Year C, Proper 23: Balm for Gilead

Balm for Gilead
by James Joiner
Preaching with St. Mary’s House Episcopal Center
September 23rd, 2007

Year C, Proper 23
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
Psalm 79
1 Timothy 2:1-7
Luke 16:1-13

“No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

-from the Gospel reading this morning, and from Jeremiah:

“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved. For the hurt of my poor people I hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?”

In the name of God who made us, saved us, and will not leave us alone. AMEN.

A prophet goes to a place, to a high place where he can see, to a place where he can be with God, a place where he can weep, for the prophet goes to be with God, to behold his people as a whole, and beholden as they come to be in his eyes, where they come into the eyes of God as well, they are submerged within a well of tears. What did Jeremiah see? Perhaps, literally, a drought. “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” Perhaps, literally, the toil of a whole season driven wastefully into caked and unforgiving ground. No food to eat, nor water to drink, a suffering long past the expectation that salvation might still be coming. What did Jeremiah hear? A people crying out: “Is the Lord not in Zion? Is her King not in her?” Where is God in our time of need? Is there in fact, a God? Perhaps not, for surely we, the very people of God, would not be suffering so. Jeremiah hears God turn a shoulder and sigh: “Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their foreign idols?” It pains Jeremiah to denounce his people. Yes, of course your God is in you, but you have forgotten. You are “Adulterers, traitors, you bend your tongues like bows; grow strong in the land for falsehood, and not for truth; you proceed from evil to evil; you do not know God.” And for this there is weeping. For this there is mourning. The very place where God would come to rest is decimated with the suffering of a people who have forgotten. It is a mystery. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?

A prophet goes to a place, to a high place where she can see, to a place where she can be with God, to a place where she can weep: for the prophet goes to be with God, to behold her people as a whole, and beholden as they come to be in her eyes, where they come into the eyes of God as well, they are submerged within a well of tears. She is perched atop an overpass, busily delivering souls into their homes along a daily trail of smog She is hunched in a stiff waiting room chair amid bodies that don’t work the way we though they would and anxiety over which part of the paycheck this next bill will pull from. She is on a playground swing in the late afternoon, wishing that her presence were enough to console the boy who is tired, and simply ready to go home, to eat, to sleep, to go to school again. And what does the prophet see? Routines that have become so habitual that the better part of a nation remains asleep to the wars being waged in their own name? Illness that goes untreated because treatment is too expensive? Homes divided over finance, love lost among the schedules that hold us to task, to bear on so many more important things that we’ve created for ourselves. And what does the prophet hear? I ache, cry the people. I hurt. I cannot afford this. I am lonely. I am unhappy. I thought we were the chosen of God- why then do we suffer for no reason? Why then has our life become so mundane as to require a new purchase, the acquisition of expose, a life apart to be a voyeur to, simply to make the next day worth waking up for? Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?

The answer is: yes, of course there is. In the wealthiest of the nations there is balm in abundance, but without human hands to apply it, that which would heal us and soothe our woes lies in perpetual wait. We have enough medication to feed the face of AIDS, enough food spoiling in the dumpsters outside glorified high end groceries to feed the families of the streets, enough tax dollars wasted on our warring appetite to keep the books in our childrens' hands more than just relevant, but a beacon of innovation and a departure for flight. And the physicians? the teachers, the counselors, the mediators and mechanics, the farmers and the soldiers are the best in the world. Why then do my people suffer? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored? The answer is the same for us, as it was for Judah and Jerusalem: Because we live apart from God. Because we live for a system that neglects to acknowledge God’s reality.

