Sunday Service 17th November
Remembering that we’re loved
17/11/24
Call to worship
Hymn 15:The Lord’s my shepherd
Time for all Gil
Hymn 144: I love the sun
Reading: Lamentations 3: 19-24
Prayer
Hymn 97: O God, you search me and you know me
Sermon (+Psalm 23)
Prayer
Hymn 1008(MP): The Lord’s my shepherd
Benediction
Welcome to our meditation for 19th of November
We are reading from Lamentations today, that is a book so rarely read from that probably even ministers would struggle to tell you where in the Bible it is.
And no wonder it is rarely read, it is by someone who has lost everything, not a happy book, yet one that still tries to have hope...as we will see in our readings today
God of constant love,
God of unending grace,
God of the outcast and the prisoner,
God of the powerful and powerless,
God of all,
we join in worship this day,
(in this building and in our homes)
giving thanks for your presence in our lives and for all that you have done.
God who supports,
God who challenges,
God who sees our whole selves, not just that which others see,
speak to us today, shine the light of your wisdom into our lives and guide us towards service of you.
God in the good times,
God in the bad times,
God in every pain and in every triumph,
we present ourselves before you, just as we are, tired and broken,
dried out and struggling, searching and seeking,
take us and transform us in the way only you can.
Living God,
in sorrow and the sure knowledge of your immeasurable forgiveness,
we come seeking your healing care.
Forgive us merciful God
for all that we have done that we know we should not,
and for all we have not done that we know we should.
In your compassion take away the guilt we have held onto for too long, the shame we have had hanging round our souls bringing us down.
And so guide us to be better than we have been, closer to the discipleship you have called us to live.
This we ask in Jesus name, and in his name say the prayer of hope he taught us to say together
Our Father,
Which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil;
For thine is the Kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever.
Amen.
Sermon
Lamentations.
Even the title tells us that this isn’t going to be a happy book.
It is a tough book to read, dealing with the final destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.
Here’s the technical part...the bit you can’t get in English translations.
It was written in poetical form as acrostics.
The first four chapters are acrostics.
That is, each line started with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
No one is sure why.
The main thought that is just as the alphabet is complete, so this destruction of Jerusalem was complete.
And the writer felt that there was nothing left of the people once it was done.
We have images of starvation in its extreme.
We have images of cannibalism, with parents eating their children to survive.
we have not only the destruction of property but of hope, of the souls of the people,
destruction of the future of this people.
They knew what was ahead of them; they had seen it happen before.
The Northern kingdom of Israel had been destroyed about a century beforehand.
At that point a lot of refugees would have come from that land to find safety in the Southern kingdom of Judah. No doubt they believed that after a while the people would return and they could go back to their villages and towns, maybe rebuild their cities...but that had never happened.
The hierarchy were taken into exile and just disappeared, never to be seen again, never to be heard of again,
But they still had hope.
They had hope in Jerusalem, that walled city on top of a hill.
The city where the temple was based, where the palace of the first kings were based.
The city that had ever been taken.
When the Northern Kingdom was destroyed and the refugees ran to the southern kingdom
there would be the fear that maybe that kingdom would fall as well,
and they would have to run to Egypt for sanctuary.
But the city on the hill had stood.
Maybe it had been more faithful to God?
Maybe God had protected his people because of that?
And in the century that followed there were times when things looked precarious.
There were times people took God’s protection for granted and did their own thing,
but in the end when the threat came and the people returned to faith, God looked after them.
All through the night get up again and again and cry out to the Lord;
Pour out your heart and beg him for mercy for your children-
Children starving to death in the streets.
Look O lord! Look at those you are torturing!
Women are eating the bodies of the children they loved!
Priests and prophets are being killed in the Temple itself!
Young and old alike lie dead in the streets,
Young men and women, killed by enemy swords.
You slaughtered them without mercy on the day of your anger. (Lamentations 2: 19-21)
But not this time.
This time big mistakes were made by the leadership.
This time words of the prophets were ignored.
This time the city was surrounded by armies that never let the people out....they just waited for the food to run out.
There was starvation.
There were desperate measures to survive.
There was breakdown of civilization.
They did things that they felt humans shouldn’t do and still call themselves humans.
In the end everything they believed in was destroyed.
Their kings who were meant to be God’s chosen...killed or taken into exile.
Their priesthood that was meant to be their comfort and solace and inspiration....killed or sent off as slaves.
Their Temple which was meant to be where God’s presence was with them...
no more than a pile of rubble, all its treasures taken.
Their homes, destroyed, their children, killed.
All gone.
And then the armies left,
and the people that had survived, that were not taken away,
didn’t even have the assurance of being cared for as a slave.
Our princes were undefiled and pure as snow,
vigorous and strong, glowing with health.
Now they lie unknown in the streets, their faces blackened in death;
Their skin, dry as wood, has shrivelled on their bones.
