“Cracked Cisterns”

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 [Jeremiah 2:13, a portion of the OT reading for this Sunday, the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, RCL, Year C].

Thirty feet beneath the streets of Istanbul, we descended into one of the most breathtaking spaces I’ve ever encountered. The Basilica Cistern, built in the sixth century to serve Constantinople, stretches across nearly an acre of underground chambers. Three hundred thirty-six columns rise from the shallow water like an ancient forest, their capitals supporting graceful arches that disappear into shadows. Soft lighting plays across the water’s surface, creating ripples of gold and amber that dance against the weathered stone.

This magnificent structure was designed to hold 80,000 cubic meters of water—enough to supply the great city through siege or drought. Standing there in that ethereal space, I was struck by something our tour guide mentioned almost in passing: the cistern itself produced nothing. When it served Constantinople, every drop of water that filled the chambers had traveled miles through carefully engineered aqueducts, flowing from distant springs north of the city. The cistern was a marvel of human engineering, but it was entirely dependent on sources it did not control and could not create.

The beauty was undeniable, but the beauty served a purpose. It was infrastructure in the truest sense, designed to channel and preserve something that originated elsewhere. The builders understood the crucial distinction between storage and source, between container and contents. The cistern’s grandeur lay not in its independence but in its faithful service to waters that flowed from beyond its walls.

I found myself wondering: what would have happened if the Byzantine engineers had decided to seal off those aqueducts? What if they had convinced themselves that the stunning underground cathedral was beautiful enough, sophisticated enough, to function as its own source? The stone columns would still rise majestically from the floor. The arches would still sweep gracefully through the shadows. But without connection to those distant springs, all that architectural splendor would become nothing more than an empty monument to human ingenuity—breathtaking, yes, but completely unable to fulfill the purpose for which it was built.

Standing in that ancient space, later to spend time with my fellow pilgrims visiting places where living water first flowed—St. Philip’s tomb, landscapes where St. Paul preached, the site of Mary’s house in Ephesus, the ruins where the Apostle John once proclaimed the Gospel—I began to see Jeremiah’s ancient accusation with fresh eyes. The problem was never the cisterns themselves.

The Ancient Technology and Its Purpose

In Jeremiah’s time, cisterns were marvels of engineering every bit as impressive as Constantinople’s underground cathedral. Carved from bedrock into bell-shaped chambers, they featured narrow openings that widened into spacious reservoirs below. Families directed rainwater through carefully constructed channels, sometimes adding filtration systems to trap debris. Where the bedrock was chalk, it formed a natural seal when wet. Elsewhere, craftsmen applied plaster made from slaked lime to prevent precious water from seeping away.

These systems made life possible in Israel’s central highlands during the long, rainless summers. Without them, communities could not have survived in regions far from natural springs. The technology represented human ingenuity at its finest—practical wisdom applied to sustaining life in an often harsh environment.

Every ancient household understood a basic truth: cisterns were storage, not source. They collected and preserved what fell from the sky or flowed from distant springs; they created nothing. The most expertly carved reservoir was worthless without rain, useless without the living springs that fed the channels leading to it.

In this Sunday’s OT reading, when Jeremiah speaks of “cracked cisterns that can hold no water,” he’s invoking technology that his audience knew intimately. They understood the constant maintenance required, the way stone could shift and plaster could fail. They knew the difference between the fresh flow of a spring and the increasingly stagnant water that sat too long in storage. Most importantly, they knew that no amount of engineering skill could make a cistern into a source.

And so, when YHWH accuses Israel of forsaking “the fountain of living water” to dig their own cisterns, His charge cuts to the heart of a fundamental confusion. The tragedy wasn’t that they built storage systems—that was wise. The tragedy was that they gradually began treating their containers as if they were the source itself.

The Seductive Nature of Infrastructure

Old Testament scholar, Anathea Portier-Young, a young professor at Duke Divinity School, captures something revealing about idolatry: “Often, when we’re doing it, it doesn’t seem like we’re worshipping a false god. It seems like we’re worshipping a true god.” The shift from faithful tool to substitute deity happens so gradually that we miss it entirely. We tell ourselves we’re being responsible, practical, forward-thinking. We’re not abandoning God—we’re building better systems to manage our relationship with God.

