September 29, 2019 “Tears” – Lamentations 3:19-51

Lamentations 3:19-51
“Tears”
September 29, 2019 – Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

My wife and I were in bed with our oldest daughter, 6 years old, between us. We were reading to her from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. We had come to the part where the dwarf king Thorin lays dying. Gandalf and Bilbo come to him and the old dwarf says goodbye to Bilbo with these words, “I go now to the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed.”

Beth’s father had recently died and those words about the dead waiting for the renewal of the world touched a chord in Beth’s and my hearts as we remembered our own Christian hope in something just like that. We began to cry, tears running down our faces. Our daughter Susan was indignant. She wanted to hear the rest of the story. “No, no,” she said, “don’t cry! Just keep reading!” Yesterday, Susan reminded us that this happened more than once when she was little, like as we read to her about Reepicheep’s bravery at the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader in the Chronicles of Narnia. She finally gave up on us and learned to read those stories for herself.

Grown up, having read Tolkien’s and Lewis’s gorgeous, poignant stories many, many times, Susan now understands very well what moved her parents to tears back then. But her first desire to want to simply move on, to leave the tears behind and get on with the story, is not just a child’s reaction. It is how many of us handle such moments. Tears are merely an interruption to the normal course of life. Let’s just get through them and move on to other things, to happier thoughts.

As Christians we may have a spiritual version of that let’s-get-past-this attitude toward tears. We may acknowledge sorrow and pain and weeping in our lives and in the lives of others, but fairly quickly we want to move on to a different spiritual place, a place of hope, even of joy, and leave the tears behind.

You may have noticed that desire to move beyond tears in several of the psalms we’ve read together over the past two weeks. David and other psalmists will often sing of sorrow, of sickness as we heard last Sunday, of pain, and yes, of tears. We read in Psalm 56 verse 8, how David said to God,

You keep track of all my sorrows.
You have collected all my tears in your bottle.
You have recorded each one in your book.

But in the very next verse, he’s moved on,

My enemies will retreat when I call for help.
This I know: God is on my side!
I praise God for what he has promised;
yes, I praise the Lord for what he has promised.

It might seem like that happens in our text this morning from Lamentations, at the bottom of page 174 in Poets. In the middle of this middle lament of the book, the writer, perhaps speaking as if he were the city of Jerusalem, declares,

The thought of my suffering and homelessness
is bitter beyond words.
I will never forget this awful time,
as I grieve over my loss.

But then in the very next verse he does seem to forget it as he goes on in words we may know well from hymns and praise songs:

Yet I still dare to hope
when I remember this:
The faithful love of the Lord never ends!
His mercies never cease.
Great is his faithfulness;
his mercies begin fresh every morning.
I say to myself, “The Lord is my inheritance;
therefore I will hope in him!”

The thing to realize and remember here is that the book of Lamentations neither begins nor ends on that spiritual note of faith and hope in God. That more positive outlook is buried, hidden if you will, there in the center of it all, but the bulk of verses here paint an overwhelmingly dismal and pretty hopeless picture of absolute loss and devastation.

So the book begins with a picture of Jerusalem as a widow, as a slave woman, sitting with tears streaming down her cheeks. It moves into more literal images of slavery for those taken into captivity and desolation and starvation for those left to wander Jerusalem’s streets. We read that “her young women are crying,” and “her people groan as they search for bread.”

In the second lament we find descriptions of the physical destruction of the city, “the ramparts and the walls have fallen down,” and “Jerusalem’s gates have sunk into the ground.” And there is this terrible, horrifying account of how hunger grips the city’s citizens, “mothers eat their own children, those they once bounced on their knees.”

The fourth lament intensifies the images of misery, adding that children are ignored so that

The parched tongues of their little ones
stick to the roofs of their mouths in thirst
The children cry for bread,
but no one has any to give them.

That horrible account of cannibalism of children is repeated too, along with a description of the people’s helpless feeling as their city was conquered. No assistance or defense came either from God or from any human allies.

