Welcome to the Lightly Salted Podcast.
These are the readings and sermons of St. John's Lutheran Church of Park Rapids, Minnesota.
They are offered so that the Word of God would shape and strengthen you to be what he calls you to be,
salt and light.
You can find us at stjohnspr.org.
Now, on to the Word.
There's a little addition to our Old Testament reading.
It's about Jeremiah who was the prophet of doom.
His message was that even repentance wouldn't change the fact that God was sending his people into exile.
That wasn't very popular since there were many other so-called prophets who were assuring
the people that this would never happen.
But it did.
And the destruction was terrible.
The city was leveled, including the temple.
And Jeremiah was a witness to this.
And out of this came the Book of Lamentations.
There are laments for the city, for the people, and today's reading is found in the midst
of a personal lament.
We're going to have a couple of extra verses from this personal lament to lead into the
reading that is printed on the bulletin insert.
So Jeremiah writes, I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath.
He has driven and brought me into darkness without any light.
Surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long.
He is a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding.
He turned aside my steps and tore me to pieces.
He has made me desolate.
He bent his bow and set me as a target for his arrow.
He has made my teeth grind on gravel and made me cower in ashes.
My soul is bereft of peace.
I have forgotten what happiness is.
So I say, my endurance has perished, so has my hope from the Lord.
Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall.
My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me.
But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope.
And now we continue from the back of the bulletin insert.
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.
The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.
It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.
It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.
Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him.
Let him put his mouth in the dust.
There may yet be hope.
Let him give his cheek to the one who strikes and let him be filled with insults.
For the Lord will not cast off forever, but though he cause grief, he will have compassion
according to the abundance of his steadfast love.
For he does not willingly afflict or grieve the children of men.
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
The epistle is from the eighth chapter of St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians beginning
with verse one.
We want you to know, brothers, about the grace of God that has been given among the churches
of Macedonia.
For in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty
have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part.
For they gave according to their means, as I can testify, and beyond their means, of
their own free will, begging us earnestly for the favor of taking part in the relief
of the saints.
And this not as we expected, but they gave themselves first to the Lord and then by the
will of God to us.
Accordingly we urge Titus that as he had started so he should complete among you this act of
grace.
But as you excel in everything, in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in all earnestness
and in our love for you, see that you excel in this act of grace also.
I say this not as a command, but to prove by the earnestness of others that your love
also is genuine.
For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake
he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.
I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of
fairness your abundance at the present time should supply their need so that their abundance
may supply your need, that there may be fairness.
As it is written, whoever gathered much had nothing left over and whoever gathered little
had no lack.
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
We stand in respect of Christ, of whom the Holy Gospel is read.
The Gospel is from the fifth chapter of the Gospel of St. Mark, beginning at the 21st
verse.
When Jesus had crossed over again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered
about him and he was beside the sea.
There came one of the rulers of the synagogue, Jairus by name, and seeing him, he fell at
his feet and implored him earnestly, saying,
My little daughter is at the point of death.
Come and lay your hands on her so that she may be made well and live.
He went with him and a great crowd followed him and thronged about him.
There was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for 12 years and who had suffered
much under many physicians and had spent all that she had and was no better but rather
grew worse.
She had heard the reports about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched
his garment.
For she said, If I touch even his garments, I will be made well.
And immediately the flow of blood dried up and she felt in her body that she was healed
of her disease.
And Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned
about in the crowd and said, Who touched my garments?
And his disciples said to him, You see the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say,
Who touched me?
And he looked around to see who had done it.
But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling and fell down
before him and told him the whole truth.
And he said to her, Daughter, your faith has made you well.
Go in peace and be healed of your disease.
While he was still speaking, there came from the ruler's house some who said, Your daughter
is dead.
Why trouble the teacher any further?
But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the ruler of the synagogue, Do not fear,
only believe.
And he allowed no one to follow him except Peter and James and John, the brother of James.
They came to the house of the ruler of the synagogue and Jesus saw a commotion, people
weeping and wailing loudly.
And when he had entered, he said to them, Why are you making a commotion and weeping?
The child is not dead, but sleeping.
And they laughed at him.
But he put them all outside and took the child's father and mother and those who were with
him and went in where the child was.
Taking her by the hand, he said to her, Talitha, kumi, which means little girl, I say to you,
arise.
And immediately the girl got up and began walking, for she was 12 years of age.
And they were immediately overcome with amazement.
And he strictly charged them that no one should know this and told them to give her something
to eat.
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and our Savior Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Please be seated.
Actually, maybe I should have you stand like the old days.
I'll sit down, you guys stand and I'll preach for an hour.
How's that?
No.
