The Reverend Dr. Lillian Daniel
September 23, 2007
First Congregational Church,
www.firstconge.org
630-469-3096
Scripture: Jeremiah 8:18–9:1
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
(‘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
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!
Sermon:
The prophet Jeremiah[1],
weary and discouraged cried out to God, “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my
heart is sick.” “Is there no balm in
In another age, a man sits in a warm coffee shop, on Crescent Boulevard, his head in his hand. The coffee he nurses has long since gone cold.
A woman with a stroller for two needs to get by, as her baby cries and her toddler squirms to escape his belt. She is the kind of woman whose well-toned body gives no evidence of having birthed the two little ones in front of her, just as her crisply casual evening outfit signals a busy, efficient woman on the move. The front wheel of her efficient juvenile traveling machine bumps up against the man’s belongings, which have now spilled out of their plastic bags.
He pulls them back in, the old clothes, the remnants of the life he once had, and is embarrassed to see her looking down at his few private possessions. He picks up a wallet size picture that has fallen to the floor, an image of a nephew he has not seen in years, who by now must look different, as a high schooler in another state. As he reaches for that old school picture, he knocks the last of his coffee over, and it splashes across the floor like the dregs of his life. Now, he has not even a beverage to justify his stay in the coffee shop.
The woman’s baby screams. An employee comes over with a mop. Everyone is looking at him, and wondering why he cannot stop muttering to himself at the injustice of it all, that some could have such security in life, while others would scramble to collect belongings in a plastic bag. “Hark, the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land.” And then, from a deeper place, came the cry of his inner soul, the pain that seemed never to leave him and never to quiet down. “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.”
The young woman flinched as he pushed by her. A protective well-manicured hand fell in front of her crying child, but not in time to stop the toddler from smacking the leg of a man in front of her who was juggling his coffee for the train. She didn’t know why it would hit her like this, but she could feel the wave coming. It was a wave of deadly despair.
It had hit her so hard after her first child was born that she wondered about having a second. And now it was reappearing – that wave of fears and anxieties, strange, horrible thoughts about her own children, too frightening to reveal to another soul. Her eyes were reddening and her breath was getting faster. The room seemed to be closing in around her. Looking at her own children they seemed strange to her now, like little monsters, almost.
She had the fleeting thought that she could just leave them,
right here, and start running down Crescent Boulevard, and never come back.
They wouldn’t miss her, those clamoring creatures of constant neediness and
demand. With the terrible thoughts she’d been having, too grim to tell a soul,
she alone knew they’d be better off without her. But if she did start running,
what would she do with herself? There had been a time when she would have had
an agenda – go to
An older woman behind her looked down and said, “What beautiful children you have.” She put her hand out and stroked the baby’s tiny head, almost by way of a blessing. “You are so fortunate,” she said to the young mother. “These days are so precious and go by so quickly. Enjoy them.”
And the woman’s words fell upon the young mother not as comfort but as yet another indictment. “Why can’t I enjoy them?” she asked herself. “What’s wrong with me that I can’t be happy? Here it’s as if I have everything I ever dreamed of, and all I feel is this: My joy is gone, grief is upon me, and my heart is sick.”
And the young mother wondered, “Is there no balm in
But she kept her silence, as her eyes filled up with the red frustration of demons held at bay so long that the voice of her good angels had been silenced. When would these terrible thoughts stop?
“Is there something I can do for you?” asked the older woman. “My name is Maria, by the way.” But seeing that her words had not had the cheering effect she had hoped, she added, “I am sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude.”
And the older woman, who had blessed the baby, and tried to reach the woman with her words asked herself the same question, “What could cure the sickened soul?”
And looking out at the man who had left the coffee shop, now sitting outside in the cold on a bench, still fingering that little wallet sized photo, Maria wondered at the inequities of life.
A praying woman, she asked God the question, “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!”
One of the reasons Maria loved the Bible is that it told the truth. Scholars could debate the historicity of the prophet, Jeremiah. We could consult with historians and find incongruities between their archeological findings and the record in scripture. But still, Maria knew that the Bible is true.
Certainly, she, as an intelligent woman, could see that sometimes the timelines in scripture even differ internally, with one book of the Bible laying out the facts in one way and another book of the Bible telling a different story. The church she attended did not gloss over such things, but acknowledged them, as something that thinking Christians could handle.
And Maria was also a person of humility. She knew that surely, we were not the first people to catch onto this. The people who put the bible together in the early church noticed the same inconsistencies we do, and yet they let them lie, next to one another as a holy text. Maria thought they did it that way to remind us that the truth of our scripture does not lie in its timelines or its genealogies or its dietary or cultural rules. The truth of the Bible lies in words like this, from Jeremiah: “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, and my heart is sick.” True words from someone’s broken heart.
The truth lies in the age old longing for healing and
comfort for the sickened and weary soul, the plaintive cry from so many
thousands of years ago, in another part of the world. “Is there no balm in
And standing in that coffee shop, Maria knew that it was a
question that could be asked of Gilead as surely as it could be asked of
Every human being at some point reaches that point, where they hit that wall and wonder, “Is there no physician there?” And it was then, in Maria’s experience, that you finally turned to the healer that nobody’s insurance covers. It is then that you turned to God in prayer.
Maria took her coffee with her from the store. She was preparing to offer the man who had spilled his coffee some money, but he was gone. She had meant to say something more astute to the young mother, had wanted to say that she too had looked into a valley of despair in those early years, and had wisdom to offer, as well as encouragement, but it hadn’t come out that way. And now that mother was gone.
Maria walked with her coffee up
“You’re quiet today,” said another member of the knitting ministry team. But the conversation of the rest of the group bubbled forward, words moving back and forth, as surely as people wandered in and out of the church building day in and day out, all of them tackling the troubles of the world in the practical and concrete ways, with food, or with laundry, with big schemes for justice and small acts of mercy. And in the midst of that the knitting needles clacked, impractical, not concrete but hopeful.
“I am not quiet today,” Maria said, to the friend who had
inquired. “I am making a mighty noise in my heart to God. I am praying for a
balm in
And around the corner from the coffee shop, out in the crisp Fall evening air, the young mother tried to pull herself together to head home and for the first time considered that this problem was bigger than she could handle. Her baby was crying now, and the toddler had tossed his bottle out onto the sidewalk, and as she reached down for it, her bag spilled its contents into a puddle. Getting down on her knees, her tears flowing in frustration, she found herself joined on the sidewalk by a man who helped her to scoop up her things. Putting his own old plastic bags aside, he passed her the baby’s bottle, and recognizing her from the coffee shop, he said, “Now you’re the one who’s spilling and dropping all your things.”
“I really need help,” she said.
“Don’t we all,” said the man. “Don’t we all.”
And while they did not know it in their heads, they knew it in their hearts. Someone was looking out for them, saying a prayer like a blanket, over the pain of the world.
Hark, the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the
land:
‘Is the Lord not in
(‘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
Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?