Day 12 - I Wish My Head Were a Well of Water

I’d like to claim this content as my own, but it is not. I came across a wonderful sermon on Jeremiah 8:18-9:1 by Rev. Marianne Niesen (UMC), given on September 23, 2007 that you can read in full at this url: (Rev. Marianne Neison). It is a poignant reflection on the recent tragedy and actually parallels  more eloquently my post on Day 7.

William Sloane Coffin, Jr., was the chaplain at Yale when his college-age son, Alex, died in a car accident. Alex and his friends had been drinking.  On the way home, he missed a turn, crashed through a barrier, and plunged into the icy waters of a river north of Manhattan. After the memorial service a woman said what people so often say at times like that . . . she mused to Coffin that what happened must have been the will of God.  Later, Coffin wrote . . . "I wanted to grab her and say - 'Lady, that's wrong. God didn't cause this. It wasn't God's will that my son die. None of us knows enough to say that. God doesn't go around the world hurting and killing people.  When the waters closed in over the car, the heart of God was the first of all our hearts to break.'"That is the simple and profound hope of the faithful heart.  There is a balm in Gilead and it is simply this . . .God is not vindictive. God is not absent. God is present in the grief and the despair, in the human condition. We see evidence of it in Jeremiah's lament.  He was a prophet, after all, and his voice became God's voice. Jeremiah 9:1 in The Message Bible translated by Eugene H. Peterson reads:"I wish my head were a well of water, and my eyes fountains of tears, so I could weep day and night for the casualties of my dear, dear people. . . "In the end, the balm in Gilead is God's presence through all the exiles of our lives.   And when we can't see it ourselves - which we often cannot - sometimes we must look through the eyes, the experiences of others.
Amen