Last fall, I got to meet one of my theological heroes, Dr. Walter Brueggemann, at the Massachusetts Bible Society. It was Sunday night, October 17th, and the Red Sox were in the midst of losing their third straight game to the Yankees in the ALCS. After the lecture, I was commiserating with a friend, plugging up our hopes for a World Series, but deep down worried the Sox were going to break our hearts again. The eminent Dr. Brueggemann had been talking with the crowd, when he arrived to interrupt our baseball conversation. He confessed he was a St. Louis native and lifelong Cardinals fan, then said, “Did you know that the Boston Red Sox are in the Bible?” We were skeptical, but well aware that we were talking with a premier Old Testament scholar, we played along, “uh, ok, where’s that?” Dr. Brueggemann whipped out his Bible and flipped to today’s text from Jeremiah 8: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” Well, it’s 2005 now, and we are saved. The Red Sox may no longer be in the holy scriptures, but I think it was worth that sacrifice.

I couldn’t resist sharing this story about today’s reading from Jeremiah, but it’s actually another idea from Walter Brueggemann that informs my sermon today. In his book The Prophetic Imagination, which you have probably heard me reference before, Brueggemann dedicates several whole chapters to a biblical theology of groaning. He asserts that faith begins when we weep and wail, grieve and groan, cry and lament. The path to God, he says, begins in mourning over the agony of life and anguish of death, because we must understand that what God has in mind for us is wholeness and healing—not just coping. When we let go of coping and just start grieving, hope begins. So, ready to take the leap of faith? Sound like fun, all this weeping and crying? It’s not an ideal slogan for new members—“come groan with us.” Sounds like a lot of unpleasantness and negativity. And no one wants that, right?

This holy groaning certainly did not make Jeremiah very popular. It’s passages like today’s that earned Jeremiah his nickname as “the weeping prophet.” “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick…I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me…O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my people.” He is not, as they say, a happy camper. But he is a camper, which is actually the reason for his anguish. An invading army ransacked Jerusalem, forcibly deporting Jeremiah and his fellow citizens to hostile territory in Babylon. Jeremiah looks out over the destruction and contemplates their fate, and weeps. And wails. And cries. The rest of the people tried to suck it up, numb themselves to the brutality, and maintain some sense of normalcy in the tumult. Not so Jeremiah.

He moans. And groans. Repeatedly. The people tried to shush him, “it’s not that bad, Jeremiah. We’ll make do. Don’t get so upset, calm down. Keep the peace and it’ll be okay. Hush up, we can’t take any more of your groaning.” But Jeremiah refused to be consoled. “Peace? Peace?” says Jeremiah, “how can you say peace when we are dying? How can you urge me to silence while we are being slain? I will not be consoled,” he says, “until God’s will is restored. I will not resign myself to coping with exile.” A holy groaning, you might say—a refusal to become numb to the anguish of injustice, death and destruction. A belief that God wants true healing and wholeness for us, not just coping.

And then there is Bartimaeus. He sits by the side of the road—in the gutter, really. Because of his blindness, he has been cast out of society. But Bartimaeus refuses to accept his status as a non-person. When Jesus passes by, he shouts: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” The crowd, of course, is embarrassed by this outburst and, as the gospel puts it, “many sternly ordered him to be quiet.” “Hush, Bartimaeus, you’re disrupting Jesus. Why can’t you just accept your fate? Here, take some shekels and get yourself something to eat, just please be quiet and leave us alone.” But Bartimaeus refused their pittance and shouted even louder. He refused to keep coping out on the margins. Unlike the crowd, Jesus actually listened to his needs. “What do you want me to do for you?” “My teacher, let me see again.” “Your faith has made you well.” It is indeed his faith that makes him whole—his faithful shouting, confident that God would move him beyond coping into healing. Because he cried and shouted and refused to be consoled, he found healing. A holy groaning.

Now, this story presents difficulties for us, we who don’t experience faith healing and either live or know those who live with lifelong disabilities. But what is still true from Bartimaeus’ day to ours is that people with disabilities get pushed to the side of the road, marginalized, told to be quiet and stop complaining when they raise their voices for a wheelchair ramp or accessible bathrooms or other innovations which allow them to fully participate in community life. And faithful activists today continue to practice a holy groaning—refusing to be left outside, demanding to be heard, insisting on a community of healing.

