Matthew Patrick Lavelle January 17, 2021 PM

At Sunnyside, he's been to our house a number of times at church functions, at church picnics, along with his daughter Erin. We are here to receive comfort. We are here to be reminded of the hope of eternal life that we have in our Savior Jesus Christ.

So, pray with me. Father, we thank You and praise You for Your great love and mercy, Your mercy, Your grace, Your long-suffering, rebounding, steadfast love, and faithfulness, and Your forgiveness, and that You are the God of all comfort.

I pray, Father, that You reach down and comfort each of us here today, especially the closer members of the family. Touch their hearts. Speak tenderly to them. May they know Your loving presence and assuage their grief.

We thank You for Matt, for the life that he had here on Earth, that we got to know him, to be with him, and we will miss him. We thank You and praise You for Your Son, the Lord Jesus, who gave His life that we might have life.

He rose again that we might know that we can also be resurrected to newness of life. And so, in Jesus' name I pray, amen. I would like to read from the Bible, the Word of God, Psalm number 103, verses 15 through 22.

As for man, his days are like grass. He flourishes like a flower of the field, for the wind passes over it and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting.

On those who fear Him and His righteousness to children's children, to those who keep His covenant and remember to do His commandments. The Lord has established His throne in the heavens and His kingdom rules over all.

Bless the Lord, O you His angels, you mighty ones who do His word, obeying the voice of His word. Bless the Lord, all His hosts, His ministers who do His will. Bless the Lord, all His works, in all places of His dominion.

Bless the Lord, O my soul.

We're going to sing together a hymn entitled, Morning Has Broken. It may very well be a familiar tune to many of you and the words are in your folder. So if you would sing along and reflect upon the comfort of the words.

A 1991 Mustang High School graduate passed away unexpectedly on January 12, 2021 at St. Anthony's Hospital in Oklahoma City. He was preceded in death by his parents, Patrick and Marsha Lavelle. He is survived by his three older sisters, Lisa Lavelle, Wendy Lavelle, Jamie Kozlowski, his daughter Erin Lavelle and nephew Raymond Wilkerson.

Matt was able to spend time with Marsha and Dennis Leeper this past year and appreciated the time he had with them. He worked for OneCore Health for over 16 years as a security guard and found his job rewarding and enjoyed serving others in that capacity.

Matt was a kind, uncomplicated guy and worked very hard every day to find joy in life after his extended illness in 2019. He was hopeful about his future and was looking forward to traveling and spending more time with his family.

He loved all God's creatures and became an avid bird watcher while recovering at home for the past year. He would not want us to be angry about his death, but rather remember him fondly and be happy we were able to spend a lot of time together this past year.

Pictures and memories with all of us, very kind of you. I want to speak with you this afternoon about hope amid grief. There is a slim volume of poetry in the Bible that we call Lamentations. Five poems written by a prophet by the name of Jeremiah who went through a kind of event in history that today we would consider catastrophic and something that would leave a person suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder for the rest of their lives.

He went through the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC and he, in his coping with what he saw and what happened to his world, he wrote these five poems. And they are constructed in such a way that in the storm of sorrow, at the very eye of the storm, there is a bright hope.

And that's what I want to draw our attention to this afternoon, hope amid grief. We hear what's going on in Jeremiah's heart as the loss that he experienced was brutal, the destruction he saw was vast, the pain he felt was deep.

His countrymen and his culture, his career as a spokesperson for God amongst his people and his comfort have all been essentially lost. And so we hear his pain and we can relate to his pain as he writes these words.

Remember, remember my affliction and my wandering, the wormwood and bitterness. Surely my soul remembers and is bowed down within me. What is he asking? He's asking that his affliction, he's asking that his grief, his disorientation, his wandering in that grief, the bitter twisting of his inner man in his sorrow, he's asking that his agony be remembered, that somebody remember this.

And I believe that is the visceral response of any one of us when it comes to loss. How can it be that our sails are in shreds, our hull scorched, and our ship listing, while others, while others go sailing merrily along around us?

Won't anybody remember? Jeremiah is asking that his lamentation be remembered, that there be some significance to his sorrow. And sorrow is his constant and unwanted companion. Even if nobody else remembers, he says, my soul remembers.

