The Reverend Kirk T. Berlenbach

Proper 17, Year C

August 29, 2010

As some of you know this summer we got a new kitten. And of course with any new kitten one feels obliged to by a lot of new toys for the kitten to play with. When we brought him home we wanted to show him all the wonderful fishing poles and crinkly foil toys and cute little mice and for a while he actually played with them. But within a few days, after he got accustomed to the house we found that he started to find his own things to play with… the ring from the milk cap that fell on the floor… the twisty tie from the bread, my daughter’s plastic bracelet or his favorite, the piece of tin foil that makes such a wonderful skittering sound when he bats it back and forth between his paws. Given I have owned cats my whole life, this did not really come as a surprise. As any experienced cat owner can tell you, all that money spent on toys is essentially wasted. In fact, the more money you spend on the toy, the less likely the cat is to play with it. .

And yet even though I knew this to be true, I still went out and spent a lot of money on a bunch of toys that the cat could care less about and then I get frustrated when the cat opts to play with the tinfoil instead. Of course the cat is not to blame for this, we are. I vainly chose the things that I thought would be better over the things that I knew were both considerably cheaper and more enjoyable for the kitten. Even though I knew better I opted for the things that don’t really satisfy. Unfortunately, such intentional insanity is not limited to our pets. We do it in much more important matters as well.

In fact, that is whole point of this week’s lesson from Jeremiah. Speaking through the prophet G-D admonishes the people of Israel for their foolish choices. “What wrong did your ancestors find in me that they went far from me, and went after worthless things…?” Throughout the passage G-D points out all the good things that He has done for the people…. Brought them out of slavery in Egypt, lead them through the desolate wilderness brought them into good and plentiful land and yet inexplicably, the people still choose, not only to turn their backs on G-D, but turn instead to false gods who cannot help them.

To drive the point home G-D finishes the passage with a brilliant and powerful metaphor. “Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the Lord, 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.” Now while the tone carries a lot of conviction, we cannot truly appreciate what G-D is saying unless we know what a cistern is.

A cistern is an underground area that has been carved out and sealed in order to collect and hold rain water. The water was then used primarily for irrigation or livestock but also sometimes for drinking. Cisterns were common enough in the time of Jeremiah. After all the people lived in a desert and water was a precious commodity. G-D on the other hand offers us a spring. Given the choice a spring is infinitely preferable to a cistern for two reasons… one the water is always fresh and clean whereas as the cistern is filled by the runoff of the rain and so not only can be dirty but also is prone to growing algae and bacteria and all sorts of other nasty things. The second reason why the spring is better is that the cistern can crack and if it does, all that water you have worked so hard to collect will simply seep back into the ground. Jeremiah stresses this when he tells the people that they have traded the spring for not just a cistern but for one that is cracked and useless.

To put it in more modern terms imagine passing up Le Bec Fin for McDonalds. Price is no object. You can have either one just for the asking. Like the image of the cistern and the spring it makes the choice rather obvious. One is so much better, so much richer, so much more satisfying how could we even think of passing it up? But to really make our metaphor consistent with the one G-D uses in Jeremiah, we have to take it a step further… the McDonalds hamburger is not just inferior; it’s been infected with mad cow disease and you know before you go in that if you eat there, you will get sick. Would you choose it then? Of course not. Yet just like the people of Israel, when it comes to G-D and our spiritual needs, this is exactly the kind of foolish choice we make.

Although we are not actually worshiping statues of Baal as the ancient Israelites did, in a very real way what we are doing is still a form of idolatry. We spend our lives looking for fulfillment, meaning and satisfaction everywhere except in the one place we should be looking and in doing so we aggrandize our own judgment over G-D’s. In order to find something spiritual we look instead to the temporal and the material. Instead of looking to G-D we look to work or sex, we look to alcohol and drugs, we look to money, we look to food, we look to our possessions… we look everywhere except to the one place where we could actually find the lasting sense of peace that seems to constantly elude us. Does any of this sound familiar? How often have you looked to physical pleasure or material things in order to fulfill a spiritual need?

But as shocking as it may sound this is not really news to us. Ironically, we already seem to know from the outset that this drink or this tryst or this purchase won’t really do the trick… that will only bring a fleeting distraction or momentary sense of fulfillment… that it cannot really ever satisfy our deepest longing or quench our spiritual desire. Yet we do it anyway. Sadly those choices are not simply futile, they are also tragic. In our efforts to find that elusive sense of peace and meaning, we manage to harm not only ourselves, but also our families and friends.

Why? Why would we pass up on the good things G-D offers us to look instead to things that are inherently flawed and even downright bad for us? It’s not a question of intelligence or understanding. We know better yet we do it anyway. Some would say it is because we are inherently evil and sinful. Others might say it is a result of our fallen and imperfect nature. The best answer I have heard is that we have been born with a G-D shaped hole in our hearts. We are born with a sense of longing for those things that are spiritual and eternal but what we want, what we need, is only available from one source. We can only find real meaning, peace and fulfillment with G-D. It is as if G-D designed with a longing for milk. Since G-D is not cruel or capricious G-D also gave us the means to satisfy that longing… he gave us cows. But when we feel that thirst… when we have that desire for milk we often choose to walk right past the cows and try instead to milk a squirrel or a lizard and then we wonder why we are disappointed with the result.

So what do we do about it? The first thing we can do is to make sure we are mindful of this problem. We must work to remember that many times when we feel an urge to gorge on junk food or get drunk or go on a shopping spree that it is not arising out on any physical or practical need. The truth is that our bodies are actually not hungry or thirty and that our homes are already full of more stuff than we can use. If we can identify that the impulse is coming from something else then we have a better chance of resisting it. The next is, when we are tempted, to remind ourselves of what we are really looking for. Instead of rushing to quell that sense of longing we need to take the time to get quiet, to sit with it and to listen to it. Only then can we realize that what we really want is serenity or meaning and that such qualities can be found only with G-D. If we truly want to find them we must take the time to again ground ourselves in G-D, spending time in prayer or in reading the scriptures.

This method isn’t easy. It takes discipline and patience and above all it takes time. We don’t usually find that sense of meaning or direction for our lives the first time we look to G-D or the second or the tenth. It is so much easier to try and numb the pain in our hearts by pulling out or credit card and heading to the store or by eating half a bag of chips. But we already know where that path leads… our efforts to fill our own souls are failures. Monuments to our vanity they are cisterns that have cracked and hold no water. Fortunately, there is an answer to our thirst, a spring of clean and living water is right there before us, and all we need to do is ask. AMEN