Hilton Head Island, SC – November 30, 2014
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 7:11-17; Jeremiah 8:18-9:6
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of the daughter of my people not been restored? – Jeremiah 8:22 (RSV)
PREACHING PROBINGS FOR A NON-ADVENT ADVENT
1. Preaching and the Cure of Souls
Today is the first Sunday in Advent. Normally during Advent preachers talk about various aspects of the coming of Jesus Christ into the world as Lord and Savior. The word Advent literally means Coming, so that centuries-old pattern is very understandable.
However, for us this Advent will be mainly a Non-Advent Advent. I shall be preaching three sermons during Advent itself, but only one of them will have a traditional Advent theme. The other two sermons, and the sermon on the Sunday after Christmas, will be a brief summary of my thoughts regarding preaching as a major factor in worship, as well as a primary vocational responsibility of parish ministers.
I begin today with how preaching relates to a concept that goes back to the early and medieval Church. It is called “the cure of souls.” The phrase has to do with how our inner being, our spirit, our soul, needs the healing word of God from time to time. Things go along fine for months or years, and then suddenly we feel cast adrift. Usually this disruption happens circumstantially. Everything goes all right, and then a major calamity strikes us, and we are brought low. Our spirit is crushed, our soul is cast down. A serious illness strikes, and we are not sure if, or when, we shall emerge from it. An accident renders us helpless, and perhaps permanently disabled. A long-valued relationship slowly evaporates, and life becomes totally different. A person dies who was more dear to us than life itself. It occurs either suddenly or after a long and painful sickness, and we are in despair. We had hoped that someone we loved in a romantic sense would return our love, but it did not happen.
Where is God in the midst of such situations? Does He know how badly our heart is crushed? Does He care?
The cure of souls is the effort of people to help one another out of the doldrums, or out of what John Bunyan called “the Slough of Despond,” the dismal swamp of despondency. By the very nature of their vocational calling by God, pastors should be particularly well-suited to assist people in such situations. At least ideally they should be, whether or not they can in reality.
No one in human history was ever more effective in the cure of souls than Jesus of Nazareth. That is definitely an Advent theme. He who is coming, Jesus the Christ, uniquely embodies God’s healing touch. Jesus becomes for us the Great Physician, he whose physical touch brings --- and brought --- wholeness to minds, bodies, and souls which had been shattered by some of what Hamlet called “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”
The cure of souls does not occur in a vacuum. No one who is spiritually adrift is made well in an instant without some outside person or factor or force being involved in the healing process. Someone or something needs to be enlisted for a shattered soul to be made whole again.
The Gospel of Luke has a story regarding the cure of souls which is unique to that Gospel (9:11-17). It begins by telling us that Jesus went to a city called Nain. Nain was located at the southeast base of Mt. Tabor, an ancient extinct volcanic mountain in the Galilean region of the land of Judea. We are told that as he approached the town, a body was being carried out to the cemetery. It was a young man who had died, and we are further informed that he was the only child of his mother, who was a widow.
It would be hard enough for any widow anywhere to have her only child die. But in Judea in Jesus’ time, it was a potential complete disaster. Virtually all women in those days were “kept women,” by which I mean that a male, usually a husband, protected and provided for her. Then there were no professional women, no “working women.” There were only women living in households 24 hours a day. And if there was no man there, there soon might be no household either. A woman could be, and likely would be, left entirely destitute without a man. That presumably was the situation which awaited the lady of Nain, and she was fearfully aware of it.
Listen to how Luke describes what happened next. “And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, ‘Do not weep’” (7:13). Jesus had compassion on her! He felt what she felt! A man allowed himself to feel what a woman felt! That is literally what compassion means: com: “with” passus: to suffer. Jesus felt for her! He suffered with her! Therefore without hesitation Jesus went up to the funeral pallet on which they were carrying the body, and he said, “Young man, I say to you, arise,” and he sat up, and began to speak.
Was there more to the story than Luke tells us? Probably. But we cannot know what it might be. What we do know is that a widowed mother who thought she had lost her son forever had found her soul almost obliterated, and now it was cured! She saw no possible future for herself, and suddenly her life was restored to her by the restoration of her son to life! Hope was resurrected and her spirit was re-born, along with that of her son!
Words have the power to cure souls. That was uniquely true of Jesus of Nazareth, but it is true of others as well, and perhaps it is particularly true of preachers. A sermon is --- or should be --- God’s word to a congregation. By means of a person who is ordained into the pastoral ministry, God speaks through that individual’s words.
Some preachers become well known for their ability to participate in the cure of souls. Two 20th century preachers who did that in a particular way were Norman Vincent Peale of the Marble Collegiate Church in New York City and his disciple, Robert Schuller, of the Garden Grove Community Church, later the Crystal Cathedral, in suburban Los Angeles. Both of those men spoke powerfully to the way in which positive thinking can overcome some of the maladies of depleted or crushed spirits or souls. Or there was the beloved pastor of the Riverside Church in Manhattan, Harry Emerson Fosdick. “Preaching, ”Dr. Fosdick said, “is pastoral counseling in a group setting.”
