Well if you would turn in your Bibles to the book of Lamentations. It’s found, a little book found between Jeremiah and Ezekiel in the Old Testament. You can find it on page 685 in your pew Bibles. I recently mentioned to a few of you when asked that we will be studying the book of Lamentations this fall – more than one person said, “Fun!” or “Exciting!” Well, we’ll see! Some friends gave me a coffee mug one time and it said, “I put the fun in funeral,” so maybe that kind of fun! Whatever the case, the writer of Lamentations was not having fun. No, in fact his was an intense grief.
And I think we know something about that. We talked this morning about the household of God. And if that’s true, if we are the household of God, we are the family, together as the church, then we feel one another’s griefs; we bear one another’s burdens; we carry one another’s sorrows. And I could list name after name after name of those who have been rocked, knocked off their foundations, by some sort of grief, sadness, loss. I could list names, but I’m not, because to list names would in some ways discount the grief that maybe someone else is feeling. Maybe it’s a relationship that has fallen apart or changed. It could be a dream or a goal that has been dashed. Perhaps it’s an ideal that has been lost. We know something about grief. This is not a new thing. There are always people, there are always families among us who are going through waves of loss and sadness. And grief, it can come at us in ways that we might not have expected when we were not looking for it. And I would guess, in fact, that most of us, maybe all of us carry some sort of unaddressed or unresolved grief. None of us really knows how to deal with it. What are we supposed to say? How do we put words to what we are feeling? How long is this going to last? Where is God in all of this? Well Lamentations is here to help.
And for the next five weeks, we are going to lament. We are going to lament from this part of God’s Word and thank God for this part of His Word. And hopefully, as we read and as we study these hard words from hard times from the book of Lamentations, we will find help in our own grief. Hopefully, we will find the same hope that we find tucked into this little book. Hope in the Lord. Hope in the great faithfulness of God. Hope in God’s saving us, rescuing us, comforting us, ultimately through His Son, Jesus Christ. And so as we come to this book, let’s pray and ask that He will help us do just that and then we’ll look to the first chapter tonight. Let’s pray.
Our Father, we come to Your Word this evening, maybe perhaps to study in depth for the first time something that we have often overlooked. Maybe we come tonight to look for the first time or for the first time in a long time at a grief that we have experienced, some suffering or sorrow. Maybe it will uncover something that we have been holding back, trying to bury. And so we ask for Your mercy tonight. We ask for Your peace, a peace that passes understanding. We ask for Your wisdom and grace that we would hear Your Word, that we would have ears to hear, that we would see Jesus and the hope that we have in Him, and that You would be glorified. And we pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Lamentations chapter 1, beginning in verse 1:
“How lonely sits the city that was full of people! How like a widow has she become, she who was great among the nations! She who was a princess among the provinces has become a slave.
She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks; among all her lovers she has none to comfort her; all her friends have dealt treacherously with her; they have become her enemies.
Judah has gone into exile because of affliction and hard servitude; she dwells now among the nations, but finds no resting place; her pursuers have all overtaken her in the midst of her distress.
The roads to Zion mourn, for none come to the festival; all her gates are desolate; her priests groan; her virgins have been afflicted, and she herself suffers bitterly.
Her foes have become the head; her enemies prosper, because the Lord has afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions; her children have gone away, captives before the foe.
From the daughter of Zion all her majesty has departed. Her princes have become like deer that find no pasture; they fled without strength before the pursuer.
Jerusalem remembers in the days of her affliction and wandering all the precious things that were hers from days of old. When her people fell into the hand of the foe, and there was none to help her, her foes gloated over her; they mocked at her downfall.
Jerusalem sinned grievously; therefore she became filthy; all who honored her despise her, for they have seen her nakedness; she herself groans and turns her face away.
Her uncleanness was in her skirts; she took no thought of her future; therefore her fall is terrible; she has no comforter. ‘O Lord, behold my affliction, for the enemy has triumphed!’
The enemy has stretched out his hands over all her precious things; for she has seen the nations enter her sanctuary, those whom you forbade to enter your congregation.
All her people groan as they search for bread; they trade their treasures for food to revive their strength. ‘Look, O Lord, and see, for I am despised.’
