BALM IN GILEAD
September 23, 2001


TEXT: Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
A man and his wife were on a long trip and stopped at a full-service gas station. After the station attendant had washed their windshield, the man in the car said, “It’s still dirty. Wash it again.” So the station attendant washed it again.

After washing it again, the man in the car angrily said, “It’s still dirty. Don’t you know how to wash a windshield?”

Just then the man’s wife reached over, removed her husband’s glasses from his face, and cleaned them with a tissue. She put them back on and behold, the windshield was clean!

Our mental attitude determines how we look at things in the world. Anais Nin once said, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Right now, in the aftermath of the Terrorist Attack, the world looks pretty bleak. We try to look for hope; we want to rally around the President’s inspiring words; we attend prayer services, but still we are depressed. Even attending a jazz concert on Thursday night didn’t help; our heart does not want to sing when our spirit is low. The shock and the horror of the events has subsided some and now a sense of helplessness has started to infiltrate our spirits. We are beginning to actually feel the grief we are going through.

The Old Testament lesson that is assigned to be read today, the Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost, seems as though it was intended to be read in the aftermath of this particular tragedy: “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick. . . . For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me. 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!”

For almost two weeks we have been on an emotional roller-coaster of shock and despair, of pride and hope, of anger and frustration, of uncertainty and resolution. We ride the dragon of rage and the unicorn of compassion. We want to be lifted up on eagles’ wings, but find ourselves among the rats of depression that gnaw away at our national soul. We look for that which will ease the ache in our hearts and dry the fountain of tears, but the wounds are still raw. “Is there no balm in Gilead?” said the prophet Jeremiah, “Is there no physician there?” To whom can we turn for help in the hour of our need?

Before we can know what will ease our pain and heal our disease, we must first know the nature of our sickness. America has been attacked; seven thousand people are dead; several buildings have been destroyed. The American people are reacting to this in such a way that they never reacted to the deaths of millions in the killing fields of Cambodia, Kosova, and Rwanda. What has been attacked is not just people and buildings, but our way of life, our national pride, our sense of invincibility and invulnerability. Other nations have suffered far worse than we have in terms of acts of war, genocide, natural or human-spawned catastrophes. But you see, this is happening to us, the Chosen People of the Third Millennium, and it’s not supposed to happen this way. It’s not the way we have been taught to read the American destiny. And so we ask, why is this happening and why is God allowing this to happen, as if it has never happened before to anyone else. It doesn’t make sense to us, although we could accept it or ignore it if it were happening to someone else.

Jesus told a parable that doesn’t make much sense to us either. It doesn’t make much sense to us because it’s just not fair. Jesus is praising a scoundrel who is feathering his own nest at his boss’ expense. It’s not much different from the parable where all the employees get paid the same wage even though some work a full day and others a few minutes. What’s Jesus trying to tell us about life? What’s Jeremiah trying to tell us about healing?

The answer to this question lies in the fact that the answer lies where we aren’t looking for it. We have been addressing a lot of prayers to God these past few days, and that’s good. But remember that prayer is ninety percent listening to what God has to say to us, and we haven’t been doing much of that.

Perhaps I can illustrate this better by telling you the story of Jay Wilkinson, son of the famous football coach Bud Wilkinson. Jay ran for Congress in Oklahoma some years ago. Many people thought he would win easily. After all, Jay Wilkinson was an All-American at Duke who married a Miss America finalist after graduating from Harvard Divinity School. Young, handsome, and idealistic, Jay was a perfect subject for Madison Avenue. A television commercial was designed which pictured Jay and his wife walking hand-in-hand through an Oklahoma pasture. As they walked, they looked soulfully upward at the sky to the accompaniment of soft music with the ad “A Better Tomorrow for all Oklahomans.”

The incumbent, Tom Steed, was a good old boy with real sod-kicking credentials. He knew he was in for a tough fight. But he scheduled only a forty-second answer to Wilkinson’s spot.

He looked into a camera and said, “I may not have a fancy degree from Harvard like young Wilkinson, but I do know enough not to look at the sky when I am walking in a cow pasture.” Steed won the election.

There must come a time when we must stop looking to God to provide the answers, and begin to look to the answers God has already provided. Instead of looking up, we need to look around us and under our feet. There is a time for a prayer and a time for discernment. The answer to the question, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” is “Yes, there is a balm in Gilead.” God has already provided it. It is there and has been there. Gilead had been renowned for its healing salve; the people of Judah needed to be reminded of this. They needed someone to say, “You already have a physician. Why look elsewhere?”

The tragedy of September 11 is revealing to us the resources within us that had already existed, but which we didn’t know we had. We are seeing compassion at work. We are seeing courage and heroic effort. We are seeing resiliency. We are seeing determination and commitment. We are seeing an expression of the qualities that have made us who we are as a nation. And we will be a better people because of this adversity, as long as we remain loyal to our better nature and do not follow the demons of hatred and revenge that apparently motivated the terrorists. Those demons will destroy us.

Here is yet another parable. A man found a cocoon of a butterfly. One day a small opening appeared. He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through the little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could, and it could go no further. So the man decided to help the butterfly. He took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. But it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings. The man continued to watch the butterfly because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would expand and be able to support the body, which would contract in time. Neither happened! In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly. What the man in his kindness and haste did not understand was that the restricting cocoon and struggle required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening were God’s way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into the wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon.

Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our lives. If God allowed us to go through life without any obstacles, it would cripple us. We would never be able to fly. We may not always be able to understand the reason for adversity, or such tragedy as has been visited upon us, or personal misfortune or ill health, or even why we must die, but we continue to have faith that we will grow stronger in the broken places. We have faith that we will overcome the problems we face. We have faith that good will triumph over evil. We have faith that we will rise from the dead. We have faith that God hears our prayers and has already provided the answers to them. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.

Let us again hear the words of Jesus, “Go in peace. Your faith has made you whole.” May God’s shalom be upon our nation and our world and within each of us.