Is There Balm in Gilead?

 Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “

“'Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—

Only this, and nothing more.”

 

Ah, distinctly, I remember, it was in the bleak December, and each separate dying ember ….

 

Okay, I’ll stop there.

These words may sound familiar to you.  Maybe you recognized them right away.  Maybe the title and the author are right on the tip of your tongue.  Maybe you need a little hint—so here it is—this poem features a bird who utters only one word over and over—Nevermore.

If you guessed this poem is The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, fantastic!

If you’re also thinking “Hmm, Nevermore?  Isn’t that the school Wednesday Addams attends in that show on Netflix?”  Yes, yes it is.  That’s how writers pay homage to the greats who came before them.

If you’re also thinking that you never expected to hear a sermon that featured Edgar Allan Poe, the master of the terrifying and the macabre, and a reference to the Addams Family, well, two things—it’s October, tis the season, and also, I’m a former Language Arts teacher … trust me.

In the poem, The Raven, the narrator is deep in grief over the loss of his beloved Lenore.  When a mysterious raven appears in his room, he finds himself compelled to speak to the raven as if the bird were a mystical conduit to the other side. 

It seems crazy, but the narrator is suffering, frantic for answers, desperate for something, anything to ease his pain, at one point asking the raven, “Is there balm in Gilead?”

This question—is there balm in Gilead—is actually lifted directly from the Bible, specifically, from Jeremiah 8:22, where Jeremiah, another man in deep grief and mourning over the suffering of his people in forced exile in Babylon, asks, “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is there no healing for the wound of my people?”

Jeremiah is also credited with writing the book of Lamentations and, for the most part, the book lives up to its title.  It is a book of laments, an accounting of suffering, a liturgy of grief.  Jeremiah is known as “the weeping prophet” for a reason.

And yet, as we see in today’s reading from Lamentations 3:21-24, Jeremiah also offers an antidote to spiritual grief and suffering.  Those verses read, “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. ‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’”

Let those words just settle on your heart for a moment.  Isn’t it amazing that thousands of years later, words like that can still have so much impact, can still provide so much solace and promise?

“The Lord is my portion, therefore I will hope in him.”

That’s a verse worth remembering, worth tucking away in your mind to be pulled out when needed. 

If I surveyed a hundred people, Family Feud-style, and asked them what they thought was the most popular and well-known verse in the Bible, what do you think would be the answer?

My guess is John 3:16, right?  “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only son …” we know this one, right?

But my pick for the second most popular verse would be Jeremiah 29:11 … “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to help you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”  That’s my paraphrase. 

And here’s the thing, I can tell you how old I was, where I was and who shared that verse with me for the first time.  I was spending the summer with my grandparents when I was seventeen.  They were devout Southern Baptists and so that very first night that I arrived, they sat down with me on the couch in the living room and gave me my very first Teen Bible.  And that night my grandparents shared with me Jeremiah 29:11. They taught me to underline it and date it so that I would always know when I had first heard it.

Now, I will be the first to tell you, my grandparents could be a little heavy-handed when it came to sharing God’s word, aka, witnessing. 

I had believed in God since I could talk.  I had plenty of Bibles.  My grandparents were not the first people to ever talk to me about God.  I had been through CCD at the Catholic church and Sunday schools at Methodist churches and other Baptist churches.  I prayed nightly and deeply.  I was intensely spiritual.  And I owed most of that to my parents and how they raised me.

But that night with my grandparents was the first time I had ever heard Jeremiah 29:11.  And those words spoke to me.  They speak to me still.

My grandparents weren’t finished, though.  They told me that just like they had shared that verse with me, I now needed to share that verse with someone else, which considering I was an introvert—was more than a little terrifying to me.  But my grandparents knew the power of God’s word to heal and bring hope to others.

In today’s reading from 2 Timothy chapter 1, Paul tells Timothy in verse 5, “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you.”

It may seem like a throw-away line at first.  Ah so Timothy has a family.  Grandma Lois and Mom Eunice.  Great.  But this verse says so much more than that.  It is a statement that shows how faith is passed from generation to generation.  How Timothy’s “sincere faith” is directly connected to his mother and grandmother’s faith. 

It is a verse that shows us just what our purpose is on this earth.  We are stewards of God’s word, stewards of His love and it is an awesome responsibility.  It is a responsibility that should humble us in how grand a purpose it is.  God’s word is precious.  Afterall, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.  We are caretakers of that Holy Word.

But we cannot hoard the Word and keep it to ourselves.  We must share the Word, share our faith, because as Paul tells Timothy in verse 7, “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love.”  It is a “holy calling” Paul says later because he knows how powerful the word of God can be in driving out darkness and hate and bringing light and love to the world. 

It seems like in the world these days, we are shown again and again how words hurt, how words divide, how words prolong pain and encourage hate.

Every day we see the power of hateful words, so much so that maybe we doubt that words of love can ever be enough.

Very rarely are we shown how words heal and bless, how the power of grace and mercy, of forgiveness and unconditional love can move mountains.

In today’s gospel reading from Luke, Jesus tells the disciples if they had faith the size of a mustard seed, they could say to that mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and plant yourself in the sea,” and it would do exactly that.  The mustard seed command in Matthew is a bit different, replacing the mulberry tree with a mountain.  But regardless the message is the same. 

This is what your faith is capable of.  Even faith the size of a mustard seed could change the shape of the world.  The potential of your faith is beyond anything you could ever comprehend or imagine. 

Nothing you do in service of that faith is small.  And woe to anyone who dismisses your mustard seed.

Nothing you do for God is small.

That summer with my grandparents, I was on the phone with my mom one night.  She was having a hard time.  My mom had a hard life.  And on that particular night, she was upset and was having her own “balm in Gilead” moment.

People who feel helpless and hopeless, who are in despair, always ask, in their own way, about the balm of Gilead. 

When you are suffering spiritually, when your soul cries out, when you ache from someplace deep within … you become desperate for anything that might ease your pain.

And so, Edgar Allan Poe’s narrator turns to a raven for answers, only to be left angry and bitter, cursing the bird, for its constant non-answer of “Nevermore.”

In the end, Poe’s narrator is left without hope, confident there is no spiritual balm for the grieving.

But we (you and I) we know better.  We know there is hope.

There is hope in God.  And that hope is no small thing.

And so while I was on the phone with my mom, that night, more than thirty years ago, I opened up my Bible and said to her, “Have you ever read Jeremiah 29:11?”

[And let me say one last thing on Jeremiah 29:11.  God’s promise in this verse that His plans for us are plans to give us “hope and a future”—that promise is not just a promise to us, but a generational promise.

What does that mean?  It means that no matter what generation you are, whether Silent Generation, Boomer, Gen X, Millennial, Gen Z or Gen A, you are the hope and the future of all the generations that came before you.

You are someone’s hope.]

So what are the words that you need to hear today?  Is it Jeremiah 29:11. Perhaps you need the words from Jeremiah 31:3 where God declares this … “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”

But also, remember this—as important as God’s word is in sustaining us, in lifting us up, in carrying us through the dark, Decembers of our lives, we, as stewards of God’s word, have a duty to share that spiritual balm with others.

And so, I will leave you with one last verse, this time from 1 Peter 3:15.  “Always be ready to share with others the hope that is inside of you.”

Amen.