#prophetic lament

[lionofchaeronea]

Jeremiah in the Ruins of Jerusalem, Horace Vernet, 1844

[gaudiest-hubris]

I just realized the Federation could make a monster of mass destruction out of q!tubbo if they make player kills give coins

[magicicephoenix]

If you're still accepting color palette requests, how about Sammy with Dance Macabre?

ohh you are so so smart for this

sammy (and the ink demon too i guess) with dance macabre

ask box is now empty if anyone else wants to leave a request! :)

[unspokenstydia]

LYDIA MARTIN And I've got a lot to pine about. I've got a lot to live without.

You don’t care about getting hurt. But you know how I’ll feel? I’ll be devastated. And if you die, I will literally go out of my freaking mind. You see, death doesn’t happen to you, Lydia. / Unbelievable…you have no idea what you are, do you? The wailing woman.

[lettersfromgod]

"Beloved, come out from among them and be joined unto ME!…

Be sheltered from all these troubles which are coming And are already here; be spared from all these things Which I am about to pour out upon this generation!…

Now is the accepted time! Today is the day of salvation! Escape to The Father’s house!…

Thus have I spoken it and so shall it be, For I swear by Myself, says The Lord, it has begun."

~ Says The Lord

📖 Excerpt from "Lost Sheep": https://www.thevolumesoftruth.com/Lost_Sheep

▶ Video/Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsi0RflcFZo&list=PLE7061E9831A5C36F&index=3

[ketavinsky]

anyways, being in nz to write weird kids is mega wack. ive had horrible extremely symbolic nightmares about my parents for the 4 months leading up to the trip and now that im here i really do realise that i would have killed myself if i hadnt moved to australia. 2019 was a fucked up year and i withdrew from so many people i cared about because i was so horrified and ashamed of what i came from and in 2020 i had to really reckon with the consequences of that but thank god now i can funnel it all into weird kids, the appetiser to The Worst Series Ever

[ashlynbannerofficial]

you seem like Jane doe from Ride the cyclone

i cant sing though, im pretty terrible

id like to learn, but it scares me

[heartofashepherd]

God’s Judgment: Drought, Famine, Pestilence, and War (Jeremiah 14-15) - ...

[preacherpollard]

Off Your Face & On Your Feet (Part 2)

Dale Pollard Six hundred years before Christ would make His providential appearance, a righteous man finds himself in captivity. While exiled, Ezekiel was able to witness the spirit of God in a very intimate way. Even so, he was still living under the thumb of the Babylonians just like every other Israelite with him. Even while living in these unideal circumstances he is privileged to see awe…

[biblebloodhound]

Accept the Situation (Jeremiah 30:12-22)

I find it curious that so many folks who believe in the Bible have never read the Old Testament prophets.

“This is what the Lord says: “‘Your wound is incurable,    your injury beyond healing.There is no one to plead your cause,    no remedy for your sore,    no healing for you.All your allies have forgotten you;    they care nothing for you.I have struck you as an enemy would    and punished you as would the cruel,because your guilt is so great    and your sins so many.Why do you cry out over your…

[a-space-for-mimi]

I'm listening the book of Job and I forgot how depressed he was.

[firstumcschenectady]

“Wailing as a Means to Hope” based on Amos 5:10-15 and Jeremiah 31:15-17

I've committed to a theme of hope in the midst of despair this Lent, because it is a topic I sense we all desperately need. You can be forgiven for thinking that thus far in worship readings we've done the despair part better than the hope part. Our “We Cry Justice” reading came from the section entitled “Struggle and Lament” and an essay entitled, “You Must Let Us Wail” and it was fabulously matched with Amos bemoaning the poor being trampled and Jeremiah offering us the famous words, “Rachel is weeping for her children.”

What excellent summaries of exactly the states of the world that result in a sense of being hopeless and overwhelmed. Dismay, lament, injustice, wailing, and despair.

Amos and Jeremiah are prophets, and that means they're doing something different with the despair than we might expect. Truthfully, they're USING it. They're using it to motivate people, to create change. Amos looks around, sees the messes, points them out, and then calls people to live differently. We hear it within our passage today:

Seek good and not evil,    that you may live; and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you,    just as you have said. Hate evil and love good,    and establish justice in the gate; it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts,    will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.

