Lamentations 1: 1-6; 3:19-26 (links validated 8/18/22)
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Sermon Starters (Proper 22C)(2022)
Elie Wiesel once wrote that for a Jewish person, you can be with God, for God, disappointed with God, or even angry with God but the one thing a true Jew can never be is to be without God. So long as God is in the picture, lament can happen, and so can praise and thanksgiving and lots of other things but the point is that it is not the person without God who laments but the person who is with God in some way and who knows better than anyone what the Lord God desires for our lives and for this cosmos generally. The story is told that in one of the Nazi concentration camps where Jews were housed (and many eventually murdered) some of the rabbis and other Jewish leaders present decided one day to put God on trial for unfaithfulness. The entire trial essentially amounted to a lament for the broken condition of God’s world and now of God’s people. Arguments were made, witnesses were called, Scripture’s promises were read and put into the dock. Finally a verdict was pronounced: God was guilty as charged of letting go of his promises. They were about to begin pondering what kind of a sentence to pass when they had to break off for the day. It was time, you see, for evening prayers.
Resources from 2019 to 2021
Sermon Starters (Proper 22C)(2019)
I am writing this piece on September 11, the 19th anniversary of the terrorists’ attacks in America, an event that left a nation in mourning. Since then we have other reasons to mourn as a people. We have discovered the sad truth about such events as enunciated by Frank Yamada. “National tragedies threaten to render communities speechless. The collective grief can be overwhelming.” Thank God we have biblical passages like Lamentations 1 to help us give voice to our sorrow. But thank God even more that we have a Savior who has come to bear our griefs and sorrows with us and for us.Glimmers of Hope in the Darkness
•A little girl who was being tucked into bed by her father and asked him, “What’s your favorite Bible story, Papa?” He sat down on the edge of the bed and said, “Let me see. The story of the four friends who carried their paralyzed friend to Jesus, lowering him through the roof, is one of my favorites because it reminds me so much of how your Uncle Hans was healed.” The little girl said, “I don’t know that story. Please tell it to me.” So the father began, “Many years ago, Hans and his wife Enid escaped the war in Europe so that he could continue his life of teaching in the seminary. At first, things were difficult because his English wasn’t very good. But he soon became one of the seminary’s most beloved teachers. The students loved him because he was warm and gentle and when he spoke, the scriptures came alive. “Hans and Enid were very much in love. Nearly every day they took long walks together, holding hands. It warmed the hearts of students and faculty alike to see them sitting close to each other in church. “Then one day, Enid died. Hans was stricken with sorrow. For weeks he wouldn’t eat or take walks. The seminary president, along with three other friends, visited him regularly, but Hans felt lonely and depressed. “On one of their visits, Hans said to his friends, ‘I’m no longer able to pray to God. In fact, I’m not certain I still believe in God.’...The Course of Empire
Nineteenth-century American landscape painter Thomas Cole created a series of five paintings he called "The Course of Empire." For Cole, civilization seemed to be a cycle (an inevitable cycle?) of appearing, maturing...and collapsing. The artist chose a line from Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" as the motto for the series: There is the moral of all human tales; 'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, First Freedom, and then Glory -- when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption, -- barbarism at last.
Resources from 2016 to 2018
Resources from 2013 to 2015
Desolation and Compassion
What's it like for a house to be left behind? In one of his virtuoso inter-chapters, Steinbeck tells us: 'The weeds sprang up in front of the doorstep, where they had not been allowed and grass grew up through the porch boards. . . Splits started up the sheathing from the rusted nails. . . On a night the wind loosened a shingle and flipped it to the ground...
Resources from the Archives
Proper 22C (2010)
("It is not weak faith but strong faith that has the ability to lament. It takes courage to lament, especially if the lament isâlike many laments in the Bible areâessentially a complaint to God for God's own dereliction of duty. 'You promised us thus-and-so, O God, and we got the opposite. You owe us!....")