Learning to Grieve Together

Transcript

Auto-generated from the audio. Click a timestamp to jump to that part of the video.

[0:01] and our reading for the sermon is Lamentations chapter 1, the whole chapter. And I just want to say a word about the book study, and it's okay. A few people have said to me, you know, I can't do the book study this year. It's not going to work out for them, and that's okay. It's okay if you're not going to join the book study, because we're going to preach through the book for six weeks, and you don't have to join the study, but you can absorb some of the book by coming here on Sunday morning. So it's good, but you know, I think ideally everybody could read the book and participate, but it's not always going to happen, and that's, I just want to say that that's okay. But we do have more books in the library, or on the table there, and I would just say this is starting off as a really good book, and it's starting off really well. I think he's a very powerful author. We read a book from him two years ago, Dr. Seung-Chon Ra. He's one of the professors at our seminary in Chicago, so I'm going to now deliver a victorious sermon. I'll try to act like it's my own, okay, just so that it delivers well. But I want to ask you, when was the last time you heard a sermon on the book of Lamentations? Can somebody make cricket noises? Actually, we don't really preach this very much,

[1:18] right? There's, if you read this Bible book of Lamentations, it's clearly, a complaint or a lament about the state of the city of Jerusalem, the fact that it's been conquered by the Babylonians. There are other parts of the scripture that are lament. About 40% of the psalms are lament psalms. You know what? We skip over those. In the lectionary, which is our cycle of readings that include psalms, only about 13% of the psalms in the Bible, underrepresented the parents, parents, parents parents parents parents parents parents parents parents parents parents parents parents parents parents parents We like, you know, if you watch a TV show and it's an hour long and it's a crime drama, the crime is solved and the person that's convicted and goes to jail in the course of 42 minutes, because that's the other 18 minutes is commercials, as you know. And that's just not realistic, is it? There's this neatly tied up endings. People feel good. Oh, justice has been done. The reality is quite different in the world, right? There's crimes that have never been punished, right? And there's crimes that have never been solved. So I'm getting off track here, but we're a society that likes celebration and victory. Although you think about it today, the Super Bowl, there's going to be half the country,

[3:13] I guess, celebrating at the end and half not celebrating. Maybe not half, like, I don't know, a quarter and a quarter and the other half in the middle going, who cares? You know, I don't know how many people care. And but so if you love sports. Actually, you know, lament, right? Unless if you love sports, you know, if you love the Niners, there's some lament years. The 80s were good. They won three Super Bowls in the 1980s. That's not bad. It was a good year, a good decade. But there's crushing defeats and the defeats are worse, especially when something dumb happens, you know, it's like, oh, we really messed that up. So actually, I think sports people do know lament. You know, I went, my team, you know, my team, I like the college football team from the University of Arizona.

[3:57] Uh, three years ago, they had a season where they went, they, they won one game out of 12, one, one game, and that one game, when they won, it, it ended a 20 game losing streak. Can you imagine being a fan of Arizona football? We've lost 20 in a row, what, you know, and then if you, if you're a Stanford fan, this year, every single, they had seven home games, which is unusual, and normally there's six, every single home game was a loss. That's terrible. I mean, they won other games. But to win seven or lose seven at home? I mean, at the end, I don't think there was anybody in the stands. They're like, I'm not going to go watch Stanford lose again. But the diehards, they know lament, okay? But our society in general, we like to fix things. We like to fix things that are broken. We think there's a solution to everything. We don't have time for being sad or lamenting because that's kind of not the American way, is it, right?

