The Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

LAMENTATIONS 1:1-5: This poem is the reverse of Psalm 137. The psalm tells of the situation of the Judahites that had gone into exile into Babylon following the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC. Lamentations was written by someone who was left in Jerusalem after the city was destroyed and the others were taken into exile. His picture of life is as desolate as is that of the psalmist.

Lamentations compares Jerusalem to a widow who was formerly a great woman but now is bereft of those things that made her great. She has no husband, and from the perspective of the time a woman with no man to give her status had no standing at all in the community. She weeps bitterly through the night. She has no one to comfort her. She is the victim of treachery. Formerly she had lovers, but they have deserted her; the reference of course is to the false gods Jerusalem worshiped, but who are helpless in the face of this disaster. Verse 6 brings the climax of this picture: All the majesty of Zion has departed from her. The princes of Judah have fled without strength before the pursuers.

In verse three the emphasis shifts back to the desolate city, Jerusalem. Those who pursued her, the Babylonian armies, have overtaken her. The roads to Zion no longer bring festive worshipers. Her gates have been torn down. The remaining priests groan in their distress. The young girls who remain in the city grieve instead of laugh and dance, as young girls should. Those who were her foes, the Babylonian kings and generals, have become her masters. Her children have gone away; they are captives in another land.

Lamentations is willing to point to a root cause of this desolation. For the multitude of Judah's transgressions, the Lord has inflicted this suffering upon her. Such recognition may yet point Judah to the way of salvation. It comes through the suffering servant of Isaiah and, more than that, the suffering servant of God, Jesus Christ.

LAMENTATIONS 3:15-26: This poem is the reflection of a poet who has remained in Jerusalem during its period of disaster. The poem shows how he was able to work through his affliction in order to find some peace.

His reflections begin by centering on his present condition:

My soul is bereft of peace, I have forgotten what happiness is;
so I say, "Gone is my glory, and my expectation from the LORD."
I remember my affliction and my bitterness, the wormwood and the gall!
My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me.

But he also remembers that no matter how disastrous the outward circumstances of his life have become, the Lord is still with him.

This I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end;

they are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness.

This confession of faith was not easy to make. He may have said these words in the halcyon days when it appeared that God was in his heavens and all was right with the world. To repeat them when it was clear that all was not right with the world required him to go into the depths of his life. When he plunged into those depths he found that what he had said so easily in easier days was indeed true. The steadfast love of the Lord does not cease. His mercies do not come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is the faithfulness of God.

He concludes with this affirmation: "The LORD is my portion," says my soul, "therefore I will hope in him." The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.

He who began in desolation plumbed the depths of his own soul, and in the depths he found God there. Quietly he gathers his life together and waits for God to act. He illustrates perfectly what Paul Tillich was to say centuries later, "The only progress in religion is progress in depth."

PSALM 137: Psalm 137 carries with it more naked emotion than any other psalm in the psalter. The situation in which it was written contributes to that. The writer was in exile in Babylon with the people of Judah following the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in 586 BC. His psalm conveys longing, it discloses grief, it expresses humiliation, and it unleashes anger.

"By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept," he begins. The waters of Babylon were alien to them. The Judahites had lived on a high mountain. Each day they looked up to the highest point of the mountain and saw the temple of their God. Now that temple was in ruins, and the people had been brutally ripped from it and transported to the deserts and rivers and canals of Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers created the plain on which the city was located, and canals crisscrossed the valley between the two rivers. The only thing that resembled a mountain was the 150 foot high ziggurat built to honor the Babylonian gods. In sheer grief and homesickness, the Jews sat down and wept.

Humiliation came in the demand of their captors that they sing the songs of Zion. These would be the hymns and praises contained in the psalter to the time of the exile. How could they sing those songs? God had not protected them. God had forgotten them. Their God was as good as dead. Singing the songs in their captivity would only remind them of all of that. When Jews much later were in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, their jailers insisted they sing the songs of the synagogues. The Nazis had learned this technique from the captors of Babylon. "Sing us one of the songs of Zion," they had sneered.