It has been 30 years.
I'll get my organized here.
It's been about 30 years since the first 29 years of my life culminated in an important
event, receiving the call to serve Christ and His church here at St. John's.
I'm very grateful for that call.
In my time here, we have walked through some horrible tragedies, but we've also celebrated
the many wonderful gifts of life.
I have worked to proclaim the full truth of God's Word and tried to keep Christ in the
center of it all.
It's been a great blessing to me and to my family to serve here.
But I can also tell you this, I am extremely happy that I did not receive the call that
Jeremiah received.
Because boy, his call was not easy at all.
He was called to proclaim repentance to the people, but God told him right from the beginning,
Behold, I make you this day a fortified city, an iron pillar, a bronze wall against the
whole land, against the kings of Judah, its officials, its priests, and the people of
the land.
They will fight against you, but they shall not prevail against you.
For I am with you, declares the Lord, to deliver you.
Boy, that's a great calling.
God you want me to serve your people, but you tell me right at the very beginning that
all they're going to do is fight me and fight him.
They did.
Because they did not like the Word of the Lord coming through the prophet Jeremiah.
Because the prophet Jeremiah finally ended up saying, as Pastor mentioned, that even
if you repent now, it's too late.
Babylon is coming.
They will overthrow the city.
They will destroy the temple.
The people will go into exile.
No nation on the face of the earth likes that message.
Every nation likes the message, God bless America.
And so it was with the people.
They hated and despised Jeremiah's ministry.
They threw him for a time into a deep cistern to simply be sitting and to be mocked by the
people.
But worse.
Worse is that Jeremiah had to live through the fulfillment of God's judgment to overthrow
and to destroy Jerusalem and the temple because of the wickedness of its people.
For many months, Babylon besieged the city.
They cut them off from food.
They built a siege wall around the city walls so that anyone who wanted to escape couldn't
escape.
And the horrors were immense until finally the city and Solomon's temple were utterly
destroyed.
In Jeremiah, he mourns the loss.
The book that we have called the book of Lamentations is actually five separate laments.
In the first lament, Jeremiah describes the destruction that he saw and lived through.
He mourns the losses.
He compares the city to a widow.
In the second lament, he mourns the sins of the people which led to God's righteous judgment
on them.
But in the third lament, it becomes personal.
In his third lament, Jeremiah rages about what he suffered in his ministry and he talks
about God.
Note that.
He talks about God, not to him.
He cries out how God seemed totally set against him.
And the language Jeremiah uses, it sounds almost like the undoing of the beautiful Psalm
23 given from the time of David.
I invite you to open up your pew bibles if you would like to sort of follow with me a
few of these things.
That is Lamentations chapter 3, it should be page 688 in the pew bibles.
I've checked a couple of them so hopefully that's it.
I'm not going to be reading all of the opening part of this lament.
But I want to hit some of these parts that sound so grindingly different than the beautiful
promise of Psalm 23.
Jeremiah laments.
And instead of the good shepherd's rod and staff guiding him, Jeremiah, he has encountered
the rod of God's wrath.
Instead of leading him to green pastures and still waters, God has driven me into the darkness
without light.
Instead of anointing my head with oil, Jeremiah laments that God has made my flesh and my
skin waste away.
Instead of leading me in paths of righteousness, he's blocked my ways with blocks of stone
and made my paths crooked.
Instead of leading through the valley of the shadow of death and safety, God is a bear
lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding.
Instead of a table set before me, he has made my teeth grind on gravel.
Instead of restoring my soul, my soul is bereft of peace.
I have forgotten what happiness is.
Instead of rejoicing in goodness and mercy following me all my days, Jeremiah cries,
surely against me he has turned his hand again and again the whole day long.
And instead of looking forward to dwelling in the house of the Lord forever, he says,
my endurance has perished, so has my hope from the Lord.
What a horrible place to be.
Jeremiah says, walled in by cry, by God.
To cry out for help and then to answer your own call by crying out, he shuts out my prayer.
Jeremiah doesn't slap a happy face on it.
Smile, God loves you.
No he laments, he mourns, he cries, he complains about what he and what the people have experienced.
And he's never shied for this.
He's never told that he was wrong in his complaints.
This is one of the things about the book of Lamentations is it teaches us that we are
free to cry out against the things that we think are wrong.
We can even cry out to God when we think that he's been treating us poorly.
God is big enough to let us beat against his breast when upset.
But then there's this beautiful change in this book of laments, laments, this book of
mourning, this book of crying.
There's a change.
And Jeremiah instead of talking about God, he starts talking to God.
Look at verse 19, remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall.
My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me.
But this I call to mind and therefore 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.
