Jeremiah 2:4-13
“Leaky Buckets”
August 29, 2010 - Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

         Well, you know the church backpack trip didn’t happen last week, so on Monday afternoon Joanna and I hiked by ourselves up to one of our beautiful Oregon high Cascade lakes. We sat on rocks by the water while a little breeze rippled the surface and the sun dropped toward the big trees on the other side. We pumped a water filter for clean water to drink that night. And I told my daughter about a trip I took in the Boy Scouts.

         I was about 15 and we were hiking in the drier Sierra mountains of California. Our leaders didn’t find the stream they expected at the end of the day. So we ended up walking on in the dark before we finally came to a small lake.

         As we rolled out sleeping bags, a couple scouts took out our fold-up plastic water container that opened into a big, translucent five-gallon cube. They went off to the near, marshy end of that little lake, and soon came back. Our thirsty troop gathered round to fill canteens, take a good drink and head for bed. But someone put a flashlight down next to the cube. As the light shone through it, we saw “living water” in the very worst sense. A wriggling cloud of mosquito larvae was swimming in the flashlight beam. As thirsty as we were, none of us wanted to drink that.

         In our text for today God is dismayed by the water His people Israel chose to drink. Verses 4 to 13 of Jeremiah 2 indict Israel for their idolatry, their worship of other gods instead of God. Verse 5 uses a word that’s repeated in verses 8 and 11. They followed “worthless idols.” It’s not literally idols, but the Hebrew word hebel. Ecclesiastes uses it to say, “vanity of vanities” or “meaningless, meaningless.” Hebel is “breath” or “empty.”

         Israel was going after hebel, worthless things, empty things, things ephemeral as a breath, as cheap as air. Our NIV/TNIV translation fills it out as “worthless idols.” The worthless things God’s people sought weren’t junk bonds or lottery tickets, they were false gods.

         The indictment of verse 5 is that “They followed worthless idols and became worthless themselves.” It’s a sneaky pun. “They went after hebel and became habael, which sounds like “Baal,” the worthless idol that tempted them most. It’s a pun and a spiritual principle. You become more like whatever you seek. If go after God, you grow more like Him, more loving, more just, more holy. If you go after worthless gods—or money or entertainment or power—you become more like them, empty, worthless in character.

         I had an eccentric roommate my senior year of college. His name was also Steve. He slept on the floor and was the hippy of our conservative Christian college. He wore a headband and looked like Tommy Chong, except more hairy. But he was smart, interesting, and a fellow philosophy major. I enjoyed our year together. Two summers after graduation I drove to see him. I was terribly disturbed by what I found.

         For the previous year or so Steve hadn’t been doing anything other than living at home and driving around southern California to used bookstores to buy whatever cheap copies of one of our old textbooks he could find. His mind had become totally fixated on a historical psychology text. He believed it contained all the answers to life. There were dozens of them stacked around his room. “What are you going to do with all these?” I asked. He didn’t know. It was just his mission to collect them.

         Obviously, my old roommate was unbalanced and needed help. In his relentless pursuit of worthless, out-of-date copies of an old textbook, his own life became worthless. You and I may not be victims of crazy obsessions, but we may still aim our lives at worthless pursuits. Sometimes we’re not much better off than Steve was.

         God is dismayed that we pursue worthless things instead of Him. Verses 6 and 7 are His amazement that we would want anything else. He’s been so good to us. He was so good to Israel. He found them as slaves in Egypt and set them free. He led them “through the barren wilderness, through a land of deserts and ravines, a land of drought and utter darkness, a land where no one travels and no one lives.”

         Israel forgot where they came from, forgot their ancestors had wandered around the desolate Sinai Peninsula, forgot that there was a time their people didn’t know where their water would come from, didn’t know what they would find to eat in a dry desert. God had fed them. God had given them water. And God led them “into a fertile land to eat its fruit and rich produce.” They forgot all that.

         They sat under their fig trees and munched juicy, sweet fruit God gave them. They looked out over their vineyards and sipped wine squeezed from grapes God provided. They sat in their homes and ate tender roast lamb from flocks God had given pasture. Why want anything but to worship and thank and praise the God who had given them so much?

