No Balm in Gilead (8th Sunday after Pentecost; Jeremiah 8:20-9:7; July 10, 2016)

No Balm in Gilead

8th Sunday after Pentecost  Jeremiah 8:20-9:7  July 10, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD  First United Methodist Church  Decorah, Iowa

Two of my favorite grownup magazines when I was a boy were Popular Mechanics and Popular Science. The first was a sort of do-it-yourself guide for making really cool stuff. The second was a glimpse into an imagined future in which we would all have the best and coolest toys: jetpacks and gyrocopters that could take off from a football field and could fold up and fit in a garage.

I loved to read about science, not only for its descriptions of the way the universe works, but also for the doors it opened into a future filled with possibilities: nuclear energy so cheap it would be given away without even measuring how much was being used, household robots that did all the chores and could even make my bed, two hundred mile an hour trains, and medicines so effective that disease would be virtually unknown. I leafed through Popular Mechanics and Popular Science and read science fiction and I dreamed of the world that I would inherit when I was a grownup.

It didn't work out quite the way I dreamed. Diseases have become more resistant even as our cures become more and more advanced. It's an arms race to see whether the diseases can out-evolve our cures. The super fast trains are in Japan, not the United States. Roomba can clean floors--with some important reservations--but it cannot make our beds. Nuclear energy turned out to be recklessly dangerous and, while renewable energy sources like wind and solar power have come a long way since I was ten, fossil fuels still provide for most of our energy needs. And I never got my jetpack.

My future did not turn out as I had imagined and expected that it would. The place where I had made my imaginative home was not a place where I could actually live. And the place where I live is not what I had called home. Of course now I can look back at this micro-exile and smile at my younger self indulgently. How naive I was, how credulous! What I am styling as exile is really just a matter of growing up, of becoming a grownup, of learning to recognize the difference between a daydream--even one sanctioned by my Dad's magazines--and reality.

But I have experienced exilic disillusionment of a more serious kind. I suspect that some of you have, too.

When I was ten, and indeed, all through my public school days, our school day began with the Pledge of Allegiance. It had been written in its first form in 1892 for the opening of the Chicago World's Fair by the Christian socialist Francis Bellamy. It's been tinkered with since then, most famously and rancorously by inserting the words "under God" in 1954. But the Pledge of Allegiance has always had the words "with liberty and justice for all." Bellamy had originally wanted "liberty, fraternity, and equality," but knew that vast numbers of Americans would never stand for equality if African Americans or women were to be included in that notion, so he settled for the form that we know. "With liberty and justice for all."

No matter who you were, not matter where you'd come from, here under our flag were two things you could count on: liberty and justice. Red or yellow, black or white, here under this flag you were free. Man or woman, rich or poor, here under our flag you could count on justice. That was the republic I grew up in. That was the flag to which I pledged my allegiance. Every morning in public school, Two thousand, three hundred forty times, I stood with my classmates, put my hand over my heart and said the words. "With liberty and justice for all."

I believed those words. I believed that the America to which I pledged my allegiance was the American that really existed in the real world.

Now, when I was ten it was 1962 and African Americans were no longer willing to publicly pretend that "liberty and justice for all" described the reality that they lived. My daily pledge had, like the Declaration of Independence, become a defaulted promissory note. "Instead of honoring this sacred obligation," Martin Luther King, Jr., said, "America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds'."

Slowly, I began to understand that "liberty and justice for all" were words that described our aspirations, rather than our reality. And let’s just say that there is nothing wrong with aspiring to more than we are. This, then, became the meaning of my daily recitation. "Liberty and justice for all" is our goal. It may take a long time to get there, but we are going to get there. Bit by bit, with changed laws and slowly changing attitudes those words would become our reality.

Now, I have to confess, I am not so sure. There is not much that suggests that we are moving as a people toward liberty and justice for all. There is not even much that suggests that this remains our shared aspiration and dream.

I'm not sure what all has fed into this new pessimism of mine.Maybe it's the resurgent racism that I see. Some of it is the double standard applied along racial lines by too many police departments and too many officers. This week one black man, Philando Castile, was shot to death in the Twin Cities suburb of Falcon Heights while explaining to the officer who had pulled him over because of a broken taillight that he had a permit to carry the weapon that he had on him. His girlfriend filmed the whole encounter and her four-year-old daughter can be heard beside her on the back seat of the squad car saying, "It's OK, Mommy. It's OK, I'm right here with you."

