Finding Starlight--September 20, 2023

Finding Starlight--September 20, 2023

"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 your faithfulness. 'The LORD is my portion,' says my soul, 'therefore I will hope in him'." [Lamentations 3:21-24]

Oscar Wilde said it this way: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

I think of him when I hear these words from the underrated book of Lamentations, a collection of poems in the Bible that are all written entirely from the gutter of exile.  This is one of those books we don't often dare to crack open in our Sunday worship or even Bible studies, largely because it is so relentlessly raw with grief, rage, and heartache at watching the invading Babylonian Empire destroy the city of Jerusalem and its Temple, leaving misery and tragedy behind in their wake. For many of us, the closest we have ever come to experiencing that kind of communal destruction might have been the attacks on September 11, 2001; but to be honest, even that day's destruction didn't compare in scope to what the people of Judah went through.  We were quickly told to buy more merchandise to keep the economy going after those attacks, and many lives went more or less back to normal before long.  But for those who lived through the seige and destruction of Jerusalem, it was like having everything sacred razed to the ground. And in the aftermath, all there was to be done was to grieve and weep angry tears.  Lamentations, as its name suggests, is an anthology of laments--songs and poems that just cry out with sorrow and anger over seeing everything the poet treasured reduced to rubble.  And it is almost--almost!--utterly hopeless, too.

There is, in fact, one passage of hope in the whole book, and you've just read most of it.  It is the one bright spot in a book full of gloom and shadow, like finding the one star in the sky on a dark night while you're standing with Oscar Wilde in the gutter.

And yet--that one star sure makes a difference, doesn't it?  The pinpoints of light that come from these verses in Lamentations make the whole book feel different.  The grief is real, to be sure.  The pain is undeniable and unresolved, that is true.  And the fact that these words of hope come, not at the end as a nice bow on the whole thing, but in the middle and in the thick of the tragedy, makes them honest.  The poet hasn't just said, "Well, I have to find a happy ending here, so I'll sweep all the sadness under the rug," but rather he has found genuine hope in the midst of the sorrow.  He is still in the gutter, but he has learned to look at the stars, too.  And that makes all the difference.

The poet here in Lamentations has found one bright spot in all the terrible dark--and it is love.  In particular, it is "the steadfast love of the LORD," which is unchanging and unending.  It is in knowing that God's love is relentless and constantly renewing that the poet dares to hope.  And that, as I think we are discovering this month, is exactly what happens when we are held by God's love: it's not that the love of God lets us pretend we don't have to deal with the terror and tragedy of life, but rather that the love of God lets us dare to hope while we acknowledge them and bear them.  It is God's faithful love that lets us see starlight from the gutter, without pretending that the starlight erases the pain around us (or within us).

For the writer of Lamentations, the faithful love of God gives hope because even though he hasn't seen God bring comfort yet, he is convinced that God will act for good.  Hope does that: it is able to say, "I don't see healing yet, but I trust that the Healer will move."  Hope starts from the assurance of God's love and insists that there is light to be found even when you're in the depths.  There's a Twitter account I follow whose writer will just periodically post the same recurring sentence: "You are not alone, and this will not last forever."  And I love that she just knows that sometimes that's what people need to hear, even complete strangers. Hope is like that: it keeps asserting that whatever rotten thing we are going through will not get the last word, and it assures us that we are not alone while we go through it.  I think that's what the writer of Lamentations has in mind with these few little verses in the midst of such heavy and horrendous circumstances.  He won't pretend that everything is all better, and he won't lie to himself or his people that they don't have to bear the devastation of losing their city, their temple, their king, and their old way of life.  But he does know that they are not alone, and that because they are accompanied by a God who faithfully loves them, they know that the sorrow will not last forever.  It's not a lot to go on--like the light from a few stars in the night sky, or a single tweet's worth of words amid all the endless shouting and weeping in the background--but it is enough.

I don't know what you're going through right now, and maybe right now you are enjoying a season of good things.  But I'd wager that you've been in one of those times before when it felt like everything was falling apart, or that maybe you're in one of those times now.  And while I can't pretend I have the power to wave some magic wand and wish all the loss or pain away, I can offer you these same words that the writer of Lamentations gives, like it is a bit of starlight for people trudging through the gutter: even when everything else is falling apart, God's love is new every day, and God will not abandon us, not even if we've turned our back on God ourselves.  God's love gives us hope enough to say even now, "You are not alone, and this will not last forever."

If you have ever been in a difficult season and found it somehow more hurtful when someone offered empty platitudes (maybe about how "God will never give you more than you can handle"), the words of Lamentations speak an honest hope we need to hear.  They come from a place of real suffering, and yet the speak of a love that keeps them looking up at the stars.  If the writer of Lamentations can find hope in God's faithfulness from the ditch he was in, then maybe there is reason for us to keep our eyes open to the light, too, even at our most gutter-bound moments.

May it be true for us when we need it, even today.

Lord God, let your love be steadfast for us today, so that we can keep looking up at your light.