Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost: September 21, 2025 | The Rev. McKenzi Roberson

Readings: Jeremiah 8:18-9:1 | Psalm 79:1-9 | 1 Timothy 2:1-7 | Luke 16:1-13

God weeps. Statements like this make many bible scholars and theologians very uncomfortable. It’s almost funny how much ink scholars have spent attempting to convince each other that clearly this is Jeremiah speaking and not God. But at the end of the day, the text is ambiguous. It could be Jeremiah’s voice we hear, but it could just as easily be God continuing to speak from earlier, or it could be a mingling of the voices of both Jeremiah and God, distraught over the path their people are taking. For the sake of exploring the ambiguity, let us consider:

God weeps.

When people die on the streets because they can’t get access to the care they need for their trauma or their mental illness. When people starve to death while grocery stores throw food away and threaten to fire employees for trying to eat or share the extra. When children are brutally killed by bombs that our tax dollars finance. When species go extinct because their habitat has been cut down for profitable agriculture. When the life is stripped from the earth in search of minerals to build our technology. When people die because they cannot find shelter from extreme weather. The list goes on and on.

Every time we as individuals and we as a society choose to serve the gods of wealth, power, and greed, the gods of death, our God weeps. When we as individuals and we as a society face the painful consequences of choosing death over life, our God weeps. God lets us experience the painful consequences of our actions, and still, God weeps.

Is there no balm in Gilead?

Here’s a five dollar theology word for you: theodicy, which is the attempt to answer the question if God is good then how is there evil and suffering in the world. Why would God weep when God has the power to make it all stop?

Having spent the better part of two of my three Bible and theology degrees with this question pressing in my life, I can tell you there is no really good answer. You can throw a lot of technical or pretty words at this question, but not much sticks in the depths of despair and pain. When you are sitting there like Job with everything you love violently stripped away and your most intimate people telling you to curse God and die, no answer is ever going to feel fully satisfactory. Pain doesn’t make sense; it does not succumb to logic.

I can’t tell you how much I wish that being made a priest conferred to me the kind of magical balm that exists in the books I like, the kind of balm that impossibly heals deep wounds. Instead, the best I think I can do is offer you three of the ingredients of the balm I use for your own spiritual first aid kit and hope that maybe you’ll find something useful in them.

The first ingredient often feels the most hollow, but it is necessary to remember. God is transcendent. God exists outside of our capacity to understand. This is basically the answer Job gets when demanding an answer to his pain. “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!” Of course Job doesn’t understand, of course we don’t know. This truth doesn’t usually feel good to hear, to me it often feels like a cop-out, but it is important to our foundation to remember that God will never fit neatly into the boxes we try to create. We trust that God is good, but sometimes what is good does not make sense. You might think of a child whose parent takes them to get their vaccinations. This does not seem good to the child, but for the sake of their life and the lives of the community it is decidedly good. 

The next part of my balm is found in the fact that God’s timeline is not our timeline. This is another comfort that can be hard to hear but I find really helpful. The people to whom Jeremiah is prophesying end up in exile, and they stay there. It isn’t until the next generation that some of the people are allowed to return to their homeland. Jeremiah is the source of the classic Christian cliche, “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future.’” That future comes to pass, and it extends beyond the timeline of the original audience.

Similarly, many of Jesus’ original followers assumed that Jesus’ second coming would occur during their lifetime. You can see this in some of Paul’s letters, how he has to do some fancy theological footwork to make it make sense that believers are dying but Jesus isn’t returning. When it feels like my suffering won’t end and Jesus can’t come back soon enough to bring an end to the evil in the world, I find some comfort in the knowledge that I am just one in a long line of faithful people waiting for God. We cannot predict when or how God will intervene, but it is our tradition to wait with hope and trust that God will act, and to live our lives as best we can in the meantime.

The final ingredient, the one that holds the whole thing all together, is God’s immanence. Just as God is so much bigger than we can ever comprehend, God is also closer to us than we are to ourselves. For a time, God was human. God knows what it is to be hungry and grieve the loss of a friend and to need to run away to the mountains to pray after a long week.

Even more so, God knows both what it is to die a violent death and to be the parent who has to watch the death of their child at the hands of the state. God is intimately familiar with pain. God has experienced our suffering first hand. God knows what it is to mourn. Maybe that seems too bleak to be of comfort, but so often pain is an isolating thing. It can feel as if no one will ever know what our pain feels like, but our God knows our pain through experience and is willing and able to be with us in our pain. We do not have to be alone.

At this point I am tempted to try and wrap this all up neatly for you. We’ve unpacked some messy things in this sermon, but here is a nice container to put it all in, with a shiny bow to distract from the things we don’t like. Let’s set it on the shelf now and admire it from a distance!

But the thing with a balm is you can’t just put it on once and then ignore the wound, hoping it will go away. Wounds require fresh dressing and a levelheaded examination to make sure infection isn’t setting in. Sure, you can poke and prod too much, making the wound worse, but trying to pretend it isn’t there can lead to any number of worse problems.

This is one reason why the prayers and confession are part of our eucharistic liturgy. They give us a chance to air our wounds. We get to ask God to come heal the wounds that others have inflicted as well as the wounds we have caused through our selfishness or our fear. In our worship, we get a moment to be honest with ourselves and with God about what’s really going on in our hearts and lives. After that moment we are greeted with peace, which in turn helps us to fully participate in the eucharist, the great thanksgiving, where with wonder and praise we remember who God is and what God has done for us and are thereby strengthened to continue to do the work God has called us to do. Behold what you are; may we become what we receive.

image: Always Faithful, 2010, Mural at East Bay 23rd St., Oakland, CA.