Living in the Parched Places

Living in the Parched Places

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

February, 2019

Scripture: Jeremiah17:5-8

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

The prophet Jeremiah is a fascinating character. He’s known as the “Gloomy Prophet,” and for good reason. He lived and prophesied in Jerusalem during the final Babylonian siege of that city in 586 BCE. It’s actually quite amazing that he wasn’t killed, not by the Babylonians but by his own people. He kept telling them that they should capitulate to the Babylonians. He said resistance was futile and that their defeat by the Babylonians was God’s punishment of them for their faithlessness. Some of his fellow residents of Jerusalem wanted him killed. The king didn’t kill him, but he locked him up in a guardhouse; and once he got thrown into a dry cistern. Yet he survived the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem. The conquering Babylonians of course quite liked him. Eventually he went to Egypt, and as far as we know died there. Jeremiah can be bleak reading. He foresaw nothing good happening. He foretold defeat and destruction. He turned out to be right of course, but no one wanted to hear him in his day. He’s not a lot of fun for us to hear in our day either.

Yet for all Jeremiah’s doom and gloom there are passages in the book that bears his name that truly express profound truth. Jeremiah 17:5-8 is one of them. That text, which may or may not actually be from the prophet Jeremiah (probably not) says: “Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals…, whose hearts turn away from the Lord.” And: “They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness….” But: “Blessed are those who trust in the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water.” The text here gives us a sharp juxtaposition  of two radically different ways of being. Trust in God, here called the Lord, that is, Yahweh, and you will live and thrive. Trust in mere humans, and you’ll live in the parched places, that is, places that are dried up and bereft of lifegiving water.

The text of course uses simile here. It uses images from the ancient Middle East—deserts with no water and life-sustaining places with water. It may be that those images spoke more powerfully in the ancient world of the text than they do to us, but those images still speak to a crucial dynamic of life among us. They speak to the distinction between life focused on the material and life focused on the spiritual. In our world today untold numbers of people suffer because they have lost their connection with the spiritual dimension of existence. They live only in and for the material. So many people live that way that they aren’t the only ones who suffer from it. Indeed the whole world suffers because so many modern people have lost touch with the spiritual. Let me explain.

Our dominant Euro-centered white American culture is the most materialistic culture the world has ever seen. And I mean materialistic in two senses. First, I mean what most Americans would mean by the term. Materialistic in this sense means valuing the accumulation of material things above all else. We may not hear the phrase “keeping up with Joneses” like I did when I was young decades ago, but we white Americans are still powerfully ensnared by the allure of physical possessions. One good way to see what’s going on in a culture is to look at its advertising, and in our advertising today we primarily see two things. We see a fear of illness and death in the way the big pharmaceutical companies pitch prescription drugs not to medical providers but to us lay people. That aspect of our culture too is a consequence of our loss of connection with the spiritual, but my focus here is on the other aspect of our culture that we see reflected in our advertising, namely, our preoccupation with material possessions.

I mean, just look at what TV advertising says to us. Buy this  car and your life will be perfect (in part because you’ll drive on roads with no traffic). Order a house full of new furniture from this online outfit so that you’ll look like a success and impress neighbors and family. Buy this insurance to “protect” your possessions, never mind that insurance may protect the monetary value of possessions but does nothing to protect the possessions themselves. Buy stuff at Walmart so you can save money and buy more stuff, and never mind the social and economic consequences of Walmart’s policies. Vacation at this immensely expensive resort to you’ll be young and beautiful. The examples could go on and on.

Folks, that way lie the parched places of which Jeremiah speaks. Some of us have learned that material possessions can never truly satisfy our souls. We buy something hoping it will make us feel better. Maybe it does for a time, but the feeling doesn’t last. So we buy more and more and more. Perhaps we go hopelessly into high-interest credit card debt to do it. And it’s never enough. Countless Americans have followed that path into the parched places of alcoholism, drug addiction, broken relationships, depression, and even suicide.

Second, I mean materialistic in its philosophical sense, which is even more profound than the term’s economic meaning. Philosophical materialism is the conviction that only the material, the physical, is real. Philosophical materialism has its origins in the rationalism of the European Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution that was a big part of it. Enlightenment thinkers thought that human reason could solve all problems. It can’t, but the Enlightenment’s reliance on it led to a humanistic rationalism that has no room for the spiritual. Science deals with the material and only the material. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe science was offering up one fantastic discovery after another about the physical world and indeed about the whole physical universe. Science claimed, and claims, to prove its conclusions through observation and experimentation. Science is such a powerful tool for explaining physical reality (not that it has or perhaps ever will answer all questions about that reality, but never mind) that much of western European culture concluded that only that which can be established through science is real. Hence philosophical materialism.

Philosophical materialism is perfectly rational. It makes sense. After all, all we can see or touch is physical. Problem is, philosophical materialism denies a whole realm of existence. It denies an ocean of human experience around the world and across the ages. Yet even many Americans who self-identify as Christian, Jewish, or of some other faith are probably in their heart of hearts philosophical materialists. Certainly all or at least most secular humanists and all atheists are philosophical materialists.

That way too lie the parched places of which Jeremiah speaks. That way lie the parched places because to be fully human is to long for connection with something greater than ourselves, with something transcendent, with something infinite. To be fully human includes striving for connection with that which is beyond us. It is to know at a deep level of our being that there must be and indeed that there is more to reality than this material world. To be fully human is to seek the depth dimension of reality, the reality behind reality, the more in everything that is. To deny that there is more, to deny the depth dimension of all that is, is to deny a core part of what it is to be human. It is to deny our true selves; and when we deny our true selves we shrivel up, maybe not physically but psychologically and spiritually.

When we wake up to who we really are, when we recognize the truth that most humans of every time and place have recognized, that there is a spiritual dimension of reality, that is, that God is real, we come alive, or at least we can. We become who we are meant to be, or at least we can. When we tend our relationship with God we blossom We see the world in new and lifegiving ways. We become like Jeremiah’s tree planted by water, or at least we can. We don’t have to live in the parched places of materialism. We can live in the lushness of life with God. So let’s get on with it, shall we? Amen.