A sermon on Lamentations 3.
So, we are in the midpoint of the book of Lamentations. Lamentations (if you haven’t been here for the last few weeks) is a short little book, right in the middle of the Bible. It’s a collection of five poems that deal with sadness, heartache, and grif. And we’re reading it during Advent!
Because it’s not Christmas yet, amen? Our society likes to start Christmas a little early—with sales starting in mid-October. But this isn’t Christmas—we are in the season of Advent. And Advent is a season of hope. It’s a season of waiting. A season of darkness, when we yearn for the Light. But that Light hasn’t come yet.
This time of year can be particularly hard for folks who are enduring loss or hardship. It’s difficult to be surrounded with all the lights and excitement of Christmas, when you yourself are hurting. So, we’re spending Advent in Lamentations.
Another aspect of this study that I’m really excited about is our Call for Laments. You might have noticed as you passed through the Narthex today that we have a lament board—right outside the sanctuary.
For the last couple Sundays, we’ve had this call for submissions in the bulletin. We are inviting you to make a lament—to take whatever sadness, whatever grief or heartache you happen to be carrying and express it through lament.
This could take the form of a poem you write, or a prayer. Maybe you want to create a piece of visual art or take a photo. There’s no wrong way to do this!
We’ve already gotten a few submissions. There’s a couple of poems out there and a prayer. Cheyenne Miller created a beautiful painting. Someone sent in a poem about suffering with plantar fasciitis! I read it and I have never felt more seen!
But please, before you leave today, take a look at the lament board. Read the bulletin insert. And if you’d like to make a lament, bring it to church by the end of the month and we’ll add it to the display.
This sermon is called: “The Hope at the Center.” We’re looking at the third poem in Lamentations. And similar to previous weeks, I wanna start by looking at what the poet is doing—the structure and the artistry of the poem. Then, once we’ve had that little peek behind the curtain, we’ll dig into some of the specifics.
Way back in week one of this series, I mentioned that the five poems of Lamentations are acrostics. Do you guys remember this? An acrostic is a poem that follows the alphabet. The first line starts with the letter A. Line two starts with the letter B. Then C and D—all the way down to Z.
The poems of Lamentations are based on the Hebrew alphabet, which has 22 letters. Here they are in all their glory…
A few of you mentioned last week that the poems of Lamentations don’t look like acrostics in English. That’s because it’s almost impossible to translate an acrostic (and keep that letter-by-letter format) when you’re translating between two languages with totally different letters.
Like, you could do it. The translators could try to make the first line start with A, instead of that squiggly nonsense on there. But you wouldn’t make it all the way to Z because they only have 22 letters!
The first poem in Lamentations (Lamentations 1) has 22 verses—one verse for each letter. Lamentations 2 also has 22 verses—and it’s the same for chapters 4 and 5. But Lamentations 3 is different!
The third poem has 66 verses—three verses per letter! Lamentations 3 is like: A, A, A, B, B, B, C, C, C—and so on. This means that Lamentations 3 has three times as many verses as the other poems. And wouldn’t you know—you can split it into three chunks.
Lamentations 3 has three distinct movements. The first 22 verses are lament—darkness, sadness, grief: “I am the man who has seen trouble—trouble coming from the lash of God’s anger.” Right?
In the same way, the last 22 verses are also lament. This poem opens and closes with lament. But the 22 verses in the middle? The central section of the central poem in the book of Lamentations? Those verses contain the only explicit words of hope in the entire book!
Now, we’ve seen this structure in the Bible before – it’s called a chiasm.
Chiasms were an ancient way of structuring a story or a poem—where the first section corresponds to the last section, the second section to the second last section, all the way down. Visually, it creates something like an arrow—pointing to the hidden treasure (the most important part of the book) which is buried right in the middle.
The core of this book (full of sadness, heartache, and loss)—the central section of the central poem—is hope!
22-24 God’s loyal love couldn’t have run out,
his merciful love couldn’t have dried up.
They’re created new every morning.
How great your faithfulness!
I’m sticking with God (I say it over and over).
He’s all I’ve got left.
25-27 God proves to be good to the one who passionately waits,
to the person who diligently seeks.
It’s a good thing to quietly hope,
quietly hope for help from God.
It’s a good thing when you’re young
to stick it out through the hard times.
28-30 When life is heavy and hard to take,
go off by yourself. Enter the silence.
Bow in prayer. Don’t ask questions:
Wait for hope to appear.
Don’t run from trouble. Take it full-face.
The “worst” is never the worst.
We’re using The Message translation for this series. The Message is a paraphrase of the Bible in modern English. But you might recognize some of these verses from the old King James Version:
22 It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed,
because his compassions fail not.
