Cracked Cisterns
Jeremiah 2:4-13
September 20, 2020
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here https://youtu.be/Pw98mCaLqCU
“They went after worthless things and become worthless themselves.” That is the harsh assessment God makes about the ancestors of Jeremiah’s people. In large and small ways, persisting across time, the people had abandoned their story. They forgot who they were – people liberated from slavery in Egypt and led into the freedom of a bountiful land. They turned away from the God who delivered and sustained them. They broke faith with the covenant. Instead of prizing their relationship with God, they traded it for something of far less value, something worthless.
Take a look at this photo. This is a ceramic piece that was featured on Antique Roadshow. How much do you think it is worth? Type your appraisal into the chat if you want. There are no wrong answers. How much would you pay for it if you found it at a garage sale or in an antique store? How much would you sell it for if it were yours?
The Antiques Roadshow appraiser said it was a one-of-a-kind piece, probably late 19th or early 20th century and was worth . . . $30,000-50,000. The owner had bought it at an estate sale for $300.
Someone watching the show called a friend named Betsy and told Betsy to tune in. It turns out that Betsy created this ceramic piece. In the 1970’s. In high school.
I guess the appraiser was told that and revised his appraisal down to $3,000-5,000. The same piece has been valued at $300, $3,000 and $30,000. What is it really worth?
The owner paid $300 at an estate sale because he loved it. When it was worth $30,000, he put it away for safekeeping. Now that it is worth less, down in the $3,000 range, he brought it back out where he can enjoy it. In one last twist, the creator, Betsy Soule was surprised that someone was willing to pay $300 in the first place. She said that if she had known he liked it and it had still been in her possession, she would have given it to him.[1]
How do we know what something is worth? What is worth the investment of our time and energy and money? Sometimes we realize what something is worth only when it is threatened or lost. I wonder if, in the last few months, you have been surprised at the relative worth of things – perhaps you learned how much skill your barber or stylist actually has when you tried to cut your own hair, or conversely, maybe keeping your hair a certain length or a certain color wasn’t worth so much to you anymore. A sense of connection to each other has driven up the value of phone calls and internet speed. A sense of connection to the natural environment seems to have given new worth to activities like gardening and hiking. Most parents have greater appreciation for teachers. Many of us have been overwhelmed with bad news, so stories about love and healing and human triumph have become more precious.
Our church building is important. It provides a safe, sacred space in which we gather for worship and Christian education and to share meals. It represents generations of community. And yet, we have seen that it is not the only container of our gatherings. We have learned the worth of Sunday morning ritual and the strength of our relationships as we have continued to show up in this space week after week since March.
Jeremiah’s people have lost sight of what matters, what is really worthwhile. God says “Look everywhere. From Kedar in the east to Cyprus in the west. Look for someone who gives up their gods.” Who does that? No one. Even those with unreliable idols keep them. God is stunned and heartbroken that Israel cannot sort out what is real and unreal, what is true and false, what is life-giving and death-dealing.[2]
God indicts priests, politicians, and kings. The priests failed to ask “where is the Lord?’ The handlers of the law, the ones who instructed the priests, did not know God. And the kings have violated the covenant. Every category of leader has failed. They have led the people astray. They quit telling their story, the story that reminds them what God has done for them and who they are. The books of Exodus and Deuteronomy are full of instructions about how to teach their children, providing the specific words to use in answer to their questions. But everyone, even the grown-ups, even the religious leaders, had stopped asking the important questions. And in that void, the people have gone after worthless things.
I often read the Bible in order to find myself in the text. I mean that’s kind of the point of preaching – to explore the Bible in order to understand ourselves. There is a danger of putting myself into the text too quickly, of stretching the parallels to get the sermon done. There will be much in Jeremiah that won’t fit our time and, in any case,, we need to seek to understand the story on its own merits first. But, Jeremiah says that the religious leaders of his day failed in their duty because they stopped asking questions. So I’m going to raise some questions, knowing that part of the work of preaching falls on you, the listeners, to consider and evaluate the best truth to be found in my words.
It seems to me that one of the takeaways from this passage is that the stories we tell, the history we remember, matters. The foundation of our faith is Jesus, who came in alongside us, as one of us, to embody the God who loves all. Jesus spent years teaching people about the Creator whose will is shalom, the loving God whose deepest desire is the pervasive and widespread peace and well-being of the whole creation. The things we tell each other and ourselves, what we teach the next generation, the Bible passages we lift up and memorize, the things we say in worship – all of these things matter.