Most of us are uncomfortable with the language of groaning. Who wants to weep and cry and moan all the time? It’s depressing, disturbing. Like the crowds around Jeremiah and Bartimaeus, we’re inclined to keep the peace, make do, get by. We’re ashamed, and believe our suffering is a result of our own failure and weakness. But our silent coping just perpetuates our suffering and the silent suffering of our neighbors, because we cannot diagnose the real problem and reach out for healing and justice. Brueggemann says that injustice and brokenness and oppression “live by (their) capacity to still the groans and go on with business as usual as though none were hurting and there were no groans. If the groans become audible, if they can be heard in the streets and markets and courts, then the consciousness of domination is already jeopardized…Jesus had the capacity to give voice to the very hurt that had been muted, and therefore newness could break through.

Newness comes precisely from expressed pain. Suffering made audible and visible produces hope, articulate grief is the gate of newness, and the history of Jesus is the history of entering into pain and giving it voice.”

Newness of life demands we break the silence and engage in a holy groaning, joining voices with others until unjust systems crumble and healing flows. Like Jeremiah and Bartimaeus, we must have the courage to weep and to cry out—to surrender the illusion that everything is fine and admit that we too face fear and brokenness. Like Jesus, it is also our task to listen to the cries of our neighbors and respond with compassion. There is much in our world that aches for the groaning to begin, so the healing can follow—environmental destruction, poverty, homelessness, war, abuse—all demand for us to stop coping and making do, and bring on the groaning, until the noise of our cries is so loud it cannot be ignored and the world is reshaped in patterns of wholeness.

There is much to cry about. But today I want to offer one example that is more immediate. As you may have heard, the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization and its new partner Health Care for All are taking on the problem of affordable healthcare in Massachusetts, an issue that demands a holy groaning. Across the United States more than 18,000 people die every year because they are uninsured. Cancer patients are 50% more likely to die when they are uninsured. Medical crises are the number one cause of bankruptcy in families. In the U.S. there are 47 million people living without health insurance, nearly half a million of them here in Massachusetts. And they’re probably not the people you think—eight out of ten uninsured people either work or are in a working family.

There will be a forum happening upstairs today with John McDonough, Executive Director of Health Care for All, and Cheri Andes, Lead Organizer of GBIO to talk with us about statistics and policy and politics, and to brief us on a campaign to bring healing and justice to the uninsured in our state. But the first and most critical element of this effort is—yes—a holy groaning. We need to cry out for healing and for justice. Within our own Old South congregation, there are people who have no health insurance. There are people worried about losing their health insurance. There are people struggling to pay the premiums to keep their health insurance. There are healthcare providers who see patients too little and too late, and watch them dying because they are uninsured. There are people drowning in medical debt. These are our neighbors in the pews, our friends, even ourselves. We can cope in silence no longer—in the spirit of Jeremiah and Bartimaeus, the time has come for a holy groaning.

Is there no balm in Massachusetts? Do we not have adequate medicines to treat the sick? Are there no pharmacies, no prescriptions, no medical equipment? Is there no balm?

Is there no physician there? Do we lack doctors in this state to tend the ill? Are there no nurses and hospitals, no surgeons? Is there no one who can treat them? Is there no physician?

Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?

We need a holy groaning, weeping and shouting together with one voice. With Bartimaeus and Jeremiah, let us surrender the illusion of coping and name our own suffering, the pain of our own families. With Jesus, let us have the compassion enter into the pain of our neighbors and give it voice so that healing can come. Together, when we refused to be consoled until justice is done, we can find healing.

Remember: it is our faith, our trust in God’s healing and justice that sparks the groaning. Our confidence in God’s wholeness gives rise to an ache that refuses to be satisfied with anything less. Weeping and crying emerges from a place of great faith and courage—faith that God will hear our cries, trust that our fellow Christians will join us in our struggles, courage to give up our meager coping.

Such a groaning faith is only possible because we believe in resurrection. In this Easter season, we know that God’s newness comes even from death itself. With the Psalmist, we know that “weeping may endure for a night, but joy will come in the morning.” With the African American spiritual that answers Jeremiah’s mournful questions, we believe “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.” We will not be abandoned to our holy groaning, for God will restore the exiles, Jesus will stop by the side of the road, Christ will be raised from the dead. So be not afraid, and bring on the holy groaning. There’s healing and justice to be had, if only we cry out for it. Amen.
 

 Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 2nd edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 91.
2 National Council of Churches “Cover the Uninsured Week”, www.covertheuninsuredweek.org/interfaith and Health Care for All, www.hcfa.org.