Jeremiah: Broken Cisterns

Jeremiah 2:1-13

The young king who was on Judah’s throne when Jeremiah was called to be a prophet, King Josiah, is universally admired. Shortly after Jeremiah’s call, King Josiah began an ambitious renovation of the Jerusalem temple, and in the process of that work, a scroll was uncovered. The chief priest realized it was a scroll of the law of Moses, which apparently had been mislaid. He took it to the king and read it to him. Josiah was aghast. They hadn’t been keeping half those laws. He had the priest take the scroll to a respected prophet – not Jeremiah, at this point, but a woman named Huldah – who affirmed that it was real, and God did expect Judah to follow it. The king set about a massive religious reform. They not only removed all idols from Jerusalem, but tried to do the same through the whole nation. In fact, they shut down every place of worship in the country except for the temple – even local shrines to Israel’s god. The idea seems to have been that those local shrines were too easily corrupted; all worship henceforth was to be under the watchful eye of the Jerusalem priests. The author of 2 Kings regards Josiah as the greatest king since David, and that assessment has been affirmed ever since. When Rebecca and I were in seminary – where there were a lot of young families having kids – it felt as if every third male child born was named Josiah. Everybody loves Josiah. Well, nearly everybody. Jeremiah had reservations. We read Jeremiah 2, verses 1-13. 

2 The word of the Lord came to me, saying: 2Go and proclaim in the hearing of Jerusalem, Thus says the Lord:
I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride,
how you followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown.
3 Israel was holy to the Lord,
   the first fruits of his harvest.
All who ate of it were held guilty;
   disaster came upon them, says the Lord.

4 Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob, and all the families of the house of Israel. 5Thus says the Lord:
What wrong did your ancestors find in me that they went far from me,

and went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves?
6 They did not say, ‘Where is the Lord
   who brought us up from the land of Egypt,
who led us in the wilderness, in a land of deserts and pits,
in a land of drought and deep darkness,
   in a land that no one passes through, where no one lives?’
7 I brought you into a plentiful land
   to eat its fruits and its good things.
But when you entered you defiled my land,
   and made my heritage an abomination.
8 The priests did not say, ‘Where is the Lord?’
   Those who handle the law did not know me;
the rulers transgressed against me;
   the prophets prophesied by Baal,
   and went after things that do not profit.

9 Therefore once more I accuse you,

says the Lord, and I accuse your children’s children.
10 Cross to the coasts of Cyprus and look,
   send to Kedar and examine with care; see if there has ever been such a thing.
11 Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods?

But my people have changed their glory for something that does not profit.
12 Be appalled, O heavens, at this,
   be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the Lord,
13 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.

Jeremiah – who, we shall see, was all about covenant faithfulness – starts out by describing Israel as God’s bride, their relationship as a marriage, and the time of the Exodus as a honeymoon. Back then, Jeremiah declares, Israel was faithful to God. That’s not exactly how the book of Exodus itself remembers it, but Jeremiah didn’t invent this “honeymoon” idea. That image is central to the book of prophet Hosea, who prophesied a century earlier. Jeremiah is clearly channeling Hosea, because like that prophet, Jeremiah goes straight from wistfully describing the honeymoon to condemning Israel for breaking her marriage vows by worshiping other gods. Hosea, who was himself in an unhappy marriage, rages against unfaithful Israel, calling the nation an adulteress and a whore. But Jeremiah’s just sad. Verse 5: Thus says the Lord: What wrong did your ancestors find in me that they went far from me, and went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves? Or, again, paraphrasing verse 11: Has any nation ever just swapped out its gods, even nations whose gods are make-believe? But my people have swapped out a God of glory for worthless trash. Why would anyone do that? he asks. Why would you trade the God who brought your ancestors out of Egypt and through the desert for a … a hunk of wood? What’s the appeal? 

What do you think? What might be the appeal of having a carved idol for a god? Well, it would be convenient. That is, it wouldn’t interfere with my life. I mean, a living God – especially one like this one, who has laws – can definitely be inconvenient. Cramps my style. And if I fail to keep those laws, I then feel bad about myself, and that’s not right, is it? That kind of toxic negativity hurts my self-esteem. A wooden god, though, would fit into my life when I need a god – like, when I need affirmation – and then I could put it back into the closet when I felt better. A living God goes wherever and does whatever that God wants; with a carved god, the initiative would be mine. Sure, maybe it can’t do everything a living God can do, but it wouldn’t do anything I don’t want, either. 

