Sermon on Jeremiah 2:10-13 and John 4:7-14. Delivered 27 July 2014 at Pequea Evangelical Congregational Church. (The first line or two did not get recorded.)
Like most of
the Old Testament prophets, Jeremiah had to warn God's people about
things they really should have known already. For instance, the
people of ancient Judah should have known that God is “the fountain
of living waters”. They should have known that there's no one else
worth turning to, nothing else worth turning to. But instead, in
Jeremiah's day, the people of Judah had chosen a trade. They took
the glory of God, a glory he offered freely among their presence, and
they considered it worth bartering away at the local flea market.
They traded glory for shame. They traded truth for lies. They
traded the uncreated for the created. They traded the divine for the
mundane.
Paul picks
up these same themes centuries later in Romans 1, where he talks
about how Gentile humanity traded uncreated truth for man-made
deception; and naturally they went on to trade God's design of human
love for rebellious reversals of God's intention. They traded
nature's clear witness to God's plan in exchange for voluntary
blindness. They traded faithful struggle against our human
brokenness in exchange for a defiant celebration of human sin. Paul
focuses there on a fruit that most perfectly illustrates the
absurdity of the root, and even today, the church has to constantly
point back to God's design, reminding an unwilling people not to
trade the godly struggle for the sinful surrender.
Hundreds of
years earlier, Jeremiah focused in on that same root: the stubborn
quest to barter God away for something of our own making. Jeremiah
calls God the “fountain of living waters”: he continually flows,
he never runs out, he is pure, he is the source
for life. But the people of Judah traded him for “empty cisterns”,
things that do not flow, things that do run out, things that are
easily polluted, things that are no source at all. Judah didn't just
find these; they made
them themselves. They “hewed them out” personally. That is, the
people of ancient Judah turned away from the uncreated God, and
instead they created God-substitutes and focused on those
to sustain them, to satisfy them, and to refresh them.
Now,
it's easy to point the finger at ancient Judah. Prophets like
Jeremiah see things so clearly. Prophets like Jeremiah – and
apostles like Paul – tell it like it is, with no mincing of words,
with no fuzziness to cloud what's at stake. They see exactly what is
going on here. But Judah is not alone, and the Gentiles of Romans 1
are not alone. They may be extreme, but they're not alone. Idolatry
in its various forms is a longstanding human problem, and as crazy as
it is, it's an easy trap.
See,
we often take things in our lives – some bad things, some decent
things, even some wonderful things – and we turn them into
God-substitutes. Even when we give lipservice to God, as I'm sure
the people of Judah did, we look elsewhere when it comes to quenching
our thirst and keeping us going. We may look to the work we do, the
accomplishments of our minds and our hands. We may trust in our
financial savings for security, thinking that if we just had a bit
more in the bank, we'd have some breathing room to find peace. Or,
maybe we rely on our social status in our community. We may look to
our family and friends to satisfy us, or to other relationships in
our lives. We may turn to our own passions and desires. We may turn
to our 'tribe', our patriotic heritage as Americans. We may turn to
our local, state, or federal government to sustain us, to satisfy us,
and to refresh us.
Most
of those things aren't bad in themselves – when we hold them
loosely. But when we build an idol and cling tightly to its feet,
we're in trouble. Because we are made in the image of the glorious
true God, yet we sell ourselves into slavery to the images of
non-gods. And we reflect what we worship. We reflect what we trust
in. When we turn to the God who's a fountain of living waters, who
bubbles forever with life, we become lively, we're restored to his
image, we become what we were meant to be. When we turn to even the
second-best thing, which reflects God imperfectly at best, then we
pattern ourselves after a funhouse mirror that catches God at an
angle. And instead of growing healthy, God-centered, more human, we
become distorted, twisted, dehumanized.
All
those other things we might trust – when we idolize them, we make
them into broken cisterns. They aren't the fountain of living
waters. Not all the wishful thinking in heaven and earth can make
them that. Broken cisterns hold no water – at least, not for long.
What puddles do form are brackish, teeming with parasites. Sipping
from them poisons us from the inside-out. They're stagnant. And
they will run dry.
Maybe
we see them run dry tomorrow. Maybe it takes a week, maybe it takes
months, maybe it takes years or even decades of running from cistern
to cistern, trying desperately to satisfy ourselves. But one thing
we can know for sure: in the Day of the Lord, when all this story
gets wrapped up and becomes the prologue to the new creation, those
cisterns will be dry as dust – every last one. They will not
sustain life. God, the fountain of living waters, will clearly stand
alone. The all-too-familiar “double evil” of turning from him
and trusting other things will leave many people high and dry.
Charles Wesley was struck by this passage from Jeremiah, so he turned
it into a prayer (Poetical
Works
10:3):
Ah! Lord, with late regret I own,
I have the double evil done,
Forsook the Spring of life and peace,
And toil'd for earthly happiness:
But what in them I sought with pain,
I could not from the creatures gain,
The cisterns which my folly hew'd
They would not hold one drop of good.
Now for my double sin I grieve,
Again the broken cisterns leave;
Again I after Thee would go,
And gasp Thy only love to know:
Fountain of true felicity,
Eternal God, spring up in me,
And fill'd with life, and love, and power,
My heart shall never wander more.
In the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John, we see
Jesus meet a woman next to a cistern. In her life, she's hewn many
broken cisterns, and now she's trapped in her defeat and in her
brokenness. She's gone from husband to husband, and now to a man
who's not her husband. She tries to deflect, but Jesus gently probes
to the heart of her situation and brings it out of the darkness into
the light. He points out that, no matter which cistern she tries,
she'll always be thirsty. She'll always need to grasp after
something new – unless she accepts living water from him. Jesus,
God in the flesh, presents himself to this Samaritan woman as the
fountain of living waters. He promises that if she takes the
refreshment, the sustenance, and the satisfaction that he offers,
she'll need nothing more.
Jesus
offers the same to us. He offers the same to our friends and our
neighbors. He offers the same to our state and our nation, if we'll
listen. He offers the same living waters to Ukrainians and Russians,
to Israelis and Palestinians, to dreamers of peace and to dealers of
death – come to Jesus and find life,
true life, healing life. Only he can offer living water to soothe
every hurt, to quench every thirst. No other prophet or philosopher
brings it, unless they point to Jesus. We can't wrestle it into our
lives with the force of guns and tanks. We can't vote ourselves into
it through democracy. We can't charge it to our credit cards. It
takes humble faith: just go back to the one fountain, the only
fountain.
Only
Jesus offers these living waters: the presence of the Father and the
Son through the Holy Spirit, bubbling up forever fresh in human life.
In the coming Day of the Lord, all cisterns will be dry as dust, but
this
fountain will not fail. This
fountain will flow and flow eternally, suppling the river that runs
from the throne of God and waters the tree of life with leaves for
the healing of the nations. This
fountain will sustain life eternally in the world to come. And Jesus
offers it right now, today, to me and to you. The people of Judah
turned away in a “double sin”, the pagan Gentiles traded their
Creator for man-made idols, but we can cling to the fountain of
living waters. We don't have to be anxious about trusting in that
fountain. We don't have to keep up our exhausted sprint from cistern
to cistern, lapping up a puddle here and a puddle there.
Come to the fountain! Drink deep! Jesus is the
Fountain of God's Spirit, and if we cling to Jesus in faith, hope,
and love, he promises that his Spirit will irrigate our lives,
satisfy our deepest longings, refresh us when we wear out, and
sustain us to live in the kingdom of God eternally. Praise God for a
fountain like that! Praise God for such a Savior!
