This morning’s reading from Lamentations brings to my mind an old Bruce Springsteen song. Back on September 21, 2001, Nancy and I watched “America: A Tribute to Heroes,” a telethon to raise money for 9/11 victims and their families, which was broadcast on several networks. As the lights came up, Bruce Springsteen, equipped only with a harmonica and guitar and with the E Street Band as serving as backup singers, played a few chords and then explained, "This is a prayer for our fallen brothers and sisters." He then began to sing a quiet, mournful song: “My City of Ruins.” The lyrics were a lament tailor made for that post-9/11 moment:
There's a blood red circle / On the cold dark ground /And the rain is falling down
The church door's thrown open / I can hear the organ's song / But the congregation's gone
My city of ruins / My city of ruins
Now the sweet bells of mercy / Drift through the evening trees /Young men on the corner Like scattered leaves
The boarded up windows / The empty streets / While my brother's down on his knees
My city of ruins / My city of ruins
The song had in fact not been written for 9/11, but for a benefit concert for Asbury Park, NJ, Springsteen’s economically depressed and blighted hometown. It worked for both situations, it’s lyrics a modern lament for loss, decay and destruction. Indeed, I recently learned that, a decade later, the song would become an anthem of lament and hope for the people of Christchurch, New Zealand, following a devastating earthquake in February 2011.
“My City of Ruins” would become the closing song on the album The Rising, Springsteen’s response to 9/11, a meditation on loss and life, grief and hope, death and resurrection. Of the songs on that album, Springsteen observed that the stanzas are the blues and the choruses are gospel. That may seem an odd combination in one song. But those two African American musical styles aren’t truly separate. Instead, they are closely connected and complimentary, born as they are out of the African American experience of slavery and oppression and the religious faith that sustained them through long centuries and decades of suffering. Both, in their own way, expressed the shared lament of a people/race.
“Lament,” according to South African theologian Denise Ackermann, “is the sound suffering makes when it recovers its voice. The lament of the blues, and the lament that undergirds most of the negro spirituals, is the sound of a suffering people. Indeed, in the final chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois describes the negro spirituals as “sorrow songs.” They are after all born of the suffering of slavery and honed in the oppression of Jim Crow: one cannot long for a place where “there’s no rain to wet you” and “there’s no sun to burn you,” unless you’ve known “the monotonous toil and exposure” of long hours of unbearable heat and been drenched to the bone by sudden, torrential downpours. Yet, this lament, this sorrow, especially in the spirituals, is shaped and interpreted by the religious experience of those same people who have known suffering. Indeed, such laments are actually cries of faith, because they assume that there is a God who hears and who cares.
The book of Lamentations is a series of five poems reflecting on the destruction of Jerusalem and the deportation of many of its leading citizens by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. It was written sometime during the nearly 50-year period of exile (ending in 539), when the deportees were forced to live in Babylon. Lamentations expresses the doubts, the desperation, the pain of the survivors, and asks, “Where is God and why is this happening?” It is a lament for a city in ruins: How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations! She that was a princess among the provinces has become a vassal. 2She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks; among all her lovers she has no one to comfort her; all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they have become her enemies. Yet in the middle of such profound lament, we encounter this morning’s passage—a bold declaration of faith and hope.
Our reading begins with the pain that is at the core of the book: 19The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall! 20My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me. But here the tone changes: the author calls to mind something that gives him hope. He remembers the character of God: 22The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; 23they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. This declaration reflects not merely the author’s own memory, though he may well have had personal experience of God’s faithfulness. What he is remembering encompasses his personal experience and grounds it, but also stretches far beyond it. He is calling to mind the collective experience of his people, the memory of what God had done for Israel, the stories of God’s mighty acts in the past. This is the faith that was passed down from generation to generation, the conviction that God “is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,” a declaration of faith which is repeated over and over in the Hebrew Scriptures. It is the faith which, in Deuteronomy, the people were commanded to teach to their children and their children’s children. And in that story of God’s past acts, in that affirmation of faith in God’s grace and mercy, the author of Lamentations, like so many before and since, found hope that all was not lost, hope that God was at work, that God was still speaking and would yet act to help God’s people.
That same emphasis on memory is found in 2 Timothy. Paul remembers that Timothy’s faith is rooted in the faith of his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice. They taught him the faith as they lived out their own. One of the essential tasks of the Christian community is to pass on the faith, to instill it in the hearts of our children and our children’s children. But, it’s not just in sermons and Bible studies and confirmation that the faith is passed on, though these are important ministries of the church and worthy of our support, prayers and efforts. The faith is also passed on in families and in the interactions of the congregation. Our young people learn what it means to be a Christian by observing how their parents, their grandparents, and their church family live out their faith. The faith, hope and love we live, establishes a foundation upon which they can grow in faith, hope and love, upon which they can grow to be faithful and find strength and hope in trying times. Even as adults we learn what it means to follow Jesus, what it looks like to love God and neighbor, by observing the enacted faith and embodied love of those around us, those with whom we share the pews, those with whom come to the Lord’s table. Christian faith is not an individual achievement. There is no such thing as a “Lone Ranger” Christian. Faith is communal; it is shared. Faith is taught and it is caught.
One of the key elements of this communal faith, this faith passed down to us by those who came before, is the conviction that God is present with us even as we journey through the most treacherous valleys of our lives; even as we experience suffering and loss; even as we endure the spiritual turmoil which arises from the apparent absence of God, that experience of dryness and aloneness which the mystics call “the dark night of the soul.”
