Jeremiah And The Cisterns

29^th August 2010

Alienation

‘Alienation is the precise and correctly applied word for describing the major social problem in Britain today. People feel alienated by society. In some intellectual circles it is treated almost as a new phenomenon. It has, however, been with us for years. What I believe is true is that today it is more widespread, more pervasive than ever before. Let me right at the outset define what I mean by alienation. It is the cry of men who feel themselves the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control. It’s the frustration of ordinary people excluded from the processes of decision-making. The feeling of despair and hopelessness that pervades people who feel with justification that they have no real say in shaping or determining their own destinies.

Many may not have rationalised it. May not even understand, may not be able to articulate it. But they feel it. It therefore conditions and colours their social attitudes. Alienation expresses itself in different ways in different people. It is to be found in what our courts often describe as the criminal antisocial behaviour of a section of the community. It is expressed by those young people who want to opt out of society, by drop-outs, the so-called maladjusted, those who seek to escape permanently from the reality of society through intoxicants and narcotics. Of course, it would be wrong to say it was the sole reason for these things. But it is a much greater factor in all of them than is generally recognised.

So spoke Jimmy Reid, in his Rectorial address to Glasgow University in 1973.

Jeremiah

Many many years, back in the dusts of an ancient civilisation

In a time where people spoke strange languages

In a spot that is still there,

A prophet stood and he shouted out words, to describe the alienation of his people

I don’t know how he came upon these words

It may have been something of a trance

Or it may have been that in his own creative gifts he assembled the words

And the Spirit of God confirmed within him that he had found the truth.

Anyway, he spoke of the same things as Jimmy Reid had in 1973 during his address as Rector.

Something is broken

Something has dulled us

Something is empty

Jeremiah went further than Jimmy Reid

He went beneath the social degradation

The violence

The unjust taxation

He went beneath that and discerned a community

Which had lost its umbilical connection with the mother who had birthed it

A wife who was no longer on speaking terms with her husband

A relationship that broken in its most fundamental degree.

And the prophet stood on that dusty street, and he said his words

And they have echoed down through the ages,

Even as far as our gathering this morning.

Never Introduced

There was once an atheist (I think it was George Bernard Shaw, but struggled to find the quote) who was once asked why he did not believe in God, and he answered “We have never been properly introduced”.

There is a tendency to think that our alienation from God is kind of God’s fault,

His fault for lack of clarity.

I was reading on Facebook this week someone talking about faith.

I take comfort in science and the quantifiable evidence it can provide as opposed the blind faith of religion. Others feel the opposite and neither is fundamentally right or wrong as we will never be able to disprove religion though religion can, in theory, be proved. (All it would take is for God to pop by for a visit. )

I believe that Jimmy Reid and Jeremiah and that guy in Facebook were all describing a similar thing, this alienation.  This sense that God is not here.

But where Jeremiah takes us in a different direction, is that he insists the problem is not a logical one, it is not a question of finding the best argument,

It is down to a moral flaw in us.

They are both in verse 13,

We have forsaken God, the fountain of living waters

And hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that hold no water.

Wanting Away

It is a stunning charge for us to hear, for the people of God

“You have forsaken God”

There is a part of us, that wants to be away from where we are now

There is a malicious discontentment

It runs away from the present moment – we move fast

It wants out of the constraints of living – we drink much, we eat much, we get our highs

It wants away from responsibility , from ownership, from being needed.

It is the pain of living, and we want away.

Now this is not the same as wanting to things around us to become more

It is being fundamentally dissatisfied with who we are and where we are, even though it is the right place for us to be.

It is like those strange Michael Jackson impersonators you get on the X-Factor, unable to live with who they are called to be, they become a grotesque, frightening impersonation of someone else.

Ultimately this is rejecting of the kindness of God,

That God alone cannot be left to the job of keeping us and guiding us.

We need another agent, we need to take control, we forsake God.

And when we forsake God, we run away to other Gods.

Going To Other Gods

The second charge is this

Not just that we abandoned God, but that we went after other Gods.

There was an offer of water, and instead of taking it,

We said, I will collect water for myself, the cistern may be broken

But I want that water.

I have a friend who whenever he or someone he knows is tempted to look at another woman, he says “Drink water from your own cistern”

In verse 11, it says “Has a nation ever changed its gods”

One writer has suggested that other nations would never want to change their gods,

Why would they want to do such a thing, because when your gods are undemanding, why would you want to leave them, but the God of Jacob, Isaac, the God of Jesus, he calls and summons us to something big.

