Fake and Shiny
August 31, 2025 • Proper 17, Year C
Jeremiah 2:4-13 • Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 • Luke 14:1, 7-14
About seven years into my marriage, with two children aged two and under, I read a list of ten marriage tips. These tips came from a woman who’d been married twenty years, had five children, was married to a pastor, and had her own career writing books and public speaking. She also had a knack for funny Twitter posts, like about preparing for the new school year by waking up her teenagers “at the crack of 11:30.”
Encouragingly, my spouse and I already followed some of these tips, like speaking kindly to each other. The tips promised that “Treating your husband like a good friend will preserve your marriage forever.”* I wasn’t so hot at following the tip, “Lighten Up.” I resolved to do better. But I quaked when I got to tip #4: “Find Couple Friends.”
Josh and I had no “couple friends.” We’d just moved to Arkansas, leaving our only set of couple friends back in Chicago. (We really missed them . . . and their DVR, which let us watch episodes of “The Office” at any time we wanted!) We had some prospects of couple friends here, but we’re pretty sure we scared some of them off by coming on too strong. The others moved to California. When I filled out day care paperwork, I started to cry because I had no one to list as local emergency contacts.
I so envied this happily married woman and successful writer with couple friends. According to her book, she and her husband had been going on “couples’ trips” with their friends for years.” On these trips, she said, “the girls can be with the girls or the guys can be with the guys or the bunch of you go to Cancun for anniversaries.” She and her husband and their couple friends “create[d] buckets of inside jokes and memories,” she said. According to her, “These friendships keep [our marriage] healthy, grounded, and connected like nothing else does.”
With no couple friends, how did my marriage stand a chance?
***
Imagine the temptation I felt this week, when the New York Times published an interview with this woman about the end of her very public marriage. My fleeting temptation was to demand, “Who were you to make a ten tips list about marriage?”
“Who were you to make me feel so bad?”
Temptation gave way to empathy, though. She got married at nineteen, lived in a Christian subculture with impossible and contradictory standards for women, and had her heart broken after being married for 26 years.
It’s sure tempting to wonder how innocent and how complicit who was when. It’s tempting to wonder which of the ten tips they didn’t follow—or whether the tips even work. Even though her memoir about all this comes out next month, we’ll never know the full story.
But when it comes to the very public marriage of God and God’s people, the prophet Jeremiah lays it all out. In today’s first reading, the prophet Jeremiah is kind of like a divorce lawyer for God. The verses just before today’s reading are a message from the Lord to God’s people: “I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride” (Jer 2:2).
The rest of the passage is structured like a legal hearing: a claim of innocence, a list of accusations, and the calling of witnesses. The Lord’s side of the story—at least according to Jeremiah—is that the Lord is the innocent party: “What wrong did your ancestors find in me . . . ?” he asks. The implied answer is, “none.”
The main accusation is that if the Ten Commandments are like a top ten list of success tips for marriage between God and humankind, these people violated two big ones: “You shall have no other gods before me,” and “You shall not make for yourself an idol.” Instead of clinging to God, they went after what our translation calls “worthless things,” meaning idols. Another translation calls these idols “mere breath” (Alter).
Jeremiah then calls the heavens as witnesses that these people, unlike any nation on earth, have exchanged their God for another. “Be appalled, O heavens, at this,” says the Lord through Jeremiah, “be shocked.”
At last, a kind of closing argument: Jeremiah accuses the people of committing what our reading calls “two evils”: first, forsaking “the fountain of living water” that is God’s very self; and second, turning to broken cisterns instead.
***
Cisterns are receptacles dug into the ground to capture rainwater. Their sides could be plastered. That plaster could crack and break. A powerful metaphor for idols.
Why do we put so much of our precious faith in such breakable things? In shiny, happy people who have ten-point formulas that promise to shield us from heartbreak. In marriage itself as the cultural benchmark of success and satisfaction.
Because the Episcopal Church follows a scheduled rotation for the Scriptures we hear on Sundays, the Old Testament reading doesn’t always connect directly with the gospel reading. This year, most of our gospel readings come from Luke, like today, and most of our Old Testament readings come from the prophets, like Jeremiah.
I think today’s reading from Jeremiah is most closely connected to the story of the woman at the well, from the gospel of John. This woman had been married five times. Most women who show up at wells in the Bible end up getting engaged to a man they meet there, like Jacob or Moses. But when this woman comes to the well, Jesus just asks her for a drink of water. Then, Jesus tells her he himself has something much better than well water: he has living water. The woman points out that Jesus doesn’t have so much as a bucket. But Jesus insists that everyone who drinks his living water will find it “a spring of water gushing up to life for all time” (trans. adapted from Ruden). Jesus offers her something better than a bucket of water—and better than marriage.
What is this living water that God offers? According to Jeremiah, God, “the fountain of living water,” wants the people to remember God as the one “who brought [them] up from the land of Egypt, who led [them] in the wilderness . . . in a land where no one lives,” who “brought [them] into a plentiful land to eat its fruits and its good things.”
That’s what comes from the fountain of living water: Liberation from what distorts us. Accompaniment in hard, lonely times. Good things to enjoy on this earth. Anything else is like a broken cistern—an idol that distorts us, abandons and misleads us, drains our joy in what good things we have.
***
This week, my husband helped me dig up that book with the ten marriage tips. It was in a box in our attic. The end of the chapter with the marriage tips describes marriage as a series of moments when people have to make a critical choice. In those moments, the author writes, one spouse can say to another, “I choose you over the Fake Shiny Other who promises something better.” Reading them again now, those words struck me as prophetic. They’re words we always have the choice to say to God. “I choose you over the Fake [and] Shiny.” You, “the fountain of living water,” over everything empty or broken.
*Quotes are from Jen Hatmaker, For the Love: Fighting for Grace in a World of Impossible Standards (Nelson Books, 2015).
~The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh