Sermon Tone Analysis
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Broken Hearted
Over my lifetime I have watched family members who were diagnosed with cancer begin that journey that ended in their death.
When we hear that someone is diagnosed with an awful diagnosis we pray for them.
We pray that God will bring healing.
There have been times when that healing comes.
Sometimes it is a temporary reprieve.
If the person is a Christian and they die in their faith we grieve but we also rejoice that they are in the presence of our heavenly Father.
As Paul said “for me to live is Christ, but to die is gain.”
As much as we might want them back, we wouldn’t want them to leave the glory of all they are experiencing.
My father had a lump removed on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend in 1994.
By the time September of that year arrived he had lumps all over and before the month was over he breathed his last and was gone.
My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy of the effected breast.
Six years later she had the other breast removed.
She along with us her children thought that the cancer would take her life because it had metastasized.
She survived the cancer.
About two years later she was standing in her living room drinking a cup of coffee and talking with my sister-in-law.
One moment she was there and the next she stepped out of this life and into the presence of God.
Grief can be complicated.
For some who have watched a family suffer with an illness, death can be a sense of relief.
A sudden death can be shocking and grief takes an entirely different form.
The overdose crisis that we are experiencing leaves many families grieving.
There are family members who knew it was going to happen because of the depths of their loved ones use of drugs.
For others, they had no idea that the person was using any kind of substance.
Sickness can lead to grief because of death or continued suffering.
There are days as a Therapist that I want to just shut my office door after a client leaves and have a good cry.
There are clients that I would like to take them into a big hug and cry with them.
There are some that I want to go home and bleach my brain because of the horror that they have revealed.
Sometimes the things I hear can bring strong emotions.
I hear individuals talk about what they have experienced by their own choices.
I more frequently hear about the unspeakable that has been done to them and the choices they made in order to cope with their life experiences.
It is easy to cry out in that brokenness, Where is God in all of this?
In our scripture text this morning it is hard to know whether it is Jeremiah speaking or if it is Jehovah.
Jeremiah had been called by God to be a prophet.
Rather than standing on the sidelines telling the people what God was saying, Jeremiah lived among them.
Perhaps that is why he is referred to as the weeping prophet.
This section of scripture opens with these words:
Israel and Judah had continued to walk away from God.
They had become like the nations around them, worshipping idols rather than the one true and living God.
God had kept his promise.
He gathered the people out of Egypt and brought them to freedom.
The people would follow Him for a period and then they would turn their back on him.
It started when Moses was on the Mountain receiving the Ten Commandments.
The people were down at the base of the mountain fashioning a god to worship.
The spies went into the promised land and two came back and said that it was everything that God had promised.
The remaining spies said that their were giants there.
An entire generation died in the desert because of their disobedience.
When God brought them to the promised land the second time the followed Him and He gave them victory over the nations that were in their land.
After they had settled the land they looked around and saw that every nation around them had a king so they demanded a King other than God.
They began worshiping the idols of the nations around them.
One king would be faithful to God and the people would worship God.
The next several kings would be evil and idolatry increased.
It was a vicious cycle.
That cycle sped up and here they are on the verge of being destroyed as a nation and hauled off into captivity.
It is into this mess that Jeremiah cries out Jeremiah 8:18 “18 No healing, only grief; my heart is broken.”
Jeremiah was not just putting on a front, he was living in the midst of the sin of the people.
There can come that point that there is no hope for healing.
Jeremiah appears to recognize that.
He seems to recognize that the people have gone to far.
Have you heard the phrase “the tipping point?”
In sociology, a Tipping Point “is a point in time when a group—or many group members—rapidly and dramatically changes its behavior by widely adopting a previously rare practice.”
[1]
Israel had reached it’s tipping point.
Idolatry was rampant.
They had turn their backs on God.
The had been warned by the prophets.
That had received a call to repentance by the prophets.
Despite all that God had done, they had reached that point of no return.
There seemed to be no turning back.
Jeremiah recognized that and said that there was no healing.
Nothing was going to change.
He said there was only grief left.
There has nothing left to do but mourn the demise of the people who were set aside by God.
Jeremiah says “My heart is broken.”
The Psalmnist wrote about this.
A broken heart is that idea “for the intense emotional stress or pain one feels at experiencing great and deep longing.”
[2] That is what Jeremiah was experiencing.
He loved the people, he was being obedient calling them back to God.
Even though he loved them intensely, he loved God more and was being obedient to God.
It is that intense love of his people and his love and obedience to God that brings on this intense grief, this broken hearted.
This did not have to happen.
I mentioned the promise last week.
God had said
If.
That one little word is very powerful.
I routinely talk with my patients and they talk about the “if onlies.”
It is those things that they say if only had done this, or if only this hadn’t happened.
If Onlies goes along with the woulda, coulda, shouldas of life.
God said to the people, “If you return, If you get rid of your disgusting idols, if you swear by the living God, then the nations will enjoy God’s blessings.
We know that they did not return, they did not get rid of their idols, and they did not swear by the living God.
They people seemed to be getting the idea that God was bringing punishment.
They had witnessed Israel, those 10 northern tribes be destroyed and carried into captivity.
Babylon was on the verge of destroying Judah.
Jeremiah writes:
Jeremiah 8:19 (CEB)
19 Listen to the weeping of my people all across the land:
It seems that the tipping point had been reached.
The writing was on the wall.
Destruction was coming.
They seem to be getting it and they cry:
It is almost a cry of “Where is God?”
Don’t we sometimes say that when bad things happen?
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