October 11, 2020 “Trust” – Habakkuk 3:16-19

Habakkuk 3:16-19 (Immerse Prophets p. 200)
“Trust”
October 11, 2020 – Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

2020 has been one thing after another. A pandemic, protests, devastating storms, blazing fires, election turmoil. You may have seen some memes that wonder “What’s next?” At one point “murder hornets” seemed like a live possibility. Others suggested an alien invasion from outer space, land sharks or… you name it. It might all be very funny if so much of it hadn’t been so terribly sad. Some of you, like our dear friends Marci and Trudy, have had your own personal mishaps added on top of our shared trials of this year.

You know how it has been. We went through two or three months of quarantine and then George Floyd was murdered by police. Then we went through two or three months of intense racial tension, with people in the streets of most cities, including ours, calling for justice. Both those struggles were still going on as fall approached and we suddenly woke up to skies tinged an unnatural color and the smell of smoke in the air. You may have said, like many, “Really, Lord, really?”

The first part of Habakkuk is about a “one thing after another” time in the life of Israel. We do not know much about this prophet other than what you read in the introduction to his book in the Immerse volume. He lived about the same time as Nahum, when Judah, the remaining southern kingdom of Israel, was in thrall to the Assyrians, but another world power, Babylon, was on the rise.

All that had happened to Jerusalem and Judah did not much change people’s hearts or change their “system,” the way they dealt with each other. With Assyria more in the background, they went back to and kept on cheating and exploiting the poor, even doing violence against each other. In chapter 1 on page 195, Habakkuk asks how long it will be before God steps in to help, complaining,

Wherever I look,
I see destruction and violence.
I am surrounded by people
who love to argue and fight.
The law has become paralyzed,
and there is no justice in the courts.
The wicked far outnumber the righteous,
so that justice has become perverted.

Habakkuk griped that God was not listening, but in what he wrote down, we immediately hear God’s answer. It’s an answer that makes us remember how Amos, the first prophet we read, warned people about wishing for God to show up, for “the day of the Lord.” Amos told them, “You have no idea what you are wishing for.” It was a little like that for Habakkuk. God’s answer surprised him. God’s answer was… the Babylonians. He told the prophet,

I am raising up the Babylonians
a cruel and violent people.
They will march across the world
and conquer other lands.

Judah had been through idolatry and injustice. They’d suffered under wicked kings. They’d been through the Assyrian conquest and occupation. Now, now God’s answer to the continuation of violence and injustice is… more of the same, except likely worse. We can just imagine Habakkuk shaking his head and saying, “Really, Lord, really?”

In America we are not familiar with being a nation that’s only a minor character in the play of the world. The pandemic gave us a little taste of what it’s like to be a country not really in charge of events sweeping across the whole earth, but that has been Israel’s story throughout history. At the time of the prophets we’ve just been reading, Nahum, Habakkuk, Jeremiah, what’s left of Israel in the south of Palestine was battered back and forth between conflicts of larger nations like Assyria, Egypt, and now soon to be, Babylon.

Ever since Assyria overthrew the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C., Judah the southern kingdom had been more or less Assyrian occupied territory. They paid tribute and lived under constant dread of that empire’s cruel tyranny. In the late 600s B.C. the grip of Assyria loosened, but a new power was on the horizon, from further east. The city of Babylon, the land of the Chaldeans in some Bible translations, was growing in strength and challenged Assyria.

Judah got caught in the middle. As we heard Nahum predict last week, the Assyrian capital of Nineveh was captured by the Babylonians in 612. Assyrians leaders fled west to Harran and tried to make a stand there. In 609 B.C., Egyptians tried to go to the aid of Assyria in Harran. They were delayed by an encounter with King Josiah of Judah. Josiah was killed, but it made the Egyptians too late to keep the Babylonians from overrunning the Assyrians in Harran as well.

Finally, in 605 B.C., what was left of the Assyrian army had retreated to an Egyptian outpost on the Euphrates called Carchemish. Babylonians arrived and crushed both the Egyptian and Assyrian forces. Assyria was gone. Egypt retreated and no longer played a significant role there in Palestine or Mesopotamia. Babylon was now the ruler of the biblical world. As all these pre-exilic prophets foretold, they would soon come knocking at the gates of Jerusalem and change the lives of God’s people forever.

