I have to credit Bob Dylan with the title of this week's sermon, "The Times They Are A Changin'" based in Lamentations 1:1-6:

How lonely sits the city
that once was full of people!
How like a widow she has become,
she that was great among the nations!
She that was a princess among the provinces has become a vassal.
(Lamentations 1:1)
The author is looking back to "better days" ... the "good ol days" ... of how things used to be ... when Jerusalem and the temple were the center of the Israelite people and Hebrew life. Now in exile, lives have changed. Everything is different. Nothing is as it once was.

Sound familiar?

It should.

While the prophet Jeremiah has been attributed by some to the be author of Lamentations, composed during the Exilic Period of the 6th century BCE, it could just as easily be written by any modern and faithful church person who laments how different "church" and "faith" and "family" and ________ (fill in the blank) have become over the course of their lifetime. There is not a one of us - regardless of age or generation or experience - who does not, at some point, long for how things were - the familiar things, the comfortable things, the safe things; those things which seem permanent.

Indeed, the times they are a changin'. They always have. They always will. A wise person once acknowledged it's the only constant.

The question we must wrestle with is "How are we to respond?"

This is the question placed before us: How are we to respond?