New Every Morning

Text: Lamentations 3:19-33

When I was in high school, my youth group took a summer mission trip to the northwest part of our country.
I went to a larger church in Cedar Rapids, so we filled an entire bus with our students and chaperones.
Our ultimate destination was Seattle, but along the way we stopped and sang at churches in Wyoming and Idaho and we spent some time at Yellowstone National Park.
We took time to hike and walked through a part of the forest that had experienced a forest fire and saw the beginnings of the new forest already beginning to emerge with soft green baby trees.
We worshipped and remembered the indigenous people who once lived upon this land… like the Blackfeet, Crow, Sioux and Cheyenne.
We strolled along the pathways to see the hot springs and of course, visit Old Faithful.
And we rolled up our sleeves and got to work.
I remember one of the projects my group was assigned to was helping to secure rolls of grass seed to the side of a hill so that we could help prevent erosion along the road way.

But one of the things that has stuck with me the most from that particular trip was not the sights or the service… but a prayer.
A prayer that we said together every morning… often while we were rolling down the road on our bus.
A prayer that rose us up out of slumber and helped us to center ourselves before the day began.
A prayer that I still think of in the mornings.

We actually have this prayer in the back of all of our hymnals as part of the Orders for Daily Praise and Prayer:

New every morning is your love, great God of light,
And all day long you are working for good in the world.
Stir up in us desire to serve you,
To live peacefully with our neighbors,
And to devote each day to your Son,
Our Savior, Jesus Christ the Lord.

New every morning is your love.
Every morning.
Every. Single. Day.
Over and over again.

To be faithful is to be constant… steadfast… reliable…
And those words could certainly be used to describe one of the most striking features of Yellowstone National Park – Old Faithful.

Just beneath those gorgeous mountains and rivers and forests is an active volcano somewhere between thirty and fifty miles across.
As it simmers and brews underground, water from above seeps in and begins to boil, creating these amazing geothermic features throughout the park.

From mud pots to hot springs, you find incredible colors and textures as various gasses and bacteria and algae that thrive at different temperatures come alive.
And then there are the geysers, superheated water rockets that burst unpredictably out of the ground.

Well… most of them are unpredictable.
Not Old Faithful.
Roughly every ninety minutes, this geyser erupts.
In every kind of weather, in any part of the year, at any time of day.
Over and over and over again.
Consistently.
Constantly.
Faithfully.

As the Mills family found out just this week on their own family road trip in Yellowstone… here is Scott’s video!

Something you can count on.
Something you depend on just as sure as the sun will rise in the east.

Now… we can’t always see the sun rise.
Sometimes the rain is pouring on our heads or the storm clouds are raging.
But the sun still rises.

And as the author of Lamentations reminds us, the faithful and compassionate love of God is renewed every morning, too.
Even if we can’t see it.
Even if it seems like God is far away.
Even if we are swimming in distress.

The eruption of Old Faithful happens not in spite of the simmering energy and destructive forces just beneath the surface… but because of them.
And so it is with God.
It is in the midst of our lament…
In the midst of our conflict…
In the midst of our grief…
In the midst of our suffering…
It is because of all of those powers that could destroy and overwhelm that we witness the faithfulness of God’s love.

Now, what is interesting about what is happening to the lamenter is that they are talking about their own punishment by the hand of the Lord.
They were experiencing the consequences of a life where they had rejected peace…
Where they had forgotten what is good…
Like so many of the prophets, he is writing about the direct result of turning away from God’s ways…
of failing to look out for our neighbors,
of taking advantage of rather than caring for creation…
It is chaos.
It is destruction.
And while we can point to God as the cause, the truth is, we are simply harvesting what we have sown.

There is a lot happening in the world today…
A lot of the turmoil we are experiencing…
That are simply the consequences of choices and decisions we have made in the past.
The anger that is erupting on the streets about racial injustice is not simply about the racist actions of a few individuals.
It is confronting the cultural, historic, and structural systems that we all participate in and have not challenged in the past.
The rise in Covid-19 cases across the country, but also right here in Iowa… they are directly related to choices that we are making about whether or not to wear a mask, where we go, and who we interact with.
And now we are facing the consequences of increasing the burdens upon our families and our teachers because we have not done our part to create a safer environment and reduce the spread.

What the Lamenter also wants to remind us, however, is that in spite of all of our failures.
In spite of all of the consequences we are experiencing.
God has not walked out on us.
God’s faithful love has not disappeared.
God’s compassion doesn’t dry up.

No, every morning, it is renewed.
Every morning we experience just how great is God’s faithfulness.
Every time the sun comes up, we have a chance to turn away from our selfishness and our destructive tendencies and instead turn towards God.

And so when we feel like we are standing on the edge of the volcano…
When we feel like everything is falling apart…
When we feel like the consequences of our failures have become too great to bear…
That’s when we need to stop.
And wait.
And sit.

You know, the forces that lead to the eruption of Old Faithful rely upon two things.
First, the ever simmering force of the volcano.
Like our sin and our selfishness and our tendency towards destruction, it is a constant reality.

But it also depends upon the renewing and refreshing waters above the ground.
The melting of the snow in the mountains.
The rain that falls from the sky.
The ground water that seeps deep into the earth.
Without them, the geyser simply wouldn’t gush.
In the same way, God’s faithfulness and mercy are constantly pouring into our lives,
constantly rushing over us,
new every morning,
new every day.
As the Message translation puts it – God’s loyal love couldn’t have run out.
God’s merciful love couldn’t have dried up…
It is ever-flowing.
It will not end.

And when life is heavy and too hard to take, the lamenter reminds us that God is still there.
Waiting for us.
Waiting for us to set down our load.
Waiting for us to turn around.
Waiting for us to stop harming one another.
Waiting for us to face the music and get real and honest about where we went wrong.

If we keep going a bit farther in the text, the lamenter tells us that we must search and examine our ways.
We should lift our hearts and our hands to God.
We were the ones who did wrong.
And when we call out for another way…
God comes to our side.
Always.
Consistently.
Faithfully.

New every morning is your love, great God of light,
And all day long you are working for good in the world.
Stir up in us desire to serve you,
To live peacefully with our neighbors,
And to devote each day to your Son,
Our Savior, Jesus Christ the Lord.