[4:53] If we start reading this book, though, and not just this book but other books, he will talk about how, as Americans, we have really ignored parts of our own history. Not all of American history is victory, okay? Have you noticed that there are more movies about World War II than any other war? You know, there's just so many movies about World War II because it was the most glorious, most victorious war for the United States. I guess. There are wars about Vietnam, but those are better in a way because they're more realistic. They actually touch the reality of lament. You know, there's like, this is not a war that ended in the same way. It's not a war that was started for all the same reasons, right? But there's more wars about glory than there are, I mean, there's more movies about glory than there's fewer movies about mistakes, right? And it's not just wars in foreign lands. It's what happens. And it's what happened in our own history from the beginning of our country. There were moments like, if you think about the Constitutional Congress, there were beautiful moments where they crafted the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. That was amazing. But there are other moments where people were dispossessed and displaced and murdered, right?

[6:12] And pushed off their land. And there was, let's face it, there was slavery. There was the idea of owning another human being for your own financial gain. And the sort of... The racial understanding of it that had to develop so that people could live with themselves for owning another person. They had to kind of create both a spiritual or theological and kind of an anthropological view of the human race that allowed them to do that with good conscience. But when you ignore all those bad news stories, you have to warp view of your own reality, right? It's more complex than it's always good. It's also more complex than it's always bad. It's more complex than the idea that the country is always bad. There's good and bad mixed in. You know, Jesus talks about this in the parable of the wheat and the tares. At the end, there's the wheat and the weeds grow up together and they can't be differentiated. Only at the end of the time, he says, will the angels come and pull the wheat and harvest them. The weeds will be gathered up and thrown into fire. But in the in-between time, they're so entwined and entangled that we don't have the... We don't have the capacity to tell them apart. They look like each other. Anyway,

[7:29] we do this in the church. So this is the other side of it. The church does this, not just the lectionary. But if you look at a classic Sunday school curriculum, what do you get? David and Goliath, right? You know, King Solomon doing smart things, not King Solomon doing dumb things, because King Solomon did dumb things, too, but we don't talk about those. King David did dumb things, but we don't talk about those. So even Sunday school curriculum is like, this is the victorious church. These are the heroes of the Bible that we want the kids to hear about. We want them to hear about all the smart, good people. But if you just read your Bible, the first death in the Bible, I harp on this a lot. The first death in the Bible wasn't disease or accident. Somebody didn't fall off a cliff. Somebody didn't die of old age, but maybe they weren't going to die of old age because they live in paradise. The first death in the Bible was a murder. Not just that, one brother murdered another brother, and really because he was kind of jealous. It wasn't like a super, like, it didn't seem like a very good reason, you know, in my mind. Like, you were just jealous of your brother and you killed him? It wasn't like your brother threatened you or something like that or pulled a knife on you.

[8:43] So the very first death in the Bible is a murder, and it just all goes downhill from there. So if we look at some of these people, you don't want to hear about them. You don't want to hear about Jephthah. You don't want to hear about him. I'm not going to talk about him. He made some big mistakes. You don't want to hear about that. You don't want to read the second to the last chapter of Judges right now because you'll throw up. It's terrible, okay? So the Bible actually is full of brokenness. This is what makes the Bible true, is the Bible records all of the history of God's people, warts and all. This is why you sometimes, I think especially the New Testament is incredibly authentic, because it talks about this. It talks about the failures of Peter. It talks about the disciples running away on Good Friday. They're scared. They don't stand up for Jesus. Peter denies Jesus, right? Paul says, here's a saying that's trustworthy and worthy of full acceptance. Christ Jesus came to save sinners, of whom I am the worst. So praise God that our scriptures are honest about who we are. The question is, why isn't the church honest about what's in the scripture? And why isn't the church honest about our own history and about who we are?

[9:57] Well, I think that's the challenge that we face, is that we've led our culture, the culture of winning, the culture of exceptionalism, the culture of solving things. Americans solve things. That culture has infiltrated the church. It's infected the church in a way. And we bring that thinking with us as we come through those doors, you know. Let's go buy an umbrella. Let's go buy an umbrella. I thought that was great. You know, let's go buy an umbrella. And then one said, yeah, but you have to walk to the umbrella store to get to the umbrella store. You know, I thought that was great. So we have solutions. But sometimes there aren't solutions, right? Sometimes we're stuck in our sadness, our brokenness. We're stuck in the reality that things aren't working. And there's no fix for them, all right? I remember once visiting the Holy Land.