Those two verses show up in the midst of a looooooooong lament, but they're also THE POINT. “Do life differently, don't keep up this system of things being unjust.” And, indeed, Amos is lamenting the unjust ways society is siphoning wealth from the poor to the rich. Many modern prophet smake similar points in similar ways. But perhaps we're not hearing the point within the lament – the POINT is to create change.

Jeremiah is doing a similar thing but on a larger scale. Jeremiah is the prophet of the exile: he saw where things would land if nothing changed, he saw destruction happening, he saw the depth of despair, and then afterwards he points out that not all hope is lost. His is a tough book, but the hope in it is real. We may also be trained to hear more easily, “Rachel is weeping for her children” than the lines that follow it, “They shall come back, there is hope for your future.” Jeremiah isn't speaking an easy or light hope, he is speaking hope into the darkest of times – and that hope was just as real as his concerns about the exile had been.

In Jeremiah's writing, despair is named, and met with hope, despite it all.

Interestingly, Stephen Pavey seems to be doing a similar thing. He is speaking clearly about the injustices of our day, but he isn't doing it to bring hopelessness. He says, “Callie and Martin, like Amos, are speaking for God using the poetry and prophecy of lament. They are calling for justice to be worked out and lived out in order to build a different world, a beloved community.”1

There is a funny truth here: prophets don't lament things being the way they are to induce hopelessness and lead people to shut down because they're overwhelmed. Prophets name injustice because they believe JUSTICE is possible. Prophets name systemic greed because they believe an equitable distribution of resources is possible. Prophets name their concern about “how things are going” because they have hope it can get turned around.

Why isn't this more obvious? Why does this seem worth mentioning, even?

I think dear ones, because we now live lives saturated in “news” that can sound a little bit like prophecy, but isn't. Headlines lament poisoned water, but “the news” is an industry committed to turning a profit from exposing bad news. There may be plenty of people in the industry who do so hoping it will motivate change, but that isn't the industry's first concern. And, we'd probably be OK if there were just headlines about poisoned water. We can work on that! But there are also headlines about... wars, possible genocides, famines, coups, floods, fires, earthquakes, ELECTIONS, hospital mergers, lack of nursing home staffing, COVID learning declines, long COVID, increasing poverty rates, lack of housing for migrants, use of solitary confinement despite it being banned...

What else have you read THIS WEEK?

The news can sound like a prophet, but it isn't one.

Because a prophet shares concerns about injustice to motivate changes towards God's visions of justice. NOT to make money.

Now, I'm really not trying to pick on the news industry (it is having a hard enough time), nor discourage you from seeking to be informed (which sometimes can feel like a form of power in an otherwise powerless existence). Rather, I'm wanting to remind us all that a constant intake of bad news isn't something we're OBLIGATED to engage in, and knowing doesn't ACTUALLY create change. Especially if we're already overwhelmed, especially if we're worried about our own lives of that of one of our loved ones. The world is vast and complicated and none of us are ever going to know everything, and it is definitely OK to fast from the news when it leads you to hopelessness. (Lenten Spiritual practice I'd recommend, even.)

Because the news isn't doing the work of the prophets. It isn't rooted in hope.

The prophets do that work and God still calls them to do it. Interestingly, the prophets sometimes get overwhelmed by despair too, but somehow they find their way through Somehow the urging of God to call for something BETTER than what is, motivates them to move beyond what's wrong and into what could be. When we seek out information, maybe it matters a little bit why the story is being told – and why it is being listened to. None of us can respond to the hundreds of concerns we can read about every day, so it is worth paying attention to if in-taking them is live-giving or life-draining. I do not believe God needs us to know about one more justice issue we can't tackle if knowing it drains us from hope.

There is, however, something fundamentally GOOD about injustice being named – by prophets and even by the news. The piece of hope is that people will respond “this isn't as it should be.” Now, again, if that's just a way to make some money, meh. But STILL, just naming that things being broken isn't as God wants them to be MATTERS.

The act of lament is the act of seeing what is broken and wishing for it to be healed.

Sometimes, dear ones, when we feel hopeless, I think we're really engaging in the sacred act of lament. And we need not berate ourselves for engaging in sacred actions, even if they're hard.

