Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost: August 31, 2025
Readings: Jeremiah 2:4-13 | Psalm 81:1, 10-16 | Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 | Luke 14:1, 7-14
“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.”
The prophet Jeremiah has not been given a gentle word to prophesy. Last week we heard God commission Jeremiah to reveal to the people of Israel the truth of their actions and their consequences, and this week that truth telling begins. It is not a pretty story. The people had a covenant with God, and they have not upheld it.
Today we hear God building the case against the house of Judah. It’s a dramatic courtroom moment, and the evidence is heavy. We heard only the smallest portion this morning, but it was enough to certainly convey the idea. God’s opening sentence makes the argument clear: “What wrong did your ancestors find in me that they went far from me, and went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves?”
It might be helpful to remember the context in which Jeremiah is speaking. God first called Jeremiah to prophesy during the reign of King Josiah. King Josiah is known for his sweeping religious reforms. The story goes that Josiah had ordered repairs to the temple, and in that work was found the Book of the Law, which is likely the book we know as Deuteronomy. Josiah was convicted by what he heard in that text, and he demanded all the people hear it be read and repent of their idolatry.
Deuteronomy makes clear that in the time of Moses, the people of Israel vowed to love God with all their being. There are rules and laws about how they should behave, but all of it serves to help them love God and not turn away to idols.
Through Moses in Deuteronomy, and then again and again throughout their history, God gives the people of Israel a choice, life or death, blessing or curse. God does not coerce this decision; it is the community’s to make. God gives the people of Israel, gives us, the agency to choose how we will live and love. God has no patience for idolatry, whether it's the obvious idolatry of worshiping other gods like Baal or the more subtle idolatry of loving the religious practice rather than the God it is meant to help worship.
In a sense, God is selfish. God wants all our love. But God knows that what God offers is the only true and living water, the only way to refresh and sustain us. Everything else is dirty water that will make us sick and will dry up on us like water held in a cracked cistern. Even this demand that we turn to God is really giving us the chance to choose ourselves.
Now, I worry that preaching a sermon that boils down to “God is the source of living water” will feel too simplistic, if not downright naive. I know I’ve heard sermons and Sunday school teachers dismiss my pain and my struggling as simply a bump in the road getting in the way of a publicly palatable spiritual life. “Nevermind your hurt, nevermind your grief,” these well-meaning Christians have said to me, “Just let go and let God.” “Turn your eyes from the suffering of others,” they imply so that I might “Keep your eyes on Jesus.” God is the source of living water, so I am wrong to need anything else.
The insidious thing about cliches is that they typically contain at least a seed of truth. God does have control of the narrative, even if it is on a timescale beyond our lifetime. Jesus is the only clarity in a chaotic world. God is the fountain of living water, the only thing that can sustain us in the desert of this world. But cliches take powerful truths and render them powerless. They instead can become powerful in exactly the opposite way they were intended. Instead of lifting us up, they become words that crush us down. Instead of offering life, they offer death.
All of which is to say, one of the challenges of our faith is to hold in one hand the belief that God is the source of living water, and in the other hand to hold the knowledge that sometimes it doesn’t feel like it. The work of faith is to look at the world around us and within us, and when we see that it is parched with drought remember that God has brought rain before and will bring rain again. Like we saw in Jeremiah, God wants us to ask, “Where is the Lord?”
We get a partial answer to that question in our other readings this morning. Both our epistle and our gospel give us instructions on how to live.
It’s hard for me to hear this gospel reading and not remember the first time I really heard this story. “The first will be last, and the last will be first,” my little ten year old brain heard. So, if I can bear to be last for a little bit then I will ultimately get what I want so that’s alright. It was a simple calculation.
A friend graciously reminded me this weekend that this response is pretty developmentally appropriate for a ten year old. But I wonder if it serves as another example of digging out a broken cistern. If I practice a false sort of humility that only serves to reach my own selfish ends, then not only am I choosing the water of personal gain over living water, I am also putting that water in a system that will eventually run dry.
We can practice humility all we want, but if the point of our humility is to make ourselves look good, then we have missed the point. God calls us to a radically different life than the world pushes us towards. Every step of the way, we have to be mindful that we aren’t slipping into idolatry. And to be clear, idolatry is a much bigger umbrella than at least I was taught to believe. It’s a subtle thing, in some ways. Fighting against idolatry requires an unflinching examination of our motivations. It is very easy to do the right thing for the wrong reasons.
Which is not an excuse to not make an effort, of course.
In our baptismal covenant we are asked, “Will you persevere in resisting evil, and whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?” This vow acknowledges that resisting evil is a lifelong project, and it is honest about the fact that we will eventually fall into sin. The point is not perfection. The point is a continual effort to turn towards God and to strive live in God’s ways. The point is to practice letting mutual love continue, because loving each other is part of how we get better at loving God. We practice hospitality and we care for those in prison and pushed to the margins of society precisely because God first loved us.
Where is the Lord, the prophet prompts us to ask? God is in the souls of our neighbors. God is in the interactions filled with compassion. God is here, in this community, gathered around this table.
The letter to the Hebrews calls us to a sacrifice of praise, and that is a sacrifice we make with our lips and in our lives. I know in Seattle it can be tempting to exclusively live into the evangelistic approach that prescribes preaching the gospel at all times, and if necessary use words. In this time and place, our words are deeply necessary. Our words of love and liberation and a God who calls us to live lives of justice are our sacrifice of praise, so long as we remember that this sacrifice of praise is to God’s glory alone.
We continue to praise God in our worship and in our lives when it’s easy and when it’s hard, and when we aren’t even entirely sure we believe in God in the first place, because we have committed ourselves to the belief that God is the only fountain of living water and we trust that in some way we cannot quite imagine yet, God will not fail us.