‘Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which was brought upon me, which the Lord inflicted on the day of his fierce anger.
From on high he sent fire; into my bones he made it descend; he spread a net for my feet; he turned me back; he has left me stunned, faint all the day long.
My transgressions were bound into a yoke; by his hand they were fastened together; they were set upon my neck; he caused my strength to fail; the Lord gave me into the hands of those whom I cannot withstand.
The Lord rejected all my mighty men in my midst; he summoned an assembly against me to crush my young men; the Lord has trodden as in a winepress the virgin daughter of Judah.
For these things I weep; my eyes flow with tears; for a comforter is far from me, one to revive my spirit; my children are desolate, for the enemy has prevailed.’
Zion stretches out her hands, but there is none to comfort her; the Lord has commanded against Jacob that his neighbors should be his foes; Jerusalem has become a filthy thing among them.
‘The Lord is in the right, for I have rebelled against his word; but hear, all you peoples, and see my suffering; my young women and my young men have gone into captivity.
I called to my lovers, but they deceived me; my priests and elders perished in the city, while they sought food to revive their strength.
Look, O Lord, for I am in distress; my stomach churns; my heart is wrung within me, because I have been very rebellious. In the street the sword bereaves; in the house it is like death.
They heard my groaning, yet there is no one to comfort me. All my enemies have heard of my trouble; they are glad that you have done it. You have brought the day you announced; now let them be as I am.
Let all their evildoing come before you, and deal with them as you have dealt with me because of all my transgressions; for my groans are many, and my heart is faint.’”
The grass withers and the flowers fall but the Word of our God endures forever.
Here’s what we are going to do with this chapter. Marshall McLuhan once said that, “The medium is the message.” In other words, how you say something says something in and of itself. So a handwritten note means more than a text message. A call from your doctor means more than a message in the online portal. The medium is the message. The way you say something says something. Well the way or the medium of Lamentations, the way Lamentations is written says something about the message of Lamentations. And so those will be our two points for tonight for chapter 1 – the medium and the message.
Number one – the medium. Now here is the most obvious one. Lamentations is a lament. And the title, we get to it right from the very beginning, the title of this book of course in English is “Lamentations” but in Hebrew it is the first word of this book, the first word of chapter 1. It’s “How” – “Ech.” That’s the title in Hebrew of this book. It is written by one who has been gut-punched. He is stunned. He is almost speechless to where the way he begins is, “How…” And this is a lament. A lament is the most depressing of all of the literary genres. Think back to Charlie’s sermon this summer from the Psalms – Psalm 88. Do you remember how Psalm 88 ends? The last verse of Psalm 88 is, “My companions have become darkness.” It’s a comparison to something like solitary confinement. The NIV translates that, “Darkness is my closest friend.” Now that’s brutal. That is depressingly bleak. But that’s lament. Lament is a prayer of grief. One writer defines lament this way – “Lament is a prayer in pain that leads to trust.” Or to put it another way, “Lament is the honest cry of a hurting heart, wrestling with the paradox of pain on the one hand and the promises of God’s goodness on the other.” Lament.
And lament is a major feature of the Psalms. Think about this. At least one-third of the Psalms are laments. One out of three of the playlists of the divinely inspired songs and prayers of the people of God in the Bible are in a minor key you could say. But not if we could help it. Because we want things happy and upbeat, don’t we? And singing a mournful song on a Sunday morning and somebody is probably getting a call on Monday morning! And by the way, if we try to work in some laments during this series on Lamentations and you can put all the blame on me! But, and I’m the same way – give me “Victory in Jesus” any day over a funeral dirge on the organ. I’m the same way. That is our culture. But is that good for us? Is that good for us? What are we missing? What are we missing when we avoid dealing with the hard things in life in our worship? What are we missing when we neglect to train ourselves to face dark days and frowning providences in faith? What are we missing? Well that’s what lament is for. In fact, for people who know what they are talking about when it comes to Hebrew poetry, they tell us that the book of Lamentations is written with a beat that is particularly suited for a sad song. It’s called a kinah meter or a kinah rhythm. It’s a 3-2 pattern where a stanza will stress three words in the first line and then two words in the second line. And so it creates this sort of dying away or trailing off effect with the lyrics. And some scholars even say that the whole book of Lamentations is structured this way. And you’ll notice that there are three chapters written one way – Lamentations 1, 2 and 3 are all about the same length, and then chapters 4 and 5 are much shorter. And so it’s almost like this whole book, in a sense, limps to the finish line. And lament is like that. Grief is like that. It’s wounded. It’s faltering. It’s literally down beat.
