This is a sermon I preached in class on Nov 19 and was supposed to preach at AU on Nov 21. I ended up scrapping it for the AU service because it felt a bit more put together than I was feeling at the time, but same general themes and ideas.
I'm posting it here because I think some of the ideas of waiting and the true meaning of patience connect well with this week's theme of preparing a way for God.\
The text is Habakkuk 1:1-4 and 2:1-4.
"Still a Vision"
This
past weekend, 10 of us hopped in the Metropolitan church van and headed to New
Jersey to help in the continuing rebuilding efforts after last year’s
devastating Superstorm Sandy. We had an incredible time. I could tell you stories
about it all night, but here’s one quick one: We were working in the home of a
man who lived right across the street from the wall separating Atlantic City
from the bay. Our host was really encouraging, and completely hilarious. At one
point, he had us all laughing, and he said: “You gotta laugh at this stuff. If
you don’t laugh, you cry. And Lord knows I’m tired of crying.”
Our host has had plenty of reason to cry. His house filled
with four feet of water a little more than a year ago when Sandy made its
landfall. Bay water, ground water, and sea water formed a toxic mix that
rendered much of his house uninhabitable. More than a year later, he’s still
rebuilding, and he’s not alone. This weekend we learned that 40,000 people in
New Jersey still have been unable to
return to their homes in the aftermath of Sandy. And that’s just in New Jersey.
“O LORD! How long shall I cry for help, and you will not
listen?” Our passage from Habakkuk starts with a cry—a shout! God—how long are
you going to let this happen? How long are you going to wait before you act?
This
semester that cry has been resonating with me. I mean, I’m exhausted. Here in
DC we’ve had government shutdowns and shootings and healthcare snafus. This
past few weeks we’ve seen a monstrous typhoon pound the Philippines and killer
storms in the Midwest, and our New Jersey team was made aware of just how long it
can take to rebuild after natural disasters. Not only that, but we heard how
human-made systems exacerbate the effects of disasters—disasters that are,
perhaps, not as “natural” as we think of them. It’s worth noting that, two days
after the storm subsided, the Atlantic City casinos were open for business,
while people crowded into shelters and hotel rooms or returned to survey
devastated houses. The economy in Atlantic City relies on these casinos, but
the jobs they promise are low wage, low benefit, and low security.
In Atlantic City a year ago, you could gamble;
but you couldn’t live.
“So
the law becomes slack,” says Habakkuk, “and justice never prevails.”
In the Philippines, the destruction of the typhoon itself
intensifies the reality of systemic poverty, structural inequalities, and
government corruption. And the massive resource extraction projects of transnational
corporations have not only threatened the rights of indigenous peoples in the
Philippines but have also contributed to global climate change, which in turn
has its most disastrous consequences in poor coastal areas and small island
nations already struggling with economic inequality.
“How
long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you, ‘Violence!’,
and you will not save?”
Of course, maybe you came here tonight, thinking not
about hurricanes or typhoons but about the personal storms battering your life.
Perhaps you have your own reasons, not of national news interest but nevertheless
of vital personal meaning. Depression. Anxiety. Sickness or death in your
family. Your own storms that do not simply disappear because you have essays to
write and articles to read. Your own reasons for yelling, “How long, God? How
long?”
If, tonight, you have some questions for God—if, tonight,
you, too, want to yell “How long?”—if you have ever felt angry or confused or
hurt—then you are not alone. Habakkuk, the prophet we heard from tonight, is
just one in a whole line of biblical voices—including patriarchs, prophets,
psalmists, letter writers, and Jesus Himself—whose faith is deeply connected
with lament and complaint. In our worship together and in our prayers to God,
anger and doubt are not only allowed—they are necessary. It is with lament and
complaint that Habakkuk comes to God, and it is only by challenging God with difficult questions that Habakkuk is
able to develop trust in God’s justice and faithfulness. “Why?” and “How long?”
are not questions that we need to answer and “get out of the way” in order to
go back to believing in God. They are foundational questions for our faith.
Honest lament is, I believe, preferable to feigned piety.
So we heard, tonight, from Habakkuk, who grapples with
questions. Who challenges God, and who refuses to quit: “I will stand at my
watchpost,” he tells us, “and keep watch to see what God will say to me.” I
will stand here and wait.
And God answers Habakkuk! But if you are anything like
me, you don’t find his answer particularly satisfying. “There’s still a
vision,” God says. “Wait for it. It will come.”
All of the suffering that Habakkuk sees. All the
violence. All the injustice. And God says:
Wait.
A
year after Sandy and you still don’t have housing?
Wait.
Two weeks after Typhoon Haiyan and you still don’t have
access to drinking water?
