Jeremiah’s images of the fountain and the cistern have held power for me for a long time. I didn’t even know what a cistern was until I lived in Mexico. Where we lived the city turned on the water two or three times a week. While it was on, people had to store it in whatever container they had. During our first years we had two large metal barrels that held our water. Someone had to be home when the water came in order to turn on the hose and fill up the barrels. Our ears became attuned to the sound of rushing water through the city pipes under the street. During those years we would frequently run out before the water came again. So we installed a storage tank on top of the house. Only occasionally did we run out of water after that. But the best situation was to have a cistern. We never had one, but many of our neighbors did. Cisterns came in all shapes and sizes, but they held much more water than barrels or tanks.
Jeremiah describes something like the difference between the water running through the pipes and water stored in whatever container people had – except that the fountain he described didn’t depend on the whim of city officials to turn it on and off. It was always on. I imagine a fountain that is simply a muddy patch on the ground from which a little stream of water runs down to a lower level. I don’t envision a gushing spring but a constant, albeit low pressure, flow. That explains why people might choose a cistern over a fountain. The cistern already has an adequate supply of water. It seems safer and easier to go with the cistern. The fountain requires daily trips to collect water; at the same time it offers more assurance because it is a never ending source.
Jeremiah is writing to a group of people who were on the verge of becoming exiles. They were about to move from a settled existence to an unsettled one. Centuries earlier their ancestors who first settled the land for them had moved from the unsettled existence of the wilderness for the settled existence of life in the Promised Land. Now the experiment of being a tiny independent monarchy amidst larger nations was being severely tested. They had already suffered a civil war that led to dividing the nation in two. Now they were being threatened by a larger nation. So they were seeking protection from two other large nations – Egypt and Assyria. Jeremiah tells them that they were making a huge mistake, and he uses the image of the cistern and the fountain to make his point. They were abandoning the source of flowing water (God) because it looked like an unpromising hole in the ground with a trickle of water coming out. In its place they had dug cisterns (dead end political alliances), which allowed them to store water but not get any fresh water. They didn’t realize that the cisterns were cracked and leaking water. Even if they weren’t the water would eventually become rancid unless it is constantly flowing. But that process happens slowly people don’t even notice: they get used to drinking rancid water.
This struck me powerfully 2 weeks ago driving home from a retreat in Mendocino. We stopped at a fruit stand along the side of the road. I bought a peach and a couple of plums. I can still remember the taste of the recently picked peach. I couldn’t stop talking about how good it was. I had forgotten that the peaches we get in the city have very little flavor – just like tomatoes, apples, and other fresh foods. We get far away from the source and the flavor changes, decreases; but we get used to it and hardly notice it until we taste the real thing that’s just been picked from the tree. In the same way we get used to the rancid water of unsatisfying lives, while the life force leaks out even as it grows stagnant. We grow accustomed to at least enjoying the safety of providing for ourselves. We don’t even notice there is no longer any flavor to our lives. We forget that there are other options.
For Jeremiah cistern water can never sustain people without the fountain. The fountain might just be a muddy trickle, but it sustains for the long journey. I believe Luke is saying something similar in the parables about taking the last place when we’re invited to a banquet and inviting the poor when we give a banquet. The humble and poor help connect us to the fountain if we listen to their voices. They give us strength to avoid the temptation of choosing the attractive but cracked cistern over the less attractive or downright ugly muddy fountain. The poor put us in touch with the source of life, which we often forget when we are able to provide life for ourselves without tapping into the source. This is the spiritual under girding for the practices of justice and hospitality.
When we keep providing for ourselves through the structures of society, we tend to forget the heart. When Jeremiah prophesied, Israel was seeking political and military assistance from nations that offered to protect them from other nations. Not only did that keep them from facing the spiritual issues that were destroying them from within. It set them up for a life in which they had to continue to sell themselves for less benefit each time. It works like addiction: it takes more of the substance to satisfy the craving, but that only creates a larger craving next time. Jeremiah asks, “Have you not brought this upon yourself by forsaking the Lord, while God led you in the way?” What does it mean to forsake the Lord?
It means to stop asking where God is. Our practical polytheism gets revealed. We have gods for each situation. Where do you seek security when life feels unsettled? The generation that settled in the Promised Land had failed to ask that question. Then the leaders of the nation stopped asking it. Yahweh was fine for wandering in the wilderness. God took on visible form – cloud and fire – so people knew they weren’t alone. Manna and quail and water from the rock all provided for their needs. But the generation that entered the Promised Land was the children of those who received those gifts. Children mostly experience life through their parents. It doesn’t matter if the parents bring home a paycheck or a welfare check; if they get their food from the farm, the supermarket or the church’s food pantry; it all comes from mom and dad.
