Heartsick
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
September 27, 2020
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Image: Verdant Smailović in Sarajevo's partially destroyed National Library in 1992. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev / CC BY-SA (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)
A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here https://youtu.be/_-R6wfBD2RI
Many of you know the name of William Sloan Coffin. He was the pastor for many years at the Riverside Church in New York City, a church we might call a tall steeple church for the scope of its outreach and influence. In January 1983, William’s son Alex died in a car accident when the car he was driving plunged into a South Boston channel. Ten days later, Bill Coffin was back in the pulpit at Riverside.
His sermon that day captured so much about how we respond to tragedy. I’m going to quote from it at some length. He said, “When a person dies, there are many things that can be said, and there is at least one thing that should never be said. The night after Alex died, I was sitting in the living room of my sister’s house outside of Boston when the front door opened and in came a nice-looking, middle-aged woman, carrying about eighteen quiches. When she saw me, she shook her head, then headed for the kitchen, saying sadly over her shoulder, “I just don’t understand the will of God.” Instantly I was up and in hot pursuit, swarming all over her. “I’ll say you don’t, lady!” I said. “Was its God’s will that Alex was driving too fast in a driving rain? Did God have his hands on the steering wheel? Was it God’s will that Alex had a few too many beers to be driving that night? Was it God’s will that that stretch of road on Boston Harbor had no signage warning about that dangerous curve?” I expect that woman got out of that kitchen as quickly as she could.
In the sermon, Coffin went on “For some reason, nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn’t go around this world with his fingers on triggers, his fists around knives, his hands on steering wheels. God is dead set against all unnatural deaths. And Christ spent an inordinate amount of time delivering people from paralysis, insanity, leprosy and muteness. Which is not to say that there are no nature-caused deaths—I can think of many right here in this parish in the five years I’ve been here—deaths that are untimely and slow and pain-ridden, which for that reason raise unanswerable questions. . . . But violent deaths, such as the one Alex died—to understand those is a piece of cake. As his younger brother put it simply, standing at the head of the casket at the Boston funeral, ‘You blew it, buddy. You blew it.’”
“The one thing that should never be said when someone dies is ‘It is the will of God.’ Never do we know enough to say that. My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.”[1]
I have read that sermon a number of times over the years. It is a powerful proclamation from a pastor who, was in that moment, a broken-hearted father. I had forgotten the line from Alex’s brother who said, “You blew it, buddy. You blew it.” One of the stages of grief is anger. It was healthy that he could express his anger that his brother was gone, that Alex had made some choices which contributed to his death.
This is very tricky to talk about. I do not want to suggest that suffering is God’s punishment for sin. I don’t believe that. But it is helpful to understand that Alex’s brother’s anger came from a place of love, from heart-sick grief.
That is a good way to understand God’s response in the time of Jeremiah. We heard from the end of chapter 8. The beginning of chapter 8 and previous chapters have described the people’s extreme self-reliance, doing what was right in their own eyes, no matter what it did to others or to their relationship with God. God has been looking and listening intently for the people to cry out in remorse or repentance, but the silence has been deafening. In fact, the people seem completely impervious to any sense of wrong-doing. Jeremiah scholar Patrick Miller says that elsewhere Scripture calls “hardening of the heart” and it suggests a point of no return in human conduct.
He writes, “Self-interest and personal gain may control one’s actions for so long that it is not possible for that person to see or act differently, even when circumstances indicate that a change of heart and a different mode of conduct are, in fact, in one’s own self- interest. A society that focuses on the acquisitive instinct, on personal fulfillment, on ambition, and on accumulation .. . create[s] an ethos of just such hardening where patterns or paths of conduct are so set that they cannot be given up, even when they are wrongheaded and disastrous.”[2]
He was describing Judah in the 6th century BCE, but perhaps you hear something familiar about another culture closer to our time. Hmm.
It is the point of no return. The armies of Babylon are already on the way. The northernmost areas have already been invaded, and yet the people persist in thinking they know best.
“Is there no balm in Gilead?”, Jeremiah asks. Gilead was a region known for its healing resources. Balm was an ointment made from the resin of balsam trees and applied to wounds. Maybe Jeremiah means that even all the balm in Gilead can’t heal this. Or maybe he means that God has offered healing, but the people are so deep in denial that they can’t accept their need for it, and will never get well.