And then there’s the whole thing with the acrostic. What’s an acrostic? Well did you notice how many verses are in chapter 1? There are 22 verses in chapter 1. What about chapter 2? There are 22 verses in chapter 2. The same thing – there are 22 verses in chapter 4 and in chapter 5. Now that is not an accident, but it is because there are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet. From Aleph, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, all the way to Tav. And each verse in these poems start with a different word that begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Remember back to Psalm 119 as David led us through some months ago, each section of Psalm 119 is structured around, the beginning word of each section begins with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet. That’s what’s going on with these acrostics in the book of Lamentations.
Now what about chapter 3? Chapter 3 is actually 66 verses. Why is that? Well, 66 is 22 times 3. And so chapter 3 is like a super acrostic. And 3 verses at a time start with the same Hebrew letter, and so it makes chapter 3 of this book the focal point of the whole book, and rightfully so as we will see when we come there. Now, what’s the point? What’s the point of using an acrostic poetic device? Well if I could say this reverently, 22 verses is too long. I mean, if I was writing, if I was writing this, if I was writing about a painful experience, I would have given up a long time before getting to verse 22. Think about it. We can’t even comment on every verse of this chapter in our time together tonight because the sermon would be much too long. But you see what the acrostic does, is it forces the writer to stick with it. It forces the writer to think of new ways and new words to express the pain of his situation, the pain that he is feeling.
Wouldn’t you say that about the problem of grief? We get tired of talking about it. We get tired of thinking about it. We want to bury, to bury it or stuff it before we really deal with it. But not with an acrostic. And yet it’s only to a point because you get to verse 22, you get to the twenty-second letter and then stop. I read somewhere recently that one writer said that, “To some, ill health is a way to be important.” And it can be tempting to go on and on and on about a painful situation. But what the acrostic does, is it forces one to continue on, to press through to a certain extent, and then to put the pen down.
And then, the other helpful thing that the acrostic does, is that it helps to come up with new and creative ways to identify what grief is. How would you express, how would you define in your own words what grief is? I think we would all say something like – sadness, listlessness, heartache. But what about verse 13? Fire. “Fire into my bones.” It’s a memory. It’s an emotion that makes you feel like you are on fire. Maybe it even causes you to actually sweat. That’s grief. Verse 15 says “trodden in a winepress.” It’s expressing something about a feeling of being churned up, of being squeezed out, drained of life. That’s grief. And we may never have gotten those images if the writer was not forced to go all the way through the alphabet, from
“Aleph to Tav” or from “A to Z” as we would say it. The acrostic lament, it actually helps us to say, “Yes, that’s what I’m feeling and I didn’t even know to call that or to identify that as grief.”
But then there’s this. You get to chapter 5 and all of that falls apart. The 22 verses are still there, yes, but there’s no more alphabetical order anymore. It doesn’t go from Aleph to Tav. And I think it’s something like this. I went to the funeral of a man a few years ago who suffered from dementia. And one of the things that he did when he was diagnosed with that disease is that he took up art for the first time as a hobby. And it was abstract. It was compelling what he produced. In fact, I actually saw it on display in an art gallery in town recently. But as his visitation, they had lined up several pieces from different times in a row, several pieces of his art lined up in a row. And you could tell that over time they became more abstract, and especially his signature became more broken down and illegible over time. You could see on visual images the progression of his disease on the canvas, the breakdown. It was heartbreaking. But Lamentations is like that in some way. The order breaks down. The alphabet is abandoned. Chapter 5 does not follow the rules of the acrostic, but that’s the way it is with grief so often. It is not neat. It is not linear. It’s not orderly. It’s not predictable. We could even say it’s not very presbyterian at all because it’s not decent and it’s not in order. That’s what grief is like. There are no easy answers. And Lamentations is here in these five chapters, it embraces the messiness of it all.
