ELS General Pastoral Conference Communion Service Sermon: Lamentations 3:19-26 IN NOMINE JESU Prayer: Lord God, heavenly Father, of Your fatherly goodness You allow Your children to come under Your chastening rod here on earth, that we might be like Your only-begotten Son in suffering and hereafter in glory: We beseech You, comfort us by Your Holy Spirit in all temptations and afflictions, that we may not fall into despair, but that we may continually trust in Your Son’s promise, that our trials will endure but a little while, and will then be followed by eternal joy; that we thus, in patient hope, may overcome all evil, and at last obtain eternal salvation; through the same, Your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one true God, now and forever. Amen. Text: The Holy Ghost has caused to be written in Lamentations 3,19/26. Remember my affliction and roaming, The wormwood and the gall. My soul still remembers And sinks within me. This I recall to my mind, Therefore I have hope. Through the LORD’S mercies we are not consumed, Because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; Great is Your faithfulness. “The LORD is my portion,” says my soul, “Therefore I hope in Him!” The LORD is good to those who wait for Him, To the soul who seeks Him. It is good that one should hope and wait quietly For the salvation of the LORD. Introduction: The prayer we just offered was written for the third Sunday after Easter, which is also called “Jubilate.” That Sunday is a curious thing in the Church Year. It takes place only a few weeks removed from having sung those alleluias as Jesus shattered the power death, and the name for that Sunday reflects this. It’s called: Jubilate! Which means, “Rejoice!” But the Gospel for the day seems to be anything but joyous. In it, Jesus told His disciples and His Church: A little while and you will see Me no more, because I go to the Father, and: Most assuredly, I say to you that you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; and you will be sorrowful. It was these words that inspired Johann Sebastian Bach to write the Cantata for that day called: Weeping, Lamenting, Worrying, and Fearing; which probably sounds way more depressing in German and which we might subtitle: Awake my Heart with Sadness. Bach and those who set up those readings for our historic lectionary well understood that even though the Church was only a few weeks past celebrating Easter Day and was still “under its influence,” nevertheless, it was also still only three days more removed from Jesus’ crucifixion…an event that – while we might want to keep it in the shadows because it’s so icky and sad – it’s an event that is central to what the Church’s shepherds are to preach and you, the Church, should demand to hear from them. In that Cantata, Bach wrote: I follow after Christ; I will not abandon Him in well-being and trouble, in living and dying. I kiss Christ’s dishonor; I will embrace His cross. I follow after Christ; I will not abandon Him. And it is this idea of “kissing” Christ’s dishonor that can be found at the center of our lives whether lived as a Christian pastor, husband, wife, child, student, teacher, parent, grandparent and which is the focus of the portion of Jeremiah’s Lament that is our focus this evening. But your sinful, pain averse human nature doesn’t want to kiss that cross, much less embrace it. You look at books of the Bible such as Lamentations and you try to find a way to exorcise it of it’s sad, sad demons, and the verses of tonight’s text would seem to be an excellent place to do so. And so, just as the prosperity pimps preach who populate so many pulpits today, you declare with the voice of victory: “Out with the wormwood! Flush away the gall! Depart from me you vile affliction!” Not only that, but you also do your best to push aside any thoughts of hope and waiting. Demand from God right now what He promises because you’ve been so, so good to follow His demands and have lived such a holy, blameless life and have paid your dues. But the hope of the members of Christ’s body does not rest on the vagaries of karma. If that were so, then there would have been no Babylonian Captivity for the people of Judah because there would have been no Judah…or Israel…or any kind of promise made to Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob. Adam and Eve would have been instantly immolated as full payment to quench the Lord’s anger over their sin and there would have been no Cain or Seth from which the rest of humanity sprung. Yes, of course you are accountable for your sin of rejecting the bad from God while demanding the good. You are as eternally accountable as were Adam, Eve, and all the rest who fell short of God’s glory and who deserve something far more terrible than having your nation destroyed and being carried off to another land. To understand this from Jeremiah’s words, you deserve to be consumed. You deserve that God’s compassions fail, that He simply gives up loving you. His anger remains burning in all its hotness with no love there at all for you to make your agony any less. The same God who would inspire these words of Psalm 137 that the Pastors prayed this morning – and I wonder if anyone was listening and what they may have thought – this is the God who requires the same payment and horrors of you, spiritual Babylonians, enemies of God, should you remain in your rebellion against Him (8,9): O daughter of Babylon, who are to be destroyed, Happy the one who repays you as you have served us! Happy the one who takes and dashes Your little ones against the rock! Jeremiah was not listened to when he spoke these words to the people of Judah in the same way Judas didn’t listen to Jesus’ warnings, either. If these words had been heeded, Jerusalem might not have been destroyed…at least then. But the people and their