Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 19, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Poor old Jeremiah. No one can ruin a party like Jeremiah. No one can bring you down like Jeremiah. If you’re feeling sort of blue or maybe even depressed, for heaven’s sake don’t read Jeremiah. He’ll make you feel worse not better. Jeremiah is called the gloomy prophet, and for good reason. With Jeremiah it’s all doom and gloom. Our passage from his book this morning begins “My joy is gone.” I didn’t know that Jeremiah ever had any joy to begin with, so I don’t quite see how it can be gone. Jeremiah isn’t exactly the kind of guy you’d want to go out and have a beer with. You’d be more likely to send him home to get back on his meds.

Now to be fair, Jeremiah had a lot to be gloomy about. He wrote just before, during, and after the final siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians around 586 BCE. That wasn’t a fun time to be writing, or to be living. Jerusalem, the holy city of God, the site of the temple, the place where Yahweh actually resided, and Judah, the kingdom that God had established supposedly forever, the kingdom of David and Solomon, were being ravaged by a massive imperial power from the east. The suffering during that final siege of Jerusalem was enormous. Archeologists still find physical evidence of it today, almost 2,600 years later. The Babylonian conquest of Judah and Jerusalem wasn’t just another war, not even just another lost battle. It was the end, the end of God’s temple, of God’s holy city, of God’s Hebrew people, or so it seemed. Jeremiah is the prophet who foretold the destruction, and he is the prophet who laments the loss. So it isn’t too surprising that he’s so gloomy. He’s not much fun, but I guess we can cut him some slack given the hard times he lived in.

The passage we heard just now is pretty typical Jeremiah. It is a lament over the suffering of the people of Jerusalem and Judah. The people cry out, but no relief comes. They are not saved. The prophet mourns and proclaims his despair. OK. That’s Jeremiah, but the passage contains a familiar image, and that’s what I want to focus on. Jeremiah says: “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?”

It may not be obvious to us, but Jeremiah intends the first question, is there no balm in Gilead, to be rhetorical. The answer is yes, there is a balm in Gilead, and everyone knows that there is. You see, Gilead is a region across the Jordan river to the northeast of Jerusalem between the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee. It was famous precisely for a balm that was produced there. That balm, a sort of ancient healing ointment, was made from the gum of certain trees that flourished in that region. Jeremiah’s question “Is there no balm in Gilead?” is not lamenting the absence of a balm; it is commenting on the presence of a balm that isn’t working. Yes, there is a balm in Gilead, Jeremiah could have said. As he does say, why then has the health of the people not been restored? It should be, for there is a balm available.

Now of course Jeremiah is using the balm of Gilead as a metaphor. He knows that no balm made from tree resin is going to repel the Babylonian army. What is he using the balm of Gilead as a metaphor for? We get the answer to that question, I think, if we read just a bit farther in his text than the lectionary passage we heard. In the next verses in Chapter 9 after the ones we just heard Jeremiah says of the people for whom he is lamenting “They are all adulterers, a band of traitors….They have grown strong in the land for falsehood, and not for truth; for they proceed from evil to evil, and they do not know me, says the LORD.” Jer. 9:2-3 That, it seems, is Jeremiah’s answer to the question of why whatever it is that the balm in Gilead is a metaphor for isn’t working. The balm in Gilead isn’t working because the people do evil acts and do not know the LORD their God. The balm in Gilead then is the people’s knowledge of God and of God’s ways. That balm is at hand. The people have available to them God’s law and the message of God’s prophets. They have available to them what they need to prosper, but they aren’t using it. They turn from the LORD their God to the ways of evil and idolatry. That, Jeremiah is saying, is why the people suffer. He was convinced, as all the great Hebrew prophets were convinced that if the people had not strayed from the ways of God the calamities that they were experiencing would not have happened.

Now, I’m not so sure of that. I doubt that the Babylonians much cared if the Judeans were being faithful to Yahweh. Babylon was just doing what empires do, expanding and using their military might to impose their will on others. Still, I think that there is an important lesson for us here. Jeremiah’s point is that, in his view, the people of Jerusalem and Judah had available to them all they needed for health. God had given them what they needed. The problem wasn’t that there was no balm in Gilead, the problem was that they weren’t using it. They were ignoring, or rejecting, what God had told them. They were spurning what God had given them. That’s why they suffered. The same thing is often true of us.

Now, we’re Christians not ancient Hebrews. That means mostly that we look for what God has given us in a different place than the ancient Hebrews did. They looked to the law of Moses. We look to Jesus Christ. For us Jesus Christ is the Balm in Gilead. For us God has given us all we need for health in Jesus Christ, in his teachings and in his grace. In Christ Jesus God has given us an unfailing source of everything our souls need to thrive no matter what comes our way. In Christ Jesus God has given us the fullest demonstration that our human minds can comprehend of God’s unshakable solidarity with us in everything that happens, in the good and more importantly in the bad. In that demonstration is everything we need for spiritual health.

So why are our spirits not healthy? We, so many of us, so often live in fear. We fear the future. We fear loss of what we have. We fear illness. We fear death. Or we, so many of us, live in despair. We lose hope for the future. We lose hope for a better, brighter future. We see around us only evil, only suffering, only injustice, and we lose hope that things could be better. Why is the spirit of our nation not healthy? Why do we resort so quickly to violence to solve our problems? Why do we spend so much of our treasure on military forces and not do a better job of caring for the poor, the needy, and the vulnerable? Why do we care more about our own bank accounts than we do about the welfare of God’s people who are in need?

There is a balm in Gilead. We have all we need to solve these problems. In Christ Jesus we know that we need not fear, for in him God is always with us, holding us up and leading us forward, come what may. Nothing can harm us. Not really. That doesn’t mean that bad things won’t happen. It doesn’t mean that we won’t die. It means that no matter what happens we are safe because we are with God. In Christ Jesus we know that we need not despair. We can live in hope because we can trust in God. That doesn’t mean that the Kingdom of God is going to break out on earth overnight. It hasn’t yet, and I don’t expect it to tonight. It means that we can trust God in the future as we trust God in the present. We can have faith in God for the future as we have faith in God for today. In Christ Jesus we know that violence is not the way. In Christ Jesus we know that justice is the way. In Christ Jesus we have all we need to be well.

But we are not well. There is a balm in Gilead, but the health of God’s poor people has not been restored. Why? Because we don’t apply the balm. Because we ignore what we know in Christ Jesus. Because we trust in the ways of the world, not in the ways of God. That’s what the people in Jeremiah’s time and place did. They traded the truth for falsehood. They turned away from God. I don’t think that’s why they were conquered by the Babylonians like Jeremiah thought, but quite apart from any geopolitical consequences it meant that there was a nation that was spiritually ill. It means that today too. It meant that individuals were spiritually ill. It means that today too.

There is a balm in Gilead, so why has the health of my poor people not been restored? Because we don’t use the balm. So let’s use the balm. Let’s smear it all over our bodies. Let’s breath in its aromas. Let’s bask in its warmth. Let’s turn back to the ways of God made known to us in Christ Jesus. Let us turn back to God, apply the balm, and be well. Amen.