Just wait.
Centuries of race-based oppression?
Just wait.
It’s
2013 and a United Methodist pastor can still be brought up on church trial for
presiding at his son’s marriage because his son is gay?
Just
wait.
I can’t help but think of the words of Martin Luther
King, Jr., who wrote a letter while jailed in Birmingham for his campaign of
nonviolent civil disobedience. Responding to a group of white clergymen who had
criticized the timing of the Birmingham campaign, King wrote: “For years now I have heard the word "Wait!"
It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This
"Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to
see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed
is justice denied.”[i]
---
So is that all that tonight’s scripture has to offer us? Justice
delayed? Is that all God has to offer Habakkuk? I think not. I think the text
points to something much deeper than that.
To understand the text, we need some sense of who this
Habakkuk character is, and what is happening in his world. Scholars know very
little about the person Habakkuk. He is a prophet in Jerusalem, probably
associated closely with worship in the temple. His ministry of preaching occurs
sometime in the late 7th or early 6th century BCE, when
the rise of the Babylonian empire in the East has begun to threaten the safety
of his homeland, the kingdom of Judah. It’s a time of great violence and
anxiety, and yet many of the residents of Habakkuk’s beloved city of Jerusalem
believed themselves to be immune to harm—after all, God was dwelling in their
midst, in the great temple.
But Habakkuk sees through the charade. He sees the
injustice and structural violence perpetuated by the elite of his society. He
sees the advancing Babylonian armies and knows that the myth of Jerusalem’s
impregnability is a lie. In fact, in the section of the text that we skipped
over reading tonight, we get a vivid description of the destruction that the Babylonian
forces would bring to Jerusalem. And so Habakkuk cries out to God. Cries out in
response to the corporate sin of his people. Cries out against God’s
unsatisfactory answer: that the
catastrophe of invasion could somehow bring justice. Cries out, I think, in
despair. “I will stand at my watchpost,” he says, perhaps evoking the doomed walls
of the temple that he has served so faithfully. I will not give up, God. I will
keep crying out until you answer.
God’s response to Habakkuk’s lament seems cryptic. “Write
the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it. For there
is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and it does not
lie.”
God
tells Habakkuk to write a vision.
So what is this vision? What is Habakkuk supposed to
write? And what are we to say, in the midst of a world that seems so broken, so
wrought with violence and suffering? What is our vision?
---
I do think we
have a vision to hold up. A vision of a God who is still at work, in the midst
of all the mess, to redeem a hurting world. And we need to be reminded of that
vision, because I think when we walk around this city and we see cracks in the
façades of power, when we see our unhoused neighbors shivering on the streets,
when we read the news of disasters and when we talk to our friends who are
struggling with mental illness and depression and suicide, it is easy to feel despondent.
It is hard to imagine a better world, a world in which mercy and justice and
faith rule the day instead of cynicism and violence and despair. We have to hold
on to a vision. We have to lay claim to a missional imagination that truly
believes that God is at work, and that we have a role to play.
We need a vision because justice and mercy and faith are
long-term propositions. American University is often ranked as the most
politically active campus in the country. That makes this a really exciting
place to be in ministry. I love that there’s always people tabling outside of
the Mary Graydon Center. The other day I scored free fair trade coffee and
chocolate, learned about domestic violence and what groups on campus are doing
to stop it, and bought ice cream to support a school in Honduras. You in the
United Methodist Student Association[ii]
host interfaith events, plan discussions on creation care, and organize service
trips to New Jersey. There is so much important ministry going on here.
But in the hectic world of Washington, DC—and you know as
well as I do that American University often serves as a mirror for that hectic
world—burnout is common and anxiety reigns supreme. And so I want to challenge
our community to be, not solely standard banners for particular causes, but
bearers of a vision. Not to fall victim to the temptations either of apathy or
of a cynical sort of strident societal criticism, but ministers of
reconciliation who lift up in our collective imagination the hope of a better
world. Many of my colleagues complain of burnout, of what we call “compassion
fatigue.” If we’re going to participate, in the long term, in God’s healing
work in this world, than we need to have a vision, a dream, that can sustain us
and keep us focused.
Earlier I quoted Martin Luther King’s letter from prison:
“Justice delayed is justice denied.” But King knew, better than anyone, the
need for patient hope. One of King’s mentors, Howard Thurman, the dean of Marsh
Chapel at Boston University during King’s time there, writes eloquently of the
need for patience: “Paradoxical as it seems, patience is an important technique
for accomplishing difficult tasks, even in matters having to do with social
change….Some things cannot be forced but they must unfold, sending their
tendrils deep into the heart of life, gathering strength and power with the
unfolding days.”[iii]
Thurman continues: “Patience…is only partially concerned with time, with
waiting; it includes also the quality of relentlessness, ceaselessness and
constancy. It is a mood of deliberate calm that is the distilled result of
confidence. One works at the task intensely even as one realizes that to become
impatient is to yield the decision to the adversary.”
