2022.08.28 | Cracked Pots
“Cracked Pots”
Rev. Dr. Arlene K. Nehring
Eden United Church of Christ
Hayward, California
Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
August 28, 2022
My grandparents were remarkably resourceful people. If they weren’t born with this quality, they clearly learned it from their parents and grandparents. All of my ancestors were farmers. Most were prompted by a farming crisis of one sort or another to leave Europe and emigrate to the US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
According to family lore, my ancestors sold everything they had in order to pay their passage to the US. The entered the US at the port of Ellis Island, took trains to Chicago, laid over in Illinois for a time to raise money, and then headed west to rent and buy farmland in Iowa. There, they raised corn, cattle, hogs, chickens, and children, who were all above average.
Although my ancestors routinely worked with other relatives and neighbors to build barns, put up hay, and harvest crops, each family knew that they had to be relatively self-sufficient in order to survive the harsh weather of the rural Midwest.
My dad spent a lot of time in the late fall “winterizing our farm” which included stacking straw bales around the wells that provided water for the livestock and the house. He also piled bales around the house to insulate the foundation and keep the pipes in the basement from freezing up.
In the late summer we butchered a steer or a barrow and stored the meat in a giant freezer. We raised a kitchen garden and canned and froze the produce and kept those commodities, along with potatoes and other vegetables, in the root cellar under the house.
Like our neighbors, we had to be prepared to fend for ourselves and care for our livestock if we got snowed in, or suffered a major power outage in any season of the year. In times like these, we often leaned back on the old ways of our pioneer ancestors.
II
The importance of learning from and leaning back on the pioneer ways in order to make it through rough patches was brought home to me one summer, when lightning struck the transformer that serviced our farm, and then again a few years later when we endured a major ice storm on top of a couple of blizzards. So much ice accumulated on the electrical lines that January that numerous poles snapped off and had to be replaced. (I did not envy those REC linemen who had to go out in sub-zero temperatures and drill holes for new light poles in God’s frozen tundra.) Both of those storms took the REC two to three weeks to replace equipment and restore power.
We didn’t have central heat on the farm, which turned out to be a good thing when we had really bad storms, because the heat wouldn’t have worked when the power went out. Instead of an electric furnace, we had oil burners on the first and second floors. The oil burners were outfitted with electric fans that forced hot air from the burners into the surrounding rooms.
The oil burners also doubled as cook stoves. It took all day to make a meal, but my mother could produce the equivalent of a Sunday dinner in a single pot on top of the living room oil burner. Her go-to entree was beef stew.
The REC usually got the electricity back on in a couple of days, but when they didn’t we had to get more creative, because we needed electricity to pump water for the livestock and the house. It was those times when we drew on lessons from our ancestors.
Dad would draw power off of a tractor battery to pump water for the livestock. We got to use the outhouse in the grove that didn’t require running water, in the daytime, and Dad drew water from the cistern, and brought it into the house in a 5-gallon cream can, so that we had water to flush the toilets at night, and do the wash during the day.
For the uninitiated, I’ll explain that our cistern was fed by rainwater and snow melt that flowed from the roof into the rain gutters, and down the rain spouts into an underground storage unit that was dug well below the frost line, so we could access water in every season of the year. Cistern water was not as good as well water, because it wasn’t clean. You had to filter it in order to drink it. But cistern water was a life-saver for the livestock and for us, when we endured those long spells without electricity.
III
Like my dad, Jeremiah had hoped that his contemporaries would have valued the lessons learned by their ancestors, and applied them to their own situations in times of hardship and trouble, but they did not.
Jeremiah warned the Israelites about the consequences of worshiping other gods. He compared the Israelite King and High Priests to an unfaithful spouse. He was furious that the Israelites had turned from worshiping Yahweh to worshipping Ba’al, even though Yahweh had freed them from slavery, guided them through the wilderness, and brought them to the Promise Land.
The prophet reminded the Israelites that Yahweh was “the living water” who never failed them, even in the desert. But Israel preferred to make their own earthen cisterns--cisterns that cracked and would not hold water--so their judgment was inevitable.
One can’t help but imagine Jeremiah turning his head, closing his eyes, putting his fingers in his ears, and preparing for the impending crash and burn.
Jeremiah desperately wanted Israel to learn from their ancestors' experiences, rather than having to re-learn everything for themselves, but they did not.
So the whole nation suffered the consequences, and we are here today reading and reflecting on Jeremiah 2, because the prophet’s oracle came to pass. What Jeremiah said would happen happened.
Today’s passage isn’t a fun one to read. It’s filled with doom and gloom. People don’t get up early on Sunday mornings and hustle down to church to hear stories about infidelity and judgment, especially not in progressive Protestant traditions like ours.
Nevertheless, we take on this passage and others like it, because we can’t become mature Christians without facing the truths of our tradition--warts and all.
In addition, we study these slices of history in light of the broad trajectory of our Judeo-Christian story, and as we do, we are reminded that judgment didn't get the last word in Israel's ancient history, and it doesn’t get the last word in our histories.
Like our ancestors in the faith, we discover in the larger story of our Judeo-Christian history that God perpetually seeks us out, invites us to acknowledge the errors of our ways and to make amends. We also learn that God continues to offer us living water--water that flows from a well that never runs dry or freezes up. And that’s really Good News. Amen.