Scripture: Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
I mentioned last week that I stole my sermon title from a book by a church consultant, Gil Rendle. This week the title is stolen, or at least is the same as, a Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Marilynn Robinson that I know at least a few of us have read. I don’t feel too bad about using it since we’re both really getting the title from the Bible.
As many of you know, there exists something called the lectionary that assigns certain Bible readings to Sundays and special occasions throughout the year, one from the Hebrew scriptures, one from the gospels, and one from the other writings of the New Testament. As many of you know, I don’t very often preach on those assigned readings, but I do very often check them out to see if there’s anything in the week’s assigned readings that particularly grabs me. This week there was. The Hebrew scripture reading listed for this week is the one you heard from Jeremiah, and it contains, as you heard, the verse where the question is asked: “Is there no balm in Gilead?” That was enough to cause me to linger over this reading a bit, in part because we so often sing the hymn, “There Is a Balm in Gilead”, in part maybe because of the novel I mentioned which I liked a lot, and in part because of what the scripture itself seems to be about—I say seems to be about because it’s always good to hold off thinking you really know what a scripture is about or what it has to say. I almost always find, when I spend any time with a scripture, that it ends up being about something a little different from what I thought at first it was about. Anyway, I decided to spend a little time this week with the lectionary scripture from Jeremiah.
First thought: the phrase that’s probably in most of our heads, because of the song, is the statement, the affirmation, “there is a balm in Gilead”. What’s in the Bible is a question: “Is there no balm in Gilead?” Isn’t this the opposite of the way it’s supposed to be, or at least the way we usually think about it? Aren’t we humans supposed to have the questions and the Bible is supposed to have the answers or the assurances? Not only that. It’s not just that the Bible happens to pose this in the form of a question. It’s a serious question, maybe even a desperate question, and it comes from God. Or at least Jeremiah channeling God—there is some question among Biblical scholars as to who is actually speaking here, but the point is essentially the same. Let’s assume the words reported are coming out of Jeremiah’s mouth. It’s a prophet’s job not to speak for himself but to speak for God, and so the words may be coming out of the mouth of Jeremiah but they are meant to be thought of as words coming out of the mind and heart of God. “Is there no balm in Gilead? God asks.” It’s a question that almost presumes that the answer is no. It’s almost as though God has already looked and couldn’t find any sign of balm in Gilead. I picture God searching the earth with her eyes. Is there no balm in Gilead?
Thinking about things this way turns everything around for me. As I was starting to say, we usually think of a balm in Gilead as being something that will soothe our stressed out psyches maybe, or something that will tend the wounds of a troubled world—don’t we usually think that way? I do. A balm is some gift that will bring some kind of healing wherever it is needed, and we can find a need for healing just about anywhere we turn, and Gilead then stands for wherever we are living our lives and for wherever in this world our prayers reach out to. We know we are in need of balm in the Gilead of our lives, and sometimes it seems we have failed so miserably in providing healing balm for one another, and sometimes it seems we are in such desperate need, that we turn to God, who we hope will be the source of the healing we need, since we can’t heal ourselves all by ourselves. And God is supposed to say, in this scenario, I will give you balm. I will send you healing. I am your balm, and I am present everywhere, in whatever your Gilead is for you, I am there. There is a balm in Gilead.
That’s a good message. It’s just not the one I am finding in this particular scripture. Here, as I say, God is asking the question. God has looked around in Gilead. God found war. God found terror. God found pride and dishonesty and all kinds of worshiping of things that were not worth worshiping, paying attention to things not worth paying attention to. But God found no peace, no reconciliation, no healing. Is there no balm in Gilead? God sees his people troubling each other, to be sure, but it is also that God is among those who are being troubled. Is there no balm in Gilead for anyone, for you or for me? God says.
Am I making this up? Listen. “For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt. I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.” These are the words of God. God is among those in need of balm. God is among those in need of comfort, of healing. God is not the fount of every blessing, not here. God is not the One who comes to dress our wounds and wipe away every tear. God is not the One who troubled people turn to for comfort and who has an unending supply of whatever it is that we need. It’s not that that’s a wrong view of God. It’s just that sometimes we are called to have more than one image of God and to hold different, even seemingly contradictory images of God in our spirit, at the same time. The image Jeremiah gives us is one of those different images. God turns to humanity and asks is there no balm Gilead? If there is and I have missed it, if there is any balm in Gilead, please send some of it my way. I need it. My heart is breaking. Thus saith the Lord.
