Dennis Tuuri

How lonely sits the city that was full of people. How like a widow is she who is great among the nations. The princess among the provinces has become a slave. She weeps bitterly in the night. Her tears are 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 captivity under affliction and hard servitude. She dwells among the nations. She finds no rest. All her persecutors overtake her in dire straits.

The roads to Zion mourn because no one comes to the set feasts. All her gates are desolate. Her priests sigh. Her virgins are afflicted, and she is in bitterness. Her adversaries have become the master. Her enemies prosper, for the Lord has afflicted her because of the multitude of her transgressions. Her children have gone into captivity before the enemy. And from the daughter of Zion, all her splendor has departed.

Her princes have become like deer that find no pasture, that flee without strength before the pursuer. In the days of her affliction and roaming, Jerusalem remembers all her pleasant things that she had in the days of old, when her people fell into the hand of the enemy with no one to help her. The adversaries saw her and mocked at her downfall. Jerusalem has sinned gravely. Therefore, she has become vile. All who honored her despise her because they have seen her nakedness. Yes, she sighs and turns away. Her uncleanness is in her skirts. She did not consider her destiny. Therefore, her collapse was awesome. She had no comforter.

O Lord, behold my affliction, for the enemy is exalted. The adversary has spread his hand over all her pleasant things. For she has seen the nations enter her sanctuary, those whom You commanded not to enter Your assembly. All her people sigh. They seek bread. They have given their valuables for food to restore life. See, O Lord, and consider, for I am scorned.

Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Behold and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which has been brought on me, which the Lord has inflicted in the day of His fierce anger. From above He has sent fire into my bones, and it overpowered them. He has spread a net for my feet and turned me back. He has made me desolate and faint all the day. The yoke of my transgressions was bound. They were woven together by His hands and thrust upon my neck. He made my strength fail. The Lord delivered me into the hands of those whom I am not able to withstand. The Lord has trampled underfoot all my mighty men in my midst. He has called an assembly against me to crush my young men. The Lord trampled as in a winepress the virgin daughter of Judah.

For these things I weep. My eye, my eye overflows with water because the comforter who should restore my life is far from me. My children are desolate because the enemy prevailed. Zion spreads out her hands, but no one comforts her. The Lord has commanded concerning Jacob that those around him become his adversaries. Jerusalem has become an unclean thing among them.

The Lord is righteous, for I rebelled against His commandment. Hear now, all peoples, and behold my sorrow. My virgins and my young men have gone into captivity. I called for my lovers, but they deceived me. My priests and my elders breathed their last in the city while they sought food to restore their life. See, O Lord, that I am in distress. My soul is troubled. My heart is overturned within me. For I have been very rebellious. Outside the sword bereaves, and at home it is like death. They have heard that I sigh, but no one comforts me. All my enemies have heard of my troubles. They are glad that You have done it. Bring on the day You have announced that they may become like me. Let all their wickedness come before You and do to them as You have done to me for all my transgressions. For my sighs are many and my heart is faint.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank You for this piece of holy Scripture. We thank You that in Your providence, it is the text that we will be transformed by, healed by, and brought hope through. Bless us, Lord God, as we consider this text. Give us clarity. Help us to understand the opening of this book that has so much sorrow in it. And help us, Lord God, to respond to that book the way Your Spirit would have us. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

Well, it’s not going to get better either. There’s no happy ending in Lamentations. Next week it’ll get a lot worse. So what is this book doing in our Bibles? Why does Pastor Tuuri want us to think about it so hard?

It’s interesting for me because the last two days I spent listening to some other very difficult things. I went to a justice conference in Portland. One of the last talks we heard, for instance, was about the Congo, where Lynn Hibbels was interviewing the head of World Relief in the next to last session last night. He was talking and has spent some time bringing attention to the world to the Congo, where ninety percent of the women have been raped in violent warfare. You know, where death is common, where poverty is intense, and yet also where planes arrive and leave daily taking away some of the most precious minerals and resources that the world needs from the Congo. These are hard things to listen to.

The last talk last night was Francis Chan trying to describe why he chose to give away so much of what he had to try to stop the sex slavery in Thailand and Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and other places. People tried to tell him, “No, Francis, you’ve got to take care of yourself. You might have an emergency.”

And he said, “An emergency? Children are being raped daily in these countries. Rich men fly in and do horrific things to these kids, who end up killing themselves or addicted to drugs, whatever it is. I should wait? I should save up my money for an emergency? Isn’t that an emergency?”

