A Heartbroken God
A God Who Weeps - Part 2
Sunday, September 11, 2022
Jeremiah 2:4-13
My people have committed two crimes:
They have forsaken me, the spring of living water.
And they have dug wells, broken wells that can’t hold water.Jeremiah 2:13 (NRSV)
Listen to this week’s sermon here:
____________________
“Look at all I’ve done for you… and this is how you respond? This is how you treat me?”
Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish the voice of God from the voice of a parent trying to navigate the tumultuous years of a rebellious teenager.
It’s easy to see the anger of God in passages like this, scolding Israel for their idolatry and disobedience, but perhaps the teenager analogy actually gives us some much needed perspective. What if God is not simply exploding with anger and wrath against a sinful people? What if God does not want to destroy Israel by sending them into exile? What if despite all the horrible things they have done, God still loves them and wants the best for them?
Are there consequences for their choices? Absolutely! Just like there are consequences for the unlicensed and underage teenager who takes off in his or her parent’s car at night for an unsupervised party where they drink far to much and end up totaling the car on the way home. This may be a pretty extreme example that is hopefully more common in movies and TV shows than in real life, but the point is that even with such an extreme act of rebellion, the rightfully angry parent still does not wish harm on their misguided child. They don’t wish their teenager had died in the accident. Before they are angry, they are first relieved when nobody is hurt.
What we see here in Jeremiah 2 is not the wrath of a God who is ready to wipe a rebellious people off the face of the earth, but the overwhelming heartbreak of a parent who has given their now adolescent child every possible opportunity only to find that the child would rather run away from home and throw away their lives on temporary pleasures that will never satisfy.
Living on a friend’s couch might work out in the short term, but eventually the tearful parent peers into the child’s empty room with all the luxuries of home and wonders why this wasn’t good enough for them. In the language of the Biblical prophets, the cry sounds something like this… “they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.”
Building cracked cisterns is Jeremiah’s way of saying, “why are you trying to do it yourself when God has already given you everything?” Today we might ask the same question. Why do we turn to politics, money, fame, weapons, walls, divisive speech and action, and even religion to “protect us” and make us feel secure, included, or even loved as if somehow God is not enough?
What cracked cisterns have we built to sustain ourselves that continue to break God’s heart?