Pentecost IV – 6/28/09 – “There’s No Tomorrow” – Lamentations 3:22-33  – By Pastor Chuck Pegg            Older Sermons

In one of the Peanuts cartoons I have in my collection of jokes, Charlie Brown is watching a golf tournament on television. The announcer says: “All right, golf fans, this is it…The old pro has to make this one…He’s down to the last putt, and he can’t play it safe…He has to go for it… There’s no tomorrow.”

Just as the announcer says, “There’s no tomorrow,” Charlie Brown’s little sister, Sally, walks into the room. “There’s no tomorrow?” she asks, with panic in her eyes. Out the door she rushes, screaming, “There’s no tomorrow!!” She confronts her brother’s friend, Linus, yelling at the top of her lungs, “They just announced on TV that there’s no tomorrow!!!”

She finds Snoopy and tells him excitedly: “There’s no tomorrow!! They just announced it on TV! Panic! Panic! Run! Hide! Flee! Run for the hills! Flee to the valleys! Run to the roof tops!” In the last picture, Sally, Linus and Snoopy are on the roof of Snoopy’s doghouse. Linus laments: ”Somehow I never thought it would end this way.” Snoopy gets in the last word: “I thought Elijah was to come first.”

It’s not hard to understand from a reading of the Old Testament how it was that the people of Israel thought this way – there’s no tomorrow - many times over the course of their history. The book of The Lamentations of Jeremiah comes from a period in Israel’s history when the people could have rightly thought that their end was at hand. They had been taken into captivity by the Babylonians when Jerusalem was destroyed in 586 BC.

The description of the fall of Jerusalem is written in detail in II Kings. Zedekiah was king of Judah and had ruled for eleven years. Following his predecessors, according to II Kings 24:19, “King Zedekiah sinned against the Lord, just as King Jehoiakim had done.” All the kings of Judah had sinned against God, beginning with Manasseh who, according to the account in chapter 21, had set up and worshipped false idols and may have at least condoned, if not joined in the practice of, human sacrifice.

Thus, in chapter 25:1-2, we read that “Zedekiah rebelled against King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia, and so Nebuchadnezzar came with all his army and attacked Jerusalem … They set up camp outside the city, built siege walls around it, and kept it under siege…” There follows a lengthy description of the takeover and destruction of the city and the temple, including these words in 25:9-10 – The commander of Nebuchadnezzar’s army ”burned down the Temple, the palace and the houses of all the important people in Jerusalem, and his soldiers tore down the city’s walls.”

In addition, there is an account of the taking into captivity of the temple and military leaders, as well as skilled craftsmen and others of importance – the commander of Israel’s army, five of King Zedekiah’s personal advisors, and 60 other important people. Left behind were the poorest people who owned no property. They were put to work in the vineyards and fields. The account ends with the words, “So the people of Judah were carried away from their land into exile” (II Kings 25:21).

This was the final result of a long history of corrupt kings, and the coming to power of several different nations, among them Egypt, Assyria and Babylonia. Instead of being true to the God who had covenanted with them and promised to make them a great nation, the people of Israel were led into ruin by kings who worshipped other gods, who led immoral lives, and who engaged in political corruption and ill-fated alliances.

Thus the kingdom of Judah stood little chance of successfully defeating the powerful kingdom of Babylonia. The result, as we have read in II Kings, was the downfall of Judah and the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.

No wonder Jeremiah, a prophet of Israel during that period of her history, lamented over what had happened and penned the verses that form our first lesson. He shared the people’s deep sorrow, sorrow he expressed in this way: “How lonely lies Jerusalem, once so full of people! Once honored by the world she is now like a widow; the noblest of cities has fallen into slavery… Judah’s people are helpless slaves, forced away from home. They live in other lands, with no place to call their own – surrounded by enemies, with no way to escape” (Lam. 1:1, 3). Further on he writes, “Our glittering gold has grown dull; the stones of the Temple are scattered like common clay pots” (Lam 4:1).

For Israel, everything happened by the hand of God. The good was the result of God’s care and concern for His people, and the bad was the result of God’s punishment for their sin. If the Lord is responsible for the suffering and tragedy faced by the people, to whom are they to turn for help? To no one other than the Lord, the same God who is the source of their trouble.

God is steadfast in love, in mercy, in faithfulness, in goodness toward his people. It is that goodness here that Jeremiah emphasizes – how good the Lord is to those who wait for him, waiting in anticipation, looking forward eagerly to the fulfillment of God’s purposes; how good it is to be hopeful, optimistic, believing that nothing can prevent God from achieving his end; how good it is to honestly face the situation in which God has placed us, humbly recognizing that God is in control of our destiny, for our own good.

Jeremiah knows the Lord. He trusts that God, the God of the Covenant, will have mercy on his people and forgive their sin, that God will restore Israel to her place of greatness: “The Lord will not reject forever. Although he causes grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone” (Lam 3:31-33).

These same words are true for us today. The God we worship is a God who cares for us, in good times and in bad, in health and in sickness, in good fortune and in adversity. The God we worship is the God who sent his Son to rescue us from sin and eternal death.

I have remembered throughout my career what one of my seminary professors said to us fifty years ago about dealing with hard times in the ministry – when things were not going as we would like them to, when the congregation we served seemed not to appreciate what we were trying to do, when those one or two or three people who seem to be in every congregation were trying to undermine everything we were trying to accomplish. His advice to us, when we began to feel sorry for ourselves, was to go make a hospital visit and see how tough things really are.

Every weekday morning for the past four weeks I have been driving to Denton for radiation treatment. After about my eighth trip a man showed up in the waiting room for his treatment immediately following mine. I subsequently learned that he has cancer of the throat and is receiving chemotherapy as well as radiation treatments. In light of that, my situation doesn’t seem so grim.

It seems to me that regardless of how tough we have it – whether we’ve lost a job (been there, done that) or had our hours cut back, whether we have a cantankerous boss (been there, done that) or co-workers who are difficult to work with, whether we face foreclosure on our home or our kids are running with the wrong group of other kids, whether we face a death in our family or a life-threatening disease – no matter what the circumstances may be - we would do well to remember that it is pretty certain there is someone out there who has it worse than we do. We would also do well to remember these words of Lamentations: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning: great is your faithfulness. ‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’”

 Amen!