And we don’t know who wrote it. We don’t know who wrote the book of Lamentations. Maybe Jeremiah. Maybe not. We’re not told. And probably, that’s a good thing because at a very basic level, this text is meant to be read as an anonymous work perhaps “so that it might be considered the prayers of many and not just one person,” as one commentator put it. You see, and maybe it’s so that it can become your prayer in your circumstances and not just tied to one particular tragedy in particular. So that’s the medium. That is the medium or some of the literary features of the book of Lamentations. It’s a lament. It’s an acrostic. And it’s anonymous. And what it does, because of that, it gives us language to identify and to express our pain. It forces us to linger, to deal more fully with our grief, and it gives dignity to our grief. It gives a place, there’s a place for talk like this. There’s a place for songs like this. And our faith needs to be able to allow and to handle and to deal with hard things like this because God is there in hard times like this. And God is faithful in hard times like this.
Now what about the message? What about the message of Lamentations chapter 1? Well here is one message, one message from this chapter. It’s not the only message by any means, but one thing that we can take from this chapter is this – just say it. Just say it. Get it out. Write it down. You see, don’t bottle up your grief. Don’t worry about saying exactly the right thing but say something. And along those lines you’ll notice an announcement in our bulletin for this fall there is a Grief Share group that will be meeting, led by Billy Dempsey here at the church in the fall. It may be a place for you where you can come and get it out and say it with other people and to help one another in our griefs. But don’t hide it. In one of the well-known studies on grief, it identifies several different stages of grief. And number one is denial. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Now this was never meant to be or to describe a step-by-step process that grieving people go through, but it’s expressing a multitude of complicated feelings that people may feel and overlap or all at once or different times in grief, different experiences that grieving people have, but denial is a big one.
I was reading a memoir recently and the writer says she came home, came back to her apartment one day, and the window was open and there were muddy footprints on her bedspread. And she looked over and a spice drawer, a spice rack drawer was turned over on her bed. That was the spice rack where she kept her grandmother’s jewelry. And all of it was gone. And then one month later, to the day, one of her best friends took his own life. And she is writing this memoir about her grief and about how she wrestled in one place with denial. She said this. She said, “Denial is humankind’s specialty. Our handy aversion. We are so allergic to our own mortality. We’ll do anything to make it not so.” And she said, “I am holding these losses as if they are familiar to me, but not quite mine.” That’s how she expressed the denial of her loss. Denial is a big one. Denial is my big one. That is my specialty. Do you know what my go-to move is for dealing with hard things? The default setting of my operating system? It’s this – it’s silence. Don’t talk about it. Just move on. But that’s not good. And Lamentations is the furthest thing from that. Lamentations is the furthest thing from denying pain.
In fact, it starts out with remembering the disaster. Look at verse 1. “How lonely sits the city that was full of people! How like a widow has she become, she who was great among the nations! She who was a princess among the provinces has become a slave.” Just notice in that verse all of the reversals that are being described there. The writer is saying just how terrible it is, how terrible it is that so much has been lost. How far things have fallen. All of this is about the defeat and the destruction and the captivity of Jerusalem at the hands of Babylon in 586 BC. It was unimaginable. It was unthinkable. And we’ll come back and think more about that at another time. But what had happened was they had suffered a complete reversal of fortunes. The city went from being full to empty. Once a bride, now a widow. The princes had become a slave. And he could remember. He can remember all that the city used to be. He can remember all the ways that they had been blessed by God, all that had been lost.
And there is a rich tradition in the Bible of remembering, isn’t there? And yet what do we usually think about when we think about remembering in the Bible? We often associate remembering with thanksgiving. “Count your blessings, one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done.” But here, it’s remembering that is associated with grief, remembering that is lament. It turns out that grief and gratitude are close relatives. They share a common ancestor – remembering. It’s like grief and gratitude are first cousins in some way. And it’s true. We grieve for that for which we are so grateful. In that memoir that I mentioned just a minute ago, she said about telling her story, she said, “If I do not capture what I have lost, it will be like losing it twice.”