So I heard a lot of those kinds of hard stories. I heard about American Indians going from twenty million down to about two hundred thirty thousand, and you probably know, but American Indians and Native Americans in America are addicted to drinking. They’re drunkards and they have tremendously high suicide rates. I mean, it’s sad, sad, sad. Some of these things we heard last night.

Lamentations, you know, kind of wants us to come face to face with pain and suffering and trials. And as we’ll look in a minute, it’s not just the same—it’s not just that kind of pain and suffering that results because of direct direction of our sins. See, it gets broader than that here. That’s specifically what’s happening here.

Lamentations is set in the context where Jeremiah, undoubtedly, is writing after the sack of Jerusalem in 586 BC, when it finally goes into captivity. All those children—the mother is bereaved because the kids are marched off to captivity, and you know, in the process of that two-year siege there was put against Jerusalem and mothers ate their babies. I mean, it was bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

And this book of Lamentations is a lamentation over tremendous suffering and the fall of Jerusalem. And you know, the fact that it is a lamentation and the fact that, as you heard just in chapter one, there are these various cries to God that exist in the context of that lamentation, sort of sets us up for the basic idea of this book and why it’s so important to us and why it’s a particularly good time during Lent to go through this particular book.

Pain, suffering, trials. This is part of the fallen human condition. And sometimes it’s because of our own sin. Sometimes it’s because of other people’s sins. You heard here they said, “Well, do to our persecutors what they did to us.” And that’s a righteous prayer that they’re praying, because they know that the people that come in and sack them, and that will be God’s judgment against them—they themselves deserve God’s judgment.

And it reminds us that sometimes the pain and suffering and trial we go through is because of other people’s sins. Those women being raped in the Congo, they’re suffering not because of their sin. They’re suffering because other people are sinning. Chapter three of this we’ll turn to in a few minutes, but it’s very significant because there’s a whole change of speaking. A man starts to speak. And I’m convinced the man who’s speaking in the middle chapter of this book in chapter three is Jeremiah himself.

His suffering is layered into this book of suffering and pain and trial. And he wasn’t suffering for his sins. He was suffering relative to the sins of the people. But you know what happened to him? They hated him. They threw him in a pit. They beat him. I mean, his suffering was included here in the middle of this book.

So don’t, you know, think that this book is not for you, or don’t think that Pastor Tuuri is trying to convince us all that we’re sinning and that’s why we’re suffering. This book is about pain. All kinds of different sorts of pain and suffering and trials. And this book is about prayer. It’s the response in prayer that we see here.

Now, it’s not prayer that’s immediately answered. The book doesn’t end happy. The book ends with the nation still suffering, with the pain intense. And that’s often what our lives are like. This book is really sort of preparation—at least for that portion of our lives that I know we all share—where we enter into pain and suffering, depression, betrayal of friends, isolation, whatever it is, the things that cause us the most difficult pain and suffering.

And this book is for us. And this book helps us. There’ll be hope in this book. We’ll see that. But understand first: this book is about pain and it’s about prayer. We come to it. That’s what Lent sort of is about. Lent is a consideration, kind of a meditation on suffering and sins, but suffering not for sins as well.

You know, Lent starts with Fat Tuesday in our particular culture, right? In our churches and actually in liturgical churches it does start with Tuesday, but it’s a completely different Tuesday. It’s not a day of Fat Tuesday to indulge the flesh, and then you enter into the fast. Carnival—death to flesh—because you just let your flesh do whatever you want to do on Fat Tuesday and everything goes wild and crazy. It’s chaos, and then new life will come the next day. No, it isn’t like that.

Tuesday is called Shrove Tuesday in liturgical churches, and in their tradition typically there’s a pancake breakfast. You do eat a little better. You eat some fat because you’re going to do maybe a fast perhaps during Lent. But it’s Shrove Tuesday, and to shrive someone means to hear their confession. So actually, instead of Fat Tuesday, it is a day to rejoice, but it’s a day to confess your sins, to be shrived, in preparation for a further consecration of Lent and a remembering of sufferings and trials.

Now Lent is forty days long because in the Bible, forty days is always the precursor to victory. You know, Jesus—forty days in the wilderness. He comes back and he gets into ministry. Israel—forty years in the wilderness, and then they’re going to conquer the land. So, you know, it’s not just that. It’s preparation for something. It’s a consideration of suffering and pain and our sins and all that stuff. And it’s a way to process that instead of trying to always forget about it.

You know, we hear those stories about, say, the Congo or the sex slaves in Thailand, and we just kind of want to forget about all of that. We may even hear stories about, you know, people suffering in Oregon City and we tend to just kind of block it out of our minds a lot, or we’re tempted to do that. Well, Lent is a time to kind of not do that—explicitly to think about suffering, think about our own sufferings, think about other people’s sufferings, think about the sufferings of the world, and to process those things properly in preparation for victory.

It’s kind of interesting, by the way. One of the presentations we went to was an art advocacy dinner. I don’t remember—maybe it’s World Vision. I don’t remember now who the guy was from—but there’s a website and they’re going to come up with six weeks of creative ideas using art to try to make Lent a special time for the people that use their services. And the first one they’re going to launch this Wednesday is the practical idea: go home, take all the paintings off the walls of your house, and then redecorate those walls in a way that will be motivating you to do something about the suffering of the world. Interesting, creative ways to do things.

Well, Lent’s kind of like that, right? It’s a time that we try to put off our sins. We have those sin stones back there on the table. The idea is, you know, maybe put it in your pocket, think about it. Think, “Gee, I really, you know, that sin is bad. It’s dishonoring to God and my neighbor. I really want to try hard this period of time to get rid of that.” Realizing that it’s a red stone, right? So it’s the blood of Jesus Christ that gives you freedom from your sin. But there it is.

So Lent is this period of time. It’s forty days, but it’s actually forty-six. Why? Because on Sunday, you don’t fast. Sunday is a day of joy. We’re going to come to this table. We don’t put off the table for, you know, the time of Lent. So Lent, being forty days in a context of forty-six, is a reminder that while Lamentations doesn’t end with resolution, resolution is surely found in the coming of Jesus Christ, that intrusion of the kingdom of God at which all things are being put to rights. Suffering and injustice is being done away with. That is intruded into the human condition, and we remember that by not fasting and by changing the day or the pattern of the day in the context of the Lord’s Day during this period of time.

Now, so that’s kind of where we’re at. That’s why I’m talking about Lamentations. That’s what I want to do here. And I want to make just a couple of simple points this morning about Lamentations.

And the first one is that Lamentations is about lamenting. You know, it is the proper place of lamenting in the life of the Christian. And you know, last week at the supper I talked about grumbling and disputing, trying to be light-bearers by not grumbling or disputing. And in a way, this is the counterbalance to that, right?

So in the Bible, you know, there are these statements, but then you’ve got to be careful how you frame those statements, because Lamentations and all kinds of other scriptures make quite clear: there’s nothing wrong with crying out to God in the midst of pain and difficulty. And in fact, there would be something very wrong if pain and trouble that you’re going through kept you from prayer. Now, that’s, you know, evidence of unbelief.

So Lamentations is about lamenting and it is a proper thing. It’s an essential part of the Christian life to lament certain things. And I mentioned these global things that we should be lamenting. And there are things going on in America that we should be lamenting.

Not many people at this conference talked about, you know, sex slaves and they talked about, you know, the Congo and Native American Indians. Nobody—none of the speakers, the plenary speakers—well, a couple of workshops, people did talk about the thing we’re supposed to be lamenting here. If twenty million Indians have been killed or died in America in the last fifty years, you know, there’s double that number of pre-born babies that have been killed, right? We’ll talk more about that next week. We’ll see the death of babies next week in the fallen city.

There’s stuff to lament and there’s stuff that we don’t even know why we’re lamenting it. Look at the sorts of things that are lamentable in this book of Lamentations. Let’s just start with verse one.

Loneliness. “How lonely sits the city that was full of people! How like a widow is she, who was great among the nations.” Now, probably referring to the siege that Babylon put up around Jerusalem. People couldn’t come in and out. They’d already taken away most of the inhabitants to captivity—right—over a couple of different times in the years leading up to this. But what is the imagery given to us?

Well, first of all, the image is that the city is a woman. Now, that puts it immediately in a vulnerable position, right? The fellow from World Relief yesterday was talking about men and women. He’s like six foot six or something, a big guy. And his wife is five foot two, and she was telling him the other day, “You just don’t get it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know, when I go outside and walk around the streets or when I go on the mission field with you and I’m not with you, I feel very vulnerable. I’m five foot two. I’m a little person. People can do what they want with me. Every day I feel vulnerable.”