On the same day in Raleigh, North Carolina, a 62-year-old white man, William Bruce Ray, was standing near a road and pointing his shotgun at the drivers of passing cars. A deputy was sent to the scene and succeeded in wrestling the shotgun from Ray's hands. Then Ray drew a handgun and fired it. The deputy then took the handgun from him and arrested him.

The actor Jesse Williams's speech at the Black Entertainment Television awards sparked heated, we'll call it "conversation", on the interwebs last week. As part of an amazing acceptance speech for BET's Humanitarian Award he said, "What we’ve been doing is looking at the data. And we know that police somehow manage to deescalate, disarm and not kill white people every day."

"Liberty and justice for all."

We suffer the effects of the deep racism that infects our society. The same racism that justified the theft of a continent and the kidnapping of millions, is now used to oppress black (and other) communities all over the country. The only way I see past our crisis is to face it head-on. It will take hard work, especially on our part, since black folk have always been more willing to talk than we white folk have been to listen. It will take hard work and time and lowering white defensiveness and growing our ability and endurance for engaging in meaningful conversation across racial lines.

It's a long shot, but I think it's the only way forward toward "liberty and justice for all."

It's been made even less likely, though, by the blatant racism that has erupted into the open in this country in the last eight years. It is racism that is being nurtured and stoked for the political advantage of a few who seek to harness the justified anger and disillusionment caused by our economy's transformation into a system for enriching the rich and to focus that anger in the form of hate for African Americans, Muslims, Latinos, and LGBTQ folks.

So I was already discouraged when the news of the shooting in Dallas broke. Five officers killed, other officers and civilians wounded in the space of a couple of minutes. There is a great deal that we still don't know. We do know that the officers on the scene were there to protect the right of people to express their justifiable anger at how things stand and to petition the government by means of public protest for a redress of grievances. This was First Amendment speech, protected speech. The police were doing the protecting. And then shots rang out, terrifying the marchers and felling one office after another.

Among the first to condemn this shooting were the organizers of the march. Contrary to what some critics claim, #BlackLivesMatter is not short for "only black lives matter more" but for "black lives matter, too." But even knowing this, I fear that, in addition to the lives lost, in addition to the grief of their families and friends, in addition to the shock and dismay felt in every squad room in the country, these deaths will serve only to embolden those who foster racism for their own ends.

To say that I am discouraged is a vast understatement. The events of our recent history have wrenched me not only from the country in which "liberty and justice for all" is a fact realized in our shared life, but also from the country in which "liberty and justice for all" is an aspiration toward which we strive. I am a refugee from that country looking for shelter. If it persists long enough, I will have to call myself an exile.

I find that I resonate with the prophet Jeremiah even more now.

"The harvest is past, the summer has ended, yet we aren't saved." I used to quote those words as a joke, a description of the life of a Cubs fan in October. But it isn't funny any more.

Where is the healing ointment for our sickness? Where is the doctor who can treat our disease? Whatever healing there is, whatever balm there is in Gilead, whatever physician, it has not been and is not enough.

"If only my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, I would weep day and night for the wounds of my people." I get it. Man, do I get it. If I do not weep constantly it is not because there is a lack of things to weep about. Eventually I run out of tears.

I see the wounds more clearly than I would like. I see the racism. I see the homophobia. I see the rapist culture. I see how the mentally ill rank in our hierarchy of concern. I get it.

Jeremiah sees the wounds of his own people, too. He wishes that he could simply go his own way and leave them behind:

"If only I could flee for shelter in the desert, to leave my people and forget them..."

and he begins to catalog his people's failings: they are adulterers, crooks, liars, and he finishes with:

"They go from bad to worse. They don't know me! declares the Lord."

Wait! What?

It turns out that we have not been listening to Jeremiah's pain and anguish, but to God's. It is God who despairs:

"Because my people are crushed, I am crushed; darkness and despair overwhelm me."

It is God who suffers from a lack of tears:

"If only my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, I would weep day and night for the wounds of my people."

I confess that I would like God to hover above the world untouched by it and able to fix things with a word or the flick of a finger.I would like God to eliminate racism. I would like God to wipe out homophobia. I would like God to salve our wounds and heal our dis-ease. I wait, but there seems to be no balm in Gilead and no physician there, either, not even God. Instead, we find God crushed because we are, overwhelmed with darkness at the darkness that overwhelms us, weeping over our wounds.

In the darkness of exile perhaps we will yet find healing as we are washed, not with our own, but with God's tears and we hear God speaking with the voice of a four-year-old who says, "It's OK. It's OK, I'm right here with you." We aren’t saved, not yet anyway, but we aren’t alone either.

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