September 1, 2025

I speak to you in the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Christine and I love to go on walks.  Whatever route we take almost always runs through a park.  And in this Land of 10,000 Lakes, where there’s a park, there’s almost always standing water.

Now, this time of year, most of the ponds we walk by are filled with runoff.  Between the poor circulation and the phosphorus and Lord-knows-what-else in the water, these ponds are covered in algae.  It’s disgusting to look at, and honestly if you get too close the smell is overwhelming.

Let’s pretend for a moment that I was foolish enough to decide that bottling this stuff and selling it would make a great fundraiser.  I could bring it in for the fall bazaar.  Would you buy it?  Would you even drink it if I gave it away?  Of course not.  What we want – what we all need – is fresh, clean, pure water.  Not something that’s likely to kill you if you drink enough of it.

The Prophet Jeremiah uses similar imagery around water this morning.  It’s a tough passage to listen to.  Jeremiah’s indictment of Israel’s choices about how to live make us squirm in our seats.  We’d rather that ___________ finish the reading quickly, so that we can move on to something more inspirational. 

The reality is that Jeremiah’s original audience didn’t need inspiration.  They needed the cold, hard truth.  They needed to understand why the God who had given the Israelites the promised land after leading them out of slavery in Egypt had now given that land to the Babylonians.  It’s a catastrophe, and the remnant are trying to make sense of their fallen world.

In response, God inspires the prophet to bring the message we hear today.  It’s a message from a God who is fundamentally hurt and angry.  From a God who laments that the people to whom God has given so much have foolishly turned away from Him and gone after worthless things.  From a God who painfully claims it’s as though Israel has turned away from the fountain of living water to dig out cracked cisterns that can hold no water at all.

Water is essential – and especially so for people who lived in the ancient Near East.  Not just prosperity – but life itself – depends on having enough good water to drink, and to grow crops, and to give to your livestock.  Without water, people starve.  So having a fountain of living water – all the fresh, clean water you’d ever need – is a gift beyond all measure.  Your most basic need is always and forever met.

You’d have to be a fool to turn your back on this gift.  But that’s what the Israelites have done.  They’ve thrown away the covenant they made with YHWH – to worship and love him above all things in return for YHWH’s protection and provision.  They have given up on a God whose saving grace has been demonstrated again and again for Ba’al – the god of storms and fertility. 

Ba’al’s false promises are centered on control.  On the idolatry that we can control our lives, and the lives of those around us, and even the larger world.  Ba’al promises that if you dig cisterns – storage wells – the storms will come and fill them.  And then you can control that precious gift of water.  And then you will be sure that you will never run out.  Who needs a God to provide that precious water when we can hoard it for ourselves?

But the reality is that Ba’al’s water is not reliable.  The cistern might fill, but after the water sits in it long enough the algae grows.  It becomes undrinkable for man or beast.  And then the cistern cracks, and that stagnant water of last resort leaks away. 

Seeking to find life elsewhere – pursuing the idolatry of control that replaces God’s sovereignty over the world with ours – becomes an utterly fruitless task.  And, Jeremiah prophesizes, doing so leads nowhere but to ruin.  Because the people of God have traded away the fountain of living water for a cistern of limited life that can never endure.

This story makes us squirm because even through it’s about a people who lived thousands of years ago, its truth resonates with us.  We know – in our hearts – that we, too, are a wayward people.  We know that we, too often, foolishly turn our backs on God and dig our own cisterns.  We try to provide life and health and goodness for ourselves.  There are idols all around us that tempt us to do so.  The idol of modernism, with its belief that through advances in science or society, we can save ourselves because we are the true lords of the world.  The idol of individualism, where our relationship with God is rooted in trying to get God to give us what we want.  The idol of materialism, with its insatiable desire for new, and bigger, and better. 

But maybe the most sinister idol of all is the idol of violence.  Where we worship power and might instead of the humility and compassion that is the way of the Cross.  Where we legitimize violence as a tool for achieving our goals or punishing our enemies.  Where cruelty becomes a virtue instead of a vice.  An idol where we fail to see God’s image in other.  And we have seen – yet again this week – how devastatingly destructive this idol can be.

All of these idols are sinful, because by following them we refuse to live out God’s intentions for our lives.  By following them, we drink the stagnant, algae-filled runoff from the cistern.  And the cold, hard truth, my friends, is that drinking that water is a recipe for disaster.

So where do we turn for that never-ending fountain of living water?  We turn to Scripture.  To the stories we tell and remember in worship.  The stories of we hear proclaimed from lectern and pulpit about being delivered from the grip of bondage by the mighty, saving acts of God.  The stories about being delivered out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, and out of death into life as we celebrate the Eucharist.  The stories that help us make sense of our world.

So turn to the stories of faith, my friends.  Know them.  Make them your own.  Turn to the source of life – that never-ending fountain of cold, fresh water – and find yourself sustained by the awesome power of the Living God.  Amen.