And then she asked, “Well, how often do you feel vulnerable?”

Maybe once or twice in the last year.

So the fact that this is a woman increases the vulnerability aspect. But particularly, because it personifies Jerusalem as an individual, this individual begins first to talk about pain and suffering in terms of isolation or loneliness. She’s alone.

Now, you know, that is the modern condition for so many people. Isolation, loneliness, absence of community. This place right here is a place where people can feel most alone, because here we promise community. Here we’re with people that are supposedly blood brothers and sisters. But people can come here and they can find themselves on the edges, alone. That’s real suffering. That’s what begins the sort of suffering that’s being talked about in Lamentations.

Now, of course, there’s physical pain, people being killed. But just to read what it says here as it begins: what’s the next verse say? “She weeps bitterly in the night. Her tears are on her cheeks.”

Depression. We could say depression that leads to great weeping. Later in this he will say—the woman will say—that she’s greatly anxious. She’s tremendously anxious. She has psychological suffering as a result of the things that the Lord has put her through. And I say, I’m not, you know, trying to ignore the specific situation of the captivity, but I’m just telling you that when God gets around to describing what that pain and suffering that’s being lamented here—that she’s crying out to God about—when he gets around to discussing the specifics, the specifics are put in ways that you and I can easily identify with it: loneliness, anxiety, depression, tears.

That’s where it starts. Look at the next one—the second half of verse two: “Among all her lovers, she has none to comfort her.”

The absence of people comforting us. Have you gone through this? I go through it all the time. I know a lot of people in this church do. No one’s comforting me. Now, maybe they don’t know. Their lives are busy, you know. I don’t know. I’m not trying to make everyone feel guilty, but I’m just telling you this book has all kinds of stuff in it that’s quite practical for you to enter into lamentation over your particular state of being lonely or isolated, of being depressed and weepy, or of being comfortless. No friends to comfort you.

It gets worse, though. These are just the opening verses, right? But look at what it goes on to say. “No one to comfort her. And look, all her friends—she had friends—have dealt treacherously with her.”

Oh, who hasn’t gone through that? The suffering that—you know what?—this is discussing the beginning specific elements of what she’s lamenting about. And this is experience. And it’s written in such a way to bring you into the text.

No, you didn’t live in Jerusalem during the time of the captivity, and you weren’t getting killed, and the Babylonians aren’t at your door, and all that stuff. But see, it’s describing this in a way that you, the church, for thousands of years can read this text and we can acknowledge our sufferings, our trials, our tears, our loneliness, our isolation. We can see it here. God wants us to see it here.

And so the loss of friends—friends who were friends. Bob Dylan: “I thought some of them were friends of mine. I was wrong about them all.” You know, old age—that’s kind of what becomes of it. I don’t know what it is. Life gets tough. People fall off. The old buds just don’t work anymore.

You young people know this too. You teenagers particularly, you go through these weird changes in your attitudes and actions, and hormones, and you’ve got a friend, and then your friend’s not hanging out with you anymore. Their action kind of becomes treacherous to you, and giving you the stink eye or whatever it is. That’s sad. That’s sorrowful.

But it gets worse, right? So her friends—no one’s comforted her. Her friends don’t comfort her. Her friends actually are treacherous. And whoa, they have become my enemies.

Her enemies—the prophet says here—not only are they treacherous, they actually now are plotting against you. You ever have that happen? A friend not only, you know, stops hanging out, not only gets a little funky toward you, but now, you know, you hear they’re actually your enemy.

Now, I’ve had it. I know a lot of you have had that. Well, you know what? That’s something we’re supposed to be lamenting before God. There’s all kinds of stuff here that takes it beyond just this particular historic situation. And it kind of helps us remember that, you know, the big deal isn’t just the historical situation. The lamentation is for things that are common to man. And we can enter into those things.

And I know some of you—I mean, I know people. I know some of you this last week—tears, feeling completely alone, isolated. What’s the point? What’s going on? Feeling abandoned. Why don’t I have the old friendships that I had? I know you’re going through it. See, and you’re here because God’s called you here to allow you to lament and cry out to God for that sorrow that you have.

And as this comes about in your life, you’re supposed to lament that stuff. You’re supposed to lament that stuff.

Now, I mentioned—and so you’re saying, “Well, yeah, Dennis, yeah, but that’s Zion. She was mean and evil and wicked and she was bad, right?” So, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe I could make an application, but me and wicked bad.

