THERE IS A BALM!

(The follwing is an abridged version of the sermon preached at Epworth Chapel, Baltimore on 2/12/12,and at Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, DC on 2/17/12)


“Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no healing there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?“ (Jeremiah 8:21-22)


The writer of the book of Jeremiah asks the community of the faith of his day these provocative questions amidst their exile in a strange city. Here the Israelites found themselves in Babylon – alienated from their land, alienated from their God, and alienated – many of them - from their loved ones.

We can imagine that the Israelites here experienced what some philosophers have come to refer to as a certain nihilism – where a certain nothingness, meaninglessness, lovelessness, and hopelessness comes to define the existence of a people. It is against a backdrop such as this that Jeremiah poses these questions.

These were the same times and conditions that would lead the psalmist to write other familiar words of a people in exile –
“By the rivers of Babylon – there we sat and we wept when we remembered Zion. And our captors asked us to sing to them the songs of Zion… How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

Perhaps the context in which Jeremiah wrote is not much unlike that of our days. In many ways hope today seems fleeting - with political unrest, economic uncertainty, social disarray, and family distress.

I would suggest that Jeremiah’s questions here offer us today an important backdrop for thinking about where we are as communities, the church, and as an institution - and also where we’ve been and where we may be going.

Two weeks ago, I was honored to have been invited to give a workshop to a group of young, emerging preachers in Baltimore. There they shared their challenges, and dreams and hopes for the church of today and tomorrow. And despite the challenges that we all acknowledged, I left that night with a sense of hopefulness for the church, as I sense that these young, gifted preachers will continue to be instruments of hope – conduits of hope – for church today and into the future.

Jeremiah poses the questions:
“Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?”

The region of Gilead was known for producing a healing balm. This balm was known for its medicinal qualities. When people where hurting, they would seek out the balm from Gilead, for it was like no other in its ability to facilitate healing. The balm from Gilead was considered to be a miracle drug, and if it could not heal one’s wounds…there was perhaps nothing that could.

Is there no balm? For me this conjures images of visiting my Grandmother in Lynchburg, Virginia as a child. When we became ill and were hurting, my grandmother would often concoct a home remedy – what she called liniment – a balm – to soothe our hurts and pains. She would combine various ingredients as only she knew how to do, and she would rub the balm on the places we were hurting, and somehow the balm and my grandmother’s tender, loving care would make everything all-right.

In light of declines across much of the church over the past 40 years, one of the church’s primary theological tasks to be self-critical as it pertains to our role in addressing issues such as the proliferation of the prosperity gospel, the lack of activism in many circles, and the inability or unwillingness of the churches today to speak prophetically on matters of contemporary concern such as the war in Afghanistan, corporate greed, the widening gap between the rich and the poor in America and around the world, the ongoing proliferation of racial bigotry, and the marginalization of others in our society, along with the generally violent and misogynous nature of hip hop and other forms of popular culture.

Furthermore, it is the churches’ – and indeed the theological schools’ - task to articulate a framework for thinking and speaking about God amidst the apparent hopelessness around us. A question that I believe we must continue to ask is one posed by Howard Thurman in his seminal work, Jesus and the Disinherited. Thurman asked, “What does the religion of Jesus have to say to people who have their back against the wall?” In other words, how does Christianity today offer hope to the disinherited among us – the poor, the voiceless, the violated, and the oppressed? We are to be conduits – instruments of hope.

What is this hope of which we speak? In one of his later sermons, "The Meaning of Hope," Martin Luther King, Jr. defined hope as that quality which is "necessary for life."

"The hopeless individual is the dead individual." In King's view hope had a transformative quality that keeps human beings "alive" both spiritually and psychologically. Hope, therefore, is "one of the basic structures of an adequate life."

Hope helps us to look ahead with eyes of faith. Hope helps us to see the future with hearts of anticipation. Hope is the refusal to give up “despite overwhelming odds.”

In this month when we celebrate, honor and give thanks to God for those African Americans who were bruised over history by the atrocities of the Middle Passage slavery, and jim and jane crow, we are reminded that Martin Luther King, pointed out that the nature of the hope that many in the church have found in the resurrected Christ is imbedded in the questions posed by the prophet Jeremiah: “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no healing in the land?” (Jeremiah 8:22)

King intimated that the miracle of faith is that many were able to convert the question marks of the prophet’s lament, into exclamation points as they affirmed their faith and hope in the living and life-giving God. And so they could sing the Negro spiritual with hope:
There is a balm in Gilead,
to make the wounded whole
There is a balm in Gilead,
To heal the sin-sick soul
Sometimes I feel discouraged
And think my work’s in vain
And then the Holy Spirit
Revives my soul again!