Cracked Cisterns

"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." Jeremiah 2:13

Nabatean cistern north of Makhtesh Ramon, southern Israel. Photo by Wilson44691

For those not familiar with water collection in the desert, a cistern gathers rain water so that it can be stored and used later. This water, because it is stored, is stagnate and prone to becoming polluted, which is not to say that the water wouldn't do the job of keeping someone alive, but there is better water to be had. A cistern also requires a great deal of work to maintain. In the arid climate of the middle east, cisterns are dug into the ground, created through many hours of intense and costly labor. Once the rain water is collected, people have to travel to the cistern and draw water from it, often having to carry the water for miles.

Portuguese cistern El Jadida in Morocco.
This image was originally posted to Flickr by Axel Rouvin

Cisterns are/were such an essential part of living in the desert that in some places, cisterns were built in extravagant fashion.









Cisterns are difficult to build, hard to maintain, prone to failure, contain stagnate water, but are necessary to the survival in the desert. Living water, on the other hand, is water that is mobile, flowing, free. Living water is also less likely to contain pollution as the water moves any contamination further downstream. There is no cost of labor or goods to capture flowing water, but it is quite rare in the desert. This contrast points us to the absurdity of the people to whom God is speaking in Jeremiah. Given the choice between a cistern and a source of living water, the choice should be living water every time. But the accusation that God levies against the people is that they have chosen a cracked cistern, a broken cistern, one that cannot hold water, cannot sustain life and will always run dry, over the guarantee of free flowing water.

It sounds like a stupid thing to do, but we do it quite often, maybe without even realizing it. This passage from Jeremiah connects back with a saying in v.5 "Thus says the Lord: What wrong did your ancestors find in me, and went after nothing, and became nothing themselves?" The temptation when interpreting this passage is to make a claim similar to "you are what you eat." If that were the case then the temptation to go after "nothing" or things that are "worthless" would be fairly easy to avoid. Anybody who has played facebook games knows this pattern resides in our hearts. We spend hours toiling over, and worrying about, empty promises, worthless actions and fruitless farming. What makes these actions of nothing so contagious is their promise of something more at every go. They are a moving target, something that continually draws us out for more, but never fills us up.

My wife has gotten into watching the seemingly unending number of shows about the paranormal on TV. They're interesting shows if you enjoy hearing the occasional ghost story, but we noticed a trend with many of the shows. For so many of the people who claim to be afflicted with paranormal activity, their experiences seem to stem from their own troubles or inability to relinquish their anxieties and fears about the world. There was one episode where a mother and daughter claimed to have had a traumatic ghost experience. For a while they had come to believe that they were being haunted. One night their paranormal activity escalated when they were awoken in the middle of the night by a loud banging noise and footsteps on the floor above them. They were so terrified by the sounds that they cowered in their beds, unable to move for the fear of the paranormal. The next morning, as the daylight flooded their windows, they walked upstairs to investigate. What they found was a broken window, their stuff flung all over the room and several items missing. They presented this story as an encounter with ghosts that were trying to scare them out of their home. The host of the show then worked to "rid" the house of the spirits, through some ritual and prayer.
What this mother/daughter team experienced looked a lot less like "ghosts" and a lot more like a break in. The problem was that they were so caught up in looking for something that wasn't there to explain their pain, that when something really did happen, they had no meaningful way of dealing with it. They had been trying to draw water from a cracked cistern, so that every bump in the night became a ghost, which only reinforced the "presence" of ghosts in their lives.

I have a friend who is an alcoholic. They have been sober for many years now, but when they were drinking, they would go to AA meetings and leave after a few minutes, frustrated that something didn't immediately happen to them. When they got frustrated, they would drink. When they drank, they would get frustrated with their drinking. The whole time they knew that drinking wouldn't solve their drunkenness, but they also did not know what else to do about it. Every time they reached for a bottle, they reached for a cracked cistern, frustrated that the water it contained was polluted, but they were also blinded by the pollution so that they couldn't see the living water that was always readily available for them.