Well, look at Lamentations chapter three. If you’ve got your Bibles, look at chapter three. Now, as you’re turning there, I’ll tell you that the way this book works is there are several major actors. And we’ll talk about this in more detail, but you’ve got the prophet that speaks, right? And then you’ve got Zion, the woman, the city identified as Zion, and she speaks. The prophet speaks—seventy percent of the verses are the prophet speaking. Fifteen percent of the verses—Zion speaking. And another fifteen percent—the congregation. Not Zion singular, but now the city corporately is speaking. That’s another fifteen percent.

These are very precise delineations, and it sets us up for what’s happening here. There’s a series of actors playing this out. It’s like a play. In fact, I have a new translation of Lamentations where they get actors and they act the thing out. When Zion’s speaking, it’s a woman. Oh, she’s lamenting out. And when the prophet’s speaking, it’s a man’s voice. And the congregation’s speaking, it’s multiple voices speaking together.

Well, that’s the way this works. Now, this is still the prophet speaking, but now something different happens. He says, “I am the man who has seen affliction.” Now, see, the rest of this book—the one that is experiencing affliction and lamenting—is the woman. It’s the woman. It’s Zion. It’s Jerusalem, the congregation identified as a woman. But now the prophet is still speaking, right? He hasn’t—he doesn’t say she’s the woman—but now he’s identifying himself. The prophet is the man who has seen affliction “under the rod of his wrath. He has driven and brought me into darkness without any light.” That is literally true. They threw Jeremiah in a pit and covered it over.

Okay. Now, you know, it’s symbolic—it’s the language that we can identify with. Not many of us are actually thrown into a pit, but that’s what they did to that guy. Okay? And he’s discussing his own suffering. “Surely against me, he turns his hand again and again the whole day long. He has made my flesh and my skin waste away. He has broken my bones. He has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation. He has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago. He has walled me about so that I cannot escape. He has made my chains heavy. Though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayers. He has blocked my ways with blocks of stone. He has made my paths crooked.”

Now I—that’s Jeremiah speaking, and the wrath of God that he’s experiencing is being poured out on him, so to speak, but it’s not his sin, right? He’s the one calling Jerusalem to repent. But he’s also a picture of the weeping prophet, and the judgment of God on them. But so he’s suffering, but he’s not suffering for his own sin. Okay? He’s not doing anything wrong. He’s just the prophet. And this is what God has called him to do. Kind of like Job.

Job could say the same stuff: “I’m suffering, but it wasn’t for my sin.” And he’d be absolutely right. So you see, we’re brought into this book of Lamentations very explicitly by chapter three—by implication by those opening verses of chapter one—because the stuff that’s being described is stuff that’s common to our sufferings.

One other thing before we move on from this: the lamentation is certainly in the part of Jerusalem for sins. But what’s interesting about the book of Lamentations—unlike other prophetic books—is that it’s not specific sins that are named. It doesn’t tell us you were stealing from poor people. Doesn’t tell us you were sleeping with different girls or different guys, whatever. It doesn’t really tell us that. The sin is unspecified.

Why? Well, one reason for that is that you and I who have sin—it applies to us too. If it’s specific sin, well, then we say, “Well, we didn’t do that.” But it applies to us. So whether we’re sinning or not sinning, you know, whether we’re going through specifically what she’s going through in terms of deportation or whatever it is, this book is about you and I, whether we’re sinning or not sinning. And this book is about the same sort of sufferings that bring you to tears, bring you to exhaustion, bring you to a loss of hope in the person and work of God.

This book is good for you. It’s good for you, and God wants you to recognize that.

Now, I want to talk about one other aspect of this book, and that is there’s this form stuff going on. And I know some of you don’t like this, but, you know, just a couple of quick comments, and you can examine the handout I give you later. This book has five poems. They’re beautifully constructed. They’re probably—I think—the most well-constructed or beautifully-constructed, carefully-constructed piece of Scripture.

Why do I say this? Well, there are five chapters. Chapter one begins as an acrostic. You know, an acrostic? There are twenty-two verses. The first verse starts with Aleph. Second verse starts with Beth, right? It goes right through the Hebrew alphabet. Same way Psalm 119 does, okay? It’s an acrostic. I mean, it’s written—it’s not by chance. You can’t by chance write an acrostic. It’s very carefully constructed.