If nothing else, this book can help us grasp and feel just a bit of what men, women and children experience right now in Syria and Yemen and Afghanistan and Honduras and Palestine and Sudan and other places all over the world. The United Nations Refugee Agency reports that there are currently about 71 million displaced people in the world, more than ever before. This is happening at the same time our country is cutting once again for next year the number of refugees we will receive.

We need to read and really feel Lamentations. Even as we sit here warm and safe, families are being driven from their homes to wander hungry, with no one that cares or comes to their help. That photograph from 2015 of little three-year-old Alan Kurdi, a Kurdish boy from Syria, lying dead on a beach after he drowned as his family tried to escape to Europe, would be a fitting illustration for this book of the Bible.

The fifth lament, the fifth chapter of Lamentations in a standard Bible, prays to God for help, but with more graphic descriptions of refugee life, of homes occupied by strangers, of expensive water and fuel, of exhaustion without rest. There is also violence and rape and forced labor. A little expression of confidence in God occurs toward the end, but the last verse wonders if God is even listening, if maybe He hasn’t just rejected His people forever.

If you read the introduction to this book in Poets, you know that for all its emotion it has a very ordered structure. The first four laments are acrostics. Each chapter has 22 verses, except for the third, which simply triples that. And each verse begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, in order. Verse 1 with aleph, verse 2 with bet, verse 3 with gimmel, and so on, daleth, he, waw, etc. Psalm 119 does the same thing in groups of verses.

The fifth lament, fifth chapter, abandons the acrostic but still has 22 verses. In Poets the suggestion is that the writer is trying to put some order to feelings that cannot ultimately be ordered. In the end he just can’t keep it up anymore. His sorrow just overflows any boundaries and cannot be contained. There are more tears than can fit in the bottle.

Our friend Bryan, who talks to grieving people all the time as a chaplain, said Friday morning he thought that was a good picture of how people who are dying or who have lost someone function. They try to hold things together, keep their tears in, go about ordinary life. But sometimes it all falls apart. Order breaks down. They just collapse and sob like the writer of Lamentations in chapter 5, crying out perhaps to God, but in despair rather than hope.

We can learn some personal and some spiritual lessons here in Lamentations. Talk to Bryan about this, but it might be good therapy in grief to sit down with a pen and paper or at a keyboard and try to set down in some order all your feelings, all your sense of loss, all your anger at God or maybe even at someone who is gone so you cannot talk to them anymore. Putting some form to our painful emotions, to our tears, might help us accept and live with them better.

Spiritually, Lamentations can teach us in more than one way. The verses I read for us do express the truth that God is there right in the middle of our tears. His “faithful love,” His hesed in Hebrew, His loving-kindness and mercy, are truly refreshed every morning of our lives. He sees and remembers all our tears and will one day wash them away, as it is promised in the book of Revelation, as we read Jesus in a parable say God did for Lazarus, a miserable beggar covered in sores.

But Lamentations even more helps us remember that the tears are still there and how it is that God deals with our tears. In Handel’s “Messiah,” as the crucifixion of Jesus unfolds, a tenor sings words from Lamentations 1 verse 12, “Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.” The lament of the prophet over ruined Jerusalem becomes the lament of our Savior as He dies for our sins. Our Lord wipes away our tears by drowning them in His own tears. Our sorrow is healed by the sorrow of God.

My prayer for any of you who feel tears bottled up inside or actually running down your cheeks is that you will know and take hold of the tears of Jesus, wept for you. That wonderful little verse in John 11, “Jesus wept,” speaks more than whole dissertations on the love and grace of God. Jesus wept for everyone. He wept, He weeps for you. When you feel most alone in your tears, trust that the tears of your Lord are falling all around you. Then accept and believe in His faithful love that never ends.

What we read here in the middle of Lamentations is absolutely true,

For no one is abandoned
by the Lord forever.
Though he brings grief, he also shows compassion
because of the greatness of his unfailing love.
For he does not enjoy hurting people
or causing them sorrow.