“But the grace which gave much asked much; it demanded self-surrender.  And without self surrender on the part of those who received it, grace became an empty word.  No other nation changed its god, non-entity though that was.  Israel forsook Yahweh because the relation to Him was full of ethical content… Yahwism had this iron core on it.  The iron core was that Israel could only have Yahweh on his own terms.  Yahwehism was no colourless faith, it laid a curb on men, it had a yoke and bonds.  The bonds were those of love, but love’s bonds are the most enduring and the most exacting.”  Adam C. Welch

Other gods

The ancient gods of Romans and Greeks,

Venus, the God of love

Mars, the God of war

Exist today in more subtle forms

Venus the God of love, the God of lust, the god that persuades us that joy is the perfect physical form unveiled for us –

Mars the God of war, the god that convinces us that fulfilment lies in conquest, in victory, in ascending in power above other mortals, the god of promotion

Sophia, the goddess of wisdom, of knowledge

Dyonisius, the god of pleasure

Hestia – the god of the home, quite literally the domestic goddess

Hera, the goddess of marriage, women and childbirth

Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty

Of people who worship these gods, the Bible through Jeremiah says:

“went after Worthlessness and became worthlessness”.

And then there is the god of the self:

Even sometimes we wish to install ourselves as God, as shapers of our own destinies.  I sometimes draw back from rhetoric that says “You can be whoever you want to be” – no you can’t.  We are frail, limited creatures.  The only people who say these things are the winners of talent contests, not the 20,000 people who didn’t even get to boot camp; and even the winner of the talent contest will stop saying it three years down the line when they have lost their record deal.

I was listening to Boyd Hilton the TV critic (who writes the TV reviews for Heat) saying that his favourite form of comedy at the moment is “atheist anti-religion humour”.  Eddie Izzard, Ricky Gervais, Robin Ince all have major sections of their acts which are dismissive or religion.  Stephen Fry, who I really love, has been dismissive of religion also.

And I do wonder if what is behind these people striving for their to be no god, is not a careful reasoning of the arguments but a need for self to be God.

Alienation

Jeremiah probes beneath our alienation, our frustration at the hidden god,

And says “Let us first face your abandonment, your chasing after other gods.”

And the antidote to this abandonment of God, and running after other gods

Is to ask a question

It is a question that appears in verse 6, and verse 8

It is to honestly ask the question “Where is the Lord?”

In alienation, the response is not to try and try and manufacture faith for ourselves

It is to honestly ask the question “Where is the Lord?”

This has spoken to me a lot this week.

Because for a while now I too have been carrying this sense of alienation.

It is wrong to imagine that people like me have this kind of hotline to God.

And I have been trying to ask the question “Where is the Lord?”

There is a perception sometimes that questions are the enemy of faith.

There is a scene in a film called Cinema Paradiso, set in 1950s Sicily, where the hero Toto is in Church, spots the woman he loves, Elena, arrive at the confession box to make confession, this woman is phenomenally beautiful and Toto needs to be with her, he needs just the chance to talk to her.  So he has an idea, he will rush into the priests portion of the confession box; but he needs to distract the Priest, so he enlists the help of his friend, an old man called Alfredo.

This is how Alfredo distracts the Priest:

“Father Adelfio” he says “I have a very serious doubt that is torturing my soul.  And you’ve got to help me, because I’ve lost all peace of mind”

We cut back to Toto, talking to Elena, and then back to the priest Father Adelfio and Alfred,

And the Priest is distraught, crossing himself, almost whimpering, and the scale of Alfredo’s doubts, and what are these non-permissable doubts

“I know, but the miracle of the loaves and fishes, for example I think about it a lot, how is it possible…”

And the Priest continues to be appalled.

And this plays into a serious conception about religion.  It is the job of the people to have ordinary lives, with ordinary doubts; and the it is the job of the priest to be certain, and to police the people so that they have no doubts, it is their job to wander about with their hotline to god, and their comfortable certitude; whilst everyone else asks questions.  And even the smallest of questions, what about the loaves and fishes, is a grave sin.

It’s not like that.  I too am plagued from time to time with doubts.

Sometimes fearful that I have made the right career choice.