Which means that so far as this scripture is concerned the question seems to be ours to answer, not God’s. It is God’s question to us, not our question to God. I suppose we could treat it more as a rhetorical question, as though God were talking to herself, wondering out loud if there was no balm in Gilead and being quite on the verge of deciding that there is not, and just being sad and angry about the whole scene and being ready and willing to execute some kind of punishment or at least wash his hands of the whole mess. That would be one way, a legitimate way to read the passage. I choose to read it differently. I choose to read it as though God really is sincerely asking the question…of us…and asks it waiting then for an answer. Is there no balm in Gilead? Tell me, my people. I honestly would like to know, and I’m waiting and watching and listening for your answer.
In the Bible, in Jeremiah, there is no answer, which in a way means to me that the question is left to echo for us through the ages. And others may have answered it in their own ways, but we know that an answer to God’s question did rise up from among the enslaved people of the United States and that it got expressed in the hymn we are so familiar with: “There is a balm in Gilead,” they said. And if anybody had a right to say it, they did. If anybody had the credibility to say it, they did, because no one had more reason to feel like there was no balm in Gilead than they did. In spite of all experiences to the contrary, in spite of all the harshness the world had to offer them and that could have led them to say there is precious little balm in Gilead, they nevertheless sang in notes that I believe are meant to be sung confidently, there is a balm in Gilead.
And here is my interpretation of how it was that they could say that with such assurance. It is not because they imagined God as some great physician in the sky who could open her bag and bring out medications and bandages to take care of the wounds of her people. It was not because God was a great and glorious, kind-hearted and generous dispenser of healing, handing out comfort to anyone who asked. The balm in Gilead was possible, the balm in Gilead was very real, precisely because God was the Broken-hearted One, the One who himself wasn’t even sure whether healing was possible for his people or where it would come from. But for the people it came precisely from this broken-hearted God, who was filled with dismay and who hurt because her people hurt, and who therefore they never doubted was present, right there with them, amid their own broken-hearted, right there making their journey with them. They knew what God himself, in this scripture, was not so sure of: There is a balm in Gilead.
In this view of things, the journey we make with God is just that, a mutual one. God is not the observer of our journeys, not the invisible director of our journeys, not the judge of our journeys, but One who travels with us. The journeys we make with God are mutual ones. And just so, in this view of things, any healing that takes place along the journey is also mutual, because God’s heart needs mending too, and although the presence of God is the source of balm for human beings, it is also possible for human beings to live in such way as to bring healing to the heart of God. In this sense too we are addressed by a God who asks, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” And we by the grace of God may answer in song but also of course in the living of our lives, for wherever human beings carry on their journey, in spite of all the world’s harshness, with dignity, and courage, and love, then of course there will be a balm in Gilead.
Just one more thought—and I’m not sure whether I’m on thought number 2 or more like thought 27 at this point—but there is one other thing I wanted to mention this morning that I don’t recall thinking of in connection with this passage before. It really deserves to be dwelled on a little more than I’m going to be able to do this morning but at least a mention before I close.
The Oxford Annotated Bible has a note about the phrase “balm in Gilead”. It says that this balm is a “resin from the Styrax tree, produced especially in the north Transjordan region of Gilead, widely used for medicinal purposes.” I know why I never paid much attention to this note before. It sounds like one of those factoids that doesn’t really give you any helpful information. Do we really care about Styrax trees and the fact that they grew mostly in the Transjordan region of the region of Gilead? So I may have seen this note before, many times before and just quickly decided I didn’t need to pay it any attention. For some reason this time I got a message from this footnote. The balm in Gilead does not refer to just anything that will provide a little comfort or relief. The balm in Gilead is not generic balm. It is something very specific. It is grown, I gather, specifically in Gilead and not so much in other places. It is, in other words, what Gilead had to offer the world. The balm in Gilead is not so much what people in Gilead needed. It is what they had to give. Or maybe it is both.
For some of us, maybe for all of us, the balm we need is to know what it is that we have to give, the gift that has been given to us specifically and that is particularly ours to give. And sometimes that particular something grows out of our very personal experiences of broken-heartedness and the ways we have been touched by the world’s broken-heartedness, and by God’s. Precisely those places where our own hearts may still need mending and where our own spirits may be in need of balm, precisely those places within us are the places that produce the balm we have to offer to others. I don’t know if I was supposed to get that thought out of a footnote about Styrax trees, but I did. And if we are blessed enough to know that there is balm within us already, balm that has been made out the sorrows and joys of the individual journey that it has been ours and our alone to make, then in that sense too we may say and sing our answer to God: “There is a balm in Gilead.” Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 23, 2007