For Thurman, in other words, the art of waiting is not
passivity. It is active, steady engagement. To be patient, to be persistent,
requires us to be grounded in the hope of the living God. It requires us to be
alert to the vision of an appointed time, a time of peace and of justice. We
need that hope and that vision because, in the words of author Paul Loeb, “the
impossible will take a little while.”[iv]
One doesn’t need to be theologically trained in order to get this at a gut
level. Our New Jersey host, welcoming us into his home, making us meatball subs
with his favorite local bread, and keeping us laughing, knew that to be in this
for the long-term, you have to find ways of tapping into hope.
---
Tonight’s passage ends with a verse that is, for
congregations and denominations that are in one way or another daughters of the
Protestant Reformation, very familiar. Chapter two, verse four, tells us “the
righteous live by their faith.” Paul quotes this verse in his letter both to
the Romans and to the Galatians, and the anonymous author of the letter to the
Hebrews quotes it as well. It has become part of the collective Christian conscious
as a reminder that nothing we do can
earn us the love of God; that our faith in the grace of God made available to
us in the person of Jesus Christ makes the difference in our lives. Yet in its
original context, it appears to me that the faith to which God directs Habakkuk
is not an individualized intellectual assent to a set of beliefs but is rather
trust in a God who is at work, even and perhaps especially in the midst of
violence and hopelessness, to bring about a reign of justice and peace.
For Paul and the author of the Hebrews, “faith” meant
faith in Jesus Christ. For Habakkuk, “the righteous live by their faith” would
of course have had nothing to do with a man from Nazareth who would not walk
the earth for another 600 years. And yet the God who Habakkuk grapples with,
the God who he finds at work right smack in the middle of violence and chaos,
is, I would argue, the God who Christians meet in Jesus Christ. Lutheran pastor
Nadia Bolz-Weber writes of God at work in the midst of suffering. She says,
“God is not distant at the cross…but instead God is there in the messy
mascara-streaked middle of it….We want to go to God for answers, but sometimes
what we get is God’s presence.”[v]
The vision that God wants Habakkuk to write is a vision of a world in which we
get God’s presence, right smack in the middle of it. For Habbakuk, it was right
smack in the middle of Judean corruption and Babylonian violence. For the early
followers of Jesus, it was right smack in the middle of crucifixion and
persecution. And we look for that presence, and we proclaim it today, right
smack in the middle of hurricanes and typhoons and church trials. That’s the
vision. That’s the dream.
Now, this is a service of healing. I don’t know what
struggles or concerns you bring to this place tonight. You might be hurting in
mind, or body, or spirit. You might be struggling with depression, or with
despair, or simply with stress. But I am lifting up Habakkuk tonight because I
think that one thing that needs healing is our ability to vision. The scope and
frequency of national and international disasters, the seemingly intractable
disputes that paralyze our government, the specters of anxiety and cynicism and
mental illness, all conspire to impede our vision, to make it difficult for us
to dream. So as much as our bodies and minds are in need of healing, our dreams
are in need of healing as well.
As a community, I
think that one of the ways we are called into ministry is as bearers of a
vision that can sustain and uphold our life together. Bearers of an imagination
of a different sort of world, made possible not because of our hectic efforts
but because of the healing work of Christ.
Friends,
take that vision with you. Make it plain in the tablets that are your lives. In
your friendships. In your studies. Make it plain on the quad, in front of Mary
Graydon Center, in TDR and the Tavern and the Berks and the dorms. Make it
plain in the places of our collective life where people cry out, “How long?,”
and where people are told, “Wait.” Because even in places of lament, even in
the storm-shattered lives of the people of Atlantic City and the people of the
Philippines and the people of Washington, D.C., there is still a vision. There
is still a dream. And that is good news indeed.
[i] Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” 16 April 1963. Originally published as “The
Negro Is Your Brother, The Atlantic, Vol
212 No 2, 78-88. Available online: http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
[ii] For more information about the
United Methodist Student Association and the American University
Methodist-Protestant Community, visit http://www.aumethodists.org/
[iii] Howard Thurman, Deep is the Hunger (Richmond, Indiana:
Friends United Press, 2000; originally New York: Harper, 1951), 53-54.
[iv] Paul Rogat Loeb, The Impossible Will Take a Little While (New
York: Basic Books, 2004).
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