That haunting alienation from others and from God.

The exact thing I must do is ask questions.

I can resonate with the experience of the improbably named Revered Adam Smallbone.  Vicar of St. Saviours in the Marshes in the TV series Rev.

The end of the last episode of the series was about his alienation and disintegration

He is at a party where his bitterness with life,

His sense of failure in ministry

His alienation from the sense of God

Erupts in a furious argument with his wife

He drunkenly makes a pass at the local primary school headmistress

And when walking home, having been told to leave, tries to pick a fight with a local gang

Before being picked up by the police.

The police though do not take him to the cells but to a local high rise flat,

Where high up, on what looks like the fifteenth floor, they need Adam to visit a man who is dying of cancer.

No one else they sense is qualified to deal with this man’s deepest need

Because beyond his physical pain is the need to resolve his alienation from God

And so Adam administers bread and wine

And in this profound act, a drunken disillusioned priest, a dying man

Bread and wine

God becomes present.

And Adam is summoned back to himself

Away from his lustful pathetic wanderings,

And his false gods of drink and of lust and of self

Called back to God

I thought about this a lot this week when I too

Struggling with my own sense of alienation

Met with a man who is very ill

And as he lay in his bed, my alienation felt all the more acute, my questions thundered through my head

And just as they reached the crescendo this man lying there said

“I’ve no stopped believing, I’m ready to meet my maker”

Our sense of alienation is met in a resolve to return

To ask the question “Where is the Lord?”

Do you feel alienated, empty, distanced,

Have you had your share of the worthlessness and false promises of nothing gods

Then make your return.

Jesus, the dying man who at the last cried it is finished, and gave up his spirit to God

Loves all his children with unbreakable love

Turn to him

His arms are wide

And his burden is light.

AMEN

The Threatening Text

This is a threatening text,

A text that holds you at gun point and says “If you don’t behave I’m going to pull the trigger”, and then at some points seems to say “I’m going to pull the trigger anyway”

It is text that tells us the difference between God and Santa Claus

It is a text that we want to run from, and yet the greatest condemnation is reserved for those who attempt to silence it.

It shocks us out of our complacency

Takes away from any form of faith that attempts to buy God off with well intentioned gestures.

And calls us to deep change within ourselves

Invitation Potters

The text begins with an invitation for Jeremiah to go and hear the word of God down at the potter’s house.

He goes there, and he sees the potter make a pot,

And when the vessel is not good, he takes the clay again and remakes the pot,

He breaks it down and builds it up

So that it might be right in his eyes.

Creative God

The first thing I want to note is that God is like a potter

It is the point that we were making earlier

That God is a maker, a creator

One who loves to bring from nothing something

To bring from chaos beauty

Who is immersed in the life of this world

Planning, measuring, pouring, igniting, plunging, hurling, moulding

The idea is of the potter, hands covered in clay, shaping, skilfully moulding the life of the world

In a way so intimately that it’s like the way you cannot tell sometimes where the pot ends and the hand begin.

There was a debate this week in some of the Newspapers when Stephen Hawking had said that Physics had explained the big bang and there was now no need for God.

Except people just wrote back and said “Well how do you explain the thing that caused the big bang”

And no one believed that the only thing God did was light the blue touch paper for the universe, and then take a holiday of 13 billion years.  God is always creating.

And so also should we.

This is one of the philosophies behind the work of Carol Marples.

Have a look at some of these pictures here.

It is our job to be creative, and to find ways where we can create.

A life which has the creativity suffocated out of it has one of its main outlets for joy taken from it.

That is one of the reasons we want to think about creativity on Sunday.

But God’s care of creation is intimately bound up with the fact that he is the creator, the maker

Creator Makes Demands

A creator also makes demands.

You know the image of the stroppy film director, Michael Winner, making demands

You know the way that artists will rip up a canvas that is imperfect

Or a novelist will write and rewrite a novel until it is right.

It is the creator who makes demands over us.

And this is the Word of the Lord that goes with it

It is in the form of two statements of the form

“If, and if, and then”

“If I intend to destroy a nation that I will pluck up and break it” – remember that plucking up and breaking are at the heart of Jeremiah

And if that nation at any point turns back to me

Then I will relent of the disaster”

And

“If I intend to bless a nation that I will plant and build it” – remember that building up and planting are at the heart of Jeremiah

And if a nation becomes complacent

Then I will relent of the good that I intended to do”

This is behind the image of the prophets we have been holding throughout these last few weeks.