The story of God’s presence with the Hebrew slaves in Egypt and with the exiled Jews in Babylon is part of our story and a reminder of God’s great faithfulness. We remember these stories and God’s great acts of delivering the Hebrews from Egypt to the Promised Land and restoring the Babylonian exiles back to that same land—we remember these stories each time we celebrate Communion. And we also remember that event which has brought us into the fold and made us a part of God’s family: God’s gracious acts in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
We celebrate Holy Communion in remembrance of Christ. We remember that in Jesus, God entered into our human experience and shared in not only our joys but also our sufferings. In Christ, God shares our grief, knows our anxiety and fear, endures our physical pain, and experiences our death. Jesus dies in loving solidarity with us and is then raised victorious from the grave—for God’s love is stronger than our fear and hatred and sin, and God’s life is greater than the powers of suffering and death. Where is God in our suffering? Hanging on the cross, dying with and for us, so that we might be raised up with Jesus to newness of life.
It is our shared remembrance of God’s great act in Christ and the shared gift of the Holy Spirt which make us one with each other and one with Christians around the world, a unity we celebrate and remember at this table. This is the faith that gives us strength and hope in the midst of our difficulties and sufferings. Remembering that God has been faithful, we trust that God will be faithful. Remembering that God has been present in difficulty and suffering, we trust that God will be present to help us even now.
John Buchanan, who died back in February (Jan. 30, 1938-Feb. 3, 2025), was the pastor of Chicago’s Fourth Presbyterian Church for 27 years (1985-2012) and the long-time editor of The Christian Century. One summer, some years back, he was serving a small church in Scotland for a few months. One day, the pastor from the neighboring village paid him a visit. During their conversation, the pastor told Buchanan a story that stuck with him for the rest of his life.
During the Second World War, this Scottish pastor had served in the British army. He had been captured by the Germans and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Poland. It was hell on earth. The barracks were uninsulated and unheated, leaving the men shivering through long frigid nights. Their rations were meager: a single bowl of soup and a crust of bread each day. He recalled that he and his fellow prisoners were starving, sick and filthy. All of this physical suffering took a toll on the men’s mental states. Depression and desperation were wide spread. Many considered suicide, thinking it was the quickest and perhaps only escape from their torment. It would have been easy. Just run toward the high, barbed wire topped perimeter fence and throw oneself on it as if you were trying to escape. The German guards would quickly shoot you.
The pastor told Buchanan that, one night, overwhelmed with despair, he snuck to the fence, sat down, apparently out of sight of the guards, and seriously considered faking an escape attempt so that his suffering would end. As he sat, he heard a soft noise on the other side of the fence. Peering into the darkness, he saw a man, a Polish farmer. The farmer thrust his hand through the fence and gave him half of a potato. As he did so, he said, with a strong Polish accent, “The Body of Christ.”
It was a moment of communion in the midst of suffering, a moment of hope and salvation in a place of despair and desolation. A Pole showed compassion to a young Scotsman, and in doing so gave him the hope to keep on living. He reminded the young soldier that he was not alone, that the Crucified and Resurrected Christ was with him even in the midst of his great suffering.
We, living in a divided society, should not miss the unity in Christ that is displayed in this incident. These two men were from different countries, had different customs and spoke different languages. They were likely from different denominations too; the Scotsman was Presbyterian and the Polish farmer was almost certainly Catholic. In the darkness of a prison camp, in the darkness of a war brought on by German nationalism and the malevolent shadows of the ethnic and racial hatred of Nazi white supremacy, the light of Christ shone forth brightly in a small act of kindness. A potato became the body of Christ, offered in remembrance and imitation of him, and transcended the differences, broke through the barriers—literal and figurative—and saved one man’s life by creating community and giving hope.
Sometimes in our lives we seem find ourselves wandering in the darkness. Sometimes the storms of life, be they physical, emotional or spiritual, leave us battered and broken. Sometimes the flames threaten to destroy all we hold dear. Sometimes the circumstances of our lives feel us with foreboding for the future. Sometimes our suffering and struggle causes us to cry out, “God, where are you?” Our faith tells us to hold on in such times, to “wait for the salvation of the Lord.” (Lam 1.26) God will show up. God often shows up in God’s people as they extend help, compassion, mercy, and love. Sometimes God shows up in the most unexpected ways, like a farmer offering half a potato in the deep darkness of the night. But God will show up. God will show up because God’s steadfast love endures forever. God will show up because God’s mercies never end. God will show up because God is faithful.
Springsteen’s “My City of Ruins” reflects these truths. After all, it is blues and gospel fused together; it is a lament and a prayer of faith. In the final movement of the song, that prayer becomes explicit:
Now with these hands, …I pray Lord…
I pray for the strength, Lord…
I pray for the faith, Lord
We pray for your love, Lord
We pray for the lost, Lord
We pray for this world, Lord
We pray for the strength, Lord
The song then concludes with the repeated refrain, “Come on, rise up. Come on rise, up.” It is a prayer for God’s help. It is a prayer made with hands both folded in reverence and hands busy living out the faith, busy embodying love in deeds of compassion, busy rebuilding the ruins, strengthened by God’s love. It is prayer grounded in faith in Christ’s resurrection—the concrete declaration that nothing, not any suffering or destruction, not even death, can ever separate us from the love of God. It is a prayer for moments such as the one we live in now.
This is the faith that has been passed down to us and the faith we are to pass on. This is the faith that gives us strength and hope when the world seems to be falling apart. This is the faith that we are called to live out on the mountain tops of life and in the deepest, darkest valleys. This is the faith that allows us to say, “The Lord is my portion, therefore, I will hope in God.” Amen.