[10:48] And I was speaking with a Palestinian man. And I was asking, I said, try to explain to me how you feel. This is long ago. This is probably 20 years ago or more. I said, tell me how you feel about the fact that this country, Israel, exists and it's all around you, you know, and you're not even a citizen of this country that you're in right now. And he said, it's very complex.

[11:16] And I appreciated that. He wasn't like, it's all one side or all the other side. It's very complex, you know. He said, you know, we were here. And then they came and they pushed us out. But before we were here, they were here. But they got pushed out. And then the Holocaust happened. And they didn't feel safe anymore. And they needed a place to stay. So he said, it's complex. And then years after that, I was there with the, I stayed there at Tontour, which is where our last trip there went. I stayed there for six weeks. And I was with a bunch of Catholic priests because it was a Catholic kind of gathering. And we had another conversation about it. And we were talking with somebody like that.

[11:53] And we were asking him, we said, what's going to happen, you know? What's going to happen? This is about, I guess, 15 years ago. And he said, there's no solution. There's no solution to this problem. Now, you're listening to that going, what?

[12:12] And all the Ameri- and I, me too, and all the Americans were like, after he left, they were like, that's ridiculous. There's a solution to everything. Do you see how much our American culture was informing what we were saying at that time? Why couldn't we listen to somebody who actually lived there and said that? There's no solution to this. No, there has to be a solution. No, no, I live here. There's no solution to this. I'm not, and I'm not making this about, necessarily about Israel and Palestine right now. That's just an example of the reality that there are some problems in this world that have no solutions right now and will not for decades to come. And our emblem is this. We have to be able to do something about it. And the impulse to go and fix them or to decide who is right and wrong and to compress all that complexity into a binary of right and wrong isn't actually helping anything. And it's keeping us from avoiding the lament that we need to do where we just need to step back from it and say, God, this is horrible.

[13:14] Will you please answer us in your time? Tell us what we need to do. But save us from trying to fix it. Save us from trying to understand it even sometimes. All right. So I've gone far afield here. I still have to read Lamentations 1.

[13:34] But one thing that maybe plays into this, and Zach set a record there for I think the longest first reading. And he pronounced all the names right. Well done. He must have practiced. A little bit of preparation. All right. He's a good person. Can't hurt. Either that or he's good at it. But one of the things that I think you really needed to hear in the middle of all of that was there was a command from God to the people in exile saying to them, seek the prosperity of the city to which you have been sent. You're not going to come home for more than 70 years. So don't just spend every day waiting for you to come home. Put down roots. Have families. Plant gardens. Move in and seek the prosperity of that town. And what he's saying is you have to live in the brokenness and accept the reality that you're in exile. You can't just keep saying, well, now in 69 years, now in 68 years we'll be out of exile. No, just embrace the reality that you've been sent away because of your idolatry and sin. This is my judgment on you. Now accept it and live in it for a season. And 70 years is actually so long that maybe you don't even know it. Maybe you don't even know it. Maybe you don't even know it. Maybe not even, you'll not come back, but your children will.

[14:50] Your grandchildren definitely will, right? And so there's this, I think that's what God is saying to us. He's saying the world is broken and we're under the condemnation of the law because of our sin. And so in this world, we don't just keep looking and saying, well, I'm just going to do the bare minimum here because heaven is just around the corner. I'm just going to always keep looking at heaven. God is saying, no, you need to come home. You need to connect with this world in your brokenness and in its brokenness and set down roots and connect with the people around here. Someday, yes, you'll come home. But in the meantime, you need to deal with the difficulty of living in this place. So remember that idea. Let's go now to reading Lamentations. And Andres, to his credit, has been turning this thing on and off. Thank you. But in a second when I'm done reading it, then you can make that dark screen and then you won't be able to see it. You won't be distracted by it. But let's read this in Lamentations chapter one. And I'll start reading in verse one.

