Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
You who are my Comforter in sorrow,
my heart is faint within me.
Listen to the cry of my people
from a land far away:
“Is the Lord not in Zion?
Is her King no longer there?”
“Why have they aroused my anger with their images,
with their worthless foreign idols?”
“The harvest is past,
the summer has ended,
and we are not saved.”
Since my people are crushed, I am crushed;
I mourn, and horror grips me.
Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
Why then is there no healing
for the wound of my people?
Oh, that my head were a spring of water
and my eyes a fountain of tears!
I would weep day and night
for the slain of my people.
There at the center of today’s text, is this aching question: “Is there no balm in Gilead?” Is there nothing – no doctor, no deliverer, nothing – that will change things? Jeremiah is known as the weeping prophet. He’s sad. It’s like the book of Jeremiah was written on wadded up tissues. To understand Jeremiah’s tears, you have to understand when he lived. It was a time – maybe not unlike our own – when the world was being reshaped at a pace faster than anyone could comprehend. The Assyrians rose and fell in just 50 years. Then, Babylonian empire came out of nowhere and destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in 587 BC, then they deported all the Israelites, forcing them to leave the Promised Land. They lost their heart and their home all at once, and the shame of it was how upheaval punishes the downtrodden most.
Jeremiah calls himself a fountain of tears. I remember going to New York and seeing the monument to the 9-11 attacks. All the people lost there and the shadow of loss and upheaval over decades. Jeremiah is ground zero.
I am willing to bet there are people here today who have asked Jeremiah’s question too.
Is there no balm, book, mindset, yoga pose, no recipe that will fix things for me? For my loved one? For the intractable problems of this world that seem to hurt the poorest of the poor most? Is there no formula to expedite healing, no plan to follow, no expert here to speed the recovery?
Or maybe people are waiting on you to change. Maybe they’ve been upfront about it or dropped tons of hints, passive aggressively. I suspect that hasn’t helped. This week I saw a meme that said: The first rule of passive aggressive club is… you know what, never mind. It’s fine!
What I want to share with you today is this: This yearning for relief is a specific spiritual place. It is the wilderness of the heart. Sometimes it is desert dry with unanswered questions and clocks that move slow. Other times, it’s a flood up your neck. Waves of asking — how long and hearing — not yet. Jesus describes this spiritual place as a breathless hunt for a wayward sheep. I call this spiritual place of yearning the meantime, because it can be so mean. We don’t like it but there is something healing about knowing we aren’t the only people to face it.
But the quick answer to Jeremiah’s question was yes, there is always balm in Gilead. Gilead is a region East of the Jordan River known for this incredible tree resin that treated wounds, a healing balm. It was a region full of healers who knew how to apply it. And the theological answer to Jeremiah’s question is yes, relief does come, but it might be slower and in smaller doses than we prefer. By chapter 30 and beyond, Jeremiah sounds different. He’s heard from God. “You will seek me and find me when you search with all your heart.” And later, “for I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord, “plans for good and not for harm, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah becomes the one who whispers about a new covenant. And one day, Jesus quotes Jeremiah, as he lifts a cup of salvation during
communion.
On this Reign of Christ Sunday, we come to practice our citizenship under a different kind of ruler who leads with a different sense of time than we do. In times like these, I rely on a prayer by a man named Teilhard de Chardin, Trust in the slow work of God. Trust in the slow work of God.
Everyone knows the story of how the Israelites crossed the Red Sea to escape slavery. But I learned this week from a Rabbi Holzman in Reston that according to the Jewish tradition, the Israelites reached the water’s edge and hesitated. They were stuck. They did not want to plow into the waters even though God promised healing, and they couldn’t go back. A leader named Nachshon went first into the waters. He waded into the tide. Water up to his waist. Water up to his chest, then his shoulders. At the very last moment, when his water reached his nostrils, that was when the Red Sea parted and people crossed over. Not quite the Footprints in the Sand poem I am looking for when I want relief, but a perfect description of how risky the slow work of God can feel.
In 12-step recovery programs, people often say “It takes what it takes.” Who knows when the lightbulb arrived or how it turned on but so many people in recovery describe how the way does brighten and you move forward. What is so hard is that we can’t turn on the lightbulb for anyone else.