king had descended so far into apostasy – they had so utterly rejected the righteously jealous demands that God continued to spread before them - that they were unable to look back and see how often it had been that their ancestors were punished – and punished greatly – for the very same rebellion against the Lord and His prophets. They ignored the warnings of their past that would help them to understand what the Lord’s anger would visit upon them. Therefore, it’s important to see that these words also were meant for the captives to read and hear after they had been taken away to a foreign land to serve a pagan king…they were to hear these words after, even, they repented of their sins against the Almighty. Now in them was no promise of immediate release from their bondage. The Babylonians wouldn’t disappear or become kind-hearted towards their slaves anytime soon, or at all just because the people repented. No, it would take 70 years and then a king from another nation would conquer Babylon and only then would they be allowed back within the traces of Jerusalem’s fallen city walls. Not only that, but that city’s glory and the glory of her king and kingdom would not be restored in this life to what it once was. Nevertheless, having repented of their sins, having experienced and still experiencing their bondage, these words of Jeremiah fell upon their ears and gave them a hope, a greater hope than earthly glory that they dared not have on their own. Looking back and around them in captivity, they were moved to pray as Jeremiah had spoken: Remember my affliction and roaming, The wormwood and the gall. My soul still remembers And sinks within me. But then, regardless of their sad state, they proclaimed: This I recall to my mind, Therefore I have hope. Through the LORD’S mercies we are not consumed, Because His compassions fail not. These words are meant for you, too. You have afflictions, but not as the world has them. No, on account of the fact that God the Lord has made you His children, adopted you by water and the Word into His family, you are made to feast upon the wormwood that makes even the sweetest of this life’s experiences turn bitter in your mouth. Your insides burn at the indignities thrust upon you for bearing the mark of Christ’s cross upon you and you are tempted - tempted greatly - to sink down and turn away from the sight of the one lifted high above you upon His own cross of shame and agony to find some other savior. But then…now, really…come the Words that move you to rely on what the promises of God declare to you. This Word bespeaks of Him who Himself suffered affliction. It tells of Jesus, who had no place to lay His head, and how He is your Savior who gives you an eternal home and of whom you will sing as you partake of His sacred body and blood: O the wormwood and the gall! O the pangs His soul sustained! Right here - for you! - is your Jesus, whose agony did not overwhelm Him – His love for you did not falter in the least - and it is He who gives His faithfulness to you as a gift so that the hellish hosts of your disloyal thoughts, words, and deed are drowned in your baptism and are seen by God your Father never again…no more…forever. As Jeremiah stated: (His) mercies are new every morning; Great is (God’s) faithfulness. Thus, each morning, each day, each evening – continually! - your God reminds you of whom you are. You may look as though He has abandoned you. The world may mock you and say, “If you are a child of God, turn these stones in your life into yummy bread!” But for you there is salvation, for you there are an eternal hope and peace that the mocking world cannot provide and can never possess on its own. As Jesus said through Jeremiah at the end of our text: “The LORD is my portion,” says my soul, “Therefore I hope in Him!” The LORD is good to those who wait for Him, To the soul who seeks Him. It is good that one should hope and wait quietly For the salvation of the LORD. One author describes what Jubilate Sunday is all about when he wrote: Until now (in the season of Easter)... we have felt as though we were in heaven. We forgot we were still on earth. Now the Church leads us back into the crude everyday life. She offers no paradise in which only roses without thorns bloom. No, the Church tells the newly baptized and us plainly and crisply: The Christian life is a hard, difficult life, a life of suffering, of combat, of testing. As well as, as J.S. Back wrote: Weeping, Lamenting, Worrying, and Fearing. Yet still, by the forgiveness declared to you already tonight…by the forgiveness I give you in this moment that takes away all your sins in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…by the forgiveness your brothers and sisters in Christ give you as they mutually speak with and console you by word and song…by the forgiveness fed to you by your loving Savior’s hand as He gives you Himself to eat and drink, you are made to stop speaking about yourself and what you have done and declare the hope that is in you because of what Jesus has done. Your waiting, though it might look that way, is not in vain. Jesus said to His disciples after He told them He was going away “for a little while”: Therefore you now have sorrow; but I will see you again and your heart will rejoice, and your joy no one will take from you. Your God has fulfilled this promises He made to them and makes to you. By faith you see Him and rejoice because He has washed you, forgiven you, fed you. You are freed from the curse of your sins, you are made strong to bear the cross you picked up when you were baptized, and you wait – “hoping and sitting quietly” for your salvation which is here…right now. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Forevermore. Amen. SOLI DEO GLORIA
Posted on: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 20:21:58 +0000