This in the Hebrew that word stands at the beginning of the sentence where it really
shouldn't be.
Anybody reading the Hebrew goes, this?
Whoa!
Why is this here?
What is this?
What's so important?
What is so important is that this is the twinkle of hope in the midst of the mourning, the
lamenting, the crying, the pain.
This is the one strand to grab onto.
The steadfast love of the Lord.
That word underlying that, it's chesed, it's this beautiful guttural thing, the chesed.
It's a hard word to translate.
We've just decided that in English steadfast love is probably the best way to do it.
And another way to translate it would be sort of this unbreakable devotion to the promise.
God made a promise of redemption to Adam and Eve.
He made a promise to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.
He made a promise to Moses and to the Israelites.
And it is His unbreakable devotion to the promise that is the strand of hope.
A strand of hope that came in language from the time of Moses.
After God had delivered His people out of exile in Egypt, when He brought them to the
mountain and gave them the Ten Commandments, had Moses come up, Moses requested to see
the glory of God.
And God said, you will, but only the backside of that glory because He can't handle the
whole thing.
And as God orchestrates that encounter, as the glory of God passes by Moses, God proclaims
the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, so to anger and abounding in steadfast love
and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression
and sin.
For Israel, in both the good times as well as in the midst of the horrors of the fall
of Jerusalem, even in the times of 80 years of exile, they were to maintain a focus on
this, the steadfast love of God.
Even when every sense they sensed and every thought they thought and every feeling they
felt was that God was standing against them, they were to hold on to His unbreakable desire
to keep the promise.
For us, our hope lies in the same steadfast love.
Not just an unbreakable devotion to the promise, but we get an extra blessing.
The unbreakable devotion to the promise fulfilled.
The people were restored to the land by God's mercy and by His divine intervention.
They reestablished in the land that God had promised to Abraham and Isaac and to Jacob.
They flourished in that land and generation gave way to generation until the time was
just right for the unbreakable promise to step into the flesh of His creation, to bring
fulfillment to the original promise of redemption.
And I think it's important for us to hear Jeremiah's lament again, but this time to
have in our minds not the fall of Jerusalem or the destruction of the temple, but to have
in mind the unbreakable promise on the cross.
Because of our sin, Jesus bears the wrath, the rod of God's wrath.
Because Jesus becomes sin for us, He is besieged and enveloped in the bitterness and tribulation
brought by the Lord.
Jesus whose paths were always straight, His paths became crooked.
Jesus who brought healing was torn to pieces.
And it's sort of fascinating.
A lot of our language is metaphoric and the language of sinning is actually based on a
metaphor.
The word used for sinning is the same word that we used for missing the target when an
archer is shooting arrows.
And we hear Jeremiah lament, verse 12 and 13, he bent his bow and set me as a target
for his arrow.
He drove into my kidneys the arrows of his quiver.
Jeremiah lamented how God would not hear his prayer.
Jesus laments, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Jesus became a laughingstock to all of the peoples and an object of their taunt.
And Jesus was actually then made to dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago.
For the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever.
And that unbreakable devotion to the promise wasn't broken at the cross either.
Because the Lord also will not cast off forever.
Jesus remains, his body remained in the tomb for those three days.
But the resurrection came.
The life was restored.
Not only to Christ, but the promise of life was restored to all people in all situations.
We enjoy so many blessings and benefits in our day and age.
Living in the world that we live with the gifts that God has given to us.
But through it all, the good stuff and the bad stuff, in the center of it all, the thread
that is always there, doubling our joy in good times and strengthening us in bad times,
is this unbreakable devotion to the promise fulfilled in Christ.
We are free to have bad days and weeks and months and even years.
We are free to lament the things that aren't right in our world, in our life.
But we're also free to do that in this glorious hope that we ultimately do have.
That because of God's steadfast love, because of the fulfillment of his promises made to
Adam and to Eve and to all in the Old Testament.
We have an underlying hope that indeed, even in the worst of times, we can confess that
the Lord is our shepherd, even when it seems as though he's against us.
We can confess that in his word and in his sacraments, even in the worst of times, we
are still being led to green pastures and calm waters.
We can rejoice and we can share this hope with those who are grieving and lamenting.
We can share this hope with those who feel there is no hope.
And we ourselves can be encouraged.
Indeed the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.
His mercies never come to an end.
They are new every morning and great is your faith in us.
The Lord is my portion, says my soul.
Therefore I will hope in him.
Thanks for listening to Lightly Salted.
We'd love to hear from you.
You can contact us at StJohnsPr.org or look for us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
Our thanks to Eric Medeas at SoundImage.org for Morning Jew.
God's blessings.
God Bless.