No Balm in Gilead: sermon for the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost Year C 2010

No Balm in Gilead

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.
But then the love of Jesus revives my soul again.

There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.
There is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.

This hymn comes out of the black church tradition, probably developed in the slave churches in the mid-nineteenth century. It's interesting to me that they used this very despairing phrase from Jeremiah and changed it.

Jeremiah is involved in a kind of three-way dialogue. We hear the people and we hear God and we hear Jeremiah all commenting in this passage. In the line in question, Jeremiah asks if there is no balm in Gilead, if there is no physician there? As if answering some unseen person who has said "Of course there is," Jeremiah says "Then why has the health of my poor people not been restored?"

Jeremiah is continuing with his terrifying vision of destruction and despair. We need to remind ourselves that Jeremiah was not preaching about something that had already happened, nor was he preaching about what was certain to happen. He was lifting up a very significant possibility, a likelihood. We might say that this is the flip side of God's promises.

When Jesus says, "I will be with you until the end of the age," we must remember that he prefaces it with a serious command to go and baptize and make disciples of all nations and teach them everything he taught. So if we don't do as Jesus commanded, what happens? Is he still with us? Jeremiah's vision tells us, no. No, he isn't.

But the enslaved black Christians of the American South didn't let old Jeremiah have the last word. No, no, Jeremiah, there is a balm in Gilead. They insisted on this despite their awful situation.

It interests me that slavery has been abolished since then.

We heard from Jon and Dawn Barnes yesterday about their ministry among a people who live with 40 percent unemployment, whose homes are literally shacks made of cardboard and tin, who don't make enough money to pay even the $10 that it costs to send a child to public school for a year. And yet they, and everyone else who went to South Africa who was at the Assembly yesterday testified that the faith and joy of the Christian communities there greatly outshines their counterparts in the US.

Yet here in the US it seems we hear of nothing but anger and fear and hopelessness. What do you suppose the answer would be to a survey if we put it out in our culture? Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no God present who really can fix us? A bunch of us shout "yes, of course there is!" But the answer comes back, "then why are we so messed up? Why haven't we changed already?" No, there's no balm in Gilead.

What is this balm? We know the physician is God, but what is this balm that God uses to heal the people? Is it the right economic program? Is it the right political system? Is it the right military strategy?

Jesus us taught us to pray "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors." In the ancient world, the system of debt was essentially a system of legal robbery, a simple means for powerful people to snarf up the ancestral lands of the poor. While Jesus may have been using debt as a symbol for sin, I believe, as do many other scholars, that he was also talking about literal debt. In any event the two are closely related.

Whether someone owes us money or owes us restitution of some other sort, it is this situation that gives rise to a simple choice, and surprisingly enough, that choice is the main seed from which our future will sprout.

Do we forgive the debt, or do we insist on our rights? If we insist on our rights, if we give free rein to our resentment, our choice will give birth to all manner of misery. But if we restrain our anger and fear, and keep our eyes and our ears open, and let go of our right to a pound of flesh, new possibilities arise like water in a desert.

The balm of Gilead, wielded by the great physician God, is first and foremost the balm of forgiveness. The healing doesn't end with the forgiveness, but it must and always does begin with forgiveness. The future might be very very dark, but only if there is no forgiveness. And if we are not the ones doing the forgiving, then the forgiving doesn't happen. God's forgiveness, friends, never comes until we forgive.

Jon told a story of a friend of theirs who had been a pastor during apartheid who had led his congregation to cross township and racial lines to help less fortunate people and who had been arrested for treason. He spent a year being tortured in prison before the UCC managed to get him released and out of the country. After spending some years in the US, he returned to work for the new post-apartheid government. He got a house in what had been the white town he'd previously lived near. While working in his garden one day, he saw one of his neighbors walking a dog. The neighbor had been in charge of his torture while in prison. The neighbor recognized Jon's friend and froze. Jon's friend struggled with himself and finally made a decision. He crossed his yard, walked up to his former torturer and wrapped his arms around him.

Is there no balm in Gilead?

Let's sing our answer.

Amen.