My soul remembers. His sorrow he carries around like the trappings of grief and bitterness, much like the debris of a homeless man, scooting his misery from one corner to the next. It is right for those made in the image of God to mourn, to grieve the loss of life.

And we have always been resilient in this. No matter how many times it has beaten into us that we are meaningless, mutated chemical bags of meat animated by electricity, and that our most personal thoughts are nothing but brain fizz, we nonetheless know there's more to us than that.

And we treasure life, and we ought to. And we desire right relationships, and we ought to. For we're made in the image of God. And much of the sorrow that we bear in our lives has to do with the loss of that which is good, that which is good according to God's design.

We relate to Jeremiah's grief. So what hope did he have in his grief? What hope may we have in our grief? In the loss of life, we should look to the giver of life. Jeremiah continues in chapter 3 of Lamentations in verse 21.

He says, This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope. What does he recall? The Lord's lovingkindnesses indeed never cease, for his compassions never fail. The first thing he remembers is the unfailing compassion of God.

The word lovingkindness is also translated as steadfast love, faithful love, mercies. The Hebrew word is the middle name of my eldest, Chesed. It's the way that God treats us based on who he is and not whether we deserve it.

It's grace. And Jeremiah remembers the grace of God. He remembers the lovingkindness of God. And here he begins to find hope in his grief, and I believe we should do the same. When our souls are cast down within us, we must consider the grace of God and the mercy of God, the lovingkindness of God and the compassion of God.

And God has shown this most clearly in the giving of his son, Jesus Christ. It is true, historically, that the judgment upon Jerusalem was richly deserved. And it is true that sorrow and suffering and death are the natural outworking of the curse upon this world due to sin.

And yet, God gives us his son, Jesus Christ. And he bears the curse, and he receives our judgment. And not only to die for us, but to be raised from the dead for our eternal life. This is what Jesus said to a sister who was mourning the death of her brother.

This is what Jesus said to her. I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even if he dies. And everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Then he asks his question, do you believe this?

And she said to him, yes, Lord. I believe that you are the Christ, the son of God, even he who comes into the world. There's hope amid grief when we think of the unfailing compassion of God revealed in Jesus.

And also thinking of his unending faithfulness. Jeremiah continues in his hope amid grief when he also considers that these loving kindnesses and compassions, they are new every morning, he says. They are new every morning.

And then he says, great is your faithfulness. New every morning. The Hebrew words, grace and mercy. Grace and mercy, they are new every morning. They never fail. They're always enduring. When we think of things that are always enduring, something that's been around a very, very long time, we think of something that is old and worn and not entirely disappeared.

But that's not what is in view here. He says they are new every morning. Grace and mercy, the grace and mercy of God, are as new as the sun is new every morning. They are as fresh as the morning. Like the song that we sang earlier, that God's grace and mercy are ever rising upon the face of this needy planet.

And that kind of consistency shows us how faithful God is. So every day you wake up, tomorrow when you get up out of bed and begin to see the morning light, you can rightly say to yourself, God's grace and mercy rise yet again.

Because every time you wake to another day, you experience an existence you have not earned, you don't deserve, you have not made for yourself. It is something that God gives. We breathe breath we do not deserve.

Every time we wake up, God has brought us up out of the depths of sleep, which is a picture of death. But he expresses his goodness to us every morning. And we can have hope in our grief when we trust and we worship God, whose grace and mercy are ever rising.

Ever rising. And then he says, great is your faithfulness. He says to God, great is your faithfulness. Great means abundant. Abundant. Can't come to the end of it. There may not be an abundance of finances or health or stability in our lives.

In different seasons of our lives. But God's faithfulness is abundant. And what does it mean that God is faithful? It means that he has perfect integrity. Integrity is simply this, that what we think and what we say and what we do all agree.

That what we think and what we say and what we do all agree. And this is the way it is with God all the time. That he has made his promises and he will never fail to keep them. Of course, it is up to us to not fail to learn what those are.

And to live in their light. He always keeps his promises. We don't always pay attention to what they are. But if we want hope amid our grief, let's learn what those promises are and live in their light.

Hope amid grief also because of this. The Lord is my portion, he says. The Lord is my portion, verse 24. The Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore I have hope in him. Now, Jeremiah has just lost everything.

