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Welcome to the Lightly Salted Podcast.

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These are the readings and sermons of St. John's Lutheran Church of Park Rapids, Minnesota.

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They are offered so that the Word of God would shape and strengthen you to be what he calls you to be,

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salt and light.

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You can find us at stjohnspr.org.

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Now, on to the Word.

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There's a little addition to our Old Testament reading.

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It's about Jeremiah who was the prophet of doom.

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His message was that even repentance wouldn't change the fact that God was sending his people into exile.

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That wasn't very popular since there were many other so-called prophets who were assuring

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the people that this would never happen.

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But it did.

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And the destruction was terrible.

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The city was leveled, including the temple.

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And Jeremiah was a witness to this.

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And out of this came the Book of Lamentations.

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There are laments for the city, for the people, and today's reading is found in the midst

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of a personal lament.

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We're going to have a couple of extra verses from this personal lament to lead into the

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reading that is printed on the bulletin insert.

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So Jeremiah writes, I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath.

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He has driven and brought me into darkness without any light.

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Surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long.

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He is a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding.

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He turned aside my steps and tore me to pieces.

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He has made me desolate.

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He bent his bow and set me as a target for his arrow.

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He has made my teeth grind on gravel and made me cower in ashes.

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My soul is bereft of peace.

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I have forgotten what happiness is.

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So I say, my endurance has perished, so has my hope from the Lord.

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Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall.

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My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me.

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But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope.

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And now we continue from the back of the bulletin insert.

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The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.

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His mercies never come to an end.

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They are new every morning.

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Great is your faithfulness.

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The Lord is my portion, says my soul.

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Therefore I will hope in him.

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The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.

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It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.

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It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.

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Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him.

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Let him put his mouth in the dust.

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There may yet be hope.

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Let him give his cheek to the one who strikes and let him be filled with insults.

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For the Lord will not cast off forever, but though he cause grief, he will have compassion

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according to the abundance of his steadfast love.

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For he does not willingly afflict or grieve the children of men.

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This is the word of the Lord.

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Thanks be to God.

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The epistle is from the eighth chapter of St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians beginning

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with verse one.

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We want you to know, brothers, about the grace of God that has been given among the churches

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of Macedonia.

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For in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty

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have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part.

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For they gave according to their means, as I can testify, and beyond their means, of

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their own free will, begging us earnestly for the favor of taking part in the relief

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of the saints.

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And this not as we expected, but they gave themselves first to the Lord and then by the

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will of God to us.

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Accordingly we urge Titus that as he had started so he should complete among you this act of

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grace.

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But as you excel in everything, in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in all earnestness

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and in our love for you, see that you excel in this act of grace also.

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I say this not as a command, but to prove by the earnestness of others that your love

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also is genuine.

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For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake

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he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.

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I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of

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fairness your abundance at the present time should supply their need so that their abundance

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may supply your need, that there may be fairness.

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As it is written, whoever gathered much had nothing left over and whoever gathered little

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had no lack.

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This is the word of the Lord.

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Thanks be to God.

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We stand in respect of Christ, of whom the Holy Gospel is read.

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The Gospel is from the fifth chapter of the Gospel of St. Mark, beginning at the 21st

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verse.

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When Jesus had crossed over again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered

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about him and he was beside the sea.

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There came one of the rulers of the synagogue, Jairus by name, and seeing him, he fell at

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his feet and implored him earnestly, saying,

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My little daughter is at the point of death.

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Come and lay your hands on her so that she may be made well and live.

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He went with him and a great crowd followed him and thronged about him.

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There was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for 12 years and who had suffered

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much under many physicians and had spent all that she had and was no better but rather

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grew worse.

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She had heard the reports about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched

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his garment.

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For she said, If I touch even his garments, I will be made well.

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And immediately the flow of blood dried up and she felt in her body that she was healed

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of her disease.

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And Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned

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about in the crowd and said, Who touched my garments?

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And his disciples said to him, You see the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say,

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Who touched me?

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And he looked around to see who had done it.

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But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling and fell down

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before him and told him the whole truth.

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And he said to her, Daughter, your faith has made you well.

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Go in peace and be healed of your disease.

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While he was still speaking, there came from the ruler's house some who said, Your daughter

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is dead.

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Why trouble the teacher any further?

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But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the ruler of the synagogue, Do not fear,

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only believe.

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And he allowed no one to follow him except Peter and James and John, the brother of James.

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They came to the house of the ruler of the synagogue and Jesus saw a commotion, people

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weeping and wailing loudly.

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And when he had entered, he said to them, Why are you making a commotion and weeping?

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The child is not dead, but sleeping.

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And they laughed at him.

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But he put them all outside and took the child's father and mother and those who were with

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him and went in where the child was.

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Taking her by the hand, he said to her, Talitha, kumi, which means little girl, I say to you,

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arise.

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And immediately the girl got up and began walking, for she was 12 years of age.

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And they were immediately overcome with amazement.

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And he strictly charged them that no one should know this and told them to give her something

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to eat.

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This is the word of the Lord.

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Thanks be to God.