Such grief! How could they sing those songs? Their hands would wither when they laid them on the harps. Their tongues would cleave to the roofs of their mouths as they gave voice to their shame. Yet sing they would. It helped them to remember Jerusalem. Jerusalem was their highest joy.

Grief quickly turned to anger, deep, vast, abiding anger. The psalmist called upon God to remember the sin of the Edomites. As the Babylonians were destroying Jerusalem, the Edomites had called out to them to lower it to the ground, down to its foundations. "Remember that, O Lord," exclaimed the psalmist.

His deepest anger was directed to the Babylonians themselves. "Happy shall be he who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock! Happy will be he who requites you with what you have done to us!" Some commentators, McCann and Brueggemann among them, have excused the anger of the psalmist by saying that his words were only a prayer asking God to act, not a program of action upon which he was ready to embark. They point out that anger is sometimes justified, especially when it is directed toward a great evil. That much is true.

But the truth is that God did not answer this prayer in the way that the psalmist had requested. The change of power from Babylon to Persia was one of the very few exchanges that did not result in violence. The Babylonian empire quickly expired, so quickly that the psalm was barely written before it transpired. Nabonidas, emperor of Babylon, was more a mystic than a warrior, and he did not oppose the Persians. Cyrus of Persia marched into Babylon in 539 BC without a battle, and shortly after he permitted the exiled Jews to return home. Babylon surrendered without the devastation to the city and its people that changes in rule usually entailed. Its children were saved, but its empire died. The mercy of the Lord was greater than the psalmist expected it to be.

As I meditate over this 137^th Psalm and the grief, anger, and humiliation it expresses, I think of another Jewish man who nearly six hundred years later approached Jerusalem. Jesus of Nazareth viewed the city from the Mount of Olives opposite it. The emotions he felt contrast with those of the writer of the 137^th Psalm. Instead of requesting vengeance against its enemies, he cried over its sins; instead of asking that God brutalize its enemies, Jesus felt compassion for the city and its foes. "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem," he wept, "killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not! Behold, your house is forsaken."

LUKE 17:5-10: Two statements of Jesus make up this lection. Both have to do with the relationship of God and Jesus' disciple.

The first statement comes in response to the question, "Increase our faith!" Jesus had just told the disciples a number of important things. They are never to be the cause of someone else stumbling. They are to rebuke sinners, but they are to forgive them, in a nearly unconditional way, if they repent. These things seem most difficult to the disciples, so in awe at their responsibilities, they say, "Increase our faith."

Jesus' reply is that that is not the issue at all. Faith is not a matter of degree, of small and large. It is not even a matter of results. "Degree" is found in the contrast Jesus makes between the tiny seed of the mustard plant and the huge size of the mulberry tree. The mustard seed was among the smallest of seeds; the mulberry tree grows to a height of 60 or more feet. "Results" are signified in the request to the mulberry tree to uproot itself from the hillside and replant itself in the sea - a patently improbable happening. Don't worry about degrees of faith, said Jesus. Don't worry about the results of faith. Simply learn in each instance to obey God.

The word "obey" suggests a relationship that was well-known at the time, that of master and slave. Jesus tells of a man who owns one slave. That single slave must spend all day in the field plowing up the ground and tending the sheep. When his long day is over, he is expected to come into the house, prepare the evening meal, put on his apron, and serve meal and drink to his master. When he has done this, then he can eat his own meal - one would almost add, if he has the strength to do so after this strenuous day! This is expected of a slave. He does these things because of the relationship he has to his master. The slave does not expect to be thanked for it. It is the condition of the relationship that he do these things without commendation from his master.

Jesus concludes this statement by referring to the commands he gave his discipleship in the 17:1-5. "You are to do these things because God orders us to do them. You are to refrain from causing others to fall from the faith because of you. You are to rebuke sin. You are to forgive sin. This is the nature of the relationship you have with God. Don't worry about 'increasing your faith.' Worry about doing these things. Unworthy as we are of the grace God showers upon us, simply go out and do these things which God expects us to do."

SECOND TIMOTHY 1:1-14: A brief outline of this passage may be helpful in reading it:

1:1-2 Salutation of the letter

1:3-5 The thanksgiving

1:6-8 The nature of the gift Timothy received from God

1:9-10 Summary of the author's understanding of the gospel

1:11-14 Paul's ministry as a model for Timothy.

