What Never Fails

Lamentations 3:13-24

November 10, 2024 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night with all sorts of thoughts running through your head? My time is usually about 4:30 a.m. You know, just late enough that if I can get back to sleep, my alarm is going off very soon. But I will wake up and suddenly my brain kicks in, mulling over maybe something from the previous day or something that’s coming up or a conversation I need to have or a conversation I already had. And somehow in the middle of the night, those things seem larger, scarier and more intimidating. C. S. Lewis called such ruminating “the monotonous treadmill march of the mind around one subject” (A Grief Observed, pg. 3). That sounds about right. At some point I just give up on going back to sleep.

That’s sort of the way Lamentations 3 reads, like the poet has woken up in the middle of the night and is facing his own fears in the midst of a ruined city. The first two poems in this book are largely laments in the voice of the city, Jerusalem, but this lament in the middle is a very personal one, almost as if we are reading a page from his personal journal (cf. Guest, Communicator’s Commentary: Jeremiah, Lamentations, pg. 372). “I am the man who has seen affliction,” he says (3:1). No longer is he focused on the city; he’s focused on his own personal grief. And so, in some ways, this third chapter of Lamentations is more relatable than the others because we have all been there. Maybe we haven’t grieved over a city, though maybe we are grieving over our country, but for sure there are or will be times when we end up in the midst of personal grief. And to those times, in the middle of the night, Lamentations has an important message for us.

This morning, we are continuing our series on the book of Lamentations, a book that is focused on navigating through a difficult—actually, more than difficult, a disastrous and devastating time. I’ve called this series “Cry for the City” because in many ways that’s what the poet is doing throughout the whole book. He is mourning the loss of his beloved city, Jerusalem. And we’re using this book this month as a mirror to challenges in our own time, even grief in our own time over our nation and what has become of us. No matter who won last Tuesday, if the polls are right, about half of our country is upset over the results. How will we deal with that disappointment, that anger? Where will we go from here? Perhaps Lamentations can show us a way.

As I mentioned last week, some believe Jeremiah the prophet might have written this book, but the book itself does not say that nor give any indication as to who, exactly, the author was. But Jeremiah was one of those who had told the people, repeatedly, that destruction was coming and that it was inevitable. None of what happened should have been a surprise to the people or to the poet himself (cf. Guest 374). And yet it seems it was. The people of the nation of Judah seemed to have thought they would escape the destruction that had already come to their northern brothers and sisters. But they did not. The Babylonians came, attacked the city for three years, and eventually carted off all the valuable things and important people. The city that was left was in ruins and so were the people’s lives. “I am the man who has seen affliction,” the poet says, “by the rod of the Lord’s wrath” (3:1).

In the passage we read this morning, the poet is very specific about the ways he feels injured by what has happened. And he’s pointing at God as the one who has done these things not only to the city but to him. It’s kind of painful to read: “He pierced my heart…He has filled me with bitter herbs and given me gall to drink. He has broken my teeth with gravel…I have been deprived of peace” (3:13-16). And on it goes. Now, obviously, those things haven’t actually happened. The poet is using descriptive language to describe how his grief is affecting him. Grief does that; it affects us physically and mentally and psychologically and spiritually. It’s one of the hardest things to go through, no matter what the cause of the grief is. C. S. Lewis walked through the death of his wife, Joy, from cancer, and much like the poet in this chapter, he began writing down some of his reflections. Initially it was a journal, but it turned into a book called A Grief Observed. It was so personal that he originally published it under a different name; it wasn’t known that it was his work until after his death. One of the most famous passages from that time of grief is Lewis’ observation about God’s seeming absence during his grief. “Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence” (Lewis 4). The poet feels the same way; in verse 8, he says, “Even when I call out or cry for help, he shuts out my prayer.” Grief affects us deeply on every level, and the language for such times, as the poet demonstrates here, is lament (cf. Vroegop, Dark Clouds Deep Mercy, pg. 108).