When we, as people of faith, turn to cracked cisterns we neither worship a real God, nor worship with our real selves.1 We worship nothingness, our frustration, our anxiety, the holes that are missing in our lives. When we worship the nothingness we think that one more click, one more bump, one more drink might prove to be real, thirst quenching, life. This text from Jeremiah is God calling us out, out of our nothingness into something meaningful, into worship of the living God, from whom flows living water, even, most surprisingly, amid the deserts and the wildernesses of our lives.



Skinner, Prophecy & Religion, p.71

Set Free

For so many people around the world the standard of living in the United States is an unobtainable goal. This shouldn't be too surprising, especially when we tend to think of starving children on the streets of Kenya, beggars lining the walkways of India, the shanty towns of Peru, and small fledgling villages in the heights of Katmandu, when we hear about folks who can't afford to be American. What tends not to cross most folks minds is that the standard of living of the United States is unobtainable in many places WITHIN the United States. All across the nation, in every city, there undoubtably exists a population that is beyond the brink. In the city of Detroit, this is true for so many, and the thing that always gets me is that it doesn’t have to be that way.

When banks foreclose most of your neighborhood, you are left with depreciating property value. As homes are foreclosed, the rate of crime, poverty, illness, poor nutrition, and death, increase. When banks refuse to lend to perfectly qualified folks in your neighborhood, you are left with an ever increasing rate of foreclosure and abandonment, and the cycle continues. That’s what I find so ridiculous about folks who believe that poverty, crime, and illness are endemic. For some people, that may be true, but to the vast majority of folks who find themselves left out, they are left with no choices. There are more than a few people I know of that have suggested that the best way to “solve” the poverty problem, in the United States, is to simply remove or “eradicate” all of the nation’s poor. This follows the same logic as some other folks who suggested that the best way to cure the AIDS epidemic was to round up all of the victims and separate them from the rest of society until they died off. This line of reasoning denies the possibility that there may, in fact, be something wrong with the way the problem is treated from the very beginning.

Most debates I have ever listened to, about who/what is right and who/what is wrong, ignore the one constant for all time; the past. I have friends who would say that many of the homeless I had worked with two years ago, were products of their own err. During that same time I had colleagues who were working with elementary aged kids in another part of the city. Several of their kids came from single parent homes, where their mother/father had abandoned them and whose remaining parent was a drug addict. The area is so poor that the existing school system is 20 years behind the one I was brought up in. The kids live off of a diet of highly processed food, with little to no fresh foods. Their parents are mostly out of work, so there is little money to buy much of anything as it is. One of the kids had become addicted to meth. He was 10 years old. When he grows up and walks into the office I used to work in and sits down with someone to talk about his needs, what would my friends say about him? Is he the product of his own err? Did he have a choice? 

The biggest conundrum that I think we will someday find ourselves in, is reconciling the benefits gained by some, through the losses of others. I may not be an active participant in what happened to that kid, but because I do nothing to stop it, and that I benefit from it, means that I passively accept it. Life inside the system is a life of either active or passive participation in other people’s oppression. Life outside of the system that so many American’s enjoy is a life of resistance. It is resisting the pressures to fail, the pressures to give up and quit. For far too many, there is no way of getting in. Once you’re out you’re out, even if that means you were born out. Every day is a struggle to see how you fit in the world. Every day is a test of your will to stay afloat. Every time you lose your job, or your kid’s school closes, it is a trail by fire. That is why every day that ministries like Motown Mission and JSCDC send people out to work, there is victory. Every day that someone is able to keep their home, who is on the brink, there is victory. Every time a neighbor mows the lawn in the vacant lot next door, or replaces a boarded window on a foreclosed home, there is victory. Every time the farmers market sells out of produce, there is victory. Every family that manages to stay together, there is victory. Every child that graduates high school, there is victory. And every time there is victory, the chains forced upon someone by the world around them are loosed, and every victory brings us all one step closer to being set free.