23 They are new every morning:
great is thy faithfulness.
“Great is thy faithfulness… thy compassions, they fail not… Morning by morning new mercies I see.” Does this remind you of anything? YES – the hymn “Great is Thy Faithfulness” was inspired by Lamentations 3.
The author of this book has compiled these five heavy poems about darkness, sadness, and loss. But at the center of it all (the heart of this book) is an affirmation of hope!
And we’re only halfway through! There’s a lot more darkness to come! And there are no other explicit affirmations of hope in the entire book—just at the center.
I don’t think we’d do it that way if we wrote it today. Because we’re modern people, right? And modern people think very linearly. We want to see a progression—a growth curve. The chart is always tracking up and to the right, yes?
If we wrote the book of Lamentations, the affirmation of hope would come at the end. It would be the resolution. After wading through four chapters of grief and sadness, we would end on a high note. As if to say: “Don’t worry! Don’t lament—it’s all gonna work out in the end! Everything will be okay!”
But that’s not the message of this book. And that’s not how grief works.
Grief is not linear. Sadness doesn’t follow a formula. There is no predetermined pathway for Lament that always ends in the positive. Grief comes in waves. After a loss (in the immediately aftermath) a lot of people just feel numb. Your body goes on autopilot. You’re just moving forward, pushing through, unable to process.
Oftentimes, it’s not until later—after the services are over, and the guests have all gone home, and the cards and the calls stop coming. THAT’S when the grief hits. And this avalanche of sadness bombards us out of nowhere.
Sometimes, we work through the grief, we process, we move on, we find hope, we start to heal. But then, the slightest thing sends us right back into it. That’s normal!
About ten years ago, I had a really bad falling out with a friend. He betrayed my trust, said some things that really hurt me. And I did not respond the best, let’s be clear. But that falling out ruined the relationship. And processing that took a long time.
I used to wake up at night, thinking about it. I’d replay the conversation in my head, over and over. I talked to a therapist about it. I spoke to some mentors. I even did this practice where I prayed for this person every day for a month. That’s an interesting experiment, let me tell ya!
After about a year, I finally felt like I was over it. I finally felt like I had moved on. But then, I was at a conference and ran into this former friend of mine—and it all came rushing back. I was right back in it!
That doesn’t negate the work I did. That doesn’t mean my processing was in vain. It’s just a reminder that grief is not literal. Whether you’re grieving the loss of a friend, a loved one, a divorce, estrangement, a dream that didn’t live up to your expectations—grief is not linear and that’s okay. That’s how it works. That’s why the hope of Lamentations is buried at the center and not at the end.
In this third poem, we meet a new character. Gone are the Narrator and Lady Zion from chapters 1 and 2. And in their place, we have: “the man.”
1-3 I am the man who has seen trouble,
trouble coming from the lash of God’s anger.
He took me by the hand and walked me
into pitch-black darkness.
Yes, he’s given me the back of his hand
over and over and over again.
The “man” in this passage is actually the Hebrew word: geber. But geber doesn’t just mean man.
A geber is a protector. A warrior. A soldier charged with protecting women and children. We might even translate it: bodyguard. A geber is a protector of the vulnerable.
These poems in Lamentations were written after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. We’ve talked about this in previous weeks. In 586 BC the Babylonian army laid waste to Jerusalem—destroying the temple, killing about half the people, and forcing the survivors into exile.
In this third poem, we meet a geber—a protector. A warrior charged with protecting the vulnerable members of their community. A protector who failed.
Can you imagine that pain? Exile is horrible enough—to be forcibly relocated from your home, after losing everything and everyone you love. To become a refugee, basically. Compound that loss with being one of the people who was charged with protecting your city—protecting your family and your home. That’s the speaker in Lamentations 3.
Not surprisingly, in the midst of his grief, the protector is all over the place. He’s in shock! His head’s spinning. He doesn’t know what to make of his loss—or of his God!
In the opening section of this poem, it’s pretty clear that the protector ascribes this loss to God. God is in control and ultimately this is God’s fault:
1 I’m the man who has seen trouble,
trouble coming from the lash of God’s anger…
4-6 He turned me into a skeleton
of skin and bones, then broke the bones.
He hemmed me in, ganged up on me,
poured on the trouble and hard times.
He locked me up in deep darkness,
like a corpse nailed inside a coffin.
7-9 He shuts me in so I’ll never get out,
handcuffs my wrists, shackles my feet.
Even when I cry out and plead for help,
he locks up my prayers and throws away the key.
This is in keeping with an ancient view of God as the one controlling everything. The man behind the curtain, moving all the levers that control things here on earth. That understanding of God gives way to this affirmation of hope…
22 God’s loyal love couldn’t have run out,
his merciful love couldn’t have dried up…
26-27 It’s a good thing to quietly hope,
quietly hope for help from God.
