Is there no balm?

“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, / and we are not saved.” / “Is there no balm in Gilead?”

These are apt words as we gather on together this final morning before the fall equinox.

It’s no coincidence this lament from Jeremiah turns to poetry. Because poetry gives language to all that we attempt to hold in our lives — the many paradoxes and the great complexities. As W.H. Auden puts it, “Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”

I love this definition — “the clear expression of mixed feelings” — because for as accurate as it seems to me it remains playfully true. In my own life, I’ve found turning to poetry to be a helpful practice in order to better understand whatever situation I’m navigating. And I think it’s for this reason that the writers of scripture turn to this kind of language again and again.

Much of the Psalms are written in poetic form with a kind of flailing attempt to get the attention of God. Like the words often paired alongside the Prophet Jeremiah from Psalm 79:

O God, the heathen have come into your inheritance;  they have profaned your holy temple; *  they have made Jerusalem a heap of rubble. We have become a reproach to our neighbors, *  an object of scorn and derision to those around us. How long will you be angry, O Lord? *  will your fury blaze like fire for ever?

When I read so many of the psalms I really can’t help but picture scenes playing out from the Pixar film, Inside Out. The movie imagines the five basic human emotions as though they are anthropomorphized cartoon characters — which are appropriately named Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger.

These five characters belong to Riley, the young girl at the center of the story, and throughout it they compete with one another inside of her until eventually they learn to be reconciled to one another. 

In a similar way, psalms express the many different things rumbling around within the heart of the psalmist. They are poetic and often in conflict with themselves. At times the words are not very pretty, perhaps even repulsive to us, but they are honest.

Now, if the psalms intend to get God’s attention, the poetic words of the prophets are delivered to get the attention of the people. 

God’s words flow through the prophet so that the people will pay attention to what’s really going on in their lives, and in doing so the health of the people can be restored. Walter Brueggemann suggests the prophet always holds both judgement and hope together, and delivers them with unflinching honesty — but always for the purpose of making the people whole again. 

Truth-telling in this way is vulnerable and personal, especially when others cry for “peace, peace, though no peace may be found.” And in daring to imagine an alternative it is artistic.

In the Prophetic Imagination, Brueggemann says:

“The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. [...] …every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing future alternatives to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”

And isn’t this the very place we find ourselves this morning?

At the time of Jeremiah’s life, the Kingdom of Judah was crumbling around him. After two hundred years of captivity under the Assyrian Empire, the nation had once again reclaimed its sovereignty. And during this time their King, Josiah, discovers a long forgotten book: the Deuteronomic Law which had been altogether abandoned under foreign rule.

So, in hopes that the kingdom’s favor might be restored before God and to reclaim its former greatness, Josiah quickly enacts a sweeping campaign of moral reforms. Now, in this story, King Josiah is more or less genuine and humble, and so he is remembered as a well revered ruler in the history of the Hebrew people.

But even still when Jeremiah looks at all of this he sees something different happening. The people have indeed reclaimed their forgotten identity as God’s people, and it is a matter of great pride for them that the Law is once again in their possession. It is a time full of great nationalist fervor — but it comes with no evidence of repentance. 

Opportunity for real social change was presented but they did not heed it. 

All of their talk and false assurances has merely led to complacency. So, before the end of Jeremiah’s life, once again captivity and exile are on their door step. The Empire of Babylon sweeps in and it is another time marked by the traumas of political upheaval and deportations to a strange land.

Jeremiah weeps — and it is no wonder he turns to poetry. He wades through discomfort in search of healing. A similar spirit is evoked by the contemporary poet, Nayyirah Waheed: 

the hard season
will
split you through.
do not worry.
you will bleed water.
do not worry.
this is grief.
your face will fall out and
down your skin
and
there will be scorching.
but do not worry.
keep speaking the years from
their hiding places.
keep coughing up smoke
from all the deaths you have
died.
keep the rage tender.
because the soft season will
come.
it will come.
loud.
ready.
gulping.
both hands in your chest.
up all night.
up all of the nights.
to drink all damage into love.

What a powerful image “coughing up smoke” makes. 

When I first began my academic career years ago, in what now truly feels like another lifetime, I received a PELL grant to attend a local community college and study emergency fire and medical services. I’ll never forget learning about the treatment protocol for patients in burn units — whose wounds are vigorously scrubbed each morning to prevent deadly infections. Because without vigilantly cleaning the wound the body remains at risk. It is an excruciating pain but one that is necessary for real healing to take place.

This is the way lament works. Jeremiah is known as “the weeping prophet” because he is so moved by the tragedies unfolding around him and speaks to them with radical candor. His weeping at the social situation molds the conditions for something new to take place, much like clay being softened in a potter’s hands. Like Waheed’s poem, his words extend an invitation to be made well.

In verse 21, it is curious that the term Jeremiah uses to describe “hurt,” both his own and the people’s, is the same Hebrew term used to describe brokenness, or more specifically the breaking of pottery. And then the poem shifts. 

In verse 22, it is no longer Jeremiah speaking, but rather the voice of God flowing through the prophet. God witnesses the pain of the people and is moved like a “spring of water” with “eyes as a fountain of tears.”

Just as when Jesus goes to the tomb of his dear friend Lazarus and weeps with guttural anguish, here God sees suffering and God weeps. God is not impartial to pain. 

But in the face of hurt and brokenness, the God who always creates anew does just that.   

God is like the Japanese kintsugi artist: who carefully gathers up the fragments of a broken pot and then lovingly mends them together with golden lacquer. And when this work is complete, not only are those cracks not concealed but instead they shimmer with a dazzling golden light — and the structural integrity of that once-broken pot is more strong than it ever was before.

This is the work the God of Creation does within each of our lives, again and again and again. It is the work of Jeremiah The Weeping Prophet. And I think it is the work you and I are called to participate in this time, as well.

Tears of lament, whenever and for whomever they may come in these days, are holy. And they are prophetic. Keep your hearts tender because the soft season will come.

With each cry of lament, we join alongside the artists of yesterday whose traditional African American spiritual song prophetically proclaims something beyond the pain of today...

Is there no balm? Yes, indeed. Whether it be of an individual or a nation.

“There is a balm in Gilead, To make the wounded whole; There is power enough in heaven, To heal a sin-sick soul.”