So when the children of the wilderness generation grew up and entered a different situation – a settled life rather than a nomadic life – they had to figure it out for themselves. Maybe some of them had noticed how it worked in the desert. But their parents weren’t around any more. In Palestine water came from cisterns, not from any old rock that Moses might tap. And food came from farms, not from the sky. Life was different in the Promised Land. That generation figured it needed something different for settling down to a life of farming in this place. So they decided to learn from the locals. That makes sense, doesn’t it? The people who have been living here for a long time know how things work. So they stopped even asking themselves how to recognize and access the God who fed their parents, and went after the gods of the local people. Who can blame them?
How do we learn from this story? The core stories of every culture reveal spiritual patterns that work in the lives of individuals and of the community as a whole. So the biblical story reveals those patterns for us. I am both one of the parents and one of the children. Together we are the generation of the parents & the generation of the children. At some level each of us and all of us together has these different knowings. We have experienced life on the edge, when we didn’t know where our next meal was coming from and somehow it showed up. And we have experienced the benefits of a disciplined life in which we provide for ourselves and our families by showing up at work every day.
The challenge is to keep asking the question, “Where is the Lord?” in the midst of all those different circumstances. The question may not come out exactly like that every time. Sometimes it might be a personal question like, “Where does life flow for me?”, “When do I feel most alive?”, or “What gift am I supposed to give to the world that no one else can give?” Sometimes the question needs to be asked on behalf of the whole community: “What is going on spiritually in our community right now?”; “What priorities do we need to discern as we look at everything that is going on among us?”; “Which part of the community needs our attention at this moment, both because of their need and because of our need to learn what they have to teach us?”
The poem about the two shops by Rumi that serves as the Preparation for our worship today offers another image for this same point. There are no safe holes to hide in. “The only real rest comes when you’re alone with God.” In that place we can get quiet enough to ask important spiritual questions. Rumi argues that those spiritual questions invite us to take risks to choose life. He says we own two shops, which correspond to the fountain and the cistern: “You own two shops, and you run back and forth. Try to close the one that’s a fearful trap, getting always smaller. Checkmate, this way. Checkmate that. Keep open the shop where you’re not selling fishhooks anymore. You are the free-swimming fish.” It’s much safer to sell fishhooks than to jump in the water and risk being caught by someone else’s fishhook.
This works at a political level for nations like Israel, an interpersonal level for communities like Immanuel, and at a personal level for each of us. Immanuel faces many crises, which means we face both danger and opportunity. Later this month the Session will get alone with God to discern our path to the opportunities.
When we as individuals notice that our lives consist of one crisis after another, it is time to start looking at what is going on at a spiritual level, rather than run after the next fix. That is risky, because we can’t do both. When we’re addicted to something that helps to relieve the pressure of all these crises, it gets more and more difficult to go back to the fountain. The pressure to get the fix is greater each round, so it gets more difficult to choose the spiritual response. We may look at our lives and say, “what’s the use?” The harder we try the more success eludes us. The more we play by the rules the less joyful we feel. The more faithful we are to others the more difficult it becomes to be faithful to ourselves. The more good we try to do the more we get criticized for failing to mind our own business.
The life-giving alternative is to claim the life offered by God, the fountain of living water. The challenge in that is that God is not a roadmap that guarantees we will never get lost on the journey. In Rumi’s mind God is “the nowhere that you came from, even though you have an address here.” Antonio Machado wrote a poem entitled “There is no road” that describes in other terms what it looks like to jump in the water as a free-swimming fish:
"Traveler, your footprintsBut the good news is that Rumi’s “nowhere” and Machado’s “no road” are the places where we are most deeply loved. So another wise guide, James Hillman, asks, “Why is it so difficult to imagine that I am cared about, that something takes an interest in what I do, that I am perhaps protected, maybe even kept alive not altogether by my own will and doing? Why do I prefer insurance to the invisible guarantees of existence?” Hillman is asking Jeremiah’s question, “Why do people forsake the fountain of living water in exchange for cracked cisterns that hold no water?
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship's wake in the sea."
It is precisely the lack of insurance that keeps us stuck in the shop with the fishhooks rather than the shop where we are the free-swimming fish. It is our addiction to visible sustenance that makes us choose the address that we have here over the nowhere that we came from. And it is our insistence on a roadmap that takes us off the “no road” and puts us on the road that leads to death. That’s why the fountain of living water is such frightening good news. Let us encourage one another to come to that water as we sing.