In this salutation Paul is identified as an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God; in this the salutation does not differ from other opening of other letters. Timothy is addressed as "my beloved child." He is apparently a young man who is a third-generation Christian. The faith came to his grandmother Lois and was passed to his mother Eunice. Now it comes to the grandson. There is an old saying that reads "From shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations." This implies that grandpa rolled up his shirtsleeves and made his fortune. The fortune was then passed on to his sons, who as the second generation had a tendency to squander it. So the third generation has to roll up the shirtsleeves and start all over again. This saying has a spiritual impact. Grandpa, or grandma in this instance, Lois, has a real meeting with Jesus Christ, and it changes her life. When this is passed to the next generation, the faith can become style rather than substance, keeping the form of the faith but losing the power of it. The third generation is critical: will it say, I can't imagine what Grandpa saw in this, and turn away. Or will it ask, What did Grandpa see in the faith that I must recapture? It is this question the author is addressing to Timothy.

The greeting to the readers has changed slightly. Instead of the usual Pauline "grace and peace," it comes out "grace, mercy, and peace."

The thanksgiving of the letter reminds the hearers that Paul served God in Christ with a clear conscience; nothing from his past hindered him in carrying out his service. The "service" includes prayer, and the sense is given that Paul prayed without ceasing, as he asked others to do. The word "service" is the same one used for the services of the Temple, those day-by-day, round-the-clock services of sacrifice and prayer made in behalf of those who held to the Jewish faith. By using this term, the author is saying that the Christian faith is an extension of the Jewish faith. This was important, because Judaism has given us both our Scriptures and our Christ. Judaism also was the household that protected Christians in the eyes of the Roman authorities; the Jews had won major concessions of freedom of worship, of taxation, and of use of their own courts and not Roman courts to settle their disputes, and the Christians benefitted from applying this protection to themselves. In prison, Paul remembers the tears shed for him, and he is grateful for their concern. He also looks forward to a great reunion with friends, and the joy that that will bring him.

As attention in the letter turns to Timothy, Paul expresses the wish to re-kindle faith in Timothy; the third-generation syndrome referred to above may have been at work here. But as Paul lays hands upon him in prayer, and sets him to a task, Paul is confident that the spirit that will be transmitted to Timothy will be a spirit of power and of love and of self-control, that very important Stoic virtue which Paul had discovered came to him not by practicing the teaching of the Stoics but by being in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

As the letter progresses, at a very important point the author refers to a statement of faith that Christians had learned as they became part of the fellowship:

The gospel is the power of God, who saved us and called us with a holy calling, not in virtue of our works but in virtue of his own purpose and the grace which he gave us in Christ Jesus ages ago, and now has manifested through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.

God is the one who calls us and gives us our vocation for him. He does this according to his own purpose and grace. This grace was prepared for us in Christ ages ago; this is another way of saying with the Gospel of John, "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and was God." This purpose and grace is now demonstrated in the appearance on earth of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Through God he has abolished death, that great enemy, and brought life and immortality to light. We know this through the preaching and hearing of the good news brought to us in Christ.

Paul relates this confessional statement to his own suffering. He is a prisoner of the Lord. He asks Timothy to take his own share in this suffering and to be ready to suffer as Paul does. Suffering and imprisonment are considered by some to be shameful, but Paul considers them to be integral to his ministry. For, he says, "I know in whom I have believed." Note that the word is not "what I believed." Important as that is, it is far more important to know the one in whom we believe, Jesus Christ, who himself suffered on the cross, was dead, and was buried.

Paul is certain that Christ has been able to "guard that which was entrusted to Paul." The Greek word is "deposit," "goods left in trust with someone else," and it pictures something retained and returned in the form in which it was first received. Paul received the faith, and as his ministry comes to a close, he will return it to Christ. He asks Timothy to receive the faith and to serve it so well that as Paul did he too will be able to carry on a ministry in which he is not ashamed. "Guard the truth," says Paul, "which has been entrusted to you by the Holy Spirit of God in Christ. Guard it well!"