"God is a lost cause.": the Word of Lord. Thanks be to God . . .? ~ Lamentations 2:20; 3:10-12, 16-24 (Poets series)

I struggled this week. And no, I have no snappy joke or funny anecdote. What I have is dread, questions, tentative thoughts and the Word of God. Maybe you’ve wondered, “How does Pastor Jon pick the texts he preaches on?” Well, picking texts for sermons happens in a variety of ways for pastors. Some

use the lectionary – an ancient method which lays out text in three one year cycles which aim to help you cover most of the Bible in three years. Others preach thematically and pick relevant topics that engage a cultural moment. Some pray and look for the Spirit to

guide them and others, well, they simply wing it. Now, I’ve been a lectionary preacher, a thematic picker, and even a Spirit-guided teacher. I’ve done them all, sometimes by the seat of my pants. But one truth often occurs, regardless of the method, preachers rarely pick and preach on the texts that scare us. None of those methods will necessarily lead one to our excerpts from Lamentations today, except possibly 3:22-24. Even the Lectionary which aims to have us confront the whole of Scriptures omits these verses. So around 8 years ago I started adding one more question to my own discernment, “What don’t I want to talk about it?” What would it mean to lean into the scary, the hard, the terrible, of God’s Word? What happens to our understanding of a Bible with Lamentations in it?  What are we doing when we read these verses, and say, “The Word of our Lord. Thanks be to God.”? When we do so we recognize that . . .   

          1.    The Word of God is also a painful, human book.

           It’s a real human book. Note the use of battle language:

“besieged,” “walled in,” “blockades” and people being used for “target practice.” These are actual descriptions of ancient siege warfare, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem and the slaughter of its inhabitants (c.f. 2 Kings 25). They appear as metaphors of the poet because of a historical reality that screeches with pain, from the context of real war, violence and starvation. And while the metaphors themselves reflect realities that already seem too horrific to imagine. There are also descriptions which aren’t metaphorical at all: “Look at us, God. Think it over. Have you ever treated anyone like this? Should women eat their own babies, the very children they raised?  Should priests and prophets be murdered in the Master’s own Sanctuary? (2:20). While I was reading Lamentations I found myself quickly wanting to look away, to defend God, to theologize the reading in order to soften it. And as I did so, I heard the writer of Lamentations say, “Look at us, Jon. Think

it over. . . Should women eat their own babies, the very children they raised? And I thought, “The Word of our Lord . . .”

The Bible is a painful book. The Word of God is also a human word of complaint and misery, even against God. In fact, this is a book of the Bible in which God never speaks. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that the Scriptures are the Word of God. That they are the “only perfect rule for faith, doctrine, and conduct.” But while such a statement may sound simplistic, it is not. The Scriptures were written by human beings encountering God, people, goodness, evil, pain, suffering, politics, problems, in the real world. In reality the Bible, if given fair treatment, doesn’t help us avoid reality but forces us to deal with the complexity of life. It’s writers and words don’t allow us to control it. But, how many of you have heard a sermon on these texts? God, the writer moans, is a “prowling bear,” a “lion in hiding” who “knocked me from

the path and ripped me to pieces” (3:10-11). The writer says he was used for target practice. He describes the experience as “poison” that he’ll never forget. A Bible with Lamentations in it takes the phrase “honest to God” so seriously that I sometimes want to look away, to run and hide, to weep. The Bible sometimes feels like a congregational meeting with an open mic. Between the metaphor and historical description, the writer announces to us a hot mess of pain. He doesn’t want to hear from David about “deer panting for water” but cries “He ground my face into the gravel. He pounded me into the mud. I gave up on life altogether. I’ve forgotten what the good life is like. I said to myself, “This is it. I’m finished. God is a lost cause.” And I groaned, “The Word of our Lord . . . Thanks.” But there is thanks because with Lamentations I am authorized to speak my mind and heart. I’m not asked to talk like a robot but as nothing more than a human being.

