Leaky Vessels and Living Water

There are some things that are just so wrong that you wonder why they were ever done. Like polyester leisure suits. (Been there.) Edible deodorant.[i] (It failed. Who knew?) And actors trying to sing. (Does anybody here remember William Shatner’s version of “Mister Tambourine Man” or Mae West singing “Twist and Shout”?[ii] Didn’t think so. Sad to say – it happened.) These are things that make you say, “What were they thinking? How could the people behind these projects have seriously thought that these were good ideas?”

Well, I’ve got some sad news today, brothers and sisters, and it’s not going to come as any surprise to you. The reasons these things happen and the reasons much more serious and tragic things happen is because we are human beings and as human beings we have an amazing capacity for self-deception. We are capable of some astoundingly good things, too. We are, as Psalm 139 says, “fearfully and wonderfully made” [Ps. 139:14, NRSV]. But we can also get disconnected from reality and from what is really important.

In addition we are forgetful. We forget who we are, who we are made to be, and who God intends us to be. We forget God. This is the most tragic thing about us. We are afflicted by spiritual amnesia and the results are devastating.

So today I want to bring a very simple message and it is this: God does not want any more edible deodorant. What God wants, what this world needs, is a people who are willing to be different. Really different.

I guess you know that this human condition I’ve described is not anything new. Back in 400 A.D. Augustine of Hippo, my favorite early church guy, was recognizing the same thing in himself and the people around him. In his book Confessions, which is one of the first autobiographies, he talks about how humans go astray.

It’s not that we intend to leave God. We pursue all sorts of things that we think will bring us fulfillment or make us successful or make us happy. But if we pursue these things without considering God or how our path strengthens or weakens our spiritual journey, then we often find that we have wandered a long way from home and don’t know where to turn next.

(Actually there’s a new DVD and curriculum out that addresses just this question. It’s called “Where Do I Go Now, God?” and the leader’s guide is $12. Available at your local Cokesbury store or online at Cokesbury.com. I promised the publisher I’d find a way to plug it in every sermon.)

But back to Augustine. Augustine’s way of describing this habit we have of wandering off was to use a version of the prodigal son story. The twist was that the home the prodigal leaves is his own true self. The prodigal who is us, leaves this home and travels into the far country. And the experience of salvation is really a returning to this true self. God doesn’t leave us, even though we may sometimes feel that God is very far away. The reason God seems so distant, Augustine says, is because we have become so detached from ourselves. God is there at home, with our true self, and we, through our sins and distractions and delusions and forgetfulness, have wandered off.

But we can go back even further than that. Our scripture lesson for today shows how deeply embedded this dynamic is within our natures. Jeremiah the prophet was writing around the sixth century before Christ. He spoke to a dying nation – the last days of the independent nation of Judah. It was a time when reform was in the air. When people were looking for new alliances to save them. But Jeremiah had a much more basic question for them.

Jeremiah speaks the word of Yahweh, the people’s God, and says: “What were you thinking?” That’s really at the heart of this passage. “What were you thinking that you would wander off from me? You have forgotten that I brought you out of slavery in Egypt. I led you through desert and darkness, drought and wilderness to bring you to a fertile land where you now live. But when you got here you kept going. You left me behind.

“It’s so bad,” God says, “that you have even stopped asking the question, ‘Where is God?’ It is not a question that occupies you. Even the priests and the keepers of the law and the prophets have stopped asking for me and have busied themselves with things that are worthless.”

So God prepares a case against the people. “I accuse you,” God says. “Look around you. No nation abandons its gods like you have. Even when their gods are not really gods at all, they do not leave them like you have left me. My people have exchanged their glory for something worthless.”

The people it seems have been too busy…too distracted…too disconnected from their own story to realize how far they had left God behind. Other gods seemed more enticing. Other pursuits seemed more profitable. Other things, (which were not really things at all…when you looked at them they were tissue thin), other things seemed more real than the God who gave them life.

Jeremiah was writing for his community almost three thousand years ago, but I bet you’re seeing where this is heading. We don’t read the Bible in here because it’s just a good history lesson. We don’t read the Bible because it’s a quaint old habit that we haven’t found a way to get rid of you. We read the Bible here because we believe that God still has a word to speak to us through these ancient words. So here’s Jeremiah talking to Judeans who have long since passed from the face of the earth. And what is he saying to us?

He could be living in 21st century America, couldn’t he? Are we a people who are busy and distracted and detached from the God who gives us life? Aren’t we a people who, even on the Eastern Shore, live our lives in the car, wandering the roadways in pursuit of things that seem worthwhile today but looking back on them we wonder, “Why did I spend so much time and energy on that?”? Aren’t we a people who are so in touch with pop culture that we know all about Sanjaya and the personalities of American Idol but we know next to nothing about the deep human longings of the psalms of David. Aren’t we a people who know Harry Potter but who can’t see beneath the story of Harry in that last book to see the deep images that could only be there because of the story of Jesus, the crucified King? In other words, aren’t we, just like our ancestors in Judah, just as disconnected from our root story and our primary relationship with God?

Jeremiah concludes with a powerful image. On the one side is a fountain of living water springing up with life for the people. This is God, who is the source of all that they are and whose blessings are sufficient for the crises they are facing. On the other side is a cistern, cracked and leaky, which is what the people have substituted for God…it is what we become when we try to do it on our own as if God didn’t matter. Leaky vessels or living water? What were they thinking when they chose the cracked pots? What are we thinking?

Denise Jackson, who is the wife of the country singer, Alan Jackson, has just written a new book in which she talks very openly about how her marriage to Jackson almost ended. It was 1998, when Jackson was at the height of his career. They had just had their third child and Alan Jackson, who had been her childhood sweetheart, came to Denise and said, “You know what, I can't live like this anymore, and I don't know if we know how to fix it." And he left.