         Yet from the very beginning in the promised land, says verse 7, they defiled the land by setting up idols. They got bored and indifferent to their blessed inheritance. Instead of keeping it beautiful they made it detestable with shrines and bloody sacrifices and immoral behavior in worship of detestable, worthless gods.

         God was dismayed with them and He gets dismayed with us. He’s given us so much. At the Garrison Keillor Friday night they sang “America the Beautiful.” It’s true. God blessed this land with spacious skies and amber grain, gorgeous mountains and all the food most of us could possibly want.

         God filled this country with Christian witnesses. We grew up in Christian homes or we met Christian friends. He gave us people all around us to tell us about Jesus, about His love, about His sweet, gracious forgiveness of all our sins, about eternal life and the hope of resurrection into life forever in a blessed kingdom that will have no end. It’s all ours. He’s given us all that, and yet we ignore it, make it ugly, even make it detestable.

         We have so much food. We open another bag of chips, or twist the top off one more diet Coke. What worthless snack will we consume next while detestable scenes of hunger occur right here in our own town? Maybe we’ll just wander around the food court at the mall, bored with every one of a dozen choices we could make. Pizza or hamburgers or noodles or steak sandwiches or salad or burritos or maybe just a big, gooey cinnamon roll. We’ve had it all, we have it all, and it makes us indifferent, careless, worthless people.

         Just like Israel, you and I choose the worthless instead of God in all sorts of ways. You walk that mall and window shop for a blouse to hang in a closet at home that already has a dozen perfectly good tops hanging in it. You pass a phone kiosk and though there’s a device in your pocket with seventeen features you haven’t even tried yet, don’t even know about yet, you want the newest phone, one with even more features you’ll never use. We run after all sorts of worthless things and then wonder why we feel worthless.

         Verse 8 says Israel’s leaders didn’t help. The men of God, the priests, weren’t asking and wondering, “Where is the Lord?” The national leaders, the judges and nobles and kings, weren’t trying to follow God’s laws. They were looking for loopholes, for ways to rebel and not do what God asked. Even the prophets weren’t prophesying for God. They were working for that worthless idol Baal.

         Our preachers and presidents and pundits aren’t helping us much either. They want us to buy one of their books or vote for their party or tune into their television shows. Nobody is asking us very loudly to ditch all that worthless stuff and to seek God.

         Meanwhile the world wonders what’s wrong with us. In verses 9 to 11, God brings charges against Israel in a world court. He asks the ends of the earth to judge His people, to reach a verdict on their behavior. He says go to Cyprus in the west and see what those people think. Send a messenger to Kedar in the deserts of the east and ask for their opinion. Across the whole known world does it make any sense that a nation would switch gods? Especially when they exchange a great, glorious, living, real God for worthless idols? Ask the world. They’ll tell you.

         Go west across the Pacific to China. They look at us and see a land where anyone can walk in a Walmart and buy a Bible for a few dollars, where many of us have four or five or two dozen Bibles lying around our homes. Yet we don’t spend our time and money to read the Bible and learn what it says. We buy a romance novel or the latest action flick on Blu-Ray to fill up our evenings. They live where government controls Bible printing, where a Bible might cost a tenth of a year’s salary, where God’s Word is incredibly precious. What would China’s verdict be on us?

         Go east to Sudan. Think about how they see our food consumption. At our Covenant Annual Meeting, our director of missions told me about hosting visitors from our churches in Sudan. After he took them all out to lunch one day, where they ate heaping plates of sandwiches and French fries, a Sudanese woman said to him, “What you just spent here could feed our whole refugee camp for a year.” What would Sudan’s verdict on us be?

         God’s not content just to call us to judgment before the world. Verse 12 calls heaven itself as a witness. Let the angels pass a verdict too. As they look on from their constant wonder and amazement before the face of God, as they ceaselessly, tirelessly sing His praise and glory, what would they say? Verse 12 tells them to be “appalled,” to “shudder with horror,” at people who would rather carve idols than worship the real thing, at people who play solitaire on their computers rather than read the Bible, at people who would rather go shopping than find a way to serve the Lord who’s done so much for them.

