It was a Sunday
morning. Just as we have gathered here
today, the folks at First Baptist Church came together. You know what you expect on Sunday. Maybe you’ll see friends you haven’t seen all
week and church is a happy re-union.
Maybe you’re seeking truth and you hope church is where you’ll find
it. You hope church will be where you
meet God. Maybe you’re struggling and
not sure what to do next. You hope
church might provide some hope, or at the very least, a friend to pray with
you. Sunday morning is so many
things. That’s true every Sunday at
HillSong.
It was just as true on November 5,
2017, at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, TX. The people there came for the same reasons we
come every Sunday. Devin Patrick Kelly
entered the building with an assault rifle.
He killed 26 people, the youngest 5 years old, the oldest 72. Sunday morning would never be the same.
Questions arise from survivors and
from people who hear the story and are horrified by it. How
could there be a God who would let this happen? There must not be a God. Or this: if there is a God, He must not be good.
If God were good, he would prevent such an atrocity. Thus, there is
no God; or, if there is a God, that God is not good and cannot be trusted.
Elie Wiesel, the great 20th century writer, was a teenager
during the holocaust when, like so many European Jews, he was taken into a
concentration camp by the Nazis. He
witnessed unspeakable horrors including the hanging of three prisoners, one, a
young boy. Watching it unfold, he heard
another prisoner behind him say, “Where is God now?” Deep inside himself, Wiesel heard this
response. “Where is God? Here he is, hanging on the gallows.” Elie Wiesel believed, in that moment, that God died.
He writes, “That night the
soup tasted of corpses.”[i]
We
have no right to judge worshipers at First Baptist of Sutherland Springs, TX if
like Elie Wiesel, they decided that God is dead after the shooting. The Biblical book of Lamentations allows no
place for judgment. People in great pain
need mercy.
We
all need mercy. Most people will never
experience the sudden shock of a mass shooting or the unthinkable agony of
genocide. But every person is hit with
loss and deep disappointment at some point in life. Hurt and sorrow visit even calm communities, and
sometimes people give up on God.
The
ancient Israelite who wrote Lamentations lived in inconsolable grief. The Southern community of ancient Jews,
Judah, which included Jerusalem and the great temple built by King Solomon, had
been completely and finally defeated by the Babylonian Empire. The Babylonians destroyed the city walls and razed
the temple, leaving a pile of ash and rubble in its place. They took the leading citizens, Jerusalem’s
best, youngest, and brightest, into slavery, driving them to live in exile in
Babylon.
The
book of Lamentations comes out of that exile.
It is a collection of five poems.
Many Bible readers attribute authorship to Jeremiah, but the book itself
does not claim any author. This book is
not from a single writer. This book
comes from a community; the chosen people of God.
They
knew it was their failure to live faithfully and abide by God’s laws that brought
the exiles. The Babylonians tried to
crush Judah’s spirit. Their house of
worship was destroyed. Their priests and
royal officials were reduced to slavery.
The Babyonians tried to unmake Israel.
But the Jewish people knew it only happened because God allowed it.
Rejecting
God was not an option for the Jews.
There is no Hebrew word for atheism.
Conceiving of an existence apart from God was impossible. They could only understand their plight in
relation to who God is.
We
can learn from this. I don’t know how
things are in your life right now. Maybe
you love your job, your relationships bring happiness, and everything besides
the past 10 minutes of hearing a downer of a sermon is looking up. Or, things in your life are neither bad nor
good. For you, right now, life is an
unremarkable Tuesday; not bad, not great, it just kind of is. Or, maybe, you can relate to stories of
sorrow because that’s what you’re living.
I think that whether life is good, bad, or boring, we can only truly face
if when we stay connected to God.
“How
lonely sits the city,” reads chapter 1, verse 1. A God-focused life is relational. Cities become lonely. “She weeps bitterly in the night; … she has
no one to comfort her” (1:2). “The roads
to Zion mourn” (1:6). Majesty has departed. Have you walked the weeping road, or lost so
much that you feel unmade? Lamentations
ring heavy because sorrow weighs so much.
