re reading slowly and thinking clearly, you might wonder how in the world a person who has suffered so much … who has been so articulate about the God-wrought devastation of his people … should turn and affirm that it makes sense to hope in the Lord … that it’s not crazy but actually reasonable and life-giving to wait for the Lord’s salvation.
How did he come to this conclusion?
Well, I bet what he claims to be true here will bring an ‘Amen!’ out of more than a few bruised hearts here this morning, because what this writer has discovered to be true is also what you have discovered to be real and true.
It goes like this:
The steadfast love (חסד) of the Lord never ceases.
His mercies never come to an end.
They are new every morning.
Great is your faithfulness.
Do you hear the totality of the claim in the words never, never, and every?
The whole declaration pivots on one of the Bible’s richest claims about the God of Israel and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
That claim insists that his loyal love // covenant love // persistent loyalty is simply inexhaustible.
What that doesn’t mean is that we experience God’s love in a kind of straight-line, unremarkable, always-on sort of way. It doesn’t mean that. And we don’t!
In fact, we sometimes cry with the writer of Psalm 22 and with Jesus on the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why do you stand so far off?’
But we also learn that his chesed is like a life-giving river … that sometimes goes underground and stays there for a very long time … but eventually … in our desert … we find ourselves amazed when that river springs up again to the surface and invites us to drink of its waters, to cool ourself in its refreshment.
His mercies, we learn, are experienced as though new with every fresh morning. Some of those mornings come after a very long night.
This we know. This we base our lives on.
This is why verse 3.25 can pick up Israel’s long chant that ‘the Lord is good. His lovingkindness is forever’ and add a little twist that makes all the sense in the world: ‘The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him.’
And then this little bit of instruction for those who have ears to hear: 26. ‘It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord’.
Now he has hardly been quiet, this writer of Lamentations. His waiting has been pretty noisy. But he’s battled his way to the realization that the Lord is indeed trustworthy, even in the darkest of nights.
I think his lament is his way of living out that second part of 3.25: ‘The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him.’
And I think it can be yours, too.
So when sorrow and loss become your companions, don’t you dare abandon your conversation with God. Pursue him … seek him out, with whatever words you have. And when you tell him about all that’s wrong….
Say it out loud!
Say it all!
Say it to God!
And then what are you gonna’ do? Do the next thing.
When we do these things, we so often discover what we could never discover in our comfort and our ease:
The steadfast love (חסד) of the Lord never ceases.
His mercies never come to an end.
They are new every morning.
Great is his faithfulness.
Amen.
Canter Bridge 