And I’ve given you a copy—I think on the next page—of the Knox translation, which is a Roman Catholic Bible. I’m not, you know, pushing the translation, but it’s one of the few—the only one I know of—that actually tries to maintain that acrostic appearance. Do you see how it does that? The first verse is translated—the first word is “Alone.” See that? Second word, you’ve got that bold B. Third verse, C, D, E. Now, there are only twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet, so it doesn’t go all the way to Z. But you see, that’s what it does.

And if you had a Knox Bible, it does that in chapter one. It does that in chapter two. In chapter three, it does it. It’s a little different in chapter three. It’s got sixty-six verses. And with each letter, there are three verses that begin with A, three that begin with B, and three that begin with C. And she gets sixty-six verses. Chapter four—twenty-two verses, back to twenty-two. And it’s an acrostic as well: A through the twenty-second letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Chapter five—no acrostic. It stops.

So we have this beautiful structuring of the book along acrostic lines. It stops.

Now, another thing that’s going on in this book is concentric parallelism—responses, chiasms—and without taking a lot of time, I’ve tried to show on the second page of your handout. And you know, you’ve got to look at it now. But very specific words are matched up from the top to the bottom, and it leads us to a particular center. Some of those—some of those. So that’s another thing that happens. The writer has very carefully constructed that poem in a chiastic fashion.

Chapter two—next week I’ll show you the same thing in that one. And I know it’s hard to distinguish this because I’m doing several things on this handout here. One is the chiastic pairing of words as we go toward the middle. And there are a couple of other things we’ll talk about in a minute. But chapter one—chiasm. Chapter two—chiasm. But by the last couple of chapters of the book, no chiasms. They’re gone. The acrostic goes away. The beautiful structuring of the poem chiastically goes away.

The third device that’s used is called concatenation. A big word. It means chaining. And I’ve tried to show you a little bit of this in the first few verses of chapter one. But so here’s the idea, right? So I’ve got chapter one or verse one, verse two, verse three, verse four. There’s a repeated word in verse one and verse three, okay? They tie together, jumping around verse two. There’s a repeated word from verse two to verse four. And there’s a repeated word in verse three to verse five.

So three looks back to one and it looks forward to five, okay? So this is called chaining. Chaining—and it’s a literary structure. It’s a beautiful thing. You know, you like to see kinds of chains, you know, in various times to decorate with chains. And the author here has written this with one and three, and three and five, and five and seven, and seven and nine. Two and four, and four and six, and six and eight. By use of these common terms, he’s chaining the thing together. It’s like a beautiful chain made out of a couple of strands.

Well, chapter two has a simple chain. One and two are like two and three have a common word. Three and four. It’s not doubled up like this. It’s just like this, okay? Do you understand? You know, if you can’t understand the specifics, just understand that chapter one is like a chain with this beautiful kind of every-other deal going down through. And chapter two is like a very simple chain. A double chain, simple chain. Chapter three—you know how many chains there are? None. It goes away. It goes away.

Now, why would an author—here, God using the author—have obvious chiasms, obvious chains, and obvious acrostics, and not finish it through? Do you get tired? No, God doesn’t get tired. This is, you know, a beautiful work of art with five very clearly isolated poems.

Well, I think that the literary structure itself is about exactly what the book is about: the loss of beauty. We read in verse six—and it’s the theme verse as you come in—that Zion’s glory has totally gone away. Her majesty, her beauty has departed. Bob Dylan, “Cold Irons Bound”—such a sad thing to see beauty decay and death. That’s what death is. You know, when the flower starts to fade, right? I bought my wife some roses for Valentine’s Day, and beauty decays and it starts to fall apart. I’m old. Beauty is decaying. Okay, I’m falling apart. I’m falling to the ground. You know, everybody gets short order. You’re starting to become dust. Beauty decays, right?

And when God judges us, beauty decays. There’s a beauty of relationships. There’s a beauty to the body of Christ embracing each other and embracing the isolated particularly. And beauty decays in the book of Lamentations. And sometimes in our lives, relationships with our community decay. There’s a beauty to friendships. And when friendships go away, and not just go away, they become treacherous enemies of ours. There’s a complete loss of beauty. An ugly, ugly ugliness now grips the world.

And there is a loss of beauty when young girls are being forced into sexual slavery, committing suicide, being killed, becoming addicted to drugs. There is a horrific ugliness to that that should completely offend our sensibilities, and we should get mad about it.

