“So let us not fear our anger… or our tears… or our secrets. Let us wear them all as badges of honor. Because only then…
Only when we are able to look at the world through tears and wail the lament that any decent feeling person would cry looking at how things are today
‘Is there no balm in Gilead?’
Only when we are able to share our secrets and cry our laments will we be able to hear and sing that song of healing, that song of power, that song of love, that song of hope that love will always, always, always be greater than fear.
Sermon by Mike Kinman at All Saints Church, Pasadena, on Celebration of Ministries Sunday, September 22, 2019.
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“Is there no balm in Gilead?”
Say that with me.
“Is there no balm in Gilead?”
You know, we almost never read that line the way Jeremiah must have said it.
First of all, we not used to it being the question but the answer. Instead of “Is there no balm in Gilead?” we are used to the reply:
Of course, there is a balm in Gilead! In fact, we’ve got a song about it! “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.”
So, first off, we need to say it like how Jeremiah said it. Can we do that? Can we say it like it’s a question? You know, kind of raise our voices a little at the end:
Together:
“Is there no balm in Gilead?”
Great. That’s better. But here’s the other thing.
This isn’t a question like Jeremiah asking us: “Do you want fries with that?”
Jeremiah isn’t chatting it up with his sister saying, “You know, I was down in Gilead the other day and I got this wicked sunburn and I couldn’t find a cream for it anywhere. I mean, seriously, is there no balm in Gilead?”
No. “Is there no balm in Gilead?” is a lament, and a lament comes from deep, deep inside. A lament is when your very heart and soul are crying out.
When a mother cries holding the body of her child shot through before he could see his seventh birthday – that’s lament.
When a child sitting in a cage at the border is crying for the family she may never see again – that’s lament.
A lament is what we cry when the doctor says, “It’s cancer.”
A lament is the cry that comes the first time we crawl into bed after the funeral and his scent is still on the pillow on the now empty side of the bed.
When we cry because someone we love more than life itself is suffering and we are powerless to ease their pain – that’s lament.
When evil keeps triumphing over good and nobody seems to notice or care. When we scream because the distance between how things are and how they should be is so great, we cannot see it ever, ever being breached – that is lament.
A lament is what our heart cries when we look our deepest fear full in the face and know that we are walking through that valley of the shadow of death and do not know if either God’s rod or staff are anywhere around to comfort us.
When Jeremiah says, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” it is not just a question, it is a lament, a deep, wailing cry. And lament is not weakness, it is strength. Lament is the naming of the unbearable truth that must be spoken if healing and transformation is ever to occur.
When the son of a seminary professor of mine, Nick Wolterstorff, fell to his death while mountain climbing, Nick wrote a book and he called it Lament for a Son, because that was the depth of his pain. And he wrote:
“I shall look at the world through tears. Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not see.”
Jeremiah is looking at the world through tears. And if we are to see the things he sees, the things that dry-eyed we cannot see, that is how we have to allow ourselves to be.
So, take a moment, and feel it.
What is your lament?
What is the deep cry of fear, of pain, of injustice, of hopelessness that is wanting to burst forth from your soul? Maybe it’s the secret you wrote on that card we gave you last week. Alice Walker writes “healing begins where the wound was made” so if we want to hear that sweet, healing song of comfort, first we have to go to the wound and let it breathe, and shout, and wail.
We have to lament.
So, take a moment and feel it. Are you there? Can you feel it?
Now… let’s cry Jeremiah’s lament together.
“Is there no balm in Gilead?”
Another time, louder. It’s OK to shout and cry in church. It’s GOOD to shout and cry in church:
“Is there no balm in Gilead?”
Really feel it, really wail it
“Is there no balm in Gilead?”
That’s it. That’s the way it sounded from Jeremiah’s lips. Deep. Raw. And now we can ask: “Why?”
Why was Jeremiah wailing? And we have to go back just a little bit in the text to understand.
The chapter before this morning’s reading is called Jeremiah’s “temple sermon.” It is words God has given Jeremiah to say at the center of power, at the very gate of the Temple.
There is no separation of Church and State in Judah. The state is supposed to follow Torah and lead the people in following Torah. Period. And the people trust the royal authorities to stand for the covenant values of justice and compassion and love. To work for the common good. But that’s not what’s happening.
Instead, in the words of Walter Brueggemann:
“The temple is shown to be not an embodiment of transcendence, but simply an arena for social manipulation…. a place of refuge, hiding, and safety for those who violate Torah through their life in the world. The Torah violators attempt to hide in the sanctity of the ritual. The temple becomes a means of cover-up for the destructive way life is lived in the real world.”
Put another way, the leaders of the nation are cloaking themselves in religious language and are manipulating scripture and theology in order to do the exact opposite of the love to which God calls them.
They pretend not to see the wounds of the people, crying “peace, peace” where there is no peace.
Instead of welcoming the immigrant, they oppress her.
Instead of caring for the weak and the poor, they make their lives even harder.
Instead of using the wealth of the nation to heal the wounded and protect the vulnerable, they use their power and the very authority of God to line their own pockets with even more obscene levels of abundance.
Does any of this sound familiar?
God gives Jeremiah these words of judgment to cry out at the very gate of the Temple. To speak the truth of the nation’s ills right in the face of those who are responsible for its care. And it is the naming of these deep and terrible truths, truths that others fear to speak, that leads Jeremiah from prophecy to lamentation. For it is when God’s voice stops and Jeremiah’s begins that our reading begins this morning. And Jeremiah is undone. Every day he wakes up and he sees the nation becoming more and more corrupt. It is too much, and so he cries out in deep lament, lament for a beloved dying child:
Joy abandons me.