The writer of Lamentations is doing nothing if not capturing all that has been lost. Look at verse 2, “All her friends have become her enemies.” Verse 6, “All her majesty has departed.” By the way, that word “all” is the most repeated word in this chapter. Seventeen times we read the word “all.” The writer also says, verse 9, “Her fall is terrible. She has no comforter.” Verse 14, “He caused my strength to fail.” Verse 16, “For these things I weep; my eyes flow with tears.” You know sometimes people will say, if you ask them how they are doing, they’ll say, “I can’t complain, and it wouldn’t do much good if I did.” But maybe it would. The writer of Lamentations literally takes complaining to an art form. I was talking to someone recently about an assignment in the RTS counseling course on trauma. And one of the assignments is to write your own lament. Harvard Medical Journal says that there are studies that show that writing down, getting deep emotions out on paper has actually shown benefits in immunity and blood pressure and mood. There are benefits of journaling. Maybe it’s a journal. Maybe it’s poetry. Maybe it’s a haiku or an acrostic. Something to write it down, to write down our complaints, our lament.
Now we never want to give in to bitterness. We don’t want to be known for grumbling and discontentment. But we are allowed to be honest with what we are feeling and to remember, to remember and to say what it is that is the cause of our grief. And here is the most important thing – this is the most important thing to see from Lamentations – is that the writer, as he says it, as he writes it down, he is saying it to God. And you notice, woven throughout this chapter there is his own repentance. And we’ll see more of that next time, but what is repentance? Repentance is turning to God because God knows what we are thinking. He knows what we are feeling. We cannot hide it from Him. We cannot fool Him with denial, so tell Him about it. And that’s what the writer is doing. Verse 9, “O Lord, behold my affliction.” Verse 11, “Look, O Lord, and see, for I am despised.” Verse 20, “Look, O Lord, for I am in distress.” You see, let your pain drive you to the Almighty God. Take your grief candidly, honestly, boldly to the Lord because He can handle it. He is the only one who we can actually depend on. He is the only one who can do anything about it. And He has.
Nicholas Wolterstorff wrote Lament for a Son after his twenty-five-year-old son, Eric, died in a mountain climbing accident in Austria. It was over forty years ago. Dr. Wolterstorff is now 93 years old. He still gets asked about it, still talks about it. In an interview in The New York Times this past spring he said that his lament was his way of finding his way through the loss. This is what he wrote at the time. He said, “Every lament is a love song.” Every lament is a song for what was loved and lost. Or maybe better to say what was lost and still loved. “Every lament is a love song.” And then he asked this question – “Will love songs one day no longer be laments? Will love songs one day no longer be laments?” “On this mountain, the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast, a feast of rich food, a feast of well aged wine. On this mountain, He will swallow up death forever and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces. And it will be said on that day, behold, this is our God. Behold, this is our God. We have waited for Him that He might save us. Let us be glad and rejoice in His salvation.” What’s Isaiah saying there? He’s saying that one day love songs will no longer be laments.
And that’s why we come to this table tonight because Jesus spreads the feast and He will wipe away every tear. He will swallow up death forever and we will sing a new song, a new song to Him. Go read Revelation chapter 18 to 22. Go read Revelation 18-22. It is, those chapters are the anti-Lamentations. If Lamentations is presenting to us reversals, Revelation 18-22 is the reversal of the reversals. Babylon has fallen. New Jerusalem is once again and better than ever, full of people from all the nations, a bride coming to the wedding feast crowned with glory and honor. Why? Because Jesus is the Lamb who was slain and is alive again. Because Jesus took these atrocities, these atrocities we see in Lamentations chapter 1, Jesus drank the wrath of God to the full, all the consequences that sin deserves, all the consequences that our sin deserves, He took on Himself on the cross into the grave and was raised. Do you want hope in grief? Do you want hope that one day love songs will no longer be laments? Trust in Jesus and in what He has done. Cling to Him. Cling to Him in lament and loss and grief and sadness and tears and come, come to this table. Come, eat and drink. Come and look toward the true feast when everything sad will come untrue.
Let’s pray.Our Father, we come before You and we say as the writer of Lamentations, “Look, O Lord, look upon us. Show Your favor upon us.” Would You, with whatever we come, that You would give to us the hope of the Gospel and the hope of that glorious feast that You spread before us. Would You give us a taste and a glimpse of it even now. And we pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.