In my family, I am not famous for my patience. Some people leave a light on for others. Well, I tended to come on strong like a flood light at the first hint of movement. I so strongly want relief for people. I want to protect them from any more tears, so I used to pounce and get my help all over them. It’s how I am wired. But I have been learning to release them. To show up but not show them up. Because, if I am honest, the times when I saw God the clearest, it was probably through tears. Times when I was the most scared, those times were the most sacred, because there I learned what faith feels like applied on the inside. I guess like Jeremiah those were the times I heard from God. Probably because I was actually listening, searching with all my heart.
Anne Lamott said “There is almost nothing outside you that will help in any kind of lasting way, unless you are waiting for a donor organ… You can’t buy, achieve, or date serenity. Peace of mind is an inside job, unrelated to fame, fortune or whether your partner loves you.
Horribly, what this means is that it is also an inside job for the few people you love most
desperately in the world. We cannot arrange lasting safety or happiness for our most beloved people. They have to find their own ways, their own answers.” Its hard to admit but its true. If it is someone else’s problem, you probably don’t have the solution.
Stephen Ministers here know that. But this week, I noticed how healing it was when the
church was able to be with people in their times of suffering. To offer a tissue or a cookie or a space to weep. To sit by their side. To let them say what hurt. And to let them share what felt like balm to them.
This week, I asked a bunch of people what is a balm for them in hard times… I heard all kinds of surprising and beautiful things. People like to sit near animals, to cuddle up in blankets, and take baths. They like chocolate and shorelines and gazing at the light as it shines through the leaves and serving other people. They stare into the stars in the night sky and put on clean sheets and bake and take long solo drives where they can control the radio or lose themselves in a book.
And of course, there’s music, silence, hugs, breaths, and other people who let you be who you need to be. Praying Psalm 23…or Psalm 121… What struck me in that was … There actually are so many balms in Gilead, it turns out. They just look more basic than we think they should.
Father Greg Boyle is a priest who works with gang members in L.A. When he started, he confesses to being totally out of whack. He’d ride his bike into the projects of LA at night, trying to put out all the fires. (“Put that Uzi down,” “Now are you sure you want to shoot that guy?”) He said he felt like the guy on Ed Sullivan spinning all those plates, frantic to keep others from self-destructing. “It was crazy making,” he said, and he came close to the sun, the immolation that comes from burning out completely in the delusion of ‘saving’ people.”
So for a while he took a break. He took a big step back. He rested in the solace of what he loved and didn’t have to fix. Quiet, the Scriptures, food. He took comfort in an apocryphal story about Pope John XXII. Apparently, every night this pope would pray, “I’ve done everything I can for your church. But it’s your church, and I am going to bed.”
And when he returned to ministry with balm for his heart and boundaries for his own
survival, he found he was better able to walk beside people, not rushing ahead of where they were willing to go on their own. He mentioned a man named Pedro, who had been lost, like that sheep, like that coin, lost in rage and submerged in alcoholism. Pedro was drowning in grief after losing his brother to suicide. Pedro politely said no to rehab, over and over and over and over and over again, until one day, for some reason, he didn’t. One day, a lightbulb went on. One day, Pedro made a decision to save the only life he could, his own.
Pedro said in the car one day, “I had this dream, G, and you were in it.” In the dream, they’re in this big room, just the two of them. There are no lights, no illuminated exit signs, so light creeping in from under the doors. No windows. No light. He seems to know that Father Greg was there. In the dream, Father Greg retrieves a flashlight and shines it on the light switch, steady and unwavering. In the dream Pedro knows he is the only one who can turn this light switch on. He gets to the switch, takes a deep breath, and flips it on. And then, the room is flooded with light.
Pedro is sobbing by this point describing the dream. And his speaks in a voice of astonishment and clarity, “And the light… is better… than the darkness.” He said it like he didn’t know that before. Then he continued, “I guess my brother just never found the light switch.”
Father Boyle writes, having flashlights and occasionally knowing where to aim them has to be enough for us. 1 He admits that fortunately, fortunately, none of us can save anybody. That is the role of the true medico, Jesus Christ, the light of the world. The rest of us are fumbling for.
With many thanks to Father Greg Boyle and his book, Tattoos on the Heart grace and flashlights. We aim the light we know as best as we can. And at other times, someone
else aims for us. And together, we wait and hope and stagger into the savior’s arms, the light of each tomorrow.
Amen