Park United Methodist Church

Lamentations 3:21-26

 

Reflection: 

Today we start Advent and our new Sermon Series: Unshakeable.  They go hand in hand.  It is a series for when things feel like they are falling apart, things aren’t going quite right - the little things like timelines, and gifts, or the big things like illness, relationships, or the world spinning into chaos constantly.  It isn’t about convincing you that it is all okay or explaining the why for everything.  Rather, we are going to be looking at the thing that holds when nothing else does, and standing on that.

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Each year, we celebrate Advent as a time of preparation. It is kind of our pause button before we start a new year.  It is our built-in breathing space.  It is hard, though, because our culture jumps right into Christmas.  We jump into all the carols and celebrations.  As Christians, it is important to take the time to be mindful in the pause. 

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Advent gives us space to assess. To take time to get our hearts, minds, and souls ready for Christ’s coming.  For many of our families, friends, and church folks, this has been a tough year.  We have experienced a lot of loss this year, a lot of illness and heartbreak.  There are so many places in the world at war, and some days we feel like we stand in the middle of a chaotic storm.  So this year, we are going to take time for courage and being unshakeable.  

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We will be focusing in the next four weeks on our Unshakeable Hope in Christ’s Hessed. Hessed is God’s love, but more than that, it is goodness, kindness, favor, redemption from sin, preservation of life from death, redemption from enemies, and abundant goodness.  God’s faithful loving kindness is bigger than anything else going on.

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We begin this year’s Advent with Lamentations.  Lamentations is a poetic response of heartbreak for the Hebrew people.  Babylon attacked them in 587 BCE, and by 586, their rulers were removed; thousands had been relocated throughout the Babylonian empire.  The temple had been destroyed, and what had been a rich and thriving culture was a people who were starving, whose families were broken apart, people who could not find their friends anymore, homes had been destroyed, and national identity was lost.  They were crying out to the Lord.  The book of Lamentations is a book of grief, of crying out, of confession, and as Jon from the BibleProject.com says, it was a way to process emotion and confusion. 

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In the middle of all this, the author of Lamentations, who has seen his entire world crumble, his children go hungry, his relatives die, and breathes.  He reminds himself and his community that there is a ray of hope.  That if God is consistent enough to show justice against human evil and the sin the people have been enacting for generations, the way they had turned against their covenant with God for generations, then God will also not allow God’s covenant promises to fail or evil to have the final word.  

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At the beginning of Chapter 3, the author says God has attacked him, broken his bones, besieged him, and shut out his prayers.  The wonderful thing about the Bible is that it does not shy away from our pain, our doubt, or when we are struggling.  We can see others who have gone through it.  Ane yet…. the author says hope comes anew each morning in verse 21.  Why?

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He remembers God’s Hesed - God’s loving-kindness, faithfulness is afresh each day. It is not kindness like pity, it is the stability that although it allows consequences of our actions, does not allow us to walk alone in it, does not abandon promises, is always there, and never gives up on us.  It is that love that sends God’s very self as a baby to put on humanity, to be vulnerable and to show us love incarnate, to walk with us and suffer with us so that we physically know we are not alone. There are times we can not be saved from the consequenes of our corporate sin or someone elses, when healing is with Christ and not in body, and when wholeness is not what we envisioned, but wholeness of soul, but we have courage to stand because Christ is with us, and we can be redeemed because Christ is in it with us and will make all things work for God’s good (Romans 8:28).  Sometimes we need to just hang on to the hope we have in Christ.  

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As we talked with the kids earlier, there is truly nothing that separates us from God’s love, as we see in Romans 8:31-39 - not death nor life, angels or demons, nothing in all of creation can separate us from the love of Christ.  

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This does not take away from what we are going through, like the author of Lamentations.  Some days it still feels like all things are going wrong.  Yet it gives us the courage to stand on God’s unshakeable foundation as the world shakes around us, knowing God has us, and hope is new each morning.  

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As we enter a season with expectations and busyness, how are you going to take time to stand firm on that foundation?  What ways can you stay connected with God this week?  How will you listen?