Sermon: Living Water and Cracked Cisterns

Jeremiah 2:4-13
Living Water and Cracked Cisterns
James Sledge                                                                                      August 28, 2022

The Prophet Jeremiah
by Marc Chagall

 God seems genuinely shocked at the situation, almost unable to comprehend how things could have ended up this way, this way referring to Israel’s abandonment of their God. Jeremiah is made livid by two different issues. One is worshiping the Canaanite god Baal, and the other is failing to live by God’s ways, failing to follow the commandments and law.

According to the prophet, the very people who should have led Israel in God’s ways have instead led her astray. The priests and the rulers and the prophets have all turned away from God and encouraged the people to do the same. It is a tragic situation that can only lead to ruin.

From what we know of the historical prophet Jeremiah, he was unimpressed by Temple worship and the royal house. In his view it was actual fealty to Yahweh and keeping the commandments that made Israel God’s people. But Israel was doing neither.

God’s shock at Israel’s behavior is rooted in all the blessing the Lord has showered on them. We heard some of these in our scripture this morning. God delivered Israel from slavery in Egypt, guided them through a barren wilderness, brought them to a good and fertile land, and established them as a successful people in that land.

Yet now Israel has turned away, seemingly forgetting all that God has done for them. They have traded the living God who brought them out of bondage for stone and metal idols, and the prophet employs a vivid metaphor to picture this situation. Unfortunately, many of us are unfamiliar with the elements of this metaphor, living water and cracked cisterns.

Thanks to Jesus’ use of the term in the gospel of John, living water has taken on a spiritual or religious sense. When John’s gospel uses the term, there is a double meaning in mind. Living water refers to something that gives eternal life, but it also refers to the term’s literal meaning, the only one meant by Jeremiah.

While we don’t use the term in this way, living water was the standard Hebrew idiom to speak of water that was fresh and moving, a clear mountain stream or water bubbling up from a natural spring. That may sound an odd way to describe such things to our ears, but we say it’s raining cats and dogs without a second thought.

The other part of Jeremiah’s metaphor is a cistern, particularly a cracked one. Perhaps you are familiar with cisterns, perhaps not, but they were a big deal in Israel, a land where it was often arid.

Water was a scarce commodity and so people in ancient Israel didn’t want to waste any of it. They would carve out cisterns from the rock, large underground chambers that would be used to collect rain water, a little like a giant rain barrel. They would typically plaster the walls of these cisterns in an attempt to prevent water leaking out and leaching into the ground.

As you can likely imagine, living water from a spring or stream was highly preferable to a cistern where storm runoff sat for months. Sure, most of the dirt and debris settled to the bottom over time, and you could skim off the stuff that floated on top, but still. And of course a cracked cistern was of no use at all. The rainwater would run into it but then leak out with none to be found when it was needed in the dry season.

God is shocked because Israel’s behavior seems as odd and foolish as choosing a cracked and useless cistern over a lovely spring. Why would they engage in such self-destructive behavior? Why would they try to make their way in the world without God? Why would they trade the God who had so blessed them for carved idols. Why would they abandon the ways that lead to life?

This may well raise a larger, philosophical question. Why do we humans seem to be so inclined to engage in self-destructive behaviors? Why do we persist in eating foods that we know are bad for us? Why do we lead sedentary lives when we know we need to exercise? Why do we so often hurt the people we love? Why do people smoke when they know the damage it does?

With addiction, we see such self-destructive behaviors in the extreme. If their disease goes untreated, alcoholics will destroy their careers, their relationships, their health, their families, and more through behaviors that are clearly self-destructive yet irresistible.

In his letter to the church in Rome, the Apostle Paul says this about the human condition. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do… So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.

Paul is talking here about the theological counterpart to alcoholism, an irresistible drive to act in self-destructive ways, and he labels that sin. For Paul, sin is not so much the bad things one does as it is an inclination, a persistent tendency to act in ways that are detrimental to self and to others. But Paul claims to have found a cure.

For Paul, to be “in Christ” is to be freed from the constraints of sin, from this tendency to act in ways that hurt ourselves and others. Oh, we’ll still mess up and make mistakes, but this will no longer be inevitable. Like alcoholics whose lives have been transformed by a Twelve Step Program, we can be transformed as well.

Unfortunately, the Christian tradition has often traded the transformed, new life in Christ that Paul knew for a run of the mill religion that promises goodies to its adherents. It has been content with followers who are hateful, greedy, racist, and warlike as long as they said the right creeds, professed belief in Jesus, and upheld some status quo.

And when that is the faith we live, Jeremiah speaks to the Church as well as to Israel. Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the LORD, for 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.

But prophets never speak simply to condemn. Their words always hope for repentance, for the hearers to stop and change direction, to return to the ways of God. The prophet’s voice is a call to assess where we place our deepest trust, what we trust to give us life. Is it the living water that is offered to us in Jesus, or is it a cracked cistern of our own devising?

At this moment in history, the Church, our nation, the world all desperately need people who are truly in Christ, whose lives have been transformed by the Spirit within them, empowering them to live in new ways that reveal Jesus to the world. This moment in time desperately needs people of faith who have become new creations in Christ and are agents of love and hope and grace in the world, who show the way of Christ to the world.

Jesus’ call to would be followers has always been, “Repent, leave behind old ways and follow me in the way of love, the way of self-giving, the way of the cross. Follow me so that together we may offer living water to a parched and thirsty world.”