Lament and Hope
For a few weeks now, we’ve been reading Jeremiah as our first lesson and he is an interesting sort.
As Robert Alter writes in his translation of the Hebrew Bible, “Jeremiah is the one who conveys to us the most vivid sense of the man behind the words.”
For a little background, Jeremiah was active from around 620 BCE through 586, around the time of the destruction of Judah.
Recent to his own history, around 100 years prior to his writings, the northern kingdom of Israel was overtaken by the Assyrians and a huge part of the population was deported to various places across the kingdom.
Now, even this might be new information for you, the fact that Israel and Judah ever split, when we know them as a single entity, a single country.
Yet, they did indeed split and they split over politics.
The tribes of Benjamin and Judah, two southern tribes of then a united Israel, did not agree with a certain man, Rehoboam, being chosen king.
The 10 northern tribes insisted he become king.
And so the sides split with Judah in the south and Israel with it’s ten tribes were of the north.
Around 710, the Assyrians invaded, the population was scattered and the tribes of Israel became known as the lost tribes.
This caused a sense of looming doom in Judah, they knew they were just as vulnerable as Israel was, that they could someday be wiped from the face of the earth just as the tribes were.
Around this same time in Judah, a book was reported to be found during some renovations being performed on the Temple around 620 BCE.
This found book came to be known as the book of teaching or, rather, you and I know it as Deuteronomy.
Based on this book, the king of Judah, Josiah, began to usher in sweeping religious reforms which caused some upset in the kingdom.
It turns out though, that the found book was not found at all, it was actually written in Jeremiah’s time and its authorship was attributed to Moses.
This book and the reforms described in it turned religious life on its head.
No longer would Judaism be dispersed across Judah, it would instead its worship practices and governance would be centralized within Jerusalem.
This way, the Judaism practiced would be homogenous and no longer would the country be threatened with the worship of false and foreign Gods.
Jeremiah is very concerned about these two things.
He sees the destruction of Israel and the pursuit of other Gods to be concrete dangers Judah must avoid.
He sees in Israel’s past Judah’s future if the country did not shape up.
And soon enough, the Babylonian empire would sweep into Judah and Judah itself would face its own exile, its own torment.
And so it we can understand the desperation of Jeremiah’s writings, his prose to poetic voice, the longing in his call to bring Judah back to its singular ways.
Where in the lectionary passage we heard this morning, Jeremiah writes, “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.”
Alter translates this verse as “I catch my breath from sorrow, my heart within me aches.”
Or we can approach this verse’s meaning by concatenating the two translations: My joy is gone, I catch my breath from sorrow, my heart is sick, my heart within me aches.”
Jeremiah is feeling the sadness of a world changed and changing.
He is unable to stop the march of his people towards a seeming break with God, God is saying, "Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their foreign idols?"
Or from Alter, Why did they vex Me with their idols, with alien empty breath?”
And the people say, the harvest has passed.
Passed what?
The harvest has past, the summer has ended, translates Alter, and we have not been rescued.
And the people are surprised and the people cry out, why has no help arrived?
And the people are in tears.
Jeremiah writes that he is broken, he plunges into gloom, amidst the desolation of a people soon to be lost, left, and dispersed.
“Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?”
The use of the word physician here, Alter warns could be mistranslation.
The text might have originally meant, “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no healing there?”
Now, Gilead was located in the northeast of Judah.
It is where healing herbs were grown.
Is there no healing in Gilead?
Is the healing medicine produced there no longer growing, no longer effective?
All is lost to gloom it appears, all is desolation for Jeremiah.
And yet the words of the old spiritual provide a counter argument.
This hymn, sung to the tune and with the words of the old spiritual, it is sung by slaves on the plantation.
People full of reason to be consumed by desolation and gloom provide a counterargument to Jeremiah, there is no balm in Gilead?
No, listen closely to the song:
There is a balm in Gilead
to make the wounded whole;
There is a balm in Gilead
to heal the sin-sick soul.
You see, there are moments and times and tangents we will enter into when all seems lost, all seems overpoweringly. Sad.
There are times when we are Jeremiah and yet, hope lives through faith in God.
Hope did not make enslavement easier.
Hope did not lessen the pain of the lash.
Hope did not change the regime under which the unfree lived.
Rather, it was the hope found in the faith in God that changed their situation.
This hope is different, for this hope changes lives.
Just as faith without works is dead, hope without faith is static.
But hope with faith?
Hope with faith will break the chains of oppression.
Hope with faith will cause a family to travel through swamps and escape the chasing dogs so that they might find freedom through the underground railroad.
Hope with faith is Frederick Douglass preaching and campaigning against slavery with the stories of his own chains broken.
Hope with faith is the abolitionist speaking out and saying, “no more.”
There is no balm in Gilead?
No.
There is a balm in Gilead
to make the wounded whole;
There is a balm in Gilead
to heal the sin-sick soul.
We can read Jeremiah.
We can enter into the same lamentation of his prophecy.
We can feel and understand his sadness, his loss.
And still, we can look at the course of human history and we can sometimes see the eventual victory of the oppressed over the oppressor.
Hope and faith that lead a people to cry out, “No more.”
Lament and hope.
Both are needed.
And they are needed today in our hearts.
We can look to the state of the church, not this parish in particular, but the state of the church overall.
We can look to its scandals, the hatred spewed sometimes in Christ’s name, we can look at the declining numbers and we can cry out.
We can remember fuller days, of Easters in the sun, our parents held our hands and told us to sit still, we were blessed and within community.
And we can acknowledge that Easters are different now and we can cry out and assume that the harvest has passed, the summer has ended.
And we will wonder if we are ever to be returned to those days of splendor and song.
Will we ever be rescued?
I believe we will.
And I believe it is us who will do the rescuing.
For not only are lamentation and hope necessary, I truly believe one follows the other.
We are in a time of lamentation.
We are in a time of wandering.
How do we return a church its proper due?
How do we worship God in community now that so much has changed?
Well, that’s where hope begins.
We can lament and lament only a dying church.
Or we can find hope in a dynamic church.
Is there no balm in Gilead?
No.
There is a balm in Gilead
to make the wounded whole;
There is a balm in Gilead
to heal the sin-sick soul.