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Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and our Savior Jesus Christ.

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Amen.

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Please be seated.

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Actually, maybe I should have you stand like the old days.

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I'll sit down, you guys stand and I'll preach for an hour.

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How's that?

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No.

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It has been 30 years.

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I'll get my organized here.

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It's been about 30 years since the first 29 years of my life culminated in an important

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event, receiving the call to serve Christ and His church here at St. John's.

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I'm very grateful for that call.

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In my time here, we have walked through some horrible tragedies, but we've also celebrated

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the many wonderful gifts of life.

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I have worked to proclaim the full truth of God's Word and tried to keep Christ in the

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center of it all.

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It's been a great blessing to me and to my family to serve here.

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But I can also tell you this, I am extremely happy that I did not receive the call that

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Jeremiah received.

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Because boy, his call was not easy at all.

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He was called to proclaim repentance to the people, but God told him right from the beginning,

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Behold, I make you this day a fortified city, an iron pillar, a bronze wall against the

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whole land, against the kings of Judah, its officials, its priests, and the people of

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the land.

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They will fight against you, but they shall not prevail against you.

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For I am with you, declares the Lord, to deliver you.

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Boy, that's a great calling.

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God you want me to serve your people, but you tell me right at the very beginning that

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all they're going to do is fight me and fight him.

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They did.

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Because they did not like the Word of the Lord coming through the prophet Jeremiah.

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Because the prophet Jeremiah finally ended up saying, as Pastor mentioned, that even

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if you repent now, it's too late.

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Babylon is coming.

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They will overthrow the city.

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They will destroy the temple.

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The people will go into exile.

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No nation on the face of the earth likes that message.

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Every nation likes the message, God bless America.

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And so it was with the people.

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They hated and despised Jeremiah's ministry.

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They threw him for a time into a deep cistern to simply be sitting and to be mocked by the

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people.

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But worse.

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Worse is that Jeremiah had to live through the fulfillment of God's judgment to overthrow

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and to destroy Jerusalem and the temple because of the wickedness of its people.

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For many months, Babylon besieged the city.

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They cut them off from food.

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They built a siege wall around the city walls so that anyone who wanted to escape couldn't

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escape.

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And the horrors were immense until finally the city and Solomon's temple were utterly

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destroyed.

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In Jeremiah, he mourns the loss.

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The book that we have called the book of Lamentations is actually five separate laments.

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In the first lament, Jeremiah describes the destruction that he saw and lived through.

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He mourns the losses.

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He compares the city to a widow.

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In the second lament, he mourns the sins of the people which led to God's righteous judgment

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on them.

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But in the third lament, it becomes personal.

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In his third lament, Jeremiah rages about what he suffered in his ministry and he talks

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about God.

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Note that.

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He talks about God, not to him.

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He cries out how God seemed totally set against him.

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And the language Jeremiah uses, it sounds almost like the undoing of the beautiful Psalm

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23 given from the time of David.

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I invite you to open up your pew bibles if you would like to sort of follow with me a

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few of these things.

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That is Lamentations chapter 3, it should be page 688 in the pew bibles.

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I've checked a couple of them so hopefully that's it.

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I'm not going to be reading all of the opening part of this lament.

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But I want to hit some of these parts that sound so grindingly different than the beautiful

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promise of Psalm 23.

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Jeremiah laments.

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And instead of the good shepherd's rod and staff guiding him, Jeremiah, he has encountered

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the rod of God's wrath.

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Instead of leading him to green pastures and still waters, God has driven me into the darkness

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without light.

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Instead of anointing my head with oil, Jeremiah laments that God has made my flesh and my

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skin waste away.

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Instead of leading me in paths of righteousness, he's blocked my ways with blocks of stone

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and made my paths crooked.

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Instead of leading through the valley of the shadow of death and safety, God is a bear

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lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding.

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Instead of a table set before me, he has made my teeth grind on gravel.

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Instead of restoring my soul, my soul is bereft of peace.

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I have forgotten what happiness is.

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Instead of rejoicing in goodness and mercy following me all my days, Jeremiah cries,

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surely against me he has turned his hand again and again the whole day long.

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And instead of looking forward to dwelling in the house of the Lord forever, he says,

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my endurance has perished, so has my hope from the Lord.

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What a horrible place to be.

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Jeremiah says, walled in by cry, by God.

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To cry out for help and then to answer your own call by crying out, he shuts out my prayer.

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Jeremiah doesn't slap a happy face on it.

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Smile, God loves you.

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No he laments, he mourns, he cries, he complains about what he and what the people have experienced.

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And he's never shied for this.

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He's never told that he was wrong in his complaints.

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This is one of the things about the book of Lamentations is it teaches us that we are

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free to cry out against the things that we think are wrong.

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We can even cry out to God when we think that he's been treating us poorly.

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God is big enough to let us beat against his breast when upset.

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But then there's this beautiful change in this book of laments, laments, this book of

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mourning, this book of crying.

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There's a change.

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And Jeremiah instead of talking about God, he starts talking to God.

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Look at verse 19, remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall.

