Is there no balm in Gilead?  Is there no physician there?  Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored? 

-Jeremiah 8:22

 
There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole;
there is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.

-“There Is a Balm in Gilead”

 
In the spring of 2020, I taught a Middlebury College course on the theology and ecology of climate change with my friend and colleague Rev. Andy Nagy-Benson.  The course was called “Hope in a Time of Climate Change.”  And we talked a lot about hope – what it is (and is not), why it mattered, where we found it.  We moved to Zoom partway through that pandemic semester, but our conversations about hope continued.  And talking about hope gave us hope during those dark days.  At the end of the semester, Andy and I mailed to each of our students a stone, engraved with the words “and yet.”  (That’s a bowl of those stones in the photograph.) We told them that within the Christian tradition, those two words point us to Easter hope – “dying and yet we live on,” wrote the Apostle Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians.  Easter hope is that inexplicable hope that springs up when all seems lost: the story seems to be over, and yet – look!   Something new is emerging, over there on the far horizon, even now! 
 
That hope – rugged, inexplicable, surprising – is the hope we find on the far side of the most grief-struck passages in Scripture.  Including those we find in the Book of Jeremiah.  Jeremiah’s prophecies overflow with words of lament and anguish – his own and God’s – at all that has befallen the people of Judah, including the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonian Empire in 587 BCE.  In the passage above, Jeremiah looks at the catastrophe all around and then cries out his anguish: is there no balm in Gilead?  Why is there no healing to be found?
 
Centuries later, an African-American spiritual – written during the time of slavery– answers Jeremiah.  There Is a Balm in Gilead.  Howard Thurman says, of that song’s title that the enslaved person who wrote the song “caught the mood of [Jeremiah’s] spiritual dilemma and with it did an amazing thing. He straightened the question mark in Jeremiah’s sentence into an exclamation point: “There is a balm in Gilead!” Here is a note of creative triumph.” 
 
Before reading any further, I invite you to go listen to the song a few times.  You might try the version by Nina Simone.  Or maybe Paul Robeson’s.  Or the version by Sweet Honey in the Rock.  Or my personal favorite, by Melanie DeMore.  Or, better yet, listen to them all!
 
What do you hear?  What’s the mood of the song? 
 
There’s sorrow there, to be sure.  But maybe you also hear a note of hope.  Howard Thurman describes the song’s hopefulness as “an optimism that grows out of the pessimism of life and transcends it. It is an optimism that uses the pessimism of life as raw material out of which it creates its own strength.” 
 
The song expresses that “and yet” hope, rising out of the depths when all seems lost.  It’s Easter hope, looking squarely at a terrible reality and declaring: healing will come, love will win.  (The prophet Jeremiah eventually made his way to hope, too – check out chapters 30-32 of the book of Jeremiah to hear what that sounds like.)
 
I invite you, this week, to spend some time with hope.  Listen to the hymn a few times.  (We’re singing it on Sunday – so, sing along!)  Think about your own experience of hope.  Do you have hope?  What gives you hope?  From where does your hope spring?  What’s your experience of the relationship between grief and hope?
 
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
 
Grace and peace,
 
Pastor Andi