The beautiful thing about the language of lament, however, is that it’s not just complaining. Lament is not just about feeling sorry for yourself. There is certainly room for that; you can see that in all of the poems in this book. But ultimately lament is about learning to look up. When you’re at the bottom, you have only two choices. You can look down and curse your situation. Or you can begin to look for hope. The poet in this chapter certainly does plenty of the first; that’s where the feelings he expresses in the first half of the poem come from. But that’s not all of the story. The second half of the poem begins a new chapter. “Lament dares to hope while life is hard…[It] is a prayer of faith despite your fear” (Vroegop 108, 110). So what hope does this poet find that might help us with our grief?

It begins in verse 19 when he remembers. God “calls his people to be rememberers” (cf. Guest 375), which is why we do so many things throughout the year in which we are invited to “remember.” We remember Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection through holy seasons every year. We remember that he told us to take the bread and the cup—and to remember. We remember that he set an example for us in baptism. Remembering reconnects us to the truth that we might have forgotten along the way. So the poet begins remembering. First, of course, as we all would, he remembers everything that has gone wrong. “I remember my affliction and my wandering…” (3:19). But then we encounter what might be the most powerful word in this poem: “Yet.” Three little letters (at least in English) change everything, and suddenly his remembering takes on a different tone. “Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope” (3:21). Remember what I said a moment ago? “Lament dares to hope while life is hard.” So what hope does the poet find?

Here are four things the poet remembers in the midst of his grief, four things that never fail, four things that for him turn everything around. First: God’s mercy never ends (cf. Vroegop 112-114). These are, perhaps, the most famous verses in the book. Thomas Chisholm turned them into a hymn that is one of my personal favorites. The poet says it this way: “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (3:22-23). The word that is translated “compassions” in the NIV is translated “mercies” elsewhere, and it’s a word you hear me talk about a lot: hesed. It’s that untranslatable word that is the essence of who God is. Merciful, compassionate, steadfast love. When the first English translators of the Scriptures came to this word, they had to make up a new compound word to try to explain it: lovingkindness. My favorite definition? “When the one who owes you nothing gives you everything.” That’s who God is, and the poet remembers that. He remembers that even when he has nothing else, if he has God, he has enough. In the midst of his lament, he remembers that, ultimately, God is all he needs. Even if our circumstances do not change, God never fails. His mercy never ends. You will never get to place where God runs out of mercy for us, compassion for us. Other people certainly do run out, but God never will. When everyone else has abandoned you, he will still be there because his mercy never ends.

The second thing the poet remembers is this: waiting is not a waste (cf. Vroegop 114-115). The poet writes this: “The Lord is my portion; there I will wait for him. The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord” (3:24-26). One of the things I found interesting as I looked at this passage is that different modern translations swap the words “hope” and “wait,” so I looked up the Hebrew root words, both of which can mean either “hope” or “wait.” In other words, to wait is to hope and to hope is to wait. To find hope, we often have to wait, and most of us don’t like to wait. Especially in our microwave, high speed internet, download it now culture, we want everything now. We’re coming up on the season where advertisers tell us we can get it now and pay for it later. (Of course, what they are counting on is that you pay a lot of interest between now and later.) But we don’t like to wait. I’ve watched people get very impatient in waiting rooms as other patients are called ahead of them. We don’t like to wait; we think waiting is a waste of time and we could be doing something else. And that’s just the poet’s point: there is nothing we can do. There was nothing he could do to restore Jerusalem. And most of the time there is nothing we can do to fix our situation. Whatever has brought us grief was likely out of our control, and so is the cure. When we have questions, God wants to be the answer. When we wait, he is still working. And so waiting is never a waste because waiting it teaching us to put our trust in God.

Yes, such waiting often contributes to many sleepless nights because we still think we have to do something. I went through a very stressful period some years ago and I very clearly remember laying in bed, when I should have been sleeping, and demanding that God fix it. Do something. Take my grief and my pain away. And it did seem, like C. S. Lewis described, like the doors to heaven were closed, locked from the inside. I wanted everything done on my timeline. I wanted everything fixed. I did a lot of talking and demanding but very little listening. Eventually I realized that, and when I stopped demanding I found that what God wanted was for me to learn to trust him. I’m kind of stubborn, hard-headed, so it took a while. I had to learn to wait. I had to learn to trust. I had to learn that there was nothing I could do to make anything better. And, in time, God did make everything better, but had I not learned to wait, I wouldn’t have learned to trust on a deeper level. I’m still not where I want to be or should be, but I do know now that the waiting is not a waste.