Jeremiah is grieving. God is heartsick. Verse 18 says “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.” And verse 21 “For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.” It impossible to determine exactly who is speaking – God or Jeremiah. Their profound sadness has become intertwined.
They suffer because of the people. The people have provoked God with their disregard for the covenant. God is not detached and unaffected by their behavior. On the contrary God is deeply wounded by the broken relationship. God suffers because of the people. And God also suffers with them.[3] We might imagine God speaking with her head in her hands – the coming destruction brings God no joy. God is a bit like Alex Coffin’s brother, so heart-broken and so angry “You blew it. You blew it.”
The pathos is deep. The season of lament is long. The conflict and occupation of Babylon lasts almost 50 years. The hunger, the violence, the suffering, the loss of loved ones, the economic meltdown, and any sense of normalcy – it just never seems to end. There are other passages in Jeremiah which offer hope, but they are a long time in coming and this is not one of them.
Friends, one of my roles is to help us hold on to hope. Please don’t hear me calling us to despair. But I am realistic enough to see that we are in a season that requires lament. And we will be here for a while.
To lament, to express your grief and pain and even anger to God, can be an act of faithfulness. Among other things, it is a way of acknowledging what is wrong with the situation, a way of taking a stand against that wrongness when you feel powerless to change it. To lament is to hold to your own moral center, to resist accommodating yourself to the situation, to refuse to let it change you.
You may know the story of Vedran Smajlović. It was 1992. The former Yugoslavia had erupted in ethnic strife and beautiful Sarajevo, once home to the Olympic games, was now a war zone. Yugoslavia was splintering into various nations, including what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Serb nationalists surrounded Sarajevo and laid siege, a siege which would last for nearly 4 years. For Smajlović and the other residents of the city, life was a daily ordeal of trying to find food and water amid the shelling and sniper fire that claimed thousands of civilian lives.
On May 27, people formed a long line at one of the still-functioning bakeries. A mortar shell exploded into the middle of the line, killing 22 people and seriously injuring more than 100 others. Smajlović lived close to the bakery and was appalled by what he saw as he helped the wounded.
The next day, Smailovic, a talented cellist with the Sarajevo Philharmonic, dressed in his customary black tails and white shirt, took his place with his cello in front of him. He lifted the bow and began to play Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor. He was not in a concert hall. Instead he sat in the street in a crater where the day before 22 people had died.
He played in spite of the risk. A few people listened from doorways or places of relative safety. Smajlović went back the next day and the next 22 days, one for each person killed. Sniper fire continued around him and mortars still rained down in the neighborhood, but Smajlović never stopped playing.
Then he went to other sites where bombs and bullets had taken the lives of Sarajevo’s citizens. He played at funerals at no charge, even though the Serbian gunners would target such gatherings. His music was a gift to all hiding in their basements with rubble above their heads, a musical lament for the city. As the reports of his performances on the shattered streets spread, a reporter questioned whether he was crazy to play his cello outside in the midst of a war zone. He countered, “You ask me am I crazy for playing the cello, why do you not ask if they are not crazy for shelling Sarajevo?”[4]
God was heartsick over Jerusalem, both in Jeremiah’s time and in Jesus time. We remember the words of Jesus, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often I have longed to gather your children together, and you were not willing.” The lament is not limited to Jerusalem, of course, but extends to Sarajevo and Aleppo and Baghdad and Fresno and Matamoros and Caracas. God suffers because of humans and alongside humans, even humans such as us. God’s heart is the first to break. May that love which breaks God’s heart be for us a source of love and a transmission of strength. Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] . “Eulogy for Alex,” William Sloane Coffin, Jr., 1/23/83 https://www.pbs.org/now/printable/transcript_eulogy_print.html
[2] Patrick Miller, New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VI, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001), p. 650.
[3] Terence E. Fretheim, Jeremiah, (Macon, Georgia: Smyth & Helwys Publishing, 2002), p. 155-56
[4] https://readthespirit.com/interfaith-peacemakers/cellist-vedran-smajlovic/