There is no cure for my grief.
My heart is sick…
I am devastated, for my people are devastated.
I mourn.
Terror grips me.
Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician here?
Why then has the health of my people not been attended to?
Why indeed?
The question Jeremiah cries out … not just “Is there no balm in Gilead?” …. but “why then has the health of my people not been attended to?” … is a lament and a damn good question for our day as well.
We look around us today, and we see a world that is crying out. Not just the people but the very planet itself. And like Jeremiah, we see people cloaking themselves in the trappings of faith and wielding scripture and the name of Jesus as a weapon of mass destruction. Filling their bank accounts while millions suffer and die.
We see this and we cry out: “Is there no balm in Gilead?”
We see people using language of faith to deny health care to women, education to children, and safety to immigrants and refugees.
We see this and what do we cry?
“Is there no balm in Gilead?”
We see people using the language of faith to cry from every rooftop that gun ownership is somehow a God-given right, but remain curiously silent this week when one of those guns is used to murder black transgender woman Ja’leyah-Jamar, the 19th known murder of a transgender person this year, 18 of whom have been black.
We see this and what do we cry?
“Is there no balm in Gilead?”
We wake up every morning to new stories of selfishness and corruption that are literally killing beautiful images of God and it is a good and holy thing for us cry out in lament and frustration and pain:
Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician here?
Why then has the health of my people not been attended to?
And certainly, God does put a word on our lips. A word that must be spoken at the throne of the state and at the gates of a silent and complicit church. A word of terrible truth of the way things are and how far they are from how they should be.
And … it is not just enough to speak that word in front of the throne. Because we are not merely victims of sinister despots. We participate in and uphold our own oppression.
Last Good Friday, Andre Henry reminded us of Gene Sharp’s words:
Obedience is at the heart of political power.
By themselves, rulers cannot collect taxes,
enforce repressive laws and regulations,
keep trains running on time,
prepare national budgets,
direct traffic, manage ports, print money, repair roads,
keep markets supplied with food,
make steel, build rockets, train the police and army,
issue postage stamps and even milk a cow all at the same time.
“People provide these services to the ruler through a variety of organizations and institutions. If people would stop providing these skills, the ruler could not rule.”
These systems continue and even flourish because we permit them. And how does empire control us?
With fear.
Empire controls us by convincing us that fear is greater than love.
Empire controls us and prevents us from overturning the tables in the temple by using our deepest fears against us. And hoping, hoping, hoping … that we will not realize that love is so much stronger.
Last week, we talked about how our hearts are full of secrets and songs. And we passed out cards with All Saints Church’s mission statement on them and we invited you to take them home and then bring them back this morning with your answer to one of these two questions written on them:
What secret do I wish there was someone to tell?
What song does my heart long to sing?
Those secrets and songs are the key to God being able to flow through us to turn the world as it is into the world that it can be. Those secrets and songs are the key to God’s revolution of love.
Those secrets are our fears and our laments. What we are terrified others will find out. And because we are terrified – terrified that our secrets will be told, that we will be exposed as being bad, worthless, useless, unloved and unlovable. Terrified that if our secrets are discovered we will be harmed and abandoned, stripped of our freedom or even our very identity.
Because we are terrified, we are tempted to keep silent.
Because we are terrified, we are tempted not to sing our songs.
And those songs, they are our dreams and visions. If our secrets tempt us to fear, then our songs lead us into love – how we can love in ways that will heal and transform ourselves, our community and the world.
Empire will always try to make the fear of our secrets drown out the love of our songs.
The FBI tried it with Dr. King, sending him a letter urging him to commit suicide or else they would expose secrets that would ruin his reputation. King would not be cowed … and his song changed the world.
At a time when being gay could get you arrested, beaten and killed even more than it can today, Harvey Milk took the truth of who he was and who he loved … a truth the world told him to hide … and he wore it as a badge of honor. And his song changed the world.
Our secrets, our deepest fears and our deepest laments. They can silence us. We can hold them inside, and they can eat away at our hearts like a cancer. And the systems that profit from the way things are are counting on that silence … because they know our songs can change the world.
And so, we need to claim both our secrets and our songs as our badges of honor. To not just lay our secrets and songs but our hearts on that table too, bare to God and bare to one another. We need to let loose the power of lament and name the infuriating and painful truths that hold us captive because it is only then that the song of love and comfort can bring the healing we all so desperately need.
We need to cry, scream weep and wail. We need to “look at the world through tears. So perhaps we shall see things that dry-eyed we could not see.”
Because as Latina theologian Elizabeth Conde-Frazier writes:
“Anger and tears create the space for the work of the Spirit. They are the groaning of the Spirit for renewal of creation and an expression of compassion thus revealing a deep spiritual well. To fear our tears or to suppress our anger is to block the power of the spirit springing forth from within our spiritual wells to resist death and to sustain and renew life.”
So, let us not fear our anger … or our tears … or our secrets. Let us wear them all as badges of honor. Because only then…
Only when we are able to look at the world through tears and wail the lament that any decent feeling person would cry looking at how things are today
“Is there no balm in Gilead?”
Only when we are able to share our secrets and cry our laments will we be able to hear and sing that song of healing, that song of power, that song of love, that song of hope that love will always, always, always be greater than fear.
Only then will we be able to hear Jeremiah’s cry and our own and answer it by singing YES
There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.
There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sinsick soul.
Sometimes I feel discouraged
And think my work’s in vain
But then the Holy Spirit
Revives my soul again.
There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole
There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sinsick soul.
There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole
There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sinsick soul.
