Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, 5 October 2025: Lamentations 1:1-6; Lamentations 3:19-26 or Psalm 137; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10
How do we hang on to hope? How do we live with grief? All our readings today circle around that question. The answers they give are not the same, but reflect the different ways we respond to challenge and grief.
The Book of Lamentations begins with mourning the fate of Judah, in exile in Babylon. The “city that was once full of people” is empty, the city grieving like a widow. Life is bleak. The Lectionary offers us two choices as a “Response” to that reading.
The first is from a bit later in Lamentations, and it begins with the same kind of grief we heard in the first reading. The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall. But then the speaker changes tone. But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end. Hope keeps growing: great is your faithfulness. And the writer, who started with wormwood and gall, concludes with It is good that one should wait quietly
for the salvation of the Lord.
The first response moves from grief to faith. The second moves from grief to vengeance. Psalm 137 always surprises me. I know the beginning from the Don McLean album I had as a teenager, and when I start, I always here the gentle elegiac sound of that song. By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept,when we remembered you, O Zion. The song ends there. The psalm does not. It turns to vengeance. O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy the one who pays you back for what you have done to us! Happy shall he be who takes your little ones, and dashes them against the rock! What happened to that gentle grief?
In the Letter to Timothy, Timothy is being praised for his faith, faith taught to him by his mother and grandmother. It is a “spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline“. Timothy is enjoined to be like the writer, not ashamed to suffer for his faith. In doing so, he will follow Jesus, who “brought life and immortality to light through the gospel”. It may not be easy, but “Hold to the standard of sound teaching that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.”
Which brings us to the Gospel. Jesus’ disciples, who have given up so much, feel overwhelmed, out of hope. They want more faith. And Jesus tells them that there’s just faith, and it’s not quantified. If they had faith, they could move mountains. Or at least, a mustard seed could move a mulberry tree. Mulberry trees are remarkably tenacious, so the mustardseed is amazing here. And then the parable. A slave is not thanked for doing what he has been told to do. We, as people of faith, are doing, like Timothy and his correspondent, what we have been called to do. What that is varies. We are not in a faith Olympics: we do with our faith what we are called to do.
We live in a world where there is much to lament. We lament war, hunger, and the dangers faced by refugees from violence and hunger. We lament the cruelty of those who attack migrants and refugees. We lament Christians who rejoice in the pain they inflict on those without power. It is good, like the author of Lamentations, to lament with others, to understand our grief as not individual but communal. We have a choice, we are told, in how we respond. We can respond, like the psalmist, wishing violence and destruction on those who have caused violence and destruction. Or we can, as does the author of Lamentations, trust in God.
That trust is central in the letter to Timothy, a reminder that Jesus offers the power of love. Love as a response is hard, as the writer seems to know. But it is true to the message of Jesus. Jesus reminds us that we don’t get a gold star for doing what we are called to do, but we know we have done what we can. With faith, we do what we can.
For your enjoyment, a long version of Don McLean’s performance in the National Stadium in Dublin in 1975.
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