The Rev. Canon Anne E. Kitch
Jeremiah 2:4-13 Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 Luke 14:1, 7-14
The water bottle is ubiquitous this time of year. You see them everywhere because drinking water is important—especially when it’s hot. There have been several days this past week when we have had to be careful of the heat. Drinking water is actually urgent when you are hot, or pregnant, or exercising. Yet drinking water is important all the time, even when not urgent. Still, it is amazingly easy to ignore water and our thirst for it.
I once volunteered to help with field day at the elementary school. My job was to handle the water station. I poured water from a cooler into tiny paper cups so that thirsty 1st and 2nd graders could come for a water break. But when they came, one looked at me, puzzled. “What’s this?”
“Water.”
“I don’t drink water.” I don’t drink water. Not, I don’t like water, or I don’t want water, or I’m not thirsty, but I don’t drink water. I just looked at her.
“Do you have any juice boxes?” she asked.
“No.”
She was not the only who refused. I pondered this. How could you not drink water? Had she and her family been lured into believing that juice boxes, full of sugar and false nutrients, could assuage her thirst? In so many instances we are lured into what seems easy or comforting or flavorful and ignore that we simply need water in order to survive. As we forget or forego the importance of water for our thirsty bodies, so we can easily forget God for our thirsty souls.
It is amazingly easy to ignore God--even for religious folks. Many people go days, even weeks or months without thinking twice about God. For some it is years or a life-time. Even those of us here today, who have made some public affirmation of some kind of faith, are not immune to God-forgetfulness. How easily do we set God far off? In heaven or in the future?
This is the cry of Jeremiah. Why do you not seek for God, he cries. Living and preaching God’s word 500 years before Jesus was born, Jeremiah was God’s chosen prophet to all the families of the House of Israel. “What wrong did your ancestors find in me,” God speaks through Jeremiah, “that they went far from me, and (not only that) went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves?” Why did they not simply ask, “Where is the Lord?” This is the important question for Jeremiah to be asked at all time and at all places—where is God in all this. Because in asking the question, we set our attention toward God. When our eyes and heart are set on seeking God, we have already acknowledged God’s presence. We pay attention. We sense that God is near.
This is the question for us as people of faith to be asked at all times and in all places: where is God in all this? It is not a rhetorical question. It is a question of faith, because it assumes an answer. It is not whether God is present, but how God is present. The answer to “Where is God” will always be, “here.” It is the forgetfulness of the people that Jeremiah laments. Your ancestors did not say, “Where is God?” and the priests did not say, “Where is God?” They stopped asking the important question. Instead they forgot who they were. They went about their lives as if God were not. And worse than that, they tried to replace the sustenance of God with empty wells. They forgot to drink their water. “Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate…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.”
I once had a water pitcher with a crack in it. I kept filling it and putting it in the refrigerator, but when I wanted a cold glass of water it never seemed full. I kept thinking that someone was drinking a lot of water. Somehow I didn’t take notice of the puddle of water that kept pooling at the bottom of the refrigerator. Even today we trust cracked theologies, false gods and faulty reasoning. We place our hope in systems of faith that simply do not work, that won’t hold water. We are lured into living day-to-day as if God is far off and as if heaven is in the future. This can lead us into the false notion that our life is about living well in order to get into heaven. Then we will meet God face to face. Since God is far off and in the future, there is no relationship now.
We couldn’t be more wrong. Jesus knew this. Jesus knew that the Sabbath was not about worshipping a God who was far off, not about keeping strict rules of worship in order to be honored and earn a special place at God’s banquet table in the after-life. The Sabbath was set aside to remember God’s great act of creation, to honor that creation and each one in it, to celebrate a relationship with God here and now. A life in Christ is not about how to get ourselves the best seat at the table—it is about inviting others to the table. Jesus enacts an ethic of radical hospitality as if we were in the Kingdom of God at the banquet table right now. As if it was true. As if God were present here and now.
Following in the footsteps of Jesus, the writer of the letter to the Hebrews reminds those first century followers of the way (and now 2000 years later reminds us) what God has said, “I will never leave you or forsake you!” Because God is here and now, God’s love is here and now. We are called to enact mutual love, show hospitality to strangers, remember those in prison, honor our marriage vows, keep our lives free from love of money, and be content with what we have because we are God’s beloved. Our lives as God’s beloved are not about working to earn ourselves a place in some far off Kingdom of God, but about working to create the Kingdom of God for others here and now.
When we stop asking, “Where is God?” we lull ourselves into believing we can live without water. We need to turn to God for living water. And we need to invite others to come along; or better yet, take the living water to them. We need to say again and again, “Where is God in all of this?” In times of desperation, where is God? In times of joy, where is God? In times of foggy indifference, where is God? Because there is no where or when, where God is not.
Amen.
Copyright © 2007 Anne E. Kitch
