Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

In the case of Lamentations, the unthinkable questions of God's role in the destruction come barreling forward because in the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem, the survivors state with daring power that it is God's wrath, God's anger, and then probably most devastating, God's silence, that is housed in the rubble, in the unspeakable violence, in the wormwood and the gall of the poet. And it's not lost on me that if you read the entire text of Lamentations, God never speaks. Talk about silence.
In our day, I must admit, I often ask, "Where is God?" In the midst of environmental degradation, the warring, the sheer meanness and violence inflicted by so many, and the unraveling of so much of our social order, why does God seem so silent? And though I have no interest in going down the path that God is intending violence or revenge on human sin in a form of retribution or clearing out with humans have messed up or down another path that I hear so often that the God of the Old Testament is a God of violence, that the God of New Testament revealed in Jesus a kinder, gentler God. That's far too easy.

Rather, an unflinching look at the world and a willingness to wait upon a word from God that is clear-eyed is what I believe is called for here. And with a power beyond the banal, easy, quick responses, this very text that holds massive theological questions, also hints at beauty and remarkable sound.
The question of God's absence or silence is one that is continually reckoned with throughout scripture. And that question certainly persists today with the number of people I know who actually are skeptics about religion or cynics about the word that religious communities bring, which is that God is active and alive in the world. The whole biblical sweep lays bare encounters with the question, "Where is God? Where is your God?"

It not only comes up in the Hebrew Bible, but Jesus engages the question many times, the most prominent of which was on the cross when he about shrieks out, "Why, oh God, have you forsaken me?" And I'm convinced that those of you who trudge here on a summer Sunday or any Sunday for that matter, wonder where was God in the range of issues that we carry as a culture like the Holocaust or 9/11 or when tornadoes or gunfire or floods rip through communities.

Yes, out of the depths of pain and peril and devastation, poet of Lamentations 3 sings out with what I can imagine to be a quivering, shaking, frail voice of hope. The bridge from sorrow to hope is buried in the lyrical affirmation, "But this I call to mind and therefore I have the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. God's mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is thy faithfulness." The Lord stirs in the listener the hope that is rooted in God's faithfulness in the past and the streaming overwhelming love of that God that shimmers on the horizon. It is out of grief, loss and worry, and even the anger that rails against that which lands on our face, that we come to know the power of God's affirming love, and indeed God has not abandoned us.

I think sometimes we wonder where all this is going and where the face of God is, but God is here though sometimes shadowy and fragmentary, and it allows us to remember the old, old story of God's immense pleasure in the world and God's unending faithfulness that arises from the devastation, the pain, the grief, and the loss. As one of the commentators said, Lamentations transforms loss into remembrance and bequeaths its readers of all ages of an inheritance of projected aliveness.

Over the past year and a half since I retired from active ministry, I've centered my time in somewhat embarrassing, but actually quite satisfying activities, puzzles, and novels. Yes, many early retirees that I know tend toward puzzles and perhaps because life itself is a puzzle, especially in these days, and the small random pieces of puzzles when they begin to snap into place, when the eye sees a small detail, a pinprick dot in a quick glance of looking at a piece like looks totally white with no detail, and you realize that little pinprick of a dot links the entire puzzle, there's this immense joy that arrives like the buried treasure in the field that Jesus found. It's a touch with a realm that we would not know otherwise.
But most of the time when I'm not holding a grandbaby or spinning through social media or outside walking the dog or checking what's happening on the news at a place like Harvard or D.C. or the wider world, I'm reading novels. As I said earlier, it seems that a vast number of novels and memoirs or nonfiction these days focus on grief and loss. And we can ask a question, though probably rhetorically, "Why so much grief?" Yes, some novels begin and the end with tragedy. Some counter tragedy with redemption. But the ones that I've found that really capture my attention powerfully are the ones that attend to acute grief as a powerful way of knowing. Maybe it's cultural, but Irish writers that I've read seem to capture this with power and awakening.

And recently I read a novel by Niall Williams entitled Time of the Child. The entire novel of nearly 300 pages takes place in a very few short weeks of Advent to Christmas in a tiny village in Ireland where the main characters are a doctor, his daughter, and a couple of priests. For the young teen in the village trying to coax his father, who is an alcoholic, from a bar on a random night, the young man stumbles onto a baby that's been abandoned at the church door. He believes that the baby is dead, and he takes it to the doctor's practice. He hands the little corpse to the doctor, and the doctor manages to revive the child, who's been dead for a very brief time. And the doctor's daughter living with her father winds up finding her own life awakened by caring for the abandoned little baby in ways that are completely unimaginable.

Needless to say, the drama, the reflection, the disease of the doctor whose life has been very private, very internal, very agnostic awakens with some measure of deep and abiding light in that dim December Advent world. The novel is rife with sadness, with biting hurt and worry, and the reality of some quite traumatic human intercourse. But in embracing the sadness —the acute grief of family hurt and anguish —the temptation to medicate it away gives way. Knowing the vast love for an abandoned child, the abandoned heart of the characters that reaches toward healing and immense hope. The journey takes us to hallowed, holy, courageous love that stirs the soul.
In our times of great uncertainty, in our days of worry and the loss of so much, it is to dreams, the harbors of generosity, the deep and abiding faithfulness of God made known in the person of Jesus that we must place our trust. Sometimes we stumble onto the grace of God, and sometimes we go break neck speed toward the everlasting arms. God is faithful in tough times, yes.

And though it seems like it is a long wait for the inbreaking of God's abiding and faithful presence, it is ours to embody the light that spills forth in hope. As a matter of fact, the Hebrew word for hope is the same word as meaning to wait. And in our attentive waiting, hope spills forth. In our attentive waiting, the power of God meets us because God is faithful, greatly faithful.

I will close with some words from a friend's sermon on this text that I think awaken joy and light that can break into our days even when grief and pain sometimes seems to be cutting it out. These words began as a tweet from actor-writer Lin-Manuel Miranda, and they accompany us as we step forth with hope, with newness seeking hearts and eyes fixed on the joy of Jesus' life. The tweet goes, "Good morning. Eyes up, hearts up, minds sharp and passion is on full blast. Okay, let's go." Let this be our prayer arising from lament and singing with hope. So be it.