Those who died in the war were better off than those who died later,
Who starved slowly to death, with no food to keep them alive.
The disaster that came to my people brought horror;
Loving mothers boiled their children for food. (Lamentations 4: 7-10)
There is a reason that lamentations is not read from frequently.
I think that there are some truths that we need to face, truths that we are reluctant to face.
The first is that often we deal with pain and suffering badly.
We handle it poorly.
Sometimes we treat is like punishment for some harm we have caused.
And that is an understandable reaction.
Who among us hasn’t done something wrong at some point?
Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer of Sherlock Holmes, once decided to do a prank on some rich folk.
He wrote anonymous letters to a lot of them with just the words, ‘We have been discovered...flee.’
Now any normal person would have just looked at it and thought, ‘What is this about?’ and put it in a bin.
But many of them escaped out of the country.
Their guilt about something so great that they felt it safer to run away.
We all have things that we are ashamed of...and if something bad happens to us then maybe it is easy to believe that this is punishment, or Karma, or the universe balancing itself out.
And there can be a comfort in that...if we believe that we have caused this suffering ourselves, then maybe we can fix it ourselves.
The trouble is that the punishment doesn’t ever seem to be fair; it rarely seems to be balanced.
And why should some people be punished so severely and others seem to get off scot free?
So trying to pin our pain on something we have done in our past doesn’t seem constructive, it seems more like a way for us to manipulate ourselves into thinking we are still in control.
Another way we deal with suffering is to just ignore it.
The number of times people will tell me some ailment they have,
and I am presuming that the reason they are telling me about it is that they are worried about it,
and then when I ask them what the doctor has said about it,
they tell me they haven’t seen the doctor.
And they haven’t seen the doctor because they are scared of what the doctor might tell them.
They would rather ignore the suffering, or take some false hope that maybe it is nothing, than face the reality and maybe deal with it.
And that isn’t just physical suffering. I have had to deal with financial suffering as well.
And people just ignore the problems arising, pretending that maybe they will just go away.
Or mental health.
You know the biggest killer in soldiers...suicide.
More soldiers die of suicide after they have come out of the army than ever die in the army. The reason, they don’t face their mental health problems. They go through huge stresses and just pretend that they are real men and real men can ignore their mental health. Real men don’t see counsellors; real men don’t talk about their problems.
And in the end, if they don’t face it, it kills them.
Lamentations shows us that we have to deal with it differently.
We need to be realistic about what has happened to us.
And if we believe God is punishing us...then say it.
I don’t believe that it is true, but if it is what you feel then it is true to you, and you need to say it.
Because in saying it you have to face if it is real or not,
and you will never find the truth by pretending to believe a lie.
The poet of lamentations gets it all out there, like lancing a boil and letting the poison leak out.
And once he has been honest about what he believes, once he has been open about everything he thinks i true, then that leaves a silence where he can hear if there are other truths out there.
Truths that can give him comfort.
Truths that can give him hope.
The Lord’s unfailing love and mercy still continue.
Fresh as the morning, as sure as the sunrise.
The Lord is all I have, and so I put my hope in him. (Lamentations 3: 22-24)
America has gone through elections and throughout them it was said that the future of democracy was on the line, that the world would be either safer, or more dangerous depending on the result.
The truth is that governments are not what we should base our hope in.
Governments in the end let us down.
Nor for that matter, even church buildings, or church denominations, because like the Temple, buildings crumble, church administrations wither.
The Lord is the one who will always be there for us.
And the truth is, if we can believe the truth that God is there for us, then whatever we face, we can find hope.
Because God’s love never fails.
Read Psalm 23
Let us pray (Based on a prayer by Eddie Askew)
The lord is my shepherd
We take great comfort from that Psalm.
Though often we fail to see your truth plainly revealed.
We love the lead us to green pastures, we love the guiding.
But don’t want to see that you take us through the valley of the shadow of death.
You don’t help us avoid it, or go round it or just ignore it.
Suffering is out there, it is part of our humanity and part of our life, we cannot ignore it or pretend that it won’t affect us at some point.
Even though, when our time comes, our suffering frightens us, help us to go through it knowing that you are guiding us, that we can overcome it with your strength.
Help us to be honest with ourselves.
That when the clouds of suffering draw thick chill curtains over the sun,
Their shadows racing over the ground towards us,
that we shiver .
And when those shadows come down to ground level,
our level,
shrouding us in mists so that we walk a path of unknowing,
a path of fear,
hesitancy in every step,
and when we are worried that when we move our foot might slip , our ankles might twist so that we put out our hand and be uncertain that anyone is there to take it.
May that be the moment when our faith is assured,
when we feel your hand and do not resist it, but grab onto it with confidence.
For we know the truth,
the truth that you have always tried to tell us,
the truth that keeps us secure,
that we are loved by you.
No matter what we have done, or not done.
No matter what we have said, or not said.
We are loved.
And in that love we can trust.
This we ask in Jesus name
Amen.
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