“Is There No Balm in Wauwatosa?”
Rev. Samuel Schaal
September 9, 2004

When I was a child I was entrepreneurial. Instead of setting up the familiar lemonade stand, I sold things door to door. These were things I would see advertised in the back of comic books. I sold greeting cards. I sold Grit Newspaper for a while, if you remember that homespun weekly. And I sold salve: White Cloverine Brand Salve. It came in a metal tin with the illustration of the cloverine flowers encircling the type on the can.

In reality, I think it was nothing more than petroleum jelly. It cost about 35 cents a tin. I vaguely recall actually selling a few to those in my neighborhood, to people no doubt taken in by the pluck of such a young lad, but moreover I remember that we had boxes and boxes of the stuff in our house, so most likely I didn’t really sell that much of it. But if you got a nick or a cut in the Schaal household, there was plenty of salve to go around.

I went online the other day and you can still buy it, only now it costs $5.99 a tin, instead of 35 cents. (Has inflation really been that much or are there merely shrewd managers at the helm of the Cloverine Salve empire?)

Jeremiah asks if there is no balm in Gilead and in this sermon I have asked if there is no balm in Wauwatosa. However we might answer those questions, there was a time when there was, if not a balm, there was a salve in Lubbock, Texas.

As a kid I – and maybe you – would get scrapes and cuts, and this salve or some other simple remedy would came in handy. But as we mature and face the complexities of life, the kind of injuries we receive are not so easily ministered to. I outgrew the need for a simple salve and grew into the need for a more radical balm. The kind that can heal, as that spiritual says, “the sin-sick soul.”

In the time of Jeremiah, there was plenty of need for that kind of serious soul-healing. Jeremiah is one of the most vocal and visible of the Old Testament prophets. In the section just before chapter 8, he is in the temple giving a sermon that castigates the people for relying on the temple more than on God. Today’s lection text is a lament over the people who are determined to go their own way.

Jeremiah pours out his heart and soul. He grieves for his people in their suffering at the same time as he pronounces God’s judgment on them. He mentions the balm in Gilead. Gilead, east of Jordan, was noted for its balm, an aromatic herb. It was not grown there, but traders in Gilead marketed the balm and it was thought to have healing powers that could ease pain. Yes, there is balm in Gilead, Jeremiah is saying, so why not healing for the people here?

The people’s suffering was twofold. They were suffering the spiritual consequences of placing themselves separate from God. And they were likely suffering the physical consequences of a poor harvest. The harvest of grapes, olives, and other fruits was usually completed right around this time of year, in time for celebration of the Jewish New Year – Rosh Hashanah (which began just last week, at sunset on the 15th). But in that year of Jeremiah’s lament, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”

Here in Wauwatosa the summer has ended as well. As to the harvest—well, we have left that agrarian society a long time ago and our harvests are now spread through the year (mine comes twice a month in the form of a paycheck). In our post-industrial, information age we are no longer so dependent upon the seasonal cycles of the earth for our livelihood.

And unlike Jeremiah’s contemporaries, we are largely a very successful people. Most of us don’t know of the material deprivation that Jeremiah expresses. We are a successful people, light years away from the groaning and straining of Israel’s people of God. But there is something still in that old lament that haunts us. There is something in that cry, “Is there no balm in Gilead?”

Successful people can encounter spiritual poverty. We all face the vagaries of being human. This morning’s list of those hospitalized and ill is one sure sign we get Sunday after Sunday that we are also a people in need. And we’ve all experienced the other conditions of life: loneliness, estrangement from friends and family, inability to care for ill family members, mental and emotional difficulties, difficulty with alcohol and other substances, lots of things we live with and we so often don’t share about. And there are those things that haunt us about not being successful in a worldly way: being underemployed or unemployed, financial difficulties, failure to attain the status you deserve as a certain point in life—these are all things that some of us encounter. These are all disappointments. Still we are not saved.