Our contemporary obsession with infrastructure makes us particularly vulnerable to this ancient temptation. We pour enormous resources into perfecting processes, optimizing systems, constructing frameworks that promise to deliver security, efficiency, meaning. The word itself has become almost sacred in our public discourse—infrastructure bills, technological infrastructure, educational infrastructure. We speak of these projects with the reverence previous generations reserved for cathedrals.

Increasingly, we don’t so much build infrastructure to serve human flourishing; we speak as if infrastructure is human flourishing. Our technological platforms don’t just facilitate connection—they become our primary understanding of what connection means. Our institutional processes don’t so much organize our communities—all too often, they define what community is.

Consider our spiritual infrastructure. Each morning, within an hour of rising and after my coffee, I undertake Lectio Divina—a traditional Christian method of prayerful scriptural reading. Each evening, at 9:30 p.m., or as close as possible thereto, I practice the Examen—a devotional reflection of my daily thoughts and actions. Both are ancient, tested spiritual technologies—practices designed to facilitate encounter with the living God. But I sometimes wonder: when does faithful discipline become spiritual self-sufficiency? When do my practices for meeting God become my primary relationship with God?

The question cuts deeper than personal piety. What about our churches, with their carefully crafted worship services, their programs and committees and strategic plans? What about our theological education, our systems of biblical interpretation, our denominational structures? These represent centuries of accumulated wisdom about how to channel and preserve living water. But when does religious infrastructure become our functional substitute for the divine source it was meant to serve?

The most seductive aspect of this substitution is that it feels so reasonable. Our systems work—or at least, they used to work. Our practices produce results, our institutions maintain order, our technologies deliver convenience. We’re not consciously rejecting God; we’re building better ways to access God. Until, almost imperceptibly, we realize that we’ve been relating primarily to our access systems rather than to the God they were designed to reveal.

Living Water vs. Stagnant Systems

The difference between living water and cistern water was immediately apparent to anyone in ancient Palestine. Spring water moved, flowed, carried life with it. Cistern water sat still, gradually accumulating sediment, slowly growing stagnant without constant attention. One nourished and refreshed; the other, left untended, could sicken or even kill.

This distinction illuminates what happens when our spiritual infrastructure loses its connection to the source. Practices that once facilitated genuine encounter with God calcify into routine. Institutions that once channeled divine mercy become ends in themselves. Technologies that once served human flourishing begin to demand that humans serve them. The infrastructure remains—sometimes more elaborate than ever—but it no longer carries the living water it was designed to hold.

How do we recognize the difference? Living spiritual infrastructure consistently points beyond itself. It creates space for surprise, for transformation, for encounters we couldn’t orchestrate. It remains supple enough to accommodate the movement of divine grace, even when that movement disrupts our careful plans. Most tellingly, it increases our thirst for God rather than satisfying it.

Stagnant spiritual infrastructure, by contrast, becomes self-referential. Our prayer becomes primarily about maintaining our identity as people who pray. Our church attendance becomes mostly about sustaining our role in the community. Our theological sophistication becomes chiefly a means of demonstrating our spiritual maturity. The practices continue, but they’re no longer transparent to their purpose.

Where do you find yourself depending on storage rather than source? What spiritual systems have you spent years perfecting that may have gradually replaced your dependence on the living God they were meant to serve? When did your containers last overflow because they couldn’t contain what was flowing through them?

The tragedy of cracked cisterns isn’t so much that they leak—it’s that they represent enormous investments of time, energy, and hope in systems that were never designed to be ultimate. The people Jeremiah addresses hadn’t set out to abandon God. They had simply poured so much of themselves into building and maintaining their spiritual infrastructure that they lost touch with the source that infrastructure was meant to channel.

Yet YHWH’s accusation carries a hidden promise. Living water still flows. The fountain hasn’t dried up because we’ve neglected it—springs don’t depend on our attention for their existence. What might it mean to return our focus from the management of our spiritual lives to the source that makes spiritual life possible? What might happen if we stopped trying to perfect our containers and instead opened them once again to the flow of grace that seeks to fill them beyond their capacity to hold?