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Davidson College Presbyterian Church Davidson College Presbyterian Church Davidson, North Carolina Lib McGregor Simmons, Pastor “Is There a Balm in Gilead? Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; 31:31-34 Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time September 19 2010 We turn to the Old Testament book of Jeremiah for today’s Scripture lessons. The book begins with the prophet as a reluctant young man, verbally digging his heels into the sand as God snaps him up by his shirt collar and tosses him out onto the streets of Jerusalem to be a prophet. Once Jeremiah is situated in the prophetic line of work, however, he takes to it pretty well, setting the pattern for prophets to come, shouting his “jeremiads” at the sinful, unrepentant people. He does not only screech at them, however; he also weeps for them. In Jeremiah 8: 18- 9:1, the bitterness of the judgment he had announced streams from his eyes in the form of salty tears, and he moans his hurt in painful poetry of lament. My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick. Hark, the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land: “Is the Lord not in Zion? Is her King not in her?” (“Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their foreign idols?”) “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored? O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people! Jeremiah 8:18-9:1 Is there a balm for the suffering of the people? In the passage that we have read, the implicit answer would seem to be no. No, there is no balm in Gilead. A glance at the historical landscape reveals how dire the situation had become for the people of Jerusalem. Three hundred years before Jeremiah, the Israelites had split into two nations, Israel in the north and Judah in the south. About 100 years before Jeremiah, the foreign power of Assyria had barreled in and brought the northern kingdom of Israel to its knees. One scholar labels this disaster “the World War I” of ancient Hebrew history. (1) And now, as Jeremiah speaks the words that have just been read, World War II was looming on the horizon. Another fierce kingdom, Babylon, had begun assembling its troops against the southern kingdom of Judah. Jeremiah had belligerently jabbed his finger in the chests of the kings of Judah for decades, warning that God would punish Judah for its neglect of God’s justice and righteousness, just as God had punished Israel. And so it is coming to be as Jeremiah weeps these tear-stained verses. The enemy troops have blockaded the city. No resident of the city can leave. No supplies can be brought in. 1 Drought has turned the fertile soil to dust. Trash is piling up in the street. Stomachs are empty. Eyes are dull. The faces of the children are pinched and thin. There is no laughter within the walls of Jerusalem, for the people can feel in their bones that the arrival of doomsday is just around the corner. It was a not a good time in Jeremiah’s Jerusalem. I would hesitate to draw too close a comparison between Jeremiah’s world and ours. But still… You read the same headline bannered across the top of Friday’s Charlotte Observer as I did, “Recession grinds 1 in 7 into poverty.” This is the highest poverty rate in our country since poverty estimates were first published in 1959, nearly 44 million people, 14 percent of the U.S. population. More than 15 million children are poor. The torments of joblessness and underemployment are rampant, but it appears to those who are suffering the most that those who seem to them to be at the top remain in comfortable denial about and indifferent to the extent of the carnage. An Associated Press article quoted by columnist Bob Herbert summed up the matter, “Glum and distrusting, a majority of Americans today are very confident in – nobody.” (2) Walter Brueggemann has written about this passage in Jeremiah that “the pathos of the poem is derivative from the cynical indifference of Israel that continues with business as usual in the face of sickness to death. In [the questions “Is the LORD not in Zion? Is her King not in her?] the people are quoted as presuming and insisting that God must be present. After all, it is God’s business to be present,” (3) the people insist. The people insist that it is God’s business to be present, but what they fail to see is the extent of their own idolatry: that while they may mouth the words about God’s being present, in their glum disregard of God’s justice and righteousness, in their continuing with business as usual, they demonstrate that they trust in nobody, not even God. Is there a balm in Gilead? At this point, it would seem not. It would seem that it is too late, that the die has been cast, that there is no hope, that there is nothing for the prophet or for God to do but to weep. But later in the book there comes a promise, The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they 2 teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. Jeremiah 31:31-34 Yes, there is healing. Yes, there is hope. There is healing and hope as the people of God write the twin Jewish laws of loving God and neighbor on their hearts and live. It is not a new law, but it is a law as old and infinite as God kept with a new intentionality. (4) In these words, Jeremiah calls not only the people of his own day, but each of us, all of us, back to God and to the selves God created us to be. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has written, “Goodness is our home… [But] every day, in small slips and large lapses, we part from what we know is good…In an extraordinary way, we can return to goodness [that is, we can “repent” for that is the essence of the meaning of the Hebrew word t’shuva and the Greek word metanoia—“returning,” “rethinking,” “reorienting.”] more quickly when we have a clear vision of the present.” (5) Jeremiah didn’t specify how God will go about writing the twin Jewish laws of loving God and neighbor on human hearts. He knew, however, that God will do it somehow. (6) And so God does when with intentionality, one or more of you move beyond mouthing the “I do” when the baptismal questions are asked, but take the time and the effort to match Will’s and Ryan’s and Morgan’s faces with their names and get to know them and commit to teaching them stories of Jesus and shaping them into disciples of Jesus. Perhaps it might start with sitting down this very afternoon and writing them a note or a letter or an email, sharing how you specifically intend to pray for them and join their parents in showing them the way to goodness. And so God does when with intentionality, the DCPC Career Transition Support group meets on the first and third Fridays of every month. I have learned so much from the brave folks who gather around those tables in our Congregation House. The program began when Dick Grove approached Julie Hill when the employment numbers first began to head south and said, “We need to do something in this church, in this community. I don’t want to wait until we’ve created the perfect program before we start.” And so he went to work. He recruited Ginger Roseman, Susan Manning, Ken Randall, and Bill Johnson, and eventually others who would serve as sponsors. They have all done tremendous work, but I am sure that each of them would say, as I do, that we have gained a clarity about the present that we might not otherwise have had from the folks that we have come to know through this group and from this clarity God has softened our hearts and reoriented us as we have witnessed participants offering bold encouragement and gentle grace to one another. And so God does when with intentionality, we are given a sense of clarity about the present, about the small slips and large lapses we make as individuals, as the church, as a community, as a nation – and repent, that is return to the goodness that is our home.
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