In the waiting, we should also remember the third thing: the final word has not been spoken (cf. Vroegop 115-117). Last week, in chapter 1, we talked about how Jerusalem was searching for comfort but finding none and I speculated that they were looking in the wrong place and to the wrong god for comfort. A lot of people today still do that. They believe and have believed over the last several elections that the sole hope and salvation will come through politics. If we can just get the right persons elected, everything will be okay. That’s why one side or the other is devastated when their candidates don’t win; it literally feels like the end of the world. It’s also why people start planning for the next election as soon as the last one is over. Their hope is in politics, but that is the wrong god. And I will say this: even for a lot of Christians today, politics is their god. Politics is where they find their hope. Once again, I’ll remind you of the words of Chuck Colson, someone who knew the promise and the power of politics all too well: “Salvation is not going to come on Air Force One.” Or through any other political means. We’re looking for the wrong god because we think this God, the one true God, is too slow to act.

But we live at a moment in time, as God’s people have always lived, when the final word has not yet been spoken. The poet in Lamentations says it this way: “For no one is cast off by the Lord forever. Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love” (3:31-32). Yes, God may bring or allow grief and hard times, and sometimes those things are allowed to make us stronger, but those things also will not last forever. “All suffering has limits and purpose” (Vroegop 116). God allows hard things but he is compassion. Do you hear the difference? One is something that happens to us and the other is his very nature. God will always be true to his nature. So never assume that the final word has been spoken or the last chapter has been written. Remember: the worst thing is never the last thing; one day, God is going to step in and say, “Enough!” But until then, the final word has not yet been spoken.

And that hope leads us to the final truth, which in some ways takes us back to where we started: God is always good (cf. Vroegop 117-119). The poet says, “For he [God] does not willingly bring affliction or grief to anyone” (3:33). That word translated “willingly” means “from the heart.” In other words, it is not in God’s heart or his nature to bring affliction or grief. It’s not his first choice or his default setting, just like with any good parent. Jesus used the same sort of illustration talking about his heavenly father: “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:9-11). Now, we may not appreciate being called evil, but Jesus’ point is the same: it’s not in God’s nature to give us bad things, to harm us, to afflict us. As I’ve said, sometimes those things come and sometimes God uses them to shape us but that’s not who God is at his core. He is always good. Always. And he longs to bring good things into our lives. When those things happen, one thing to remember is that we don’t see the whole story right then and we don’t know the purpose behind it. He is good; that is the truth you can rely on.

Some of you may remember when our bishop was Woodie White. Bishop White ordained me, and was a gentle, kind spiritual leader for Indiana. But one of the things people remember most from Bishop White’s twelve years here was the saying he started almost every gathering with, a call and response that people quickly picked up. You might remember: he would say, “God is good,” and people would respond, “All the time!” And all the time—God is good. Now, that was a clever way to engage people but it also was a deep spiritual truth that we need to remember constantly. When the world seems bad, when the politics don’t go our way, when we can’t seem to understand what is happening in our lives—God is still good. No matter what the headlines say, no matter what our neighbors say, no matter how much we dislike what is happening around us—God is still good. God is always good and because of that we can have hope. This truth never fails and God never fails.

So, let’s remember together these truths from Lamentations 3. I’m going to put all four of them on the screen and ask you to say them with me, one at a time. Ready? Here we go. God’s mercy never ends. Waiting is not a waste. The final word has not been spoken. And God is always good. By the way, this is an appropriate place for an “Amen.”

As C. S. Lewis worked through his own grief, he gradually came to realize that his own feelings were getting in the way of remembering the truth. Here’s how he expresses it later in that book A Grief Observed: “You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears…I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face?” (53). That’s why, especially in times of grief, God calls his people to be rememberers (Guest 375). Remember the good things that you are grieving. Remember why those things and those people made you feel the way you did. And above all else, remember who God is and what he is doing in your life and in the world. “His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is his faithfulness” (paraphrased 3:22-23). He never fails; thanks be to God! Amen.