What we may need to guard against though, is being so overwhelmed that we move into helplessness. And that, beloveds of God, I sometimes fear is one of the impacts of the 24 hour news cycle compounded by social media. They move us into learned helplessness. Because we hear about wars fought far away, and children being made into orphans, and we can't actually DO anything about it – and we hear about … and we can't do anything about it, and we hear about... and we can't do anything about it, and we start to learn that we can't do ANYTHING.

Which is simply not true.

We can't create peace in the Middle East, but we can reach out to our neighbors in the Capital Region who are Muslim and Jewish and remind them with our words and actions they are seen and loved. That matters in the face of the hatred being slung around, and it matters in simply planting the seeds of peace and love in the world. We can't eliminate hunger within the world or even our community, but we've learned we can serve one hot meal with a healthy dose of respect and that it can matter a whole lot. We can't eliminate single use plastics, but we've learned to grocery shop with reusable bags, and carry reusable water bottles and those actions add up.

There is plenty we can do, actually, there is so much we can do we struggle to decide which ways to share our love in the world, right? GOOD!!

Dear ones, a yearning for the world to be different, a lament at how things are, a longing for more justice, even fear that things might continue without change – these are beautiful expressions of HOPE. Because something in you believes this brokenness isn't enough, and shouldn't be enough. It meant to motivate change.

Not despair, not being overwhelmed, not learned helplessness. Change.

Hate evil and love good,    and establish justice in the gate.

It is possible. With God all things are possible. Love good dear ones, it isn't time to give up yet. Amen

1 Stephen Pavey“12: You Must Let Us Wail” in We Cry Justice, ed. Liz Theoharis (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2021) p. 57 used with permission.

Rev. Sara E. Baron  First United Methodist Church of Schenectady  603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305  Pronouns: she/her/hers  http://fumcschenectady.org/  https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

February 18, 2024

[ultrachoppedpenguinbouquet]

Jeremiah

[katienelsonrau]

Feed Your Ears Right

Years ago my mom pointed out my sensitivity to music. She told me she noticed I would become irritable, depressed, angry, or downright sad while listening to country music. I told her that was ridiculous. Music didn’t have any affect on my moods, but my mom planted a seed into my mind and gave me something to think about. Before long, I noticed I was, in fact, becoming more negative while I…

[lettersfromgod]

"My people, let it be known to you, I take no pleasure at all in what I must do, in what must be done - NO PLEASURE AT ALL! Says The Lord. As My hand draws back, blood pours down! As I strike the earth in My anger, My tears run down! As famine spreads forth across the land, My heart is rent inside Me over the hardness of men’s hearts! As My face fills with the heat of My fury, My eyes are set ablaze with fire over that which I see! My tears run down, My blood pours down. As My own servants turn from Me and run, as My own beloved, whom I have called sons and daughters, turn and fight against Me, as My own body betrays Me, My blood pours down, My tears run down."

~ Says The Lord

📖 Excerpt from "Blood Pours Down": https://www.thevolumesoftruth.com/Blood_Pours_Down

▶ Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlRcOvInlsM&list=PL6D1BC949E9840878&index=6

[ribbittrobbit]

“Cassandra, daughter of the king (…), exhausted from practising, is said to have fallen asleep;(…) when she prophesied true things, she was not believed.”

(A bastardisation of Hyginus’ Fabulae)

text under the cut:

This is your fate, Cassandra, You, who are cloaked in mystery: To be a god that knows fear, To live begging for believers

You will call out to them, But they will be deaf to you You will stand before them, And they will not see you

This is your destiny, Cassandra To have only hidden altars, For your only song to be silence, To dwell in the deepest darkness

You are for the doubtful and uncertain, Those who search and do not find, At the mercy of your prophet, A mere child, who chose you

This is your lament, Cassandra, To weep and to rage, For your greatest mystery is to never know Whether today you live or die

-

I feel insane about Cassandra and Kristen if you can't tell. The name! the mystery of religion! the conflict of belief!! the hard sell!!! I lay in bed and started writing in verse!! I don't write in verse!!!

But I did grow up with a lot of latin and catholic liturgy so that's probably where the structure comes from? bec i do not remember any classics despite having majored in liberal arts. (my classics professor sucked)

aight. there you go. catharsis and melodrama.