This sermon was preached on Sunday, October 6 at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Wellesley, MA. The texts for this sermon were: Lamentations 1:1-6 , Psalm 137 , 2 Timothy 1:1-14 , and Luke 17:5-10 . Have you ever been sitting in church, enjoying the excellent music, snuggling up to your loved ones, maybe finally taking a deep breath for once, grateful for a time away from the constant barrage of stress and work and politics and panic…maybe you’ve been looking forward to a space of calm and quiet to reconnect to a God of love and deep joy…and then Boom. The first scripture passage is an angry tirade about a vengeful God from some Old Testament prophet. Or…Boom. The Psalm literally ends with a gleeful verse about slaughtering one’s enemy’s children. What do we do with that? Why do we read these verses? Why include the Book of Lamentations in our lectionary at all? The other day I was doing one of those mindless scroll-throughs on one of those time-wasting websites, chuck