Lament for Lent: Grieving the Decline of Public Morality

Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, Rembrandt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, click to link to source

Lamentations 3:19-26, Romans 8:18-26

We’re living in a new church season; this Tuesday the annual Lenten study begins (as you’ve heard during the announcements). As I pondered the direction that we will travel with John Higgins’ leadership, I’ve been reminded how grief is a phenomenon with a wide scope. There are many circumstances that I grieve. I thought it might be helpful to complement the Lenten study series with a sermon series. Today, and in weeks to come, I plan to offer three or four in a series entitled “Lament for Lent.”

Today’s sermon got its start when I read an essay by David Brooks. After more than 20 years of regular political commentary for the New York Times, he wrote a farewell. In it, he said, “We have become a sadder, meaner and more pessimistic country …. The most grievous … wound has been the loss of a shared moral order … no broad agreement about what (is) true, beautiful and good. Without shared standards of right and wrong, it’s impossible … to maintain social cohesion and trust. Every healthy society rests on some shared conception of the sacred — sacred heroes, sacred texts, sacred ideals — and when that goes away, anxiety, atomization and a slow descent toward barbarism are the natural results.”[1]

Perhaps you feel it too. It might be during common daily routines, when we hear coarse language in a public place that, years ago, would have turned heads and provoked gasps, but now is so common we are almost numb to it. It might be when we’re on the road, and experience driving behaviors that a few decades back would have led to a police report about road rage, and now happens on your route every other day.  Perhaps you sense it in the way public figures speak to one another with sneers and jeers.

When we say we feel grief about such things, we must be careful. We should not be merely longing for “the good old days.” We should not be baptizing preference for any one party’s political platform as we knew and supported it during past decades. Biblical lament is not nostalgia; it’s grief about the state of the world measured against God’s holiness. It’s sorrow not because the culture has changed, but because our commitment to the public good has changed.  And where that commitment has eroded, something sacred has been diminished.

When we recognize and lament this change, when David Brooks writes this way, we are channeling grief in a manner consistent with biblical tradition. During the time of the Judges, it was said that “In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.” Isaiah prophesied against a moral inversion: ““Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness…who acquit the guilty for a bribe and deprive the innocent of their rights!” Paul, in his second letter to Timothy, puts his protegé on guard, saying, “… in the last days distressing times will come …. people will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant … lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God ….”

When we listen to expressions of grief like this, our weary hearts prompt us to ask, “Is there any hope? What is the good news?”  I selected a couple scripture readings to come alongside our grief because each author but does not believe that cynicism is the appropriate reply, or that grief is the final word. The writer of Lamentations (believed to be Jeremiah) expresses profound grief that turns toward hope.  When Paul writes the climactic central section of arguably his most important letter, notice what Paul does not say. He does not deny grief; he does not minimize the consequences of decay. He dares to name it: “creation was subjected to futility… enslaved to decay… groaning in labor pains.” Christian hope is not untested optimism. It is confidence forged in the fire of trials that the God who raised Jesus from the dead is not finished with this world.

The story is told of a farmer, who in the wake of a historic flood, contemplated what had been his livelihood. The rain had fallen without mercy. The river had swelled beyond its banks. Fields that had been planted in rows straight as ruled lines disappeared under a brown lake.

By the time the waters receded, the damage was staggering. Topsoil washed away. Fences twisted. Machinery ruined. Years of work spoiled.

A local reporter stopped by one evening as the farmer stood at the edge of the field, boots sunk deep. He asked the sort of question common to reporters in such moments: “What are you going to do now?”

The farmer looked out over the land. He could smell the mud, hear the silence from fields stripped of rustling foliage, feel the weight of people watching and waiting for his reaction.  Then he said simply, “I’ll plant again.”

Those of us who have known a farmer, and appreciate the spirit of a farming community, understand his resolve. He would plant again, not because future forecasts could guarantee better weather, not because the risk was gone. You could call it an act of faith, an echo of the countercultural narrative of scripture.

As time passed, he hitched repaired equipment to his tractor. He drove across fields churned and scarred by flooding. Into that damaged soil, he planted seed that would do its work unseen, entrusted to a future he could not control.

Days passed. One morning, almost imperceptible if you weren’t looking closely — green shoots. They were thin and vulnerable, but they were alive. Life pushed up through wounded soil; hope rose where ruin had been. For the farmer, the experience echoed the prophet Jeremiah, when he wrote, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning.” New mercies are not abstract ideas. They are like those green shoots — quiet, fragile, real.

Today, we look across the cultural landscape, and sometimes it feels like that farmer’s field, much of what had been good about it washed away. Into such a landscape, Paul’s words offer good news: Beneath the surface — unseen, unnoticed — the Spirit is at work. It’s difficult work, accompanied by groaning, laboring, birthing. It’s announced with the courageous conviction that God can coax life out of places we thought were ruined beyond repair.

Friends, as we enter this Lenten season of lament, letting God work through us may mean planting hope through prayer when you are weary. It may mean guarding your speech in a culture of sneers. It may mean refusing cynicism when everyone else expects it. May God give you the courage to plant hope in places that look ruined, the patience to trust what is growing unseen, and the faith to believe that, in Christ, the ruined fields of this world will one day break forth in green.

NOTES

[1] David Brooks, “Time to Say Goodbye,” New York Times, 30 January 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/opinion/david-brooks-leaving-columnist.html

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