If
abandoning God is not an option, what does the suffering person do? If we cannot cry out, either God is not God, or God is not good, then what can we say? The only course is to bring all the emotion
to God’s throne. No matter how life is
going, there’s nowhere else to turn.
Good, bad, or boring, we have to deal with God.
The
singer in Lamentations shows us one way to do this. “See, O Lord, how distressed I am,” sings the
poet in 1:20. “My stomach turns; my
heart is wrung within me.” Complain! Hand God all the frustration. And the responsibility! In chapter 2, the poet asserts that the
calamity is from God. “How the Lord in
his anger has humiliated daughter Zion!
He has thrown down from heaven to earth the splendor of Israel; The Lord
destroyed without mercy” (2:1a-c, 2a). The
book of Lamentations, woeful cries, ends uncertainly. “Restore us to yourself; O Lord, that we may
be restored; renew our days as of old – unless you have utterly rejected us,
and are angry with us beyond measure” (5:21-22). That’s the last word in the final poem. Unless
…
The
singer doesn’t know how the story ends.
Yet, suffering as he is, unsure of resolution, he is certain of
this. He must deal with God.
Pain
destroys our perspective. We can’t see
the big picture. Wrestling with relatively
minor anxieties, in the midst of worrying, I forget to see the entirety of
life. We all do. The poet, in the midst of his laments, discovered
clarity. Lamentations 3:21-22: “This I call to mind, and therefore I have
hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never end; they
are new every morning.” Speaking
directly to God, he declares, “Great is your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion. I will hope in him.”
The
poet sings these words in the middle of his suffering. It would be as if a worshipper at First
Baptist Sutherland Springs sang of hopeful faith on that afternoon, a few hours
after the shooting. Imagine someone in a
concentration camp remembering this scripture in the middle of the
horrors. The Lamentations poet can only speak
such hopeful faith out of memory and relationship.
I
have suggested that the God-focused life demands that we deal with God in all
circumstances including of great sorrow.
We can only deal with God when we remember God and are in relationship
with God. Faith can only be hopeful
faith when we remember that we know God and God knows us.
God’s
mercies are new every morning? Mercy is
given in the context of relationship.
Even if the giver is a stranger to the one receiving the gift of mercy,
once the gift is given and received, they can never be strangers again. The offender deserved to be punished. The offended party deserved justice. But, he says, no, I forgive. I will put away the punishment and instead
extend mercy.
That’s
God when God puts away our sins. Our sin
brings death, but God says, no, I give life.
On the cross, Jesus took all the death on himself. Through Jesus, God, gives life and presence. Because of the cross, we know God identified
with the Jews wallowing in Babylonian exile.
God stood beside his people in the concentration camp. God embraced each worshiper that Sunday
morning in Sutherland Springs. God was
there. God takes the sorrow on
Himself.
God
is here. Because of the cross and the
sacrifice of Jesus, the giver of new mercies knows what we’re going
through. Whatever you face, you don’t
have to face it alone. God is with us
and loves us. God has mercy for us,
mercy that never fails.
So,
when we come to the table to take the bread and drink the wine, we bring
everything that is in our hearts; every regret; every disappointment; every
shattered dream. We bring it all to God
who can takes our losses and gives new mercy.
He turns every death we die into new life. Jesus said, take this bread and drink this
cup “in remembrance of me.” We remember that
in Christ, God understands us and knows us.
And in Christ, we live in relationship with God. Christ is the guarantee of the hopeful faith
of Lamentations 3:22. His mercy is new
every morning, exactly what we need to face the day. His mercy exceeds our pain.
You
are invited to pray as we sing, and then to come to the table.
In
the midst of a great, happy season of life, come for bread and wine, the body
and blood of Christ.
In
a season of blahs and boredom and sameness, come! Your ennui will not lull your faith to
sleep. God’s mercy will spark you to
life.
If
you are in deep pain, God loves you and walks through the dark valley with you
and never leaves your side. In your pain, come!
Yes, it is heavy, but drag yourself to the table of forgiveness, hope,
and new life. Don’t let sorrow turn God
off. Come to the source of new
mercy.
Everyone,
come, to new life in Christ.
AMEN
No comments:
Post a Comment