The most effective physician for the cure of souls that I have known personally and heard frequently was Elam Davies. I have previously spoken of Dr. Davies on many occasions. He was the pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago when my wife Nancy and I attended Fourth Church while I was a student in seminary. Later we were there for five years when I was an assistant minister on the church’s staff.
Cities are singular communities in numerous ways. When I was a minister at Fourth Church, I discovered that one of those ways is that the city seems magnetically to attract legions of troubled souls. Perhaps they didn’t fit in where they were born and raised. Perhaps they did something which ostracized them from the people they had previously known and loved. Perhaps they just hadn’t found their proper niche in life, so they came to the city, hoping that there, in the hustle and bustle, their proper place would magically manifest itself.
Fourth Presbyterian Church is a beautiful Gothic structure. Lois and I were there a month ago, and it was an emotionally overpowering trip down Memory Lane just to walk through its sanctuary and its beautiful new activities building. The sanctuary holds fourteen hundred people, and every Sunday fourteen hundred people were there to hear Elam Davies preach.
By nature, many people were invisibly drawn to Dr. Davies. He had a way of preaching personal sermons which seemed as though each person there was the only person to whom he was speaking. Because that was so, he had the most active pastoral counseling ministry of any pastor I have ever known or heard about. He spent many hours every week talking to people who were troubled and tortured souls, and he administered the grace of God to them by what he said.
Fourth Church was a passing parade of people. Every year we had to receive 10% of our membership as new members, because 10% moved out to the suburbs or elsewhere in the nation or the world. Thus it was not possible for The Boss, as we called him, to counsel everyone individually. Therefore he did it though his preaching. What he said from the pulpit was often an example of the cure of souls. To be sure not everyone who wanted pastoral counseling needed it, and not everyone who needed it wanted it, but in one way or another, week after week and year after year, Elam Davies helped cure the souls of countless men and women whose lives were in tatters, whether or not they knew it.
The prophet Jeremiah lived at one of the most difficult and painful periods in the history of the people of Israel. The Babylonians, which is to say the Neo-Babylonians, were then the leading power in the ancient Middle East. We are talking about the turn of the 7th century BCE, which is from about 640 to about 580 Before the Common Era.
Jeremiah was convinced that the Israelites had given up their connection to God, and they were about to be conquered by the people of Babylon, which corresponds to contemporary Iraq. As did many of the prophets, Jeremiah wrote what he believed was the literal word of God, which means he wrote what he believed God was thinking. Speaking in the voice of God, Jeremiah said, “My grief is beyond healing, my heart is sick within me. Hark, the cry of the daughter of my people from the length and breadth of the land: ‘Is not the Lord in Zion? Is her King not in her?’” And then come those plaintive words set to music by Felix Mendelssohn in his oratorio Elijah, “The harvest is over, the summer days are gone” --- but there is no salvation for Judah.
And so Jeremiah, speaking on behalf of God asks a question known by millions of people the world over because of their familiarity with the words of our final hymn. “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?” There was an ointment which came from the east side of the Jordan River which is in what now is the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, just south of the border with Syria. The region was called Gilead in biblical times, and the ointment was known as the balm of Gilead. Apparently it was widely used to cure a variety of ailments, and its medicinal properties were famous.
Everywhere people are hurting. Everywhere souls have been bruised and battered, smashed and shattered. We may not be aware of it for everyone who feels spiritually bereft, but they are there nonetheless, and they need help.
Jesus Christ is the balm in Gilead. The Word of God is the restorative power of God for souls crying out to God for healing.
Preachers represent God’s Word from the pulpit. They are not the Word of God, but they represent it, they verbalize it on behalf of the One who calls them to their vocation.
Regularly I am amazed at some of the things people tell me I said from the pulpit ten or twenty or thirty years ago. I can’t remember what I preached last week, let alone what I might have said decades ago. Nevertheless I can remember what other preachers preached years back, and especially that wonderful Welsh oracle from fifty years ago and then slightly more recently. I was then situationally suited to hear God’s Word via human words. Most of us don’t recall much of what we have said, unless we think that what we said was of vast importance either to someone or to everyone. But when others said things we knew were important, we remembered it, because it touch our lives, it lifted our spirits, it cured our souls. There is a balm in Gilead. There are many physicians there and elsewhere, and they utilize their God-provided talents not only by means of pills and potions, but also by words and wisdom and compassion.
For some people, life is hard most or all of the time. For others, it is hard just some of the time. For still others, it is only occasionally hard. But for everyone, life can close in on us, and we feel crushed by its weight and its seemingly unpredictable and implacable apathy. It does not seem to care what is happening to us or how we feel about it.
But God cares. God always cares. The balm of Gilead awaits everyone who is willing to avail themselves of it, to derive the spiritual or mental or physical cure it can provide, because it comes from God, from whom all blessings flow.
Over the past fifty years I have said many things from many pulpits in many places. It was not always about the cure of souls. In fact, I being I, it may not have been nearly enough about the cure of souls. But I hope that at least in some of those places, and in the hearts of at least some of those people, souls were cured, at least to some degree.
We are not alone. Preachers are meant to assure us that we are not alone. And woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel.