Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

⁴ Sing, all you who remain faithful!
    Pour out your hearts to the Eternal with praise and melodies;
    let grateful music fill the air and bless His name.
⁵ His wrath, you see, is fleeting,
    but His grace lasts a lifetime.
The deepest pains may linger through the night,
    but joy greets the soul with the smile of morning.

⁶ When things were quiet and life was easy, I said in arrogance,
    “Nothing can shake me.”
⁷ By Your grace, Eternal,
    I thought I was as strong as a mountain;
But when You left my side and hid away,
    I crumbled in fear.

⁸ O Eternal One, I called out to You;
    I pleaded for Your compassion and forgiveness:
⁹ “I’m no good to You dead! What benefits come from my rotting corpse?
    My body in the grave will not praise You.
No songs will rise up from the dust of my bones.
    From dust comes no proclamation of Your faithfulness.
¹⁰ Hear me, Eternal Lord—please help me,
    Eternal One—be merciful!”

¹¹ You did it: You turned my deepest pains into joyful dancing;
    You stripped off my dark clothing
    and covered me with joyful light.
¹² You have restored my honor. My heart is ready to explode, erupt in new songs!
    It’s impossible to keep quiet!
    Eternal One, my God, my Life-Giver, I will thank You forever.

2 Aaghh! How could the Lord surround Zion in a cloud of His anger
    as if He has cast the beauty of Israel down from heaven to earth?
Majestic Israel, God’s footstool,
    is debased by God’s anger in a moment of wrath.

² Buried beneath the dust,
    Jacob’s houses have been swallowed.
The Lord did this without mercy,
    shattering her fortresses.
God brought down to the ground daughter Judah,
    and defiled her kingdom and her leaders.

³ Cut down by God’s anger,
    the pride and strength of Israel falls;
He withdrew His right hand and stood back and allowed Israel’s enemies
    to wreak havoc in the land.
God has burned and consumed Jacob
    in an insatiable fire.

⁴ Deployed like an enemy, God stood poised against Judah—
    bow bent, right hand clinched—crashing down
On everything that we admired
    among daughter Zion’s tents.
The anger of the Lord whipped like flickering flames to reduce it to ashes.

⁵ Enemy of ours—our God—who would have thought?
    Yet the Lord chewed up Israel,
Swallowed its mighty palaces;
    He spit out fortresses and reduced them to dust.
God increased suffering and sorrow
    to a fever pitch in daughter Judah.

⁶ Felling His own dwelling like a garden hut,
    God destroyed His meeting place;
He did away with the sacred festivals and Sabbaths in Zion,
    and in fierce anger
He ignored and spurned our leaders—
    our king and priests alike.

⁷ God disdained the most sacred religious spots—
    His altar, His sanctuary, the centerpiece of our tradition.
The Lord gave our enemy full charge of the city,
    palaces and all.
And in the temple itself, the Eternal’s house,
    they hoot and holler as if it’s one of our sacred festivals.

⁸ Hesitating not for one moment,
    the Eternal measured across the city of daughter Zion;
Unrelenting, He was determined to destroy,
    to bring the city down with rampart and wall
To its knees in rubble and grief.

⁹ Into the earth, Jerusalem’s defenses, the bars and gates, are sunk—
    her leaders, both king and prince, scattered among surrounding nations,
Gone to foreign places.
    Now there is no law, no wise instruction;
The prophets receive no divine visions;
    who can see the Eternal’s way?

¹⁰ Jerusalem elders of daughter Zion are mute,
    dispensing no precious wisdom.
They sit on the ground distraught, clad in sackcloth;
    they hurl dust on their heads.
The young maidens of Jerusalem hang their heads
    down to the ground.

¹¹ Knowing the fate of Zion, my insides are in turmoil and pour out
    for Jerusalem, the devastation of the daughter of my people.
I can’t see because of the tears for the children in the streets—
    I can’t stop crying for infants and toddlers too weak to wail.
My people are destroyed.

¹² Little Children: Mother, grain and wine—where is it?

Like the wounded,
    collapsing in the city streets,
They pine and die
    on their mother’s breast.