A Sermon based on
Jeremiah 8:18 – 9:1
Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Allentown on September 21, 2025 by Pastor Stephanie Anthony
In my note to the church included in the weekly eblast I shared a story from my own youth group days. It was in the spring of 1995, the Sunday evening after the Oklahoma City bombing in mid April. There we were, a group of highschoolers, trying to at least begin to wrap our brains around the violence that had happened that week. Someone in the room asked out loud, “Where was God when that happened?” Our youth leader, the associate pastor of our church, took an understandably long pause before he answered, “God was the first one to shed a tear.”
I remembered it a few years later when the news broke of a shooting at middle school in Jonesboro, Arkansas in 1998 and again a year later at the shooting in at Columbine High School in Colorado. Then on September 11, 2001.
I recited it to myself, “God was the first one to shed a tear,” after mass shootings at the Pulse Night Club, on college campuses, at a country concert and movie theaters, a Walmart serving the Latino community in El Paso, a spree of shootings targeting Asian Americans in Atlanta, the synagogue that was targeted in Pittsburgh and Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and even elementary schools. Elementary schools in Newtown, CT, and Uvalde, TX.
The invasion of Ukraine
The October 7, 2023 attack on Israeli citizens.
The famine and destruction of Gaza that has followed.
Watching the fear that grips those who are being or might be pulled from the streets around this country in detention raids and deportations.
And the deep sadness and helplessness experienced by so many of us at the political polarization and demonization that many, if not most of us, seem to be buying into with our entrenchment into opposing camps and the violent consequences of that entrenchment mixed with the availability and hyper-obsession with personal ownership of weapons of war.
And part of what’s sad is how incomplete that list I just recited is. I missed so many tragedies that could have been included – should have been included. You may have others that stick out to you.
My joy is gone; grief is upon me;
my heart is sick.
Listen! The cry of the daughter of my people
from far and wide in the land:
“Is the Lord not in Zion?”
Is God not in this world?
My pastor’s words often feel insufficient in the face everything we and this world carry and someday on the other side of eternity I am looking forward to a more sufficient answer, but for now this good news – that God weeps for God’s people and creation – will have to do.
And I shouldn’t diminish it. It really is a wondrous thing.
The prophet Jeremiah is doing his work speaking God’s word to God’s people during the fall of Judah to the Babylonian Empire. So imagine this lament, if you will, coming from the prophet’s gut while he sits on a high hill and overlooks the land and God’s people. In fact, the chapter starts with an image that God describes of the bones of the kings of Judah – the officials, the priests, the prophets, and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem – brought out from their tombs and spread on the ground. A visual representation of the daunting task before him, speaking for God about all that grieves God, the disobedience, the unjust treatment of the poor, the corrupt sacrifices, and greed – but also the death that has come at the hands of the enemy, the removal of the people from the land, and the anguish of those who remain.
Jeremiah’s joy is gone and grief is upon him. His heart is sick, but so is the Lord’s. So is the heart of God sick that the people couldn’t or wouldn’t follow the law to care for each other and the world around them. So does God grieve that God’s people couldn’t stay focused on loving God and loving neighbor. So does God cry out that their desire to grow materially rich through alliances with foreign nations overshadowed their commitment to be faithful to God and share riches with those in need.
God, indeed, is the first to shed a tear over our brokenness and the damage it wreaks over the human family and all of creation that God molded in love, redeems in grace, and sustains in faithfulness.
That’s an interesting image, isn’t it? The image of a crying God. It’s not the only one we have in Scripture. Jesus, of course, cries in a couple of different gospel accounts. But I don’t know about you – maybe it’s a trinitarian heresy of mine – that feels different. Jesus’ humanity makes it a little easier for me to imagine as one who had tears and sheds them. But the Almighty and invisible God, the God I think of who called creation into being, who led the Hebrew people out of Egypt through parted seas, who inspired the construction of a temple and was worshiped there with sacrifices and offerings – this image of God in my mind, this one is harder to imagine crying.
Which, I believe, is why it’s so important to pay attention to it. It’s why I think these tears have something crucial to say to us. This image of a crying God tells us about God’s compassion. Way too often I hear people talk of that angry, bloodthirsty Old Testament God in contrast to the loving, compassionate New Testament God, when in reality, there is no difference. God gets angry in the New Testament (remember Jesus who disrupts everything in the temple by flipping over tables) and God is gracious and redemptive in the Older Testament. It’s the same God, and these tears that fall from eyes of God’s messenger, the tears of God that they represent, point us toward God’s own desire for a different future, God’s own commitment to a better way forward, God’s own call to God’s people to repent, turn around, and walk again in the way of peace.