You know, Jesus—the gospel is the good news that all that crap that God kind of winked at for a while, it’s stopping now. And for the last two days, it’s evident the church of Jesus Christ is saying: This will stop. We will continue to work. We will mobilize resources. We will lament before God for the ugliness of what’s going on in the Congo and Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and what’s going on in America—the killing of pre-born babies—and what’s going on in America with meth addiction, with prostitution, with sexual sin, and yes, with young girls being brought into servitude to that through, you know, wise older guys who manipulate these young girls. There’s an ugliness to all of that.

God says we should want beauty. We should want to get back to the beautiful chain. We should want to get back to the lovely chiastic structure of the poem. We should want to get back to the acrostic beauty of those poems. It’s all falling apart. It falls apart because of sin—primarily. God says that Lent is a reminder of what happens when death comes. Things get ugly. They deteriorate. Beauty decays.

What happens with you when you’ve got a relationship with a buddy or a girlfriend or whatever it is, and somehow you haven’t really kept it up, and maybe you’re even become treacherous? It is ugly. It is an ugly thing to have people in this congregation who feel pretty much alone. It’s uglier still if we’re not looking out for those kind of people and trying to embrace them in community.

I’m not, you know, I’m not bringing something into the text. That’s what it starts with in Lamentations one: “How lonely is the city? How lonely there can be folks in this church. I’m not taking us particularly—it’s all true of all churches. But I want us to see that this stuff is ugliness. It’s the decay of beauty. And God wants us to be people that are beautifying the world, putting the world to rights. An entry’s kind of definition of justice, right? Righteousness is faithfulness. To put the world to rights.

Well, when we put the world to rights, it’s like that beautiful poetry that’s chiastic and a chain and an acrostic all at the same time in chapter one. It’s all there. All this beautiful stuff going on. That’s what God’s calling us to do. Whether you think of yourself as an artist or not, when you cry out to God and you try to do something about what’s happening in your life here, the life of Oregon City, the life of Oregon, the United States, foreign countries, whatever it is, you are an artist bringing the beauty of God’s proper ordering of things—which is never some kind of sterile rationalistic deal. It’s got chaining. Poetry. It’s got acrostics. It’s got concentric responses. It’s got beauty to it.

God cooks, man. He makes beautiful things. You go outside, it’s beautiful, right? God calls us to lament before him for the ugliness in the world. He calls us to, you know, be honest with ourselves about the ugliness in our lives, and whether some of our sin has brought about that ugliness in our lives and the lives of others.

God says, “Bring beauty out of the loss of beauty here.” Right? Bring beauty.

You know, it’s interesting because God says—and this whole deal is hope. I want to read you something just fascinating. Oh boy, let’s see. I hope I can find it quickly. I know I’m going a little bit long, but believe me, this is dynamite. I won’t get to that fourth element of the structure. We’ll talk about that next week. I’m sorry. It’s another beautiful structuring device that’s going on in the text. We’ll talk about that next week. But I need to move on to the last point about hope and hopelessness.

Listen to this verse. Now, remember, in this particular context, the one that is experiencing ugliness going on and horrific bad things happening to—I mean, girls are being raped. That’s the clear image of this text by the invading armies. They’re breaking down the walls. They’re having their way with the girls. The girls are in, you know, ugliness. There’s filth all over their skirts. Babies will be eaten by their mothers. The young people have been taken away to captivity. Daniel, he’s gone, right? Daniel had a mother, you know. So, I mean, really horrible things have happened.

And it’s because—and Lamentations makes this very clear. And of course, we know our Bibles. We know why. It’s because they’re wicked, sinful people. They won’t evangelize the world. They won’t care even for themselves. They enslave one another. The exact opposite of God’s grace—in showing, you know, God is always extending himself to people, and they’re closing themselves off to people, enslaving people in Jerusalem. They’re ripping off the poor—not ignoring them. They’re positively thinking of ways to rip them off through court systems, oppressive systems, whatever it is. Okay? They’re really in deep sin here against God. And they’re doing all kinds of sexual stuff that’s improper. They’re bad. Okay? They’re basically excommunicated. What’s kicking them out of the land is about: God, their King, isn’t there going to be there with them anymore. They’re excommunicated. That’s these people. Don’t get some romantic view of them. They’re bad, evil people. That’s why these things are happening. Lamentations makes that clear.

