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“Thus Saith the Lord: Cry... Just Cry”
A Service of Word & Feast for the 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time
October 5 2025: IN-PERSON and ONLINE at 10:30 a.m.
The Rev. Matthew Emery, lead minister, preaching
Lamentations 1:1-6
This Sunday, our journey with the prophet Jeremiah takes a bit of a turn. The prophet had been warning the nation that calamity and destruction were coming, because of all of the ways the nation had been unfaithful and not lived into the ways of life God had set out for them. Well, by the time of the words we hear in this week’s reading, what the prophet had been forewarning about has now happened. The holy city, Jerusalem, has been destroyed. Many of the people have been hauled off into a foreign land, the empire and city of Babylon, an exile from which they would not return for over two generations, some 50 years in all.
In this week's scripture passage, we hear the poetic voice of one crying out in the midst of the devastation with honest, forthright, gut-wrenching words of true lament. In much of middle-class Euro-North-American culture, we don’t tend to be very comfortable with too much true lamentation… not comfortable expressing the depths of our sorrow and pain. We fill our lives with all sorts of pseudo-solutions to numb our pain; we berate ourselves for “wallowing” in self-pity. Might the witnesses of our long-ago ancestors in the faith from whom we hear in the Bible help us learn a different, more honest and healthy way? Might we dare to join their voices in crying out, even to go so far as to question God?