Creation Time 5 Year C

I suspect that most of us rarely choose to read the book of Lamentations. It doesn’t feature regularly in the readings from the Lectionary and you would probably need to have a good reason to go and search it out. We do, quite appropriately, engage with it in Holy Week, often with musical settings of the text. The book is a commentary on the fall and destruction of Jerusalem in 596 BC and should perhaps come with a health warning. Unlike some other books of Scripture it’s not focussed on individual sadness and despair but on the situation for an entire people.

I think we need to begin by reminding ourselves that we are talking here about the people of Israel, the people of God in these books of Scripture, not the state of Israel as it now is. It’s so easy to conflate the two, to use language lazily and so to project from one situation to the other. But this reading is based in a particular time and situation and has its own integrity. Let’s place it in context. The exile from Jerusalem happened about 800 years after the Exodus. Now we know quite a bit about the Exodus because we hold the Passover as a foundational text in the narrative of our Christian faith. I would suggest that the exile is no less foundational.

This is the story of a people who turned away from their God and eventually paid a terrible price. God didn’t abandon them, they chose to stop responding to God. The people put themselves in a position where they were distanced from God; they stopped listening, perhaps they began to think that they knew best. And then things went very wrong. So wrong that it seemed as though nothing was left. So wrong that the writer could only reflect on emptiness and loss; on what had been and was no longer. Jerusalem, the symbol of unity and connection with God was no more.

The description in the reading of the experience of exile is graphic. There isn’t an attempt at sugar coating. This is a description of raw human misery, a description of the depths to which we can sink. It’s a reflection on the human condition that we rarely choose to explore. We know that bad things happen, even to good people, but we are primarily a community of hope and new life; we share a narrative that each day brings new opportunities, new beginnings. I wonder how that lands for people who are experiencing despair, how our positive spin feels to those for whom little changes from day to day. Lamentations speaks right into that situation. Speaks into our contemporary world; speaks into a place that we may choose not to dwell on, but that most of us know something of. There is a universality about this Scripture that crosses borders and faith communities and politics. For Jewish people right now, it’s real.

The events of Thursday morning in Manchester happened on Yom Kippur – the day of Atonement. It’s the most holy day in the Jewish year. A day when people fast and pray and lament their sinfulness. It’s a day when even people who rarely attend the Synagogue make an effort to go. A day that is deeply entrenched in the lives of Jewish people, perhaps especially in the Diaspora. It’s a day when people gather to acknowledge their collective sinfulness and then to be reminded of God’s infinite mercy. The blessing on Yom Kippur isn’t to say, go away and don’t sin again. It’s to say, remember that God is more merciful than you could ever imagine.

This is a narrative of faith. Faith in the God who never gives up on us. Faith in the God whose mercy was and is and is to come.

In this morning’s Gospel, the disciples said to Jesus: Increase our faith. And the response was that your faith is enough, if only you trusted it. Your faith is enough. So what gets in the way of living that faith? In part it’s our own unbelief. It’s our own tendency to turn away from God, to serve ourselves rather than him. And perhaps to treat our own failings rather lightly, while at the same time being very quick to call out the sinfulness of others.

If you had faith the size of a mustard seed. And where is that mustard seed planted? We are the ones who host the mustard seeds of faith. And faith grows when it has space for its roots to spread; when it is nurtured and tended; when we pay it appropriate attention. We do that in a number of ways – through our private prayers; through the ways that we find time and space for God; and through collective worship.

We’re fortunate, there are no restrictions on us. We don’t need security on the doors of the cathedral. None of us was watching to see whether we were being followed this morning. We probably don’t fear attack for who we are and how we connect with God. That freedom is a gift that we should never take for granted.

We began with the book of Lamentations and the experience of exile. Exile isn’t a place of freedom, it’s a place where people feel trapped, a place in life where it seems as though there are no options; a place in life where people’s agency has been taken from them. On the big world stage, that is a situation that we can identify and name. But I want to suggest this morning that the experience of exile, of feeling discombobulated, out of step with the people around you, is one that we can all identify with. There are times in all of our lives when we don’t connect, don’t fit. Times when it feels as though the world is going about its worldy business and we are observers with no agency to impact on any of it.

That is the lived experience that the book of Lamentations is laying before us. That is the lived experience that we can be quick to deny – for ourselves and for others. We can be too quick to suggest that if we just pray, or trust, or hand something over to God all will be magically well.

We know that life isn’t always quite like that. Sometimes it is. Sometimes we come before God with a heartfelt prayer and something changes. And sometimes we bring that same heartfelt prayer and it feels as though nothing has changed. Finding ourselves in that place, in that place that we may call exile, is hard; it’s uncomfortable; it’s definitely unwelcome. And yet, it is at just those times in our lives when our wee mustard seed might find new sources of nourishment. When that mustard seed of faith might grow a few new shoots; when it begins to witness to new life.

All of this takes time. The people of Israel were 70 years in that first exile. Reconnecting with God, reframing our lives and our direction takes time. And we’re not always good at giving God time.

Sometimes, as the Psalmist says, all we can do is to sit down and weep, sit down and allow ourselves to experience the lament in the knowledge that one day we will experience God’s mercy.