It’s a good thing when you’re young
to stick it out through the hard times…
31-33 Why? Because the Master won’t ever
walk out and fail to return.
If he works severely, he also works tenderly.
His stockpiles of loyal love are immense.
He takes no pleasure in making life hard,
in throwing roadblocks in the way:
34-36 Stomping down hard
on luckless prisoners,
Refusing justice to victims
in the court of High God,
Tampering with evidence—
the Master does not approve of such things.
So, blaming God, gives way to trusting God, which then gives way to accusing God again…
37-39 Who do you think “spoke and it happened”?
It’s the Master who gives such orders.
Doesn’t the High God speak everything,
good things and hard things alike, into being?...
42 “We’ve been contrary and willful,
and you haven’t forgiven.
43-45 “You lost your temper with us, holding nothing back.
You chased us and cut us down without mercy.
You wrapped yourself in thick blankets of clouds
so no prayers could get through.
One minute, God’s good—the next minute, God’s bad. “God’s with us, but then God’s against us. God’s punishing us because God hates injustice, but this punishment is unjust. God listens and is quick to forgive. But God’s not forgiving us! God, are you even listening?”
The poet is in shock! He doesn’t know if he’s coming or going. He doesn’t know what to make of God. “Should I be mad at God right now? Should I be praising him? Do I need to repent?” All of this is a normal part of grief. It all belongs.
We live in a culture of extremes. Everything is either black or white—clear cut. We like that because it’s predictable and consistent. But life is not consistent! Faith is not predictable. There’s a lot of uncertainty. There’s a lot of ups and downs. That’s normal and the Bible makes space for that.
It’s normal to question God in the midst of suffering. To doubt God’s goodness. To wonder if God even cares at all. That’s a normal part of faith. It’s healthy. And the Bible encourages it!
There’s no narrator in this poem who shows up to chastise the protector. There’s no effort by the poet to tidy up or edit out the uncertainty. The poet just lets it sit there for all of us can see.
Don’t let anyone edit out your grief. Don’t let anyone tell you that anger at God is off limits. If you need to be angry at God, be angry at God. Voice your complaint to God. Be honest with God about your uncertainty. God can handle it.
When I’m counseling couples, I don’t worry so much about couples who get angry with each other. Couples that argue and occasionally yell. That’s normal and relatively healthy. I worry about the couples who aren’t speaking at all. The couples that never argue and just bottle up all those emotions to fester.
Honestly expressing anger is a step toward healing. Being honest with God about your grief and how you’re feeling is a step toward rebuilding intimacy. It’s normal for your head to spin in these situations. It’s normal to be confused and question God. The Bible, in Lamentations, makes room for that.
I mentioned that Lamentations 3 is the only poem in this book with an explicit affirmation of hope. The bulk of that comes in the center of the poem. But there are echoes of hope elsewhere. It’s not clean. The hope in this poem is fragile and uncertain. It wavers. That’s normal! But the darkness wavers too.
There’s a tug-of-war playing out in the poet’s heart between darkness and light, hope and despair. And we have a front row seat.
55-57 “I called out your name, O God,
called from the bottom of the pit.
You listened when I called out, ‘Don’t shut your ears!
Get me out of here! Save me!’
You came close when I called out.
You said, ‘It’s going to be all right.’
The protector is still in darkness when he makes this affirmation of hope. His circumstances haven’t changed. Things haven’t gotten better. He hasn’t been rescued. His tensions with God are not resolved. But that hope is there—where we’d least expect it.
Hope doesn’t always make sense. It’s inexplicable. Hope is a grace. It comes out of nowhere to reassure us in the midst of the loss, often when we least expect it.
Reflecting on this poem, Old Testament scholar Kathleen O’Connor has this to say:
“Biblical hope does not emerge from proper reasoning or new information. It is not optimism or wishful thinking. It is not a simple act of the will, a decision under human control, or a willful determination. Hope emerges without clear cause like grace, without explanation, in the midst of despair and at the point of least hope. It comes from elsewhere, unbidden, illusive, uncontrollable, and surprising.”
Hope is inexplicable. It doesn’t always make sense—kinda like grief. Hope shows up when we’re not expecting it. It surprises us! Hope arrives unsure, fleeting, wavering, but there nonetheless.
Hold onto hope this Advent season. The Light is coming. Our Protector who knows our pain and empathizes with us is coming to be born in our hearts, all over again. That little baby in the manger—born into a world of chaos, confusion, and death, is the hope at the center.
Lean on that hope in the midst of the darkness. Amen.