Sermons on Lamentations
This month, we have focused on the themes of Advent—hope, peace, joy—and today we will be looking at love. It is difficult for us to understand the love that God has for us… the love that He demonstrated through the gift of His Son, but God’s love is a theme we find throughout Scripture. As we’ve considered these themes of Advent, we have focused on the writings of the Prophet Isaiah. These prophecies of the promised Messiah were written over 700 years before their fulfillment. We will look again to the prophet’s writings in a few minutes, but first I want us to focus on the writings of another of the Old Testament books of prophecy—the Book of Lamentations.
In our text today from Luke 5, we encounter a situation that I’m almost certain none of you have ever experienced. Sometimes it can be difficult for us to understand something if we do not have any personal experience that can connect us to that thing or event. In our passage today, we are introduced to a man who is suffering from a highly contagious skin disease—referred to as leprosy in Scripture. When we think about lepers—and the pain and suffering that they must have undergone as a result of their disease—we probably feel sorry for them. But that was not how they were treated in the first century A.D. Let’s look at how Jesus broke the cultural norms to reach out with compassion to the dregs of the society.