It is not a pretty picture. You walk down Williams Avenue until you come to Chavis Avenue and there across the railroad tracks is Mistletoe Villa. It stands in a place that once was the center of all that was important to Henderson. Those days are gone. Two or three times people have come to try to fix her up and yet the struggle to go upstream against the current couldn't last. All her friends have left and deserted her. No one comes to parties there. One look at the proud imposing structure and one has a sense of loss and a feeling of sadness that something so grand is now abandoned.

Out of these words of the sad song from Lamentations comes the same kind of sadness. This is the song of Jerusalem. This is the music coming now out of the City of God. This was the great city, the city of the Temple. The glory of God dwelt in the city and yet look at her now. The foe has leveled her walls. They have violated the temple. Not only into the Holy of Holies have gentiles gone, but they have stolen the temple silver.

The battles of 587 B.C. have left their dead and maimed. Widows and orphans now fill the streets of Jerusalem like they do Saigon. The best of the best -- the best carpenters, the best thinkers, the best leaders, the best bankers, the best of the best have been rounded up and shipped off to exile, and so those trying to put the pieces together are the blind leading the blind. The enemies of God are now the masters of God's people.

We do not have to work too hard to feel the pain and suffering in these songs of Lamentation. We have been through enough wars and police actions and UN peace keeping to know the agonies of the battle. Hunger, refugees, death, humiliation, rapes, pillage, it is all there in these songs of sorrow from the people of Jerusalem. They look around and they do not try to pretend to themselves. There is no shutting of their eyes to the disgrace that surrounds them. There is no putting on a positive face, accentuating the positive, or "Be Happy" or even talking about making lemonade.

These songs tell it like it is. They see, describe and articulate the pain. The full torrent of her overwhelming grief flows unchecked through these poems.

Yet there is something terribly strange about these poems of sorrow and pain. You read over and over these five songs of woe and you will not find a single note of resentment. There is great grief and sorrow for all the humiliation and suffering they have endured, but there is not a single note of bitterness. Nowhere do you hear the songs trying to explain their side of it.

These songs move along the line from describing the horrible misery they are suffering. Misery brought on by all kinds of things, friends forsaking them, the humiliation before those to whom they once flaunted their power, the pollution of her sacred place, the exposure to the world of all her weaknesses. Yes there is sorrow and it is ours because we have forsaken the foundations upon which we were built. We forgot whose we were and in whom our strength and hope was found, and so we abandoned God. This is the consequence of our trusting in our own power. This misery is understood by the songs to be the punishment of sin. God has brought this upon us and unlike Job, we are receiving what we deserve because we have sinned.