For the last couple of years, many of us have been using resources produced by Fresh Expressions. Fresh Expressions is a movement that seeks to help established churches cultivate new forms of church. Over and over again, they report that these new communities, which may be found in dog parks or yoga studios, define themselves as people having conversations about things that matter. I think of the numbers of younger people who do not trust churches to exercise moral leadership, because the churches they know have failed to speak about things that matter and in fact have been complicit on serious issues like sexism and racism and homophobia. Someone recently emailed me to say “The Bible has at least some emphasis on love, doesn’t it? Then why is it so often used as an instrument of hate?”
I think about the increasing lack of trust in pastors. A Gallup poll in 2018 found that only 37% of Americans rated clergy very high on trust and ethics, which was the lowest score since 1977. [3] The things we talk about, the stories we tell, or fail to tell in church, matter.
One of Jeremiah’s grievances was that the story of God and God’s people was unknown and therefore considered irrelevant, and so they went after worthless things. Jeremiah spent years calling them to listen, to repent, to remember, but “they stepped outside the relationship of grace to look for the best bargain, the most productive power, the richest benefactor,” [4] or the most strategic political alliance.
Chris Backert is the national director of Fresh Expressions in the United States. About our need for repentance, he says “sometimes our ignorance means we won’t put ourselves in a position to listen and learn and then un-learn what we thought we knew – because we don’t even realize we have something to learn in the first place. The key to this process, of course is humility. Humility that we may have not done the right things in the past. Humility that we may not have done the right things, even wen we thought we did. Humility that we participate in systems that need changing.”[5]
At the end of our reading, God says, “my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.” Cisterns were underground chambers that collected and stored rain water to use in the dry seasons. The two main problems with them were contamination and stagnation leading to a lack of purification. Given a choice between cistern water and fresh flowing water, no one would choose the cistern. But God says that’s what the people have done, by abandoning God who is the source of living water. And not only that, they built leaky cisterns! In times of crisis, they will discover that they have no resources of their own left. When Babylon surrounds Jerusalem, the army will cut off the water supply in the aqueducts and the people inside the walls will begin to die of thirst. Water is life, as the indigenous people say. Thirst is a powerful metaphor for our dependence on God.
I have been talking about our collective thirst, about our need for living water on a macro level. But I’m aware that many of us feel especially empty and dry, like our life is draining away, as individuals. And so, before I close, I want to offer these words from Valerie Bridgeman Davis, a professor of preaching and Hebrew Bible at Memphis Theological Seminary.
Recalling the Exodus and the water God provided in the wilderness she says,
“When the thirst of life parches your soul, desperation sets in. It sets in hard, and you don’t remember who God is or what God has done. That’s just the truth.
Desperation makes you believe you’re going to die; it makes you test the limits of faith, and of ethics. It makes you blame the “Moses” in your life, the one who gave you the word of your deliverance from bondage. It makes the past struggles seem not so bad. Church becomes a wilderness. Relationships become wastelands. It all gets big. It’s never just about you anymore when you’re desperate. It’s everything. It’s everyone. . . .When your throat, your life, is parched, you want to stone the messengers. You argue and you test. You bargain and you beg. It’s hard to trust who God is or what God has done. That’s just the truth.
And still, God provides: even when you’re moaning and complaining; even when you’re parched and pleading; even when your faith is a faint whisper from the past.
God still provides. Disappointed in our desperation, maybe. Wishing we would remember the miraculous escapes we’ve had. But providing nonetheless. That’s just the truth.
Look up; there’s a rock gushing with refreshment for you somewhere in your life. Your past only sounds good because you can’t see the future. There is a rock gushing somewhere in your life. That’s just the truth. Look for it.” [6]
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] http://artandfaithmatters.blogspot.com/2019/08/jeremiah-24-13-worth-art-lectionary.html
[2] Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 1998), p. 36.
[3] https://religionnews.com/2019/07/16/new-poll-shows-growing-view-that-clergy-are-irrelevant/
[4] Patrick Miller, New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VI, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001), p. 608
[5] https://freshexpressionsus.org/2020/07/02/the-world-has-already-changed-more-is-coming/
[6] The Africana Worship Book © 2006 by Discipleship Resources. Used by permission. For information regarding rights and permissions, contact Discipleship Resources, PO Box 340003, Nashville TN 37203-0003; fax 615-340-1789.