[15:53] Jerusalem, once so full of people, is now deserted. She who was once great among the nations now sits alone like a widow. Once the queen of all the earth, she is now a slave. She sobs through the night. Tears stream down her cheeks. Among all her lovers, there is no one left to comfort her. All her friends have betrayed her and become her enemies. Judah has been led away into captivity, oppressed with cruel slavery. She lives among foreign nations and has no place of rest. Her enemies have chased her down and she has nowhere to turn. The roads to Jerusalem are in mourning. For crowds no longer come to celebrate the festivals. The city gates are silent. Her priests groan. Her young women are crying. How bitter is her fate. Her oppressors have become her masters and her enemies prosper, for the Lord has punished Jerusalem for her many sins. Her children have been captured and taken away to distant lands. All the majesty of beautiful Jerusalem has been stripped away. Her princes are like starving deer searching for pasture. They are too weak to run from the pursuing enemy. In the midst of her sadness and wandering, Jerusalem remembers her ancient splendor. But now she has fallen to her enemy and there is no one to help her.

[17:29] Her enemy struck her down and laughed as she fell. Jerusalem has sinned greatly, so she has been tossed away like a filthy rag. All who once honored her now despise her, for they have seen her stripped down. She is naked and humiliated. All she can do is groan and hide her face.

[17:50] She defiled herself with immorality and gave no thought to her future. Now she lies in the gutter with no one to lift her out. Lord, see my misery, she cries. The enemy has triumphed. The enemy has plundered her completely, taking every precious thing she owns. She has seen foreigners violate her sacred temple, the place the Lord had forbidden them to enter. Her people groan as they search for bread. They have sold their treasures for food to stay alive.

[18:26] Oh, Lord, look, she mourns, and see how I am despised. Does it mean nothing to you, all who pass by? Look around and see if there is any suffering like mine, which the Lord brought on me when he erupted in fierce anger.

[18:42] He has sent fire from heaven that burns in my bones. He has placed a trap in my path and turned me back. He has left me devastated, wracked with sickness all day long. He wove my sins into ropes to hitch me to a yoke of captivity. The Lord sapped my strength and turned me over to my enemies. I am helpless in their hands. The Lord has treated my mighty men with contempt. At his command, a great army has come to crush my young warriors. The Lord has trampled his beloved city like grapes are trampled in a winepress. For all these things I weep. Tears flow down my cheeks. No one is here to comfort me. Anyone, any who might encourage me, are far away. My children have no future, for the enemy has conquered us.

[19:37] Jerusalem reaches out for help, but no one comforts her. Regarding his people Israel, the Lord has said, Let their neighbors be their enemies. Let them be thrown away like a filthy rag. The Lord is right, Jerusalem says, for I rebelled against him. Listen, people everywhere. Look upon my anguish and despair, for my sons and daughters have been taken captive to distant lands. I begged my allies for help, but they betrayed me. My priests and leaders starved to death in the city. Even as they searched for food to save their lives. Lord, see my anguish. My heart is broken in my soul despairs, for I have rebelled against you. In the streets, the sword kills, and at home there is only death. Others heard my groans, but no one turned to comfort me. When my enemies heard about my troubles, they were happy to see what you had done. Oh, bring the day you promised, when they will suffer. As I have suffered. Look at all their evil deeds, Lord. Punish them as you have punished me for all my sins. My groans are many, and I am sick at heart. Let's pray.

[20:54] Father, we thank you for this word of lament. We ask that you would teach us to lament. Amen. Well, that was not the happiest part of the Bible. As you could tell, it just wasn't. You might be thinking, there's a reason we don't read this one very often. It was a bit repetitive. But isn't that lament though too? The lament is like, if a child does skin their knee, you're not going to hear about it just once. You aren't. They're just going to keep talking about it, right? Until, even after you've bandaged it up, it's still going to be something.