Believe that. Even more, feel that. Feel that God hurts when you hurt. And trust Him and turn to Him and cry out to Him. He has never-ending grace and mercy and love for you. May you believe and accept with all your heart what God has done for you by giving up His Son Jesus to His own tears and suffering and death for your sake.

And yet. And yet that is not quite how Lamentations ends. It’s not even how the more happy bit we read from the middle today ends. Right after those verses about God not enjoying our hurt and sorrow, come verses which focus on another aspect of who God is. The poet talks about crushing prisoners and depriving people of rights and twisting justice in the courts and then says, “doesn’t the Lord see all these things?”

As hurt and angry and sad as the writer of Lamentations is, he is also deeply aware that God’s people have brought their tears upon themselves. They have sinned and God has justly punished them. “Why should we, mere humans,” he says, “complain when we are punished for our sins?”

It’s clear in Jeremiah, who may have also written Lamentations, and in the other prophets that God gets angry with His people for two big sins. The first is idolatry. They abandon their true God and worship things they make with their own hands. They break the first two commandments which say God should be first in our lives. There’s plenty of that idolatry around us today and in our own lives as we focus more on material possessions than on our spiritual life, like the rich man in Jesus’ parable.

But the other big sin for Israel is breaking the other big commandment as Jesus explained it. They have not loved their neighbors. They have failed to be kind to the poor and just to those who are helpless. They have ignored the weakest and most vulnerable people in their society. That’s the other big complaint from God which the prophets over and over speak to the nation of Israel. You have ignored or even exploited the poor. That’s what those words about prisoners and rights and justice mean here in Lamentations.

That’s why I ask you not to turn over the last page of these laments having read and heard only a message that addresses your own tears. If you read this and forget all the tears being shed around the world and in our own community by poor, hungry, homeless, desperate and lost people, then you haven’t really read and understood Lamentations.

The last line I read is from the three-verse set which is 49 to 51 in a standard Bible. That’s how the 66 verses of the third lament, the third chapter are structured. Each line begins with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet, ayin. The first two lines are:

My tears flow endlessly
they will not stop
until the Lord looks down
from heaven and sees.

That seems like a good place to quit reading, waiting for the Lord to see our tears and answer our prayers and heal our hearts. But there’s another line that must be included. We know it must because it starts with the same Hebrew letter as the previous two. It reads,

My heart is breaking
over the fate of all the women of Jerusalem.

We cannot be done with the tears of Lamentations if all they provoke is tears for ourselves. We are not done here until our hearts are breaking for all the women of Jerusalem, in other words now, for all the women of the world. Jeremiah was weeping here for mothers and daughters, sisters and wives, who were widowed and enslaved, raped and made so hungry they ate their own children. Should not our hearts weep for the women who raise children alone, who are raped and abused, who go hungry and homeless in our own city and all over this planet? And should not our tears drive us to repentance and a change of heart, to a burning desire to do something about it?

So please let the tears of Lamentations and your own tears lead you to personal faith in Jesus Christ who shed His own tears so that He might one day wipe away your tears. But let these holy tears in God’s Word lead you further to take a stand for, and, as the apostle Paul says, to weep with those who weep, especially women, around you now. Cry for one out of nine women who were sexually abused as children. Let your tears flow for the young women kidnapped and enslaved by Boko Haram and sex traffickers. Hang your head for two thirds of all girls in Afghanistan who do not get to attend school. Weep for women whose food stamps will be taken away, along with school lunches for their children, by administrative action here in the United States. Lament with outrage policies which keep women fleeing starvation and violence in their own countries from finding asylum for themselves and their children in this and other countries.

Our reading from I Timothy 6 verse 15 says that Jesus Christ is “the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords.” That means that the holy city of the King, the new Jerusalem promised in Revelation, is this entire world. So to weep for Jerusalem, weep for planet earth. It is all His City, the place where He wants to rule in every heart. Remember then the tears of that City, remember His tears. Don’t stop crying for the women, for everyone, until it is all made whole, all made new by His love and justice enacted in our own lives.

Amen.