Presbyterian leader, Rev. Jan Edmiston, the Executive Presbyter in Charlotte, NC, and the co-moderator of the 222nd General Assembly of our church held in 2016, likes to ask the churches she works with “What in your community breaks God’s heart?” When a congregation is trying to figure out what to do next, when they are in transition between pastors, or when they are lamenting that they are shrinking or they aren’t the church they remember from their glory days, when they are trying to decide if they should stay open or stay closed, stay at the center of town or move out to the suburbs – she asks them this question “What in your community breaks God’s heart?” What makes God cry? What does God lament to see near to where you live?
Homelessness and a lack of affordable housing? Inequity in public schools? Gun violence? Addiction? Lack of access to medical care? A rise in loneliness and the isolation of young men? Transphobia and violence against the LGBTQIA+ community? Division over political ideology and the way it distracts us from caring for one another as human beings? The persistence of racism in subtle and not-so-subtle ways?
A logical second part of the conversation has to be “Does it break your heart, too?” Are the things that make God cry, the things that make us cry? And if they are, then what are we going to do about them? How are we going to be a part of the balm that heals the hurts in the world?
The biblical practice of lament – of crying out to God, or may even better said, of crying along with God – is incredibly important because it helps us name the world as it should be, but isn’t. It helps us articulate the divine vision for creation that is marred by the current reality. It helps develop some divinely-righteous indignation about the injustice and pain in the world. It aligns us with God’s hope for the world and stirs up in us the motivation to go forward from our broken hearts and God’s broken heart to change our own behavior, to serve our neighbor, to restructure the systems in the world around us in order to move toward that vision of creation that God sets before us – where lion lays down with the lamb, where swords are beat into plowshares, where war and violence and hatred aren’t studied any more.
The biblical practice of lament, although our short segment of scripture doesn’t show it to us today, isn’t complete without an affirmation of faith or a statement of hope for the future.
We hear it in the end of Psalm 43
Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God, for I shall again praise him,
my help and my God.
Or this couplet from Psalm 71
Rescue me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked,
from the grasp of the unjust and cruel.
For you, O Lord, are my hope,
my trust, O Lord, from my youth.
Or the text on which a hymn is based from the book called Lamentations:
Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
This particular Jeremiah reading does not have that. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. This is just chapter 8. There’s a whole lot more of Jeremiah to still unfold.
And also, I have to believe that the statement of hope doesn’t just come in the text itself, but it comes from the people who receive the text. It comes from those of us who just prayed that this word will become alive to us that it will become inspiration for our lives And our living. What if rather than a statement of hope we are people of hope who not not only add our tears to God’s when we see what breaks God‘s heart, but add our love. Add our effort, add our resources, our time, our money, our intelligence, our energy.
At the presbytery meeting yesterday a candidate was being examined for ordination after having preached a sermon that included some lament over the brokenness in the world around us. During the examination, a member of the assembly asked this candidate a question (it didn’t feel like a “gotcha” moment, but instead a moment to give them a chance to shine), “In the face all the brokenness you mentioned, where do you see glimmers of hope in the world?”
The candidate responded that right now hope seemed hard to find a large scale, but instead she saw hope in the small acts of loving kindness all around us – the gift of food to a neighbor who is grieving or facing a difficult medical procedure, a ride for someone who can’t drive themselves, a phone call to check on someone who is grieving. We heard of other glimmers of hope during our presbytery meeting – a church with a teacher’s closet to help educators provide materials for their classrooms that the budgets don’t cover, a ministry to hikers passing through a mountain town. We have our own examples here at FPC Allentown – the 1,711 hats knit for 1st graders, the rooms we prepare for guests from Family Promise, the preschool that has expanded this year to serve more students with love and knowledge and a sense of God’s presence. We have our examples of the ways God’s tears and our own have driven us to be a part of the hope and good news the world so desperately needs.
Tears and sadness are not the enemy. Lament and grief aren’t to be stifled. None of these keep us from our hope-filled future. Only apathy does. Only a resignation that nothing can or will change. Only a desire for revenge rather than repair.
Instead our tears, as we let them flow out of our body, can water the seeds of hope and grow into action when we ask – What’s the next right thing? What’s the next loving thing? What’s the next just thing we can do in God’s name?