The wall, and the plumline,

The parts that are straight, the parts that are bent towards justice,

That parts that are bend towards compassion

Be that something as organised as the Eva Burrows

Or the quiet unassuming goodness of someone who goes in to clean for an elderly neighbour

God makes demands of us, that we be true.

That we be of the right shape

And the threat of God is against evil in the sight of God

Private evil that only God can see

Evil not as it is judged by our relaxed double standards

But the standards of God

Which are so often geared towards the vulnerable and the asylum seeker

The ones who slip through the net

As well as geared towards a kind of sacred morality that treats sexuality and life, and our bodies as sacred gifts, to be enjoyed and not be abused

That is what God the artists demands of us.

That we be truly a vessel of God.

Parking Ticket

A few years ago when I was at University, training to be a minister

A poor student for the second time in my life

I had parked my car for too long on University

And had got a parking ticket

The ticket said on it “£25 if you pay within 14 days, £50 if you pay after that”

My systems of personal organisation were not in those days the models of well oiled efficiency that surround me today, and I forgot about it;

Then one morning two weeks later I woke, worrying about the thing,

And looked at the date, it was 15 days overdue

I was distraught, £25 had become £50 entirely from my own stupidity

I was raging, not only £25 but £50 completely wasted.

Later on that morning, I did phone the parking folk at Glasgow City Council

I gave the number of my ticket, and asked the fine

“£25 she said”

I kept quiet

“Are you sure?” says I

“£25 she confirm”, and the second time I keep my mouth quiet

She then asks my address, “Flat 3/1 1 Elmvale Row Springburn”

“Thank you very much, I’m sorry but I’m going to have to put you on hold for a few moments”

As I was waiting, a friend of mine, a fellow student came along

“Who are you on the phone to”

“I’m on the phone to the parking folk.  They’ve made a mistake,

“I could barely conceal my delight”

“they’re meant to be charging me £50 but they made a mistake are only charging 25.”

“I’m not on hold and I can hear everything you’re saying” says the woman at the parking.

In the end she still let me off.

But what do we gain in moment like these, these sly moments of getting ahead

We gain the £25, we get the new phone even though it was under warranty

We get the drugs we wanted the doctor to give us, even though we keep quiet about all they symptoms

On a bigger scale we get to live in more comfortable communities,

Able to not to be confronted with the deep pain of those who lives slip through the net

On a bigger scale we might get lower taxes

And freedom to be entrepreneurs

Or travel at higher speeds in bigger engined cars

But what do we lose

We lose the shapes of the vessels of God

We lose the rightness of creation

We lose the beauty that gave the creator such delight

We lose our character

And the threat of the episode at the potter’s house,

Is that in such circumstances we will be remade.

There is a part of us that says we are beyond redemption

There is a part of us that will silence the threat

And if do that, we risk not only being remade, we risk being discarded.

Being remade is painful

Being remade is extremely painful.

For Israel they were remade, they were cast into exile into Babylon

It was a trauma that still haunts the nation today,

But curiously it was also the making of Israel

It was out of their exile that their faith was remade into the form that kind of exists in today

Much of the writing of the Old Testament comes from the pain of that time.

In Jewish religion today, the most holy book, the Talmud, exists in two forms;

The Jerusalem Talmud, the writings from the capital city

And the Babylonian Talmud, the writings of those who were remade, were thrown into exile

And do you know which of the two is the most holy,

It is the one of the exiles, the ones who underwent the excruciating pain of being remade.

I want to ask, do you know anyone who in their live is enduring excruciating pain

Who is haunted, broken

Who has lost all that they once had

Who speaks frequently of giving up, of ending it all

Who has been a source of exasperation, of exhaustion in your life for a long time

Or who has visited upon them circumstances which they have not deserved.

This is not guaranteed, but it is possible

That they are undergoing the excruciating pain of being remade

During the initial writing of this sermon yesterday we had a phone call from someone in desperate pain

Physical

Emotional

Spiritual

And you pray, let it be the pain of the potter,

Of the spoiled clay, that has to be remade

For it is a better thing to be reshaped in the hands of the creator

Even mysteriously remade in death

Than to be left untouched, and also alone.

AMEN