He's lost his house. He lost his city. He lost his land that he just bought. He lost his freedom. He's now enslaved to a foreign nation. He lost his culture in all one fell swoop. Has Jeremiah lost everything?

It is unclear if Jeremiah has lost anything at all. Because he says the Lord is my portion. The word portion means an inheritance. It means a reward. Jeremiah does not look to land or riches. He looks to the Lord as his portion.

So Jerusalem may be in flames. The temple in ruins. The houses all rubble and the land stripped bare. But the Lord is the substance and reward of his people. So it is if we have the Lord, it is difficult to maintain that we can lose at all.

Which again is hope amid grief. Notice the direction he has. The Lord is my portion, therefore I have hope in him. Hope is directional. Hope indicates movement. Hope is part of the triad of Christian virtues.

Now remain these three. Faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love. Like a river, these three come together for a living spiritual experience. Faith is like the banks of a river. That which gives the river its shape, its definition.

Love is like the water itself, which fills the river. And of course, who can think of a river without thinking about water? And thus love is the most important of all. And yet hope is that gravitational incline which creates the movement.

Faith and love without hope is nothing more than a ditch. Hope creates the motion. Hope is the direction. We're moving in a direction when we have hope. What direction is Jeremiah heading? His faith is in the Lord.

He loves the Lord. He moves toward the Lord. There is no retirement package for Jeremiah to aim towards. There is no promotion or bonus toward which he expends his life. All the temporal fixtures of his life have gone up in flames or been cut down by the sword.

But he still has hope. He still has direction. He's banked everything upon the Lord, and so he's going that way. So for hope amid grief, we have to ask, what direction are we heading? What direction are you heading?

Are you aiming toward God? In Christ, we find all of God's fullness for us. Paul prayed this for the saints. He prayed that you may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up with all the fullness of God.

A little bit longer way of saying, may the Lord be your portion. And the last bit of the hope amid grief, the very last bit, is just this unquestionable good. Jeremiah concludes this bright center of the storm of sorrow by saying this.

The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the person who seeks him. It is good that he waits silently for the salvation of the Lord.

The Lord is good.

The Lord is good to those who wait for him. How do we know that the Lord is good? When we wait for him. Waiting is hard. Waiting is difficult. It means that it's not my timing, it's somebody else's timing.

And that always, therefore, calls for an act of faith to put us in a position of trusting and depending on somebody else. When we have to wait, it means somebody else's timing is primary. But this gives us hope.

It gives us direction amid grief when we wait for the Lord's good. But that's the attitude of trust. There's more than that. There's seeking the Lord. The Lord is good for those who wait for him, to the person who seeks him.

Now, that's praying. Many times, we may feel that the prayer is inadequate. Perhaps a fantasy. Can't get past the ceiling. Many expressions. And yet, if we're waiting for the Lord, and we seek the Lord in this position of faith, we must trust that the Lord hears.

And this is attended with the good of silent waiting. It is good that he waits silently for the salvation of the Lord. This silent waiting is good, not in the sense that someone stops praying, for obviously they're seeking.

Not in the sense that someone stops grieving and crying, for that's what Jeremiah has been doing. The silent waiting is one in which, through the seeking and waiting for the Lord, that the person who is hoping in the Lord is also being silent, so as to receive the answer from the Lord, to not throw an accusation against the Lord, but to hear what the Lord actually has to say.

Those who are made in the image of God are like the pot that the potter has made. We really don't have any right to be upset with the potter. After all, we're just the clay. This puts us in the position of hope.

And hope amid grief is available for those who will trust in the Lord. And he is compassionate, and he is merciful, and he is good, and he is sovereign. And I pray that this hope, by God's grace, will fill your life.

Let's pray. Father, we thank you for Matthew Lavelle. We thank you for the good that you accomplished through his life. We thank you for the memories that his family hold dear. We thank you for the gifts that he gave throughout his life that are now treasured in the possession of his family.

We thank you for his words of kindness that they recall. We thank you for the time that he spent with the people around him. We thank you for this moment, this opportunity today to come together and to recognize what a sacred and precious gift life is.

And I pray for his family, that you would go with them, that your words would be in their minds, and that they would find comfort in you through your Son. It is in the name of Jesus Christ that we pray these things.

Amen.

We are dismissed.