And if we look beyond our own lives we get a sense of the heaviness of humanity’s load. International concerns intrude into our living rooms with surprising and often horrific images. Who can forget the images of the Russian school children recently? And in response to this we see that government returning to old-style authoritarian solutions that will diminish if not destroy the faint beginnings of democracy in that land. And there are the ongoing situations in Iraq, Iran, North Korea and in other places. While it can be said that in the latter half of the 20th century more of the world turned to democratic and capitalistic solutions which are already bearing fruit, there still is so much suffering.

Our cry might be like Jeremiah’s as we lament: Is there no balm? Is there no relief? What will save us from ourselves?

These are questions that most of us have asked ourselves, at one time or another. Perhaps not in those exact words. But in our hearts as we have ached, perhaps we have wondered, “If there is a good and loving and creative God, why is there so much evil in the world, why am I not where I want to be? Why does God allow these things to happen?”

These are very large questions and no one has definitive answers. I think it has something to do with human freedom, the freedom that God has given us, and if you want the freedom to encounter joy you must also have the freedom to feel pain and to suffer. Even the freedom to not follow God.

And so sometimes, I think that God follows us. That is to say, that God never turns God’s back on us, though we may do that to God.

In 1 Timothy, the writer says that our God “desires all men to be saved (the NRSV renders it more accurately as “desires everyone to be saved”) and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (or to accept the truth of the faith received from the apostles). This is an expression of a universal God, a God for all humanity and all creation. And yet notice the description that God “desires” everyone to be saved. There is emotional intent. There is outreach. There is relationship. This suggests a god who actually beckons people into a fuller expression of life.

There is this same quality in the Jeremiah text. Most of us think of this lament as the prophet speaking. And yet if this is so, there are textual problems. In verse 17, just before today’s lection, the narrative shifts to the divine voice, quoting God. The next verse, 18, might be a shift back to the prophet, but the latter part of verse 19 again is in the divine voice, speaking as God would speak. So this lament could be from either the prophet or from God and perhaps it doesn’t really matter, for the prophet tries to bring God’s voice to the world.

But if this is God’s lament, if it is the Lord who is lamenting the lapse of the people, the conditions of poverty and oppression, then we have a God who is very deeply connected to God’s people. What if it is God who is saying: “My heart is sick within me … O that my head were waters and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night…”

So God is not at all absent in this text. God is very present, grieving over the plight of the people.

And the writer of 1 Timothy reflects this kind of a God, a God who desires everyone to be saved. A God who reaches out to comfort God’s own good creation. Then we have a God who is connected to us in an intimate way.

This is the balm of Gilead and of Wauwatosa and of everywhere else. This is the physician of our spirits. God, as understood through the Christ experience.

But if only we would more often turn our attention to God. “Why is not God more present in my life?” we might ask. And yet God is, but we don’t see it. If we would but get more busy with being God’s people, we might feel God’s presence more in our lives and God would speak to us in ways we might hear. We might be more attuned to God’s ever-presence (omnipresence) in our lives.


In the story from Luke, the steward has squandered the rich man’s property and gets fired for it. The rich man pronounces him shrewd. Then Jesus gives his commentary, that those who are faithful in a little will be faithful in a lot, and that humans cannot serve both God and mammon, or wealth.

The issue, I think, is not that wealthy people can’t serve God. It’s more an issue of what all of us – wealthy or not – use our wealth for, for the building up of our own kingdoms or the kingdom of God. It’s asking if we own our wealth or our wealth owns us.

And it’s a commentary, perhaps, that if we would be as shrewd in our religious lives as in our business and personal lives, we would be in a different place. If we would expend more energy in the building up of our lives with Christ, we might be more aware of Christ’s presence in our lives. No matter how wealthy or not—rich or poor, our God is a God of everyone. Then, we might be more aware of that balm that is present.

The sufferings of this life are such that a little salve will rarely fix things, though it’s nice to buy the salve from the enterprising youngster next door, perhaps. But there is among us a God who dwells in us and among us – and holds us and heals us through all conditions of life. It is a love that will not let us go, even when we do not hold on.

And for that, we can say….

Amen.