[21:30] So, they wanted to go home, but they couldn't. They were in exile, so they thought, well, God has saved us in the past, right? He's going to save us now. We just need to duck our heads while we wait it out. But that wasn't the right idea. After all, God had allowed them to be taken into exile. This was God, in his divine sovereignty, let Israel's and Judah's enemies come and take them away. It's not that God destroyed Jerusalem, but God allowed their enemies to do it. But it was clearly the sin of Jerusalem that led to the destruction. They couldn't just hide themselves away while they waited. They waited for God to save them. And Jeremiah was incredibly unpopular. We think he wrote Lamentations. We're not sure. Our author thinks that he wrote Lamentations. The style is a little bit different. But he was one of the few people left who could have recorded all of this, right?

[22:27] But Jeremiah says, the city is going to get destroyed. This is from the first reading. And then, in your exile, you still need to go. Set down roots there. Make yourself at home in this foreign city. Seek the prosperity of the city that I send you to. And that also wasn't popular. So Jeremiah was sometimes known as the weeping prophet because he cried a lot. But he was incredibly unpopular, too. Because he always had negative things to say. So nobody really liked him. What a difficult job that he had. Because God said, go and tell people what I tell you to tell them. And then the people were like, we hate this guy. We do not like him. And it was not a great thing. And you know what?

[23:12] Could ever God ask you to go do something that's unpopular? You bet. You bet. God doesn't just go tell you to do victory or to be popular or to make friends. Now, we should be friendly to people. But Jeremiah was faithful even to say things that people didn't want to hear. There were also false prophets. Zach read some about them. Some of them needed to be punished. They were telling people what they wanted to hear. This is the important part. So there were these false prophets who were saying, oh, we're going to come home soon. It's not going to be as bad as it was. Maybe or even before Jerusalem fell, oh, we'll be victorious. The Babylonians are going to be held at bay. Right?

[23:55] But these false prophets, over and over in the scriptures it says, beware of false prophets. Because they tell you what you want to hear. And what is it that you want to hear? Victory. The glory story. You're good people. This is what you want to hear. You guys are smarter and better and better looking and more talented than anyone else I know. And you're like, oh, I love this. And you really should be going, wait a second. Wait a second. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't. And the false prophets, they do this. They tell you things that you want to hear. But they don't speak for the Lord. So they lie. Not only that. They take away your ability to lament.

[24:38] Because the real prophet, like Jeremiah, says, this is dire. This is a problem. Something's going to happen. It's going to be violent and terrible. You need to be prepared for that. And then after it happens, he says, you need to seek God's forgiveness. And you need to do now, finally do what God says to do. And in this case, it's to wait 70 years. But while you're waiting, invest in the place that you are. Don't pine for the place that you once had.

[25:05] So our author here talks about that we have false prophets among us in the church. Right? People who are saying, in the church, let's have a bigger church. Let's have a more victorious church. Let's have praise and worship songs that are only about happy things. Right? I really appreciate, if you were listening to the prelude this morning, Yuki chose a bunch of spirituals. And those spirituals really matter. And they really encompass the lament that is in some of our church culture. And it's not really our church culture. But we need to embrace it as a good form of lament. Right?

[25:46] Although we do sing one of them on Good Friday, which is, were you there when they crucified my Lord? It's very soulful. It's very dark. I think for Lent, I'm going to try to start listening to some blues music. Because why not? I mean, can I expose myself? Can I expose myself to music and lyrics that are about the reality that not everything is great? It might be good for me. Right? But the modern church has three easy steps. A program to grow churches into mega churches. We want to skip the hard things. We want to skip discipleship, for example. We just want numbers. We just want, you know, we just want victory. I remember, this is terrible. At pastors conferences.

[26:31] It doesn't happen as much anymore, but it used to happen all the time. You would meet another pastor that you didn't know at a pastor's conference. And they'd say, oh, hi, where are you from? Oh, I'm from, you know, Larchwood, Iowa was where the church was. I served in Iowa.

[26:46] Oh, second question was always, how big is your church? How big is your church? Because my value to them as a networking partner is, I'm not going to be a pastor or whatever. Their estimation of me depended a lot on what I said next. And so I would say, well, there's like 60 people in the church. And they'd be like, oh, well, well, you know.

[27:09] Okay. But every now and then I'd mess with them and I'd say, 2,000. And they'd be like, really? And I said, yeah, square feet. Which isn't very big. And they're like, oh, you got me there. You got me. I don't know what to do with you now. You're kind of funny, but you also have a small church, so you're not very good. I don't know. You're not good with me. It was great.

[27:32] Just subvert expectations is always fun, right? But that's what, now it doesn't happen as much anymore, which I'm glad for. I don't know. People are kind of, I think they're wising up to that. But if you read the book, and I hope you do, he talks about how the church in the 1800s was more in touch with this idea that the world isn't as it should be, and even the church isn't as it should be. The church has problems. And we're as a community, we need to work on this together. But in the 20th century, in the 1900s, it became about the salvation of the individual. So we lost some of that communal aspect of it, right?

[28:16] And if it's individualistic, then you have to pick yourself up by your bootstraps. You have to be a successful person. If you're not a successful person, then there's probably something wrong with you, right? And a bunch of individuals come together and they make individualist churches, right? And this individualistic church that pulls itself up by the bootstraps and maybe plants out in the suburbs away from the cities, and we'll get into that, then it doesn't know how to lament. It doesn't know what to do when tragedy strikes. It doesn't know how to process that. It doesn't know what to do when things change in the neighborhood around it, right?

[28:55] So what happens? And I think some of you know this is in the 1900s, cities got denser and bigger, and they changed their racial makeup. And so a lot of people streamed from the south into cities in the north. So you have black people coming up to Boston, to Minneapolis, to lots of other places, right? And it changed the inner city. And so then we had churches, and even some covenant churches did this, where they would look around their neighborhood and say, we don't know who these people are. Some of them said, let's go meet them.

[29:34] Let's invite them to church, or let's give them space in our church so that they can have their church. Let's do something. And a few covenant churches did that. Other covenant churches, but definitely you could say Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, you name it, they looked at that and they said, time to sell this church. Time to sell the land. Let's move out to the suburbs where all our people have moved anyways, because of the civil rights movement, because of busing, and you name it. And let's go out there, and let's congratulate ourselves for building these beautiful new churches out in the middle of a cornfield and having thousands of people and attracting people just like us. Do you see where we're going? Do you see the problems here? And that was the model. So the church kind of, over the course of maybe 50 years or so, it morphed into something different that was not able to live and thrive in the city where I've planted you, as God said to the people in the end of Jeremiah. Not to connect with that community and accept that things change, and that your congregation may change, and make room in your church for people of different ethnic backgrounds, and even invite them into leadership. You get the idea?

[30:48] And give them a stake in what's going on, but instead to pull up, because this is a defeat, and we're not going to talk about that, and we're going to move out, we're going to move 30 miles out to the suburbs, and we're going to replant the church, and now it's a victory story, and we can, and now we're great. We're great. So even the geographic movement of the American church has limited the ability of the American church to lament, because it's never dealt with its own realities, okay?

[31:18] So the right way would have been to struggle alongside strangers in the communities, until the stranger became a genuine neighbor. And so, we, um, I'm just reading, I'm going to read a little bit of this here, because I haven't memorized this by any stretch.

[31:41] So, one thing that Dr. Ra does is he says that, this is kind of a powerful visual, this is a powerful image, is the idea as if, if, a body has died in your midst, and it starts to decay. And then you have a choice, right? You can either mourn for it, bury it, things like that, or you can ignore it. You can ignore that it exists, you know, and try to paper over everything, right?

