Mercy Like Daily Bread--March 20, 2020
"The thought of my affliction and my homelessness
is wormwood and gall!
My soul continually thinks of it
and is bowed down within me.
But 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." [Lamentations 3:19-23]
These words were written in the midst of disaster. The hope they speak has been earned through the experience of deep suffering. It is a solid hope, then, and nothing fluffy or ephemeral. These words are load-bearing, like a plank-and-rope bridge that you know will hold you because you have seen all that they have been through and held up before.
When you hear the poet here say, "The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases," or that God's mercies are "new every morning," you might first hear echoes of that beloved hymn, "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" ringing in your ears. And rightly so--this is the passage from Scripture that provides the inspiration for Thomas Chisholm's lyrics.
But what we often forget--or maybe never learned in the first place--is the crucible out of which these words were written. These verses are part of the single, solitary passage of hope in a book of funeral dirges, all written to grieve and deal with the trauma of seeing the city of Jerusalem besieged, attacked, and burned to the ground. The poet lived through the worst of it (and it got very bad), and he tried to make sense of where God was in the midst of the suffering. The advancing enemy was the Babylonia Empire, and they surrounded the city, so that everyone had to stay inside in a sort of forced "shelter-in-place" order. We think it's bad enough to stay inside our homes to prevent the spread of a sickness or to see a local grocery store running out of toilet paper, but the folks who endured the fall of Jerusalem in 586BC ran out of literally everything. The whole point of a siege is to starve your enemy into submission, so that they put up no resistance when your army finally breaks through the walls, or so that they come out willing to surrender in exchange for food. And when the Babylonians did it, the people of Jerusalem watched their supplies dwindle down to nothing. They starved, and they watched their children starve. They contemplating eating the dead (see Lam. 2:20). Money becomes worthless when there's nothing to buy with it to feed your family, and soon the streets were filled with the dead. And on top of that, then the Babylonian army came in and looted the buildings, palaces, and temple, burned the city to the ground, and took the living back to Babylon as their prisoners while they left the dead for the vultures. So, yeah, it got bad.
And this is what I mean when I say that the words of hope from this poet were hard-earned. He's not just skipping through life from a privileged position of comfort, wondering why everyone else is so glum, or suggesting for the people, "Let them eat cake." He has seen everything he loved destroyed. He has seen the slow decline of watching friends and neighbors waste away, who could neither work nor eat, and he has seen the fast wave of violence from a literal invading army. And through all of it, he has had to ask the terrifying question, "Where is God while this is happening?"
So for someone who has seen and shared so much suffering still to say, "God's mercies are new every morning," well, that means something. The poet isn't ignoring reality, and he's not trying to whitewash a tragedy. But he believes, really and truly, that God is getting him through this. Not around it, not instead of it, not over or under, but always through. And day by day, God gives to all those who suffer the strength for the day. It comes, in a sense, like daily bread--not a lifetime supply all at once, but one meal for the soul at a time.
Hope cannot be hoarded like toilet paper. Mercy is given with each new day, like the morning's freshly baked bread. It is set before you to sustain you for this moment, and then you go and live and work and endure and fall asleep exhausted... and then you find yourself given new bread for the day when the sun rises on a new morning.
We Christians are fond of talking about "daily bread," because Jesus taught us pray for the day's bread. But perhaps all that rote memory has made us forgetful of what that idea really means. We so often want to have the lifetime supply, the pension set up and secured right now, the 36-pack of Ultra Mega 4-times-as-big rolls of toilet paper... when God gives us what we need day by day by day. Back in the wilderness days, God could have--but didn't--set the wandering Israelites up with a 40-year supply of manna in a giant slab that they could have dragged around with them on a pallet. That wasn't an error on God's part, despite the people's near constant complaint that they wanted to know where their next meal would come from. Instead, God gave them manna every day, day by day, new every morning, so that they could learn to trust what the lamenting poet here had come to see as well: God's mercies are new with each day, given like daily bread.
To live as people who recognize that mercy comes day by day like manna in the wilderness is to recognize that God brings us through suffering and thin times day by day by day. It means that instead of obsessing over trying to get a forty-year-supply of things, or to maintain control of everything into the far distant future, we take things one day at a time, trusting God to give us bread for the day and grace for the moment. And that means each day we are born all over again--that the sunrise is a little resurrection for each of us, and new goodness will be provided like bread for the day.
A lot of what we are facing these days feels pretty stark. We feel isolated, cut off, and worried about limited supplies, like in the days of the besieged Jerusalem. We feel anxious that we'll watch our children go without... or that our way of life could collapse. We wonder how far into the future our plans will remain knocked down to the ground. And we wonder where God is in the midst of it all. Maybe we feel like offering up a lamentation of our own right now.
Go ahead. Laments are not only OK in the Bible, but they are OK now, too. And the fact that book of Lamentations has this bright moment of hopefulness but then goes on to more lament, all the way to the end of the book, reminds us that it's OK if we get to the end of the day and only have sorrow left in our hearts. That's OK--God can bear the lament, and we need to be able to pour it out. Lament is not an absence of faith--rather it speaks to the strength of your trust in God if you are courageous enough to bring your anger and heartache to God, knowing God can bear it. These days, sometimes the Respectable Religious voices around us want to suggest that "real faith" doesn't get sad at the loss we are living through, or doesn't allow for any anxiety about how things will turn out because you're supposed to just say that "God is bigger than a virus." But come on--here's a whole book of the Bible woven through and through with lament and grief over what has been, and is being, lost. And if that's where you are right now today, that's OK.
Because here's the thing: the breath with which we sing our laments, and the energy which we spend on crying out in sorrow and loss--these are gifts of grace to us, too. And God keeps giving us life, day by day and moment by moment, along with the strength--in ourselves and borrowed from others--to get up and face another morning. It comes, not as a one-time windfall or a nest-egg you have to lug around, but in servings. Mercy is given to us like daily bread--enough for now. And then tomorrow, enough for tomorrow. And what do you know, but there is enough after that for the third day, too.
Lord God, bear our laments when that is all we have in us. And sustain us day by day with your mercy like daily bread.
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