          2.    The Word of God suffers God.

“God is a lost cause,” the author writes. God did more than let that be written. God has taken up those words and made them his own. And this was a public critique at the time – proclaimed on the now ruined streets of Jerusalem: “Does it mean nothing to you, all you who pass by?” (1:12). Consider

that for a moment. Imagine a thought experiment where you would allow someone to question you publicly, or challenge you at Thanksgiving dinner, or say something awful about you in a staff meeting. Now imagine that you don’t defend yourself but write it in your resume, put it in your Christmas letter, or display it on a sign in your yard that you never take down, that says: “lazy,” “mean,” “never shuts up,” “always has to win.” If you can imagine how strange that is - you are closer to understanding how powerful and amazing it is for God to have done so, for a good God to have allowed such things to be present in God’s Word for all eternity. When I left teaching as a college professor to return to the pastorate, I found myself cleaning my office one day and stumbling across some student evaluations. I paused and found myself longing for the classroom, the authority of being a professor, the joy of sharing knowledge, molding young minds. And I looked at the first evaluation which had the question, “What would make this course better?” And the student wrote: “Never hire this American hating socialist ever again!” Ouch. I won’t be putting that on a t-shirt any time soon. I wouldn’t want that to be a word about me.

And God doesn’t jump in and say, “That’s not it. Wait, don’t think that way. Or, “How dare you question me!” God allows himself to be characterized in a way that surely falls short. God is implicated by the writer to be the culprit and cause of all the misery and while I would disagree, I’m going to let the writer have his say today. I’m not going to defend God. I’d rather rest in the truth that God allows himself to be reviewed, evaluated, by a fierce critique, a damning lament, even if we’re wrong.  Our ability to question God is validated, if not mandated, by God’s own Word. What if God’s greatness is in allowing frustrated humans to make their case? What if God’s faithfulness is that he would even allow characterizations of himself to be a little less than accurate because he wants to dignify our pain? What if staying engaged in prayer, in complaint, in frustration, is more important than just getting God right? What if God keeps Lamentations in order to reveal to us that the Scriptures, even God himself, can be trusted because they aren’t always pretty, but always honest, even when talking about God.

          3.    The Word of God is painful but the center will hold.

The aching question of Lamentations also exists in another poem, in the mind of another poet, William Butler Yeats, reflecting the pain of post-World War I Europe:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. ~ “The Second Coming”

That’s also the message of Lamentations: will the center hold? Are we lost forever? But after all the misery, there is an

astonishing “this” that sits at the center. “This I call to mind; and therefore I have hope” (3:21). What “this” is becomes the key to the rest of the poem. It stands out as the first word of the line rather than the verb that usually begins sentences in Hebrew.
The first word of verse 22 is central. It is the plural form of the Hebrew chesed, a word notoriously difficult to translate. It might be read “love that refuses to let go.” Chesed best defines the basic nature of God, which God revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai in Exodus 34:6. If chesed is the center, how will it come? How will it happen? How? By the way, the word “Lamentation” in Hebrews comes from the root word, “How,” which is the first word of the book. How will the center hold? Left to myself, the center will never hold. Even together, we must admit there will be times when it appears that all is lost. But then, perhaps we should listen to the writer say this:

The Lord is good to those who wait for him,
    to the soul that seeks him. ²⁶ It is good that one should wait quietly – and we remember the holy one who waited 40 days in the desert (Matt. 4:1-2)

    for the salvation of the Lord. ²⁷ It is good for one to bear
    the yoke in youth, ²⁸ to sit alone in silence
    when the Lord has imposed it,  - we remember the silent one who stood quiet before Pilate, refusing to answer (Matt. 27:14)
²⁹ to put one’s mouth to the dust
    (there may yet be hope), ³⁰ to give one’s cheek to the smiter,  - we remember the one who was beaten and insulted by the religious (Matt. 26:66-68)

and be filled with insults.

³¹ For the Lord will not
    reject forever. – we remember the dying one who voiced

abandonment (Matt. 27:46 / Psalm 22)

³² Although he causes grief, he will have compassion
    according to the abundance of his steadfast love; ³³ for he does not willingly afflict
    or grieve anyone.

How, O Lord? God is sneaky. God does so by taking up our human word. By the One who gave his cheeks to the smiter on our behalf, who suffered the feeling of divine

abandonment for our sake, who knew silence and firsthand the terror of being “utterly rejected” by God's people. “How?,” you ask. God responds, “By refusing to let go, by refusing to fix what first needs to be shared – the human realities of pain, suffering, sin and death. How? By God speaking the final, human, painful word in Jesus Christ.
“All this life, all this loss. What if it was really one long story that kept going and going until it healed itself? Wouldn’t that be a story worth telling? Wouldn’t that be a story worth sharing?”