FOTS 6: Faithfulness—Lamentations 3: 19-25; II Thess. 3: 1-5
I had planned a pretty robust and fun sermon on faithfulness for this week. But as we look at this final fruit of the spirit in our series today, faithfulness, perhaps a more somber tone is appropriate. This week, just like last week, and so many other weeks before, we watched the horror of a mass shooting unfold. Last week it was a white supremacist at a grocery store in Buffalo. This week it’s an 18-year-old who bought two guns on the same day, went into an elementary school and murdered 19 children and two teachers. It is impossible to describe how horrific this is. And we’ve now offered our thoughts and prayers for over 200 mass shootings in 2022 alone. I think the writer of Lamentations captures the mood perfectly with the phrase, “I will never forget this awful time, as I grieve over my loss,” only for us, it’s all our loss.
Lamentations is a complex book of poetry. Preachers rarely touch on it, and the title should tell you why. Lamentations 3 is particularly difficult because the theology of it sets us a bit on edge, and it leaves us a bit perplexed. In verse 1 of this chapter, the writer says, “I am the one who has seen the afflictions that come from the rod of the Lord’s anger. He has led me into darkness, shutting out all light. He has turned his hand against me again and again, all day long.” For the entire first 18 verses of this chapter, the writer describes unmeasurable cruelty and affliction, which has left him broken, suffering, and bitter in heart and soul.
But where we all take a collective gasp is when he calls out the name of Yahweh, God, as his abuser and tormentor. It’s shocking to us as a people who would never in a million years look at the evil and suffering around us and call out God as the author of the evil and the torment. Yet the writer of Lamentations goes there. It is this retelling of the horrors he has faced which keep them alive in his mind and heart. Even if all becomes well, it’s important to him to remember what has been overcome in his life.
But we also see him suddenly snap out of it. Even as he grieves, he writes, “Yet I still dare to hope when I remember this: The faithful love of the Lord never ends; his mercies never cease.” It’s almost as if he has a choice of two paths: to continue in the remembering of the suffering, the evil, and the affliction he has faced, or to live in this knowledge and understanding of God’s faithfulness, called hesed in Hebrew, which to us means God’s steadfast love. When facing affliction, we have this same dilemma as the writer of Lamentations: to live in the reminder of “I will never forget this awful time,” or to live in the knowledge that “the Lord is good to those who depend on him, to those who search for him.”
How does the writer of Lamentations overcome this belief that God has tormented him and come to this place of saying, “The faithful love of the Lord never ends?” It is his confidence in the mutual relationship between him in hope and God in faithfulness, and you can see that develop through the rest of the book. II Thessalonians gets even more to the heart of this by adding that not only do we live in this relationship with God, we live in mutuality with one another.
As we see evil, violence, and selfishness arise in our communities and society, we seem to have forgotten this idea that we live together in this world. It’s not just me and the planet; there’s a few billion people here with me as well. We read the prayerful hope, “May the Lod lead your hearts into a full understanding and expression of the love of God.” We are called to love in the way that God loves. We are called to show concern for each other even as God has demonstrated that love and concern to the church by sharing gifts with the church.
This whole part of II Thessalonians is one big call to prayer, but it’s not prayer meant to be alone. All of the whole group is asked to pray for these things: for the spreading of the Lord’s message, for deliverance from the evil in this world, and for the expression of God’s love to be shown. One of the commentaries I read talked about this great problem of our current society and world—this insistence on selfish pursuit or this myth of rugged individualism. The Gospel and the creation of Christ’s church is a call to mutuality and community. For it is in the work with each other that we find the faithfulness of God flowing out from us.
When you see people in the world who have lost their way, given themselves over to evil desires, who exploit and harm others like these gunmen, you tend to find one common thread—a lifelong isolation and separation from community. Faith and goodness cannot be sustained in isolation, not because God is unfaithful, but because being constantly alone makes the fire of our God’s spirit in us dull, dark, and cold. Ruth Graham, the wife of Billy Graham, said it best, “We are made for community.”
God’s faithfulness sustains us because we feel the power of it in a community that prays for us, cares for us, welcomes us when others won’t, helps us when we are down and struggling, calls us when we feel sad and troubled, writes cards and letters to remind us that there is a place of love and welcome. We can find that confidence in mutual relationship. We can find growth and strength, and can be sustained, in our faith community together. That’s why the early church was made up of people who sold everything and joined to be with one another all the time, sharing and providing for whatever one another needed.
We may find hope on our own, but living in hope is a collective pursuit, and it cannot be done by ourselves. The coldest, darkest, angriest heart cans till melt with hope and love in the power of God’s faithfulness. And that almost always happens when someone who is broken and hurting finds a faith community that loves them, prays for them, and speaks the power of God’s grace into their life.
I know that the days still, even now, seem dark for us. It reminds me of the old hymn which says, “Trials dark on every hand, and we cannot understand.” We may be overwhelmed by personal struggles and opposition, the violence and suffering we see in our world, or anything else. We may even stand at the crossroads, facing a choice like the writer of Lamentations, between the affliction we feel sure is God harming us and this place of knowing the faithful love of the Lord never ends. But one thing is certain, that the writer says clearly, “Great is [God’s] faithfulness; [God’s] mercies begin afresh each morning.” May we find our hearts rooted in God’s community of faith, and may we remember the words that great is thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.
Worship Video: https://www.facebook.com/fccmacon/videos/1044140849846753