         The final image of the text takes us back to where I began. God sums it all up in verse 13 by saying that His people Israel have committed two (stupid) crimes. First, “They have forsaken me, the spring of living water.” All God’s goodness to them, to us, is like cold, clear, clean water springing fresh from the ground, like the Metolius River springs beautifully from a little mossy slope on the other side of Santiam Pass. Yet it’s as if Israel walked right by that sweet, pure water source to drink somewhere else. And that’s the second crime.

         They “have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” In ancient Palestine there was sometimes no choice. Running water was always preferable. But if a stream or spring dried up, there was nothing to do but catch and store rain water. So they dug out reservoirs in the rock or the dirt where they lived. They mixed up cement made of lime dust and plastered a lining on the inside of those cisterns to make them water tight.

         But water from those cisterns was at best stagnant, cloudy, brackish and foul tasting. It might, like our marshy water in the mountains, be full of bugs. At worst, the plaster seal cracked and all the water leaked out into the ground. If you didn’t have anything else, O.K., but why would anyone choose foul water from a cracked cistern over the pure, refreshing flow of a running spring? That’s what God can’t understand. That’s what it’s like to choose a lifeless idol like Baal instead of the living God. That’s what it’s like to go after a thousand different worthless things we spend our time and money on instead of going after the Lord who gave His life for us.

         “Living water,” the Lord says. That’s what He’s offering. In the Didache, perhaps the oldest Christian document after the New Testament, there are directions for baptism. First choice is to baptize Christians in “living water.” It just means running water, moving water, not a dead, stagnant pool. After we scouts discovered the writhing bugs in our water container, we poured it out and went to find the inlet to the lake, to find running water, to find living water, water we could drink and live.

         As we read in our call to worship, as Jesus said to the woman at the well, our Lord offers living, life-giving water to anyone who believes in Him. There’s no need for a life filled with worthless stuff. There’s no need to drink the stagnant water being offered all around us. There’s a constant fountain overflowing with living water for anyone who is thirsty.

         This has been a harsh sermon so far. I’ve been harsh on myself too, because I do all those things I’ve been picturing, the wanting, the buying, the running after worthless stuff. But in the end I’d just like to remind us that the living water of real life in Jesus is always flowing for us. We need the harsh words, the warnings, to remember that sometimes. We need Jesus in our Gospel from Luke 14 telling us not to go after the most comfortable seats. Pride and privilege is ultimately worthless. We need the writer to the Hebrews in that lesson from chapter 13 to remind us to “Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have,” because money is worthless in the end.

         We get warned against the worthless things so that we can seek the precious thing. God invites us to go after what has worth so that we ourselves will have worth. Jesus invites us to come and drink, to seek and know Him, to be filled with the cool refreshing drink of His grace and love. Jesus welcomes everyone; He welcomes you to His fountain.

         Our call to worship from John 7 also said that living water would flow out of those who are drinking from the life of Jesus. When you and I turn from stagnant pools of worthless stuff to receive life from Jesus, it flows out from us to those who are still thirsty. There are many who thirst. That’s why we’re sharing a meal with our neighborhood in two weeks. We’re going to invite them to eat hamburgers and drink lemonade, but the real point is for them to drink the Living Water, to eat the Bread of Life. That’s what will make their lives worthwhile, will make our lives worth living.

         Some of you know I like the “Monk” television series. One of my favorite episodes involved a fountain, a supposedly miraculous fountain in a monastery. People who drank from the fountain’s statue of an angel pouring water were being healed. Monk gets to the bottom of it and discovers it’s all about manipulating prescriptions and keeping hidden a body buried under the fountain before it was built. There weren’t any real miracles.

         But in the last scene Monk stands alone at the fountain, Monk with his obsessive-compulsive disorder, his phobias and allergies and hopelessly dysfunctional life. He stands there with an empty class in his hand, just looking at the water gushing from the angel, just wishing he could believe and drink and be well. And the scene fades away.

         Our Lord Jesus Christ is a real fountain of life. His death and resurrection is a real miracle pouring out the healing grace of salvation for anyone who will come and drink. Before the scene fades away, may you and I leave our leaky buckets, our worthless stuff, and drink deep of His real life. And may we always be sharing, always pouring out the living water to those around us.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2010 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj