Our First Testament reading this morning, from the Book of Jeremiah, is one of the most plaintive and distressing cries I think I know of in the entire Bible. "My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick," Jeremiah says, "hear the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land." Jeremiah is lamenting, and in fact that lament has been growing in the passages we've been reading from Jeremiah over the past few weeks. For several Sundays now we've been hearing oracles from Jeremiah in our First Testament readings, and they've been getting progressively more distressing. We'll hear more from Jeremiah over the next few Sundays as well. But in order to take all these different readings and see how they fit together, to see what meaning they make together, we need to know some of the back story, we need to know more about the times and the circumstances which Jeremiah faced and to which he addressed his prophecies.

Jeremiah was called to be God's prophet, God's spokesperson, during the tragedy of the fall of the kingdom of Judah and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian Empire in the year 586 BCE. Jeremiah's mission as a prophet, however, began forty years before that, and in those earlier days things looked pretty good. The power of the Assyrian Empire was breaking apart. The people of Jerusalem and Judah could never forget that it was the Assyrians who had attacked and conquered and destroyed their sister kingdom of Israel to the north; and with the power of the Assyrians now waning, it looked like a bright new day for Judah. True, the power of the Babylonian Empire was beginning to rise up and fill the vacuum left by the Assyrians, but to most of the people of Jerusalem--especially the kings--it didn't seem that Babylon could be much of a threat. In fact, during Jeremiah's time the kings of Judah embarked on a dangerous game of trying to play the two great empires, Babylon and Egypt, against each other. They thought they could curry favor with both empires, so that Egypt would protect them against Babylon and Babylon would protect them against Egypt--and Jerusalem in the middle could become wealthy and important and a power broker on the international scene.

But Jeremiah, along with some others, saw that this could never work. Jeremiah saw that the power of Babylon would continue to grow, and that appealing to Egypt would be no help, and that the best thing the king of Judah could do would be to make peace with Babylon, early on, before Babylon was forced upon them, and secure a space where the people of Jerusalem could live in relative security, able to pursue their own national vocation to be God's people living and worshiping in justice and peace. Jeremiah counseled the king to leave international politics aside, and concentrate on being a good shepherd for the people--but the king didn't listen, kings almost never listen--and the king punished Jeremiah for being a negative voice and for undermining the morale of the people.

But the king wasn't the only one Jeremiah got into trouble with. There were also problems in the spiritual life of the people. Jeremiah was the constant critic of what he saw as two kinds of false religion among his people. On the one hand were people who didn't take the Covenant seriously enough: people who worshiped other gods in addition to YHWH, people who didn't particularly care about being YHWH's people, people who did not understand it was their God-given vocation to follow the Torah and to build up lives of justice and peace as a sign of the presence of God in their midst. Jeremiah was constantly calling these people to return to the Covenant, to accept their call to be God's people--and indeed for a while it looked like that might happen. A new king, Josiah, mounted a national reform movement, to purify the Temple worship and get rid of foreign idols and call the people to Torah faithfulness. It looked like exactly what Jeremiah wanted. But Josiah died, killed in battle, and the vigor of his reform-movement kind of petered out. It led to some people, in a way, taking the Covenant too seriously, believing that since God had chosen the people, God would never let anything bad happen to them--because God's Temple was built in Jerusalem, God would never allow any enemy to conquer it. But Jeremiah saw that, too, as a kind of false religion; Jeremiah said that the Covenant went both ways, that God had chosen the people but the people also had to choose God, they had to be faithful and devoted to God, they had to live according to God's Torah-way, they had to turn away from arrogance and injustice and overconfidence and focus on the basic job of being God's people. But the Temple priests and the official royal prophets didn't like Jeremiah's teaching, they thought it undermined their religious nationalism--they thought Jeremiah lacked faith!--and on more than one occasion they locked Jeremiah up to prevent him from preaching about the real Covenant with God.

It was against all of that background that Jeremiah preached and prophesied. And over the course of forty years of dealing with all of this, there were changes in Jeremiah's message. At first, Jeremiah preached a pretty standard sort of prophetic word, the same sort of thing that Amos and Hosea and Isaiah of Jerusalem had said before him: Jeremiah called the people to repent, to turn away from evil and unfaithfulness and injustice, to turn back to God and righteousness and justice and peace; Jeremiah called the people to repent before it was too late, before God's judgment and God's wrath came to punish them.

But over time Jeremiah realized that people were not hearing his message, people were not changing their ways, kings were not abandoning power politics and paying attention to the people. More than anything else, Jeremiah realized that God's judgment was drawing near, that God would use the power of the Babylonians to break Judah and Jerusalem, that God would bring an end to their kingdom because the kingdom had not kept its side of the Covenant. So Jeremiah began to preach, not "Repent before it's too late," but he preached "It's too late." Jeremiah preached that God's judgment was coming and there was nothing they could do about it. Jeremiah preached that there was nothing left to do but accept and lament.

And it is that lament that we hear in our reading today. "My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick," Jeremiah says. "For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me," Jeremiah says. "O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!" Jeremiah says. Even now, when the people have rejected Jeremiah's message and punished Jeremiah for preaching it, even now Jeremiah feels for his poor people. Even now, when God has told Jeremiah not to even bother praying for the people because God's wrath has come upon them, even now Jeremiah pours out his heart to God with tears because he wants to see his people saved. Even though they deserve their punishment and there's no other hope left, even so Jeremiah wants to see his people saved.

And that's the part of this passage that speaks so poignantly to me. Even when it seems like there's no hope, Jeremiah keeps on praying. Even when the only prayer he has is a lament, Jeremiah keeps on praying. And I think that is something we are called to do, too. In our world today, we look around and we see much injustice, so much arrogance, so much unfaithfulness. We ourselves, as Christians and as citizens, have tried to stand up for justice and peace and what is right--but in so many ways we seem to have made so little difference. We're aware there is much to do and yet it seems like there is so little we have done. Every three seconds a child in our world dies from causes related to poverty. Wars rage throughout the world despite our professed longing for peace. Climate scientists wonder if its too late to turn the corner on global warming, and still most of us think its an inconvenience to change the way we use energy. Even in our own church, we are torn apart by arguments of who should be included and who is not pure enough to count among the people of God. We look at the world and we long for the world to be better--and yet when we confront our own apparent powerlessness to change things, what else can we do but lament? What else can we do but pour out our prayers, with tears, because more than anything else we want to see our world saved.

Jeremiah calls us to lament--and that's not an easy thing for us to do. It's not easy for us to stay in that place of pain and admit to ourselves, and to God, how deep that pain runs. We'd like to go to the quick fix, the easy solution. But Jeremiah tells us there is no quick fix, there is no way to avoid the lament, and we too are called to pray with tears.

But Jeremiah also tells us that lament is not the final word. As hard as it is, beyond lament there is something else: beyond lament there is hope. That hope is something we will hear in Jeremiah beginning with next week's reading. That hope is something we will explore together picking up with next week's sermon. For for now, until we get to that next word, let us join in the spirit of Jeremiah, and pray with all our hearts for our hurting world. Amen.