SCRIPTURE: Lamentations 4
TEXT: THEME: Our lives are a representation of our relationship with God. INTRODUCTION The Bible is a collection of humans stories about their experiences with God. The story of the Nation of Israel included times when they grew independent from God in their; government, foreign policies, worship and lives. They became no better than anyone else, so when their King Zedekiah foolishly rebelled against the king of Babylon, it set them up for attack and God treated them like everybody else. Letting this tiny nation duke it out with the Babylonian superpower on their own. They were surprised, they arrogantly thought that all of the success they had in the past against greater powers would be repeated, but they were decimated without God having their back. The city was lost, everything was destroyed, now in its wake is famine and starvation. Today’s chapter of Lamentations picks up after the 1st chapter of devastation, the 2nd chapter of grief and the 3rd one of turning to God and finding love, mercy and faithfulness, but turning to God does not magically erase the devastation of destruction. Shifting gears a bit, Lamentations 4 gives us insight as to what lead up to this fiasco. SCRIPTURE Instead of reading the entire chapter, I chose a few representative passages as our reading today. The People of God have become no better than any other people as they have turned away from their tradition, their heritage, their religion, their belief in God for; other idols, greed, fame, popularity, power, pleasure and vanity. They have become useless as a people representing what life in relationship with God looks like. God loves them even though they were not witnessing a belief in God. As a result of the Babylonian attack, fields were burned and the city is now facing a severe famine and starvation. No one is escaping because there isn’t anything anywhere. Money is useless as rich and poor are faced with the grim reality of starvation. We are ash. The King put on a false morality and was fed the rhetoric by false prophets to speak religiously. He was more concern about his tan and the color of his hair than ruling, foreign relations, the economy, or justice for his people. When Babylon attacked, he escaped into the wilderness. He was hunted down and taken to Babylon where he watched his family being slain before he met the same fate, killing any hope of the messiah coming from his lineage. The famine was so severe, being killed by fighting for the country was preferable to starvation. Compassionate mothers took the lives of their suffering children to end their misery. The prophets filled the King with thoughts of a Spiritual Warfare against the Babylonian pagans and demonized their opponents. Boosting a false confidence against the Babylonians, the arrogant king egged Babylon to attack, assuming God would come to their aid as God had done in the past. God would have, if they were Israel in spirit, but they were Israel only in name. No one came to Israel’s aide against Babylon, rather the than fight Babylon, Edom, their neighboring country, became Babylon’s friend and plundered Jerusalem after the Babylonians. The Daughters of Edom are warned in this chapter. This is not a story about nationalism, but of a nation that had turned away from God and lost their distinctiveness. Now that everything has been taken away, they have a story of what life without God is like and reminded of the steadfast love of the Lord that never ceases, of Mercies that never come to an end. And about the great faithfulness of God. Once again, these people, as wayward as they have been, can include this chapter in their continued story of their experiences with God. APPLICATION The story of Israel is our story too. We know what it means to live with God and be a witness, an example of living with an awareness of God, but then to lose our distinctiveness living only according to our greed, and come to our senses finding our way back to God. How does our lives give witness to a living God? At the installation service of the new Pastor Gordon Marchant, at Makawao Union, I met a lady who told stories about growing up as a youth during the second world war in Makawao. She said her father told her 3 things; have courage, put one foot in front of the other and do the right thing. Then she proceeded to tell me about all of these things her friends and she did while no one paid attention to teen aged girls during the war from; Apana’ junk yard, to camping along the water line, to cutting fences and learning how to mend them. Always about having courage(koa), putting one foot in front of the other (imua [moving forward]) and doing the right thing (pono). Hawaii is losing the Aloha Spirit because those who have come are bringing in what they were like from somewhere else, and many of those who have aloha are leaving to live their aloha elsewhere. We have to teach others how to live aloha and we have to be example of aloha. Some people mistake our aloha to think that we are here to serve them, until they realize that it is not that, rather that Aloha is the better way to live in being respectful of each other and doing what is loving towards each other. This is pono, doing the right things to build something that is caring and loving. There is no going back to the past, but imua, moving forward towards something fussed, combined, diverse and inclusive. We can take our value, our traditions, our love, our heritage, our DNA and our faith to flavor the future. If we don’t have koa, courage to live and encourage others to do the same, we could lose our aloha then we lose our distinctiveness and become like everyone else. CONCLUSION Don’t only listen to prophets who only tell us what we want to hear. We have to be willing to hear those who tell us the truth, the hard stuff of about our character, our behavior, our actions, our policies and what is right. If we silence opposing voices, we have nothing new to consider, no refinement to our thought, and we limit our thinking to only one voice and that is of our own foolishness. The author of Lamentations reminds us that we are dirt, reckoned as earthen pots. But what is steadfast is that God loves us and has never stopped. God’s mercies never come to an end and God’s faithfulness is great even when we have not been. When we turn to God, Things will still be difficult until they get better, and our waywardness becomes a couple of chapters of our story with God.
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