Now listen to what Jeremiah says about this—astonishing, really. Not astonishing. But Lamentations 2:13: “What can I say for you? To what compare you, O daughter of Jerusalem? What can I liken you to, that I may comfort you? How can I comfort you?”

He says, “Oh virgin, daughter of Zion, your ruin is vast as the sea. Who can heal you? How—what can I—how can I comfort you, Jeremiah?” Remember, this is chapter two, but it’s the prophet talking.

How can he comfort these people? Why did Jeremiah write the book? To tell us what bad, horrible jerks they are—hate them forever? No. Jeremiah writes the book to try to comfort the horrific grief that Jerusalem has been brought to because of her sins. Because of her sins.

Who do we comfort? Who do we want to bring comfort to? We want to bring comfort to people who suffer. Now, this is not an antinomian kind of comfort. I’m not—I haven’t lost my brain at this justice conference. Because what Lamentations does—Jeremiah tells these Jews that the way you find your voice, the way you lament before God, is including in the lamentation, and you’re crying out in your suffering, a recognition that he has justly judged you for your sins.

In their case, there’s not going to be hope if they don’t bring that fact out. So he’s not antinomian here. But he is trying to comfort these people. Are we trying to comfort? And remember, the excommunicates—they’re worse, right, than the average guy out there, the average sinner. Excommunicates—we treat them even more, you know, handoff-ish. And even to the excommunicates, Jeremiah is seeking to comfort them.

And he’s writing us something here that teaches us how to comfort people in our lives. What do we, you know—you—you know what? What do we do when we come across drug addicts, people sleeping all over the place with all kinds of people or things, you know, people that or whatever they’re doing, right? What’s our instinct to the tremendous sorrow that exists in the context of communities such as ours? Is our instinct to comfort them? It should be.

It should be. Like I said, that doesn’t—it’s not some kind of antinomian thing. But we need to help people who are suffering because of their rebellion against Jesus. Even those people, we need to help them find their voice in the book of Lamentations. We need to bring them to know that they can lament before God. And there is hope in the Lord God. There is hope.

We know it because we’ve been brought to the end of hope. Jeremiah says that later in this, in chapter three. He says, you know, “My strength is gone. My strength was gone and I couldn’t even hope in the Lord anymore.” He says it in the middle of chapter three. And then right after that he says, “But the Lord is faithful. Great is thy faithfulness.” That song—built on a text from Lamentations. The Lord is faithful. His mercies are new every morning. He is the one in whom I can hope, even when I feel hopeless.

Lamentations helps us find our voice in the midst of horrible struggles and trials and deep depressions that we cannot understand, and real treacheries that we can understand all too well from friends around us, right? Lamentations helps us to find our voice to cry out to God the proper way. And Lamentations tells us that part of our voice is seeking to comfort the people of this world who are suffering in great distress—whether for their sin or for somebody else’s sin, or just the circumstances of the matter. Our every instinct should be to extend ourselves to them and to help them find their voice in this book. Not denying pain, suffering, difficulties, trials, and not denying—in many cases—their own sin as the basis for it, but finding their voice of complaint and lamentation before God, and bringing them to the place that we have been brought to.

“I have no strength in me,” as Jeremiah said. And you know what that means? The only one that can save me is God. The God who has sent His Son to die for our sins. As people find their voice in Lamentations, they find there is no help. There’s no hope in themselves. But that is the great turning point to achieve hope, because it draws us to the hope of the God who doesn’t end with a happy ending yet, but the happy ending is precisely what’s been bought for us by the great mercies and ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Lamentations is a real important book, and I hope that as we continue to go through it the next four weeks, you’ll pray for me, you’ll pray for yourself, that we understand it, that we delight in it, that we see the lessons that are laid out for us, that we find our voice in Lamentations, and we help this world find its voice as well.

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank You for this book. We thank You for opening it up to us this morning. We thank You for the beauty in it. Father, please forgive us for being such dispensers of ugliness all too often—in relationships or in relying upon political solutions to things that only You can do. Bless us, Lord God, as we seek to be artists, living a life of obedience and hope and care, extending ourselves to those who suffer around us.

Help us not to be so focused on Bangladesh that we forget about the person in this room that’s suffering in loneliness, and help us not to become so introspective that we forget the horrific things going on in Thailand and Cambodia and Sri Lanka. Bless us, Lord God, that no matter where we turn and what we do with our hands, that we do it this week as people that are restoring the beauty of a fallen world.

In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.