Jeremiah has a metaphor for this in verse 13: 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. Jeremiah asks us to imagine that we have some land, and on that land is a freshwater spring: cool, clear water bubbling up from the ground. But, you know, springs aren’t always there – especially in semi-arid lands like Israel. A drought comes, the water table drops, and the spring dries up for a time. So we dig a cistern, to hold rainwater. We dig a pit and line it with stones and plaster to be watertight. That water’s not, you know, fresh water exactly. There’s a bit of algae on the top. The crunchy bits are insect larvae. On the other hand, it’s ours. We made it. Now imagine that we start drinking from the cistern all the time, even when the spring is flowing freely, because we prefer the pond water that we saved for ourselves by our own efforts to the fresh water we have no control over. And then Jeremiah adds one more note: By the way, your cistern’s cracked. It won’t hold water at all.

Up to this verse, you could read Jeremiah’s words as unqualified support for Josiah’s reforms. After all, Josiah was getting rid of idols. But this verse goes farther than just anti-idolatry. Notice that Jeremiah doesn’t even specifically name idols; he refers to them as “worthless things.” Elsewhere, he tends to refer to idol-worship as, “bowing down to the work of your own hands.” And that phrase can refer equally to a carved image of Baal and to a shiny new temple to God. Anything less than God that we put our trust in is a broken cistern.

I could go on for a long time about all the ways that we turn away from the living God to embrace something dead and wooden that we’ve constructed for ourselves. The history of modern Christianity is a history of starting with some powerful work of God, then constructing a superficial imitation of it for mass consumption. Every program, every campaign, every curriculum seems to be an attempt to approximate the work of God, and none of these things are bad exactly, if they’re used to point toward God, but by themselves they are no more like God than the pond water is like the spring. Too often, though, because the pond is our creation and fits into our schedule, we go there first.

Let me focus today on just one example: worship. Worship is the encounter with the Spirit of God. Now, this encounter can happen when we’re alone or when we’re with others, but the reason we gather here on Sundays is because it happens more often in community. When it happens, we are inspired, strengthened, and often overwhelmed emotionally. But it doesn’t happen every time. The Spirit of God is not under our jurisdiction. Sometimes we come away from church with only a taste of the Spirit’s presence; sometimes we don’t encounter her at all. She’s not tame, you know. So we gather in hope: we show up, sing, pray, listen, and wait.
But that’s not good enough for some, who feel the need to provide the full worship experience every week on schedule. So, if we can’t force the Spirit of God to be here, then we’ll create a facsimile by designing worship to replicate the effects of the Spirit: excitement and strong emotions. Oh, it can be done. You need a gifted speaker, someone who can hold an audience on the edge of their seats. Then you get the right music and lighting and visuals. When you get good at it you can reliably make people cry on cue and then jump up and down with joy thirty minutes later. Every week. Who needs to wait for the Spirit of God to spring forth when you’ve got a cistern of skilled emotional manipulation on tap? 

I went to one of those worship experiences when I was visiting around during my sabbatical. As a former theater guy and one who has planned worship for a quarter of a century, I have to take off my hat to them. What I experienced was a brilliantly planned and meticulously rehearsed production. And, again, none of that is bad exactly. It’s not wrong to try to do things well. I sometimes try that myself. The danger is that the more control we take over the work, the less room there is for the Spirit to take part, at which point we end up worshiping the work of our own hands, settling for a facsimile of the glory of God.

So how do we prevent that from happening? How do we keep open a place for God even as we do the work in the church as well as we know how? Well, Jeremiah has a suggestion there. Twice in our passage – maybe you noticed it – he says that the problem started when the priests stopped asking “Where is God?” Apparently, they felt that they already knew where God was, in their freshly-paneled temple for instance. But God’s bigger than the work of our hands. Our calling is to never be satisfied with the work of our own hands, because they’re all broken cisterns. We need to keep looking beyond them: Where is God today?