HOPE

Lamentations 3:18-24

"Sometimes I feel like a motherless child." I suppose every generation could write its own book of lamentations. At least most of us seem to find enough to gripe about.

Of course, many of our complains are about the people we don’t like because they don’t see life our way, or about the taxes that never seem to go down, or the noise the kids make, or the fact that they don’t make cars the way they used to. The tragedy of much of our griping is that too much of it is hot air blown in private and too little of it is channelled toward remedies for bad situations.

But the writer of Lamentations is deadly serious; his words have nothing to do with tax levies and new cars and pet peeves. This man felt exactly like a motherless child. His hometown had been levelled to its very foundations. Jerusalem the golden had become Jerusalem the destroyed. The year was 586 B.C. and the enemy was Babylon, and the result was the total wipeout of the city of God.

The poet needed little extra incentive to pen his lines of hopelessness. All around him rose the stench of death. The ashes of the city smoldered before his eyes. His own people were herded together for the long trek to political captivity. Darkness was all he could see. He strained his eyesight to catch the glimmer of light, but the sky was black with defeat and gloom.

It requires only a flick of the imagination to transport ourselves from 586 B.C. to the 20th century. The people of Hiroshima and Nagazaki who were left after the A-bomb holocaust must have shared our writer’s sentiments. And the survivors of bombed-out cities and villages in war-torn Europe after two major wars must have sung the same kind of song. Certainly the residents of southeast Asia must have a similar lament as they survey their towns and fields ravaged by bombs and pesticides.

Here at home the folks in Detroit, Newark, Watts, Kent State and Selma must have found a real companion in Lamentations in those long, hot summers.

But can we all appreciate the mood. Is man any different now than he was in the year 1? Probably not. Each generation has created its own bogey men; each has faced its own Waterloo. Yet our times are different from any other.

It only takes one bomb to do the work it used to take hundreds of thousands of bombs. We are so sophisticated it only takes one phone call to set off a nuclear chain reaction that will devastate the world. Instead of controlling and destroying dangerous bacteria, we now use them for lethal weapons.

C. P. Snow said the words, our technology pats us on the head with one hand and stabs us in the back with the other. Our current fight with pollution is ample evidence.

Some of our politicians build their platforms on our need to reorder our priorities, that we need to spend more and do more with the quality of life of humankind. Few of us would argue with that.

Congress votes huge sums to help children in depressed areas receive better educational tools. Lo and behold, we discover much of it goes to upgrade facilities for middle and upper-class citizens, facilities already head and shoulders above resources for poorer people.

We gripe about the welfare system. No doubt about it; many who don’t deserve relief are getting it. But check the national budget and see what a small percentage of the whole the welfare system is.

We debate spending a fortune on a new super jetcraft, all to save the stewardesses a few steps and us an hour. All in the name of prestige and increased employment. Which is to say, in our inventive age, we cannot come up with other ingenious projects which would not have such a destructive effect on the quality of life.

We live in grim days. To us at least, they are the grimmest ever. And someone in the pew may be thinking, "Look, pastor, I know the times are grim. I read the papers. I watch the news. And most of it is bad. And I didn’t come here to get the Sunday rehash. I came here to get away from all that for an hour."

To that sentiment I can only respond with as much charity as possible, the Church is not a hideout or a hideaway from reality. The Church is not a place of refuge from the grim facts of life. The Church is not here to dispense pie in the sky philosophy or to sugarcoat the truth.

The cross is a sign that God has delved into the grimy details of human life, with full vision of what life is like in any age. That makes his business our business since we are his Body in Christ.

The Church is not a haven of escape. But there is more. God always seems to have more in his pockets. The Church is here to offer hope. The Church is the sign of hope for today and tomorrow.

The person who has lost all glimmers of hope is living in hell. Hopelessness, of course, is one of the major causes of suicide. The man who sees no light at the end of his dark tunnel sees no reason for going on.

That’s the way it happens often to the patient with the terminal disease. Once he loses hope, his days are numbered.

Without hope we are dead. Our whole lives are based on hope, hope that tomorrow just has to be better than today (it couldn’t be worse), hope that I still have a chance to change some of my habits or my rotten attitudes, hope that someone will come along to shine the light, hope that a leader will come on the scene to really shake our society into some constructive action.

Finally, all our hopes are grounded in God. He made us to be people who look to the future to shape up the past. And most important, God has given us the reason to hope. The cross is a sign of hope because the cross is followed by the victory of the Resurrection.

Jesus didn’t just come out of his tomb. He won a battle over every deadly enemy, over every philosophy and every institution that enslave us, from a technology gone haywire to the legalization of war to the substances some of us need to stay afloat to the priorities which have knocked our lives out of kilter.

The Introit for Laetare says it well: "Rejoice with Jerusalem and be glad with her; all who love her. Rejoice for joy with her; all who mourn for her." That’s where the writer of Lamentations wound up, too. His memory was too good, and he recalled that God had seen his people through tough times before, and that God’s presence was always there. God held out hope, and the poet grapped that hand and held on tight.

The Church is the sign of Jonah. Jonah did get out of that whale to carry out God’s mission. Jonah is a sign of hope. We have the promise of God that he keeps his word. And we have the final Word spoken in the flesh of our risen Lord who promises, "We shall overcome." We have the reason to hope, and we have the reason to give to those who have no hope. Amen.