Old Testament

Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed...

Jeremiah has been called "The Weeping Prophet." How would you like that for a nickname? But he had a lot to weep about. He witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem twice - once in prophecy and once in person. He saw the terrible consequences of rebellion against God when the city of Jerusalem was beseiged, the people starved and reduced to cannibalism, the nation overthrown, the king blinded and taken away along with most of the population in chains.

The book is called, in our English translations, "Lamentations." Outcries. Weeping. In the Hebrew it is called 'ekah, "How..." A poignant beginning that expresses the yearning for an understanding of these tragedies.

And yet the Gospel is here too. It begins at last, after pages of pain, in chapter 3 verse 21. "Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope..."

What do you "call to mind" when you are in despair?...

On what were [the earth's] footings set, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?

First of all, I'm glad to be back after 3 days of an intense workshop on funding Lutheran schools. I apologize that my ancient laptop was unable to connect to the wi-fi. It would have been refreshing to use some of that time to write to all of you. (...both of you?)

Have you ever looked around in church to see if anyone else was singing? Last Sunday, at one of the less-attended services, I noticed a sudden drop in the volume of the hymn as I was distributing Communion. I looked up and noticed that 2 rows of people who had been singing with gusto had gotten up to approach the altar rail. The loss of just those 8 or 10 people had cut the volume of the church in half!

What's up with that?...

I myself will take a shoot from the very top of a cedar and plant it...

In commencement addresses given at this time of the year I have often heard speakers say that the students before them have been given "roots and wings" with which to move into the future. (It's a rather funny mental picture actually, to imagine someone with roots trying to fly.)

Their intention is to say that the students have roots in the past, but have wings to fly toward a grand future. But God uses these metaphors differently...

"Woe is me!" I cried. "I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty."

My son and I were standing on top of a mountain where we had stopped to take our lunch break, when 3 more backpackers came up the trail. We got into a conversation about equipment (a favorite topic of backpackers), "What are you doing for water?"

Jon and I were using a good quality ceramic water filter that removes bacteria, especially giardia lamblia. Before we bought it we studied up quite a bit about what would keep us healthy and this filter would work for every single danger except one - viruses. (Mainly a problem if you're hiking in Africa or a country with serious ground water problems.) That's why these other 3 hikers used chlorine and iodine tablets instead.

However, chlorine is...

Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. I will put my Spirit in you and you will live...

It's a bad habit that some people have, to spiritualize Bible verses. That is, sometimes people take a miraculous promise and remove the physical miracle in order to make it seem more plausible. But in this case, that's exactly what we need to do with these verses - and we do it in order to understand a greater miracle that God promises, not in order to have a lesser miracle.

Yes, there is a physical resurrection from the dead, and that's taught elsewhere in the Scriptures. But in this case God is promising a different kind of resurrection. The vision that Ezekiel has of an army being raised from the dead is intended to teach him that God can raise the nation of Israel - not from a literal physical death, but from their spiritual death.

Does this apply to people today in any way?...

Prophecy is strange to us. In modern movies and books like the Harry Potter series a prophet goes into a trance, gets eerie, maybe starts to speak in a different voice (more like he is possessed than anything else) and then utters some obscure poetic reference. Prophecies are prose enough to clearly apply to a certain person, but poetic enough to be capable of misinterpretation (which, of course, is what makes the story exciting).

The "Servant Songs" in Isaiah....

"Dem bones... Dem dry bones..." The song doesn't do it justice. It's all bouncy and jivy, but I don't imagine this was a comical or hilarious scene. This was not just about dancing bones, or even just about the resurrection of these dead bodies. This was a field of war - the scene of carnage and destruction. And God changed it. What does this mean?...

A sense of extreme frustration seems to permeate these verses. The chapter begins with a joyful tone. The Lord's servant is coming and he will establish justice. It continues with God's promise to open the eyes of the blind and free the captives. It goes on with, "sing to the Lord..."

But then, the prophet reflects God's anxiety (for lack of a better word, this is, after all, an anthropomorphism). He reveals what it will cost God to do all these wonderful things...

"We also rejoice in our sufferings..."

OK... how real is that? My instinct suggests that this is something that we can do in theory, but when we actually come to a time of suffering then we'll find it a lot harder to rejoice. That's what my instinct says. But surprisingly my experience tells a more complex tale...

If we followed the Hebrew tradition, I might give names to the rooms in my house. The living room I might call "Resting" or "Singing." The family room I could call "Laughing" or "Playing." And the kitchen and dining room I would call "Whining and Dining."

Although it happens elsewhere too, it seems that the dinner table is the place where issues get raised. As I think back, I can remember so many arguments about so many trivial things...

What are the dominant themes in this text? God's grace in calling Abram - Abram's faith in following God's call and leaving home - the incomprehensible vastness of God's promise to Abram. Those are the first that spring to mind. But - what part of this is likely to resonate with listeners on a Sunday morning? Or, more important, what part of this ought to resonate with them? What does God want to show them?

It's hard to preach on Bible stories that are hyper-familiar. Like the Noah's ark wallpaper and toys that cause our people to forever think of Noah as 6 inches tall, the story of the Fall Into Sin is too familiar. It is not familiar in a good way, because people have studied and understood it. But it is familiar in a bad way, because people have skimmed it many times and think they know what it means...

Few pastors will preach on this text because we just heard it in the Advent/Christmas season. "For to us a child is born, to us a son is given..." But it gets repeated now in the Epiphany season because of the earlier verse (2), "the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light..."

In the midst of presidential campaigning, these verses make a nice contrast. I took a few young people to hear Senator John McCain speak yesterday...