It was a terrible shock. There had been problems in the marriage. It had not been perfect. But it was still a shock. And Denise’s response was to try desperately to do whatever it took to bring Alan back. Part of that was to pray, fervently, that God would bring her husband back.

Then one day she was talking with a friend who gave her some new advice. “You have been praying for Alan to come back,” her friend said. “Why don’t you pray instead that you will become the woman God wants you to be?”

That advice made all the difference. Denise began to concentrate, not on her relationship with Alan, but on her relationship with God. Suddenly all the pressure of having a perfect marriage and her insecurity about who she was started to melt away.

“I put so much pressure on myself,” Denise said. “Everyone, I felt, was looking at us under a magnifying glass and I had to be the perfect wife, who was the perfect size, who wore the perfect gown, who had the perfect jewels, and it was so stressful to live like that and to base your self worth on what you thought other people felt about you. So that's why it was so freeing to really come to the place in my life where I realized that I shouldn't base my self worth on any of that, that my self-worth really comes from being a child of God.”

Nine years later, her marriage has been restored, but I think she would recognize that not every story ends like this. Sometimes the thing we think we want restored doesn’t happen. But the title Denise Jackson’s book is It’s All About Him, and the ‘him’ is not Alan Jackson.[iii] She found new life and living waters, not by basing her life on the relationship she had with Alan Jackson, but by returning to the God who knew…who remembered who she was supposed to be.

Which all reminds me of an encounter another woman had with God. It was by a well in Samaria. A woman on the edges of respectability shows up at the community well in the middle of the day, a time when she was not likely to run into other women who might be about the same work. She brought her jar in the heat of the day to fill it with water.

She ran into a traveling teacher who seemed to know all about her life. He asked her for water, which was a pretty forward thing for a foreign man to do. But he probed right to the heart of her life. He knew about the men in her life, five of them, none of whom had given her what her soul most needed. And what did he promise her? Living water. “A spring of water gushing up into eternal life.” [John 4:14, NRSV]

What are you wasting your life on? We’ve all got something. What is the worthless thing you are dying to give up so that you can live? Is it your preoccupation with a relationship that you just can’t seem to make any headway with? Is it an obsession that you can’t seem to let go of, no matter how ridiculous it seems? Is it video games? Is it gambling? Is it drinking? Online pornography?

I’m telling you that none of those things is getting us closer to God. They are obstacles to becoming the people we are supposed to be…the people our dogs think we are…the people God knows that we can be. Because God has not forgotten. God remembers who you were when you were created, formed in your mother’s womb. God is waiting there at home, with our true selves, the selves we were enabled to become because of Christ’s death and resurrection. God is waiting for us to come to our senses and to give up the edible deodorant. God is waiting for us to give up the cracked pots for the living water that God offers.

And there is more. Jeremiah was calling the people as a whole. There is a greater work for us to do. Our nation has lost its way, too. We have wandered off into a war we don’t understand. We are a country whose leaders have been shown over and over to have feet of clay, feet you can easily see even when it’s not below a bathroom stall. We have not addressed the cries of the poor and the immigrant in our midst. Our health care system is an unholy mess. Our media is not serving the common good. Much of our popular music and entertainment encourages and celebrates our basest desires without pointing the way to something more. There is much for us to do and we should not say – “We are on the Eastern Shore. What can we do?” If the kingdom of God is coming here first (as I sometimes say), why shouldn’t we be helping to get the people ready?

Casting Crowns, a Christian band, has a new album out and the first song on it is one that says, “What This World Needs.” The last verse says, “What this world needs/ Is for us to stop hiding behind our relevance/ Blending in so well that people can't see the difference/ And it's the difference that sets the world free.”

What this world needs is not edible deodorant. What God wants, what this world needs, is a people who are willing to be different. And different because they know the God who loves them and loves this world and because of that is not willing to let them go untransformed. Thanks be to God.

Jeremiah 2:4-13
Hear the word of Yahweh, House of Jacob,
all you clans of the House of Israel.
Thus says Yahweh:
“What injustice did your ancestors find in me
that they went far from me?
They followed vapors and became vacuous.
They did not say, ‘Where is Yahweh,
who brought us out of the land of Egypt,
and led us through the desert plains,
a land of deserts and pits,
a land of darkness and drought,
a land where no one travels
and a place where no one lives?’
I brought you into a fertile land
to eat its fruit and its good things.
But you came and defiled my land
and my heritage you made into an abomination.

The priests did not say, ‘Where is Yahweh?’
Those who handle the Law did not know me;
the leaders rebelled against me.
The prophets prophesied by Baal,
and followed after things that are worthless.”

“Therefore, once more, I accuse you,” says Yahweh.
“And you children’s children I accuse.
So cross over to the coasts of Cyprus and look;
send to Kedar and examine with care;
see if there has ever been such a thing as this.
Has a nation ever changed its gods,
(even though they are not gods)?
But my people have changed their glory for something worthless.
Be appalled, O heavens, at this;
shudder with great horror,” declares Yahweh.

“For two evils my people have committed:
they have forsaken me,
the fountain of living water,
and have dug their own cisterns,
which hold no water.”

[i] “Garlic Cake and Edible Deodorant: When Products Go Wrong,” CBC News, 2/1/2000, http://www.cbc.ca/consumers/market/files/home/failedproducts/index.html.
[ii] Dave Barry, Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs, (Andrews McMeel Publishing: Kansas City, 2000), p. 22.
[iii] “Country Star’s Wife on Marriage’s Crash and Rebirth,” 8/31/2007, cnn.com, http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/books/08/31/celeb.qa.denisejackson.ap/index.html.