The Balm of Hope and Healing

September 21, 2025

Let’s listen one more time to Jeremiah’s lament: 

“My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?”

This isn’t the voice of a prophet proclaiming with conviction, it is a cry from the gut. Jeremiah is undone. He has seen his people betray the covenant, chase after false gods, turn their backs on justice – and now they are reaping the pain of exile and collapse. He looks at the wound and he cannot stop weeping. It reminds me of Jesus approaching Jerusalem and weeping for the people who did not recognize the things that would bring them peace. (Luke 19:41-44)

It seems there is much weeping to be done over people who have turned their backs on justice and brought about untold suffering in our world even today. 

Jeremiah names what most of us would rather ignore; the wound is real. The sickness is deep. And no quick fix, no easy prayer, no cheerful platitude will make it disappear.

Our Jewish brothers and sisters hear in this passage the ache of covenant unkept, of home lost, of a people undone. We need to honour that grief and not to rush past it. 

And then centuries later, in another place of suffering, the Black church in America took Jeremiah’s lament and sang it back as hope: “There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.” They knew the wound of slavery and oppression. They knew despair. But they also knew a God who does not abandon. They knew that even when history says “no,” God’s Spirit still says “yes.”

So, we sit between Jeremiah’s tears and that old spiritual’s song – caught between the honesty of the wound and the hope of God’s healing.

My granddaughter started Junior Kindergarten this fall so she left the French daycare she had been attending for the past year. She had had some wonderful caregivers but one stood out. A woman close to my own age, originally from Afghanistan. She and her family had fled the country in the 80’s and moved to Montreal, then felt a responsibility to return in the early 2000’s when efforts were being made to rebuild Afghanistan.  She and her siblings, doctors, engineers, educators wanted to do what they could to help the country they had loved. But under threat they had been forced to flee their defeated country once again so returned to Canada. After many years working internationally and running a French school for diplomat’s families in Afghanistan and France, she started over in Guelph. This time she chose to work in the French daycare with the youngest of students. She said she loved working with the little ones because they brought her such hope with their honesty and loyalty, where up until that point she had been very despaired of what had happened to her homeland that had once flourished. In the midst of the weeping and destruction she sought hope and, found it in the innocent faces of children like my Granddaughter. She invited my daughter Amanda, Naomi and I for dinner one night in her home and we feasted on Afghan dishes, and the warmest of hospitality that only one who has been without a home, could create. She found healing in hope demonstrated by a simple gathering around a table with new friends in her adopted home of Canada. 

And now we turn to our gospel reading for today from Luke that tells a strange little story of a dishonest steward. A man caught in corruption, who suddenly has to account for his actions. He scrambles to make amends. And though his motives are mixed, he does at least one thing right: he acts. 

Jesus ‘ teachings’ at the end says: “Whoever is faithful in very little is faithful also in much: and whoever is dishonest in very little is dishonest also in much.”

What does this have to do with Jeremiah’s cry for healing?

I think it’s this: wounds – whether personal, communal, or national, - are never healed by grand gestures alone. Healing comes through honesty in the small things.  Balm is never poured by the bucket. Balm is rubbed in, drop by drop, gently, faithfully, over time. 

And here in Canada, we know something about deep wounds. We know the wound of our history with Indigenous peoples. Residential schools, Broken treaties. Silenced languages. Children taken from their families. A legacy of suffering and loss in which the church was not just a bystander but a participant.

The wound is real. Jeremiah would weep. God weeps still.

So how does healing come? How do we even begin?

Not with one national holiday. Not with one declaration. Not with one big statement. 

Healing comes the way balm works; slowly, persistently, in small, faithful acts. 

It comes when we listen - truly listen- to the stories of survivors.

It comes when we learn the names of the First Peoples whose land we live on.

It comes when we support Indigenous-led initiatives for justice and restoration.

It comes when we pay attention to the words we use, when we tell the truth about history, when we hold ourselves accountable in the smallest things.

The Spirit Circle Adult study group that meets Wednesday evenings starting next week decided to read together the book 52 Ways to Reconcile: How to Walk with Indigenous Peoples on the Path to Healing. By David A. Roberston. Members of the group wanted to do more than read our land acknowledgement each week. A book by Jody Wilson-Raybould called True Reconciliation was also recommended.  Together we hope to do what we can to offer balm on that path to healing with our Indigenous sisters and brothers. 

These are not small acts. They are drops of balm. And together they make healing possible. Jeremiah asks, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” We dare to answer; yes, there is. No cheap grace. Not a quick fix. But the slow, costly work of repentance and repair, to  any of our broken relationships.

“I am only one, but still I am one.

I cannot do everything, but still I can do something

And because I cannot do everything,

I will not refuse to do the something

that I can do”

(by Edward Everett Hale)

And here is the good news; God entrusts this work to us. Just as Jesus said, “Be faithful in little, and you will be faithful in much. “Each act of honesty, each step of faithfulness, each drop of balm – it all matters. 

So let us not despise the small things. Reading a book, saying a prayer, gathering around a table, listening to a voice we haven’t heard before, a story shared, small things. Yet through them, God is already healing. Through them, hope is born. Through them, the song rises again:

There is a balm in Gilead to heal the wounded soul. Amen.