We live apart from God and suffer- the phrase sends chills down the spine with its familiarity. Isn’t that why New Orleans got Katrina? Isn’t that why the Gays got HIV? Because of sin? Because of separateness from God? So says the conservative Church, and in their claims we have grown accustomed to rejecting that kind of talk outright, to the point, at times, of cringing whenever sin or separation from God is mentioned at all. But if we’re going to listen to the Prophet this morning, we’re going to have to hear it one way or another, preferably in as many different ways as possible until the point finally hits home and means something we can value, something that will change us. How about this way: Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams' has at one point described God as the ‘presence’ to which all reality is present. There is something which is as present to you as it is to me as it was to the first of us who tread this land and will be to the great grandchildren of tribes and nations whose existence we will never fathom in our finite capacity. In the furthest reaches of our doubt, in the places where Church will never go, this much, at least, must be true. There is something which is as present to you as it is to me as it was to the first of us who tread this land and will be to the great grandchildren of tribes and nations whose existence we will never fathom in our finite capacity. What is it? Or perhaps, more immediately answerable, do we live as if this were the case? Do we live as if the one thing which might be true, that we hold our life in common, is indeed a denominator which will render our differences ornamental in comparison with our fundamentally shared humanity? If this life is as present to each of us as it is to the brothers living beside us, if our claims are truly equal in human sisterhood, then are we as present to one another as we are to ourselves? In our multitude, in the egocentricity that asserts itself as the guiding force of our birth, the answer is necessarily “no”. How could we be? We are so many, we are nearly countless, at least- to the human eye we have at our disposal to sort among the masses. Fortunately, the body of humanity adapts to our confusion. We specialize. The thumb becomes especially good at building houses and the knee at tending sick, while the belly takes care of children when the family is away, and somehow, in its disjointedness, somehow in our human lack of presence to the whole, we are made to fit in. But we forget ourselves. We forget our presence to one another, and in this way, we forget God. Specialization becomes Individualization. We find our way into the profit system, into what is profitable for us and us alone. The knowledge we have accumulated becomes our own private resource for singular success. What’s more, the profit system makes this especially easy to do. I am a teacher, I am a clinician: I’m just the middleman, I keep the books, vote my conscious, that’s it. I go to work in the morning, I do what I can, then go home. The rest will simply have to take care of itself. It is too overwhelming for me to deal with on my own- as if we were ever ‘on our own’! Our individualization becomes our own helplessness. We forget one another, and we forget our own power, and thus we forget God, the one God who is as present to the people sitting outside this building as in. The balm is in gilead, the resources are here- but we the physicians are all too busy gazing at our own scars to reach out and take that balm in our own human hands and apply it to one another. That soothing balm, that mercy, that moment that says here, for just a brief while let us laugh and not care about this world and our sores- let us lift one another up in song high above the furnace into the cool jets of air that will freeze us for a moment as something which can only wholly be ourselves, crystalized as beloved of one another, beloved as God, as whole: no! Instead we go through the system first, the one that promises to keep us comfortable, as long as we are in our own skin. The one that holds us captive in our skills. The one that keeps us from the very humanity of each another. Jerusalem is an adulterer, choosing foreign idols over the God of her covenant. We are just as foolish, abiding by a system that promises to choose for us what is profitable to our individual identity while neglecting the reality that we are present to, and dependent on, so much more than ourselves.

I cast our predicament in this particular light because of how appropriate I think it is that the hero of the Gospel reading this morning is a crook. A man who has failed the system. A man accused of squandering the resources of the profitable. This parable is about as strange and unexpected as they get. Held accountable for the waste of his master’s earthly wealth, the dishonest manager is called to settle his accounts so that he might be cut off, and left out on his own. He has the perfect solution: not wishing to have to actually work, or beg for money, he uses his own disposition for cheating and squandering to heap up some security for himself. He cuts favors out of what doesn’t even belong to him. He decreases the debts debtors owe to his Master, that they might return favor to him, the Manager, when he is left out in the cold. This in itself, makes its own kind of sense- but then, when all is said and done, the Manager’s Master praises him for acting shrewdly, even as his own wealth has been spoiled in the process. I am as confused by this parable as I am by the degree to which I am drawn to it. The simple, and traditional explanation for the story, closest to the one which immediately proceeds it in the text, is that the Manager has acted wisely by using what is at his present disposal to secure his position in the future- a practice which believers should adapt as well. But this explanation neglects much of the strange complexity of the story. The manager is doing more than simply using what is at his disposal, he is cheating, he is using what is at someone else’s disposal for his own gain. It is not even as simple as a Robin Hood Story, where the poor gain at the expense of the wealthy, because we do not know if the debtors are even worthy of being shown this mercy. Certainly, the Dishonest Manager isn’t what we consider worthy of this mercy either, yet he is at the receiving end as well. Perhaps it is the most striking feature of this parable that Mercy is so abundant in it, and for all the wrong reasons. Mercy comes to a cheater through his cheating, and through his cheating, mercy comes to others who may or may not deserve it. The profit system is thwarted and the hierarchy doesn’t seem to mind at all. We cannot even claim Justice in this parable, for the Mercy shown is causeless. And we, the readers, are left to determine: What Good News are we to pull from that?

If I may borrow from the Archbishop one more time, (in honor, of course, of his current visit to the States), I will let myself be reminded in this tale of seemingly causeless Mercy, of his description of the Grace of God as being, “the object of the causeless loving delight of God, being the object of God's love for God through incorporation into the community of God's Spirit.” Causeless loving delight. Love that cannot be justified by our own explanations. Love that forgives us, Love that restores us in its Mercy for no reason we can control or understand. Love as present to you as it is to me as it was to those first among us to tread this land and will be to the great grandchildren of nations whose existence we cannot fathom in our finite capacity. This Grace is the balm we are left to heal from, this is the Grace we are left to seek as our nourishment, each of us the same as the ones who came before us and the ones who will come after. And the Good News we can find today is that despite our vanities and our selfish rationales, despite the systems of wealth which we flounder and flail among, the Mercy of this abundant and causeless love will work its way out to us anyhow- perhaps even because of the flaws and flukes of the human hands which are delivering it. We must be willing to look beyond those systems to which we have grown accustomed to. We must come to expect their failure, and in their failure, in our failure, to be overwhelmed by Mercy all the same. In the birth of something new, the Holy Spirit of God will use us and our devices beyond even our wildest intents. We must be willing to have our expectations unsettled, and our rules defied. God weeps with Jerusalem in her weeping, the balm has broken over Gilead- can you feel it? AMEN.