[32:10] When lament is broken, then you don't, you can't name what's actually happening in the room. You can't name that something's in a state of decay. But if we listen to the voice of the suffering, we see that they lament over dead things all the time. If we are able to listen to them. Um, you know, I'm going to skip ahead here, because we're doing a little short here. This is good stuff. We should probably send this home to you guys. Um, like I said, if you don't like the delivery, you come find me, it's fine. Um, here's where I would maybe pull things back together again. This is very helpful, what Victoria wrote here, is that the individualistic church is a church that can't lament. But the way back to a community church is actually to lament together.

[33:03] Lamenting can actually bring us together if we all stay together. Things are not as they should be. Things are broken, we're hurting, okay? And I, you know, I think this is even harder in Silicon Valley. We live in a very artificial bubble here, where we are right now. I mean, the affluence of this area is, is out of this world. This, this would be very different if we were in a, in a church in the middle of Kansas or something like that. It, it has, it would have its own problems. And I'm not saying that wealth makes us happier, because in actuality it may not, you know what I mean? But it does, it does insulate us from some of the troubles of life. And, uh, it only reinforces our sense of individuality, because nobody gave you the money that you have. You've been earning it yourself, most of you, right? And you, so you know that. It's kind of reinforced.

[33:48] But if we learn to love, and we learn to lament, and I think that's kind of be our challenge now for the next several weeks, is learning to lament, and learning to lament together. And lament isn't passive. Lament is active. It's actually saying out loud to God, I'm broken. I'm crying. It's, it's, you know, it's, it's naming a reality that actually exists. So you're not gonna, um, you know, I don't know what that looks like for us as a church. It could be a prayer meeting. Where we say, whatever you're feeling right now, you can say it.

[34:25] And if you're feeling rotten, we're not gonna try to cheer you up. You know, we're not gonna tell you you're wrong to feel bad. We're gonna say, that sounds bad. While we're with you. We're with you. That's all we can say. It's like Job's friends. At the end, when they finally wise up, all they could say is, I'm gonna sit with you in silence now for days, because all the other things I said haven't been very helpful. We're not gonna try to solve your problems. We're gonna, we're gonna sit with you in your, in your pain and your suffering.

[34:59] We bring this back now to Jesus. Jesus models for us what lament really can look like. Jesus needed to take time away to rest because he was exhausted, right? He, he didn't have limitless energy in his incarnated human body. Um, he did things that were difficult. He wished away, his suffering, because he knew what his suffering was. He suffered on the cross. And you could say, yes, he suffered so we don't have to. We don't have to suffer in quite that way. But he models for us that you can complain, even on the cross. What does he say? My God, why have you forsaken me? Jesus himself has a lament. And he quotes the Psalms when he says that. He has a lament, and he shows us what a lament looks like. And so if we want to become Christ-like, we learn to lament. We learn to say things aren't as, as we wish they were.

[35:53] So, and I think the final thing to say, this is what Victoria says, and I'll end there, is that, is that, even if it doesn't seem like it, even if we don't understand it, or feel it, or hear it, God hears our cries. God hears. And I don't know what else to tell you about that, but except that God does. God hears you crying. God hears his people crying. In the beginning of Exodus, it talks about how God heard the cry of Jesus. And God heard the cries of his people. And then he began to act, but it took time. And in our case, he hears us. And that's all I can offer you this morning. I'm not going to offer you any solution to your sadness, to your brokenness. I'm going to ask you to sit with that for a while, and then invest in the world that God has placed you. But God hears you. And what that means in the long run, I don't know. Just that God hears you. And that's that. Let's pray. Father, thank you again for your word. And I guess, Lord, I'm asking for myself, but all of us too, in these next few weeks, teach us to lament. Teach us to trust that you hear us. Help us to come to you with our complaints without any expectation that any of it will get solved for us. And we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.