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My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me.

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But this I call to mind and therefore have hope.

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The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.

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His mercies never come to an end.

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They are new every morning.

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Great is your faithfulness.

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This in the Hebrew that word stands at the beginning of the sentence where it really

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shouldn't be.

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Anybody reading the Hebrew goes, this?

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Whoa!

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Why is this here?

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What is this?

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What's so important?

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What is so important is that this is the twinkle of hope in the midst of the mourning, the

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lamenting, the crying, the pain.

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This is the one strand to grab onto.

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The steadfast love of the Lord.

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That word underlying that, it's chesed, it's this beautiful guttural thing, the chesed.

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It's a hard word to translate.

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We've just decided that in English steadfast love is probably the best way to do it.

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And another way to translate it would be sort of this unbreakable devotion to the promise.

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God made a promise of redemption to Adam and Eve.

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He made a promise to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.

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He made a promise to Moses and to the Israelites.

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And it is His unbreakable devotion to the promise that is the strand of hope.

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A strand of hope that came in language from the time of Moses.

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After God had delivered His people out of exile in Egypt, when He brought them to the

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mountain and gave them the Ten Commandments, had Moses come up, Moses requested to see

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the glory of God.

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And God said, you will, but only the backside of that glory because He can't handle the

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whole thing.

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And as God orchestrates that encounter, as the glory of God passes by Moses, God proclaims

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the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, so to anger and abounding in steadfast love

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and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression

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and sin.

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For Israel, in both the good times as well as in the midst of the horrors of the fall

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of Jerusalem, even in the times of 80 years of exile, they were to maintain a focus on

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this, the steadfast love of God.

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Even when every sense they sensed and every thought they thought and every feeling they

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felt was that God was standing against them, they were to hold on to His unbreakable desire

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to keep the promise.

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For us, our hope lies in the same steadfast love.

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Not just an unbreakable devotion to the promise, but we get an extra blessing.

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The unbreakable devotion to the promise fulfilled.

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The people were restored to the land by God's mercy and by His divine intervention.

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They reestablished in the land that God had promised to Abraham and Isaac and to Jacob.

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They flourished in that land and generation gave way to generation until the time was

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just right for the unbreakable promise to step into the flesh of His creation, to bring

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fulfillment to the original promise of redemption.

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And I think it's important for us to hear Jeremiah's lament again, but this time to

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have in our minds not the fall of Jerusalem or the destruction of the temple, but to have

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in mind the unbreakable promise on the cross.

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Because of our sin, Jesus bears the wrath, the rod of God's wrath.

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Because Jesus becomes sin for us, He is besieged and enveloped in the bitterness and tribulation

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brought by the Lord.

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Jesus whose paths were always straight, His paths became crooked.

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Jesus who brought healing was torn to pieces.

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And it's sort of fascinating.

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A lot of our language is metaphoric and the language of sinning is actually based on a

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metaphor.

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The word used for sinning is the same word that we used for missing the target when an

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archer is shooting arrows.

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And we hear Jeremiah lament, verse 12 and 13, he bent his bow and set me as a target

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for his arrow.

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He drove into my kidneys the arrows of his quiver.

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Jeremiah lamented how God would not hear his prayer.

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Jesus laments, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

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Jesus became a laughingstock to all of the peoples and an object of their taunt.

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And Jesus was actually then made to dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago.

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For the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever.

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And that unbreakable devotion to the promise wasn't broken at the cross either.

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Because the Lord also will not cast off forever.

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Jesus remains, his body remained in the tomb for those three days.

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But the resurrection came.

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The life was restored.

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Not only to Christ, but the promise of life was restored to all people in all situations.

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We enjoy so many blessings and benefits in our day and age.

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Living in the world that we live with the gifts that God has given to us.

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But through it all, the good stuff and the bad stuff, in the center of it all, the thread

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that is always there, doubling our joy in good times and strengthening us in bad times,

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is this unbreakable devotion to the promise fulfilled in Christ.

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We are free to have bad days and weeks and months and even years.

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We are free to lament the things that aren't right in our world, in our life.

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But we're also free to do that in this glorious hope that we ultimately do have.

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That because of God's steadfast love, because of the fulfillment of his promises made to

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Adam and to Eve and to all in the Old Testament.

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We have an underlying hope that indeed, even in the worst of times, we can confess that

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the Lord is our shepherd, even when it seems as though he's against us.

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We can confess that in his word and in his sacraments, even in the worst of times, we

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are still being led to green pastures and calm waters.

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We can rejoice and we can share this hope with those who are grieving and lamenting.

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We can share this hope with those who feel there is no hope.

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And we ourselves can be encouraged.

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Indeed the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.

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His mercies never come to an end.

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They are new every morning and great is your faith in us.

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The Lord is my portion, says my soul.

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Therefore I will hope in him.

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Thanks for listening to Lightly Salted.

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We'd love to hear from you.

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You can contact us at StJohnsPr.org or look for us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

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Our thanks to Eric Medeas at SoundImage.org for Morning Jew.

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God's blessings.

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God Bless.

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God Bless.