Habakkuk cannot quite believe that God is going to let it work out that way, with Judah escaping out of the Assyrian frying pan only to fall into the fire of Babylon. Yes, he says, the people of Israel are awful sinners, but the Babylonians are worse. On page 196, chapter 1 verse 13, he asks God, “Will you wink at their treachery? Should you be silent while the wicked swallow up people more righteous than they?” “Really, Lord, really?”

Habakkuk asked God if His people are just fodder for their enemies. “Are we only fish to be caught and killed?” You may remember in our reading from Jeremiah this past week, chapter 16 verse 16, “But now I am sending many fishermen who will catch them,” says the Lord. Unfortunately, the fishermen are the bad guys here. The people of Israel are to be hauled out and gutted. And Habakkuk is understandably upset about it. He asks God, again on 196, “Will you let them get away with this forever?”

God responded to Habakkuk at the top of page 197, chapter 2 in a Bible with verses, giving a familiar direction in Scripture. “Wait.” Habakkuk had already said that he was going to climb up on his watchtower and wait, literally “watch,” for God’s answer. But the answer was, “Keep waiting.”

This vision is for a future time.
It describes the end, and it will be fulfilled.
If it seems slow in coming, wait patiently,
for it will surely take place.

Then God offered Habakkuk a vision of a time when, like the Assyrians, the Babylonians would receive their own punishment for all their cruelty, theft and murder. “Now,” the Lord said to the Chaldeans, “you will get what you deserve!” So the victory of evil people will be short-lived. Justice will be done.

At the beginning of that vision, a third of the way down 197, there is a little verse, number 4, that has played a big role in Christian history. The first half is judgment on those who are proud and arrogant. The second half reads, “But the righteousness will live by their faithfulness to God.” Or more familiarly, “the righteous will live by their faith.” Paul quoted it at the beginning of Romans, chapter 1 verse 17, and again in Galatians 3:11. It’s quoted again in Hebrews 10:38. It’s a foundational Christian concept that emphasizes faith and trust in God as the key to true life. “The righteous will live by faith.”

You might wonder if our present translation of Habakkuk got it right when it changed those familiar, precious words to “the righteous will live by their faithfulness to God.” But we have to remember that in Bible languages, “faith” and “faithfulness” are the same word. Bible writers did not usually distinguish between believing in God and acting on that belief. To trust in the Lord was the same as doing what He says. Faith just is behaving faithfully. And that helps us understand a little better what God and Habakkuk meant by “wait.”

Last week in our Sunday School Zoom discussion, Kendal rightly worried that just “waiting” for God to do something can be awfully passive. He asked us to note that the Hebrew words for waiting are not about mere passivity, just accepting the status quo and hoping it will change someday. Waiting in the Bible implies something more like active anticipation, an eager looking forward that may involve preparation and effort toward what is coming. It’s the way we think about waiting in Advent. To wait properly, one needs to have faith. And that means being actively, diligently faithful.

It’s maybe not such a good translation, then, at the bottom of page 196, the beginning of chapter 2, to have Habakkuk say he’s going to climb his watchtower and “wait and see.” As I said, the word is actually “watch.” He’s not just waiting. He’s intently, deliberately watching for what God is going to do. He’s getting himself, and, by his prophecy, getting others, ready for it.

Yet at the very same time, that word which is translated “wait patiently” also implies a resting, a ceasing, a pause. Likewise, near the end of the book, page 200, chapter 3 verse 16 Habakkuk says, “I will wait quietly for the coming day…” How do we put that together, that eager, active, faithful sort of waiting, and that resting, patient, quiet sort of waiting? Here’s my fishing thoughts about it.

Last summer I stood in the Pitt River in British Columbia and hunched over intently watching my line and fly swing in the current, ready to start stripping it back in short pulls, tensely anticipating the tug of a big coastal cutthroat trout. It was the beginning of the day and my guide watched me for a couple minutes, then said, “You’re what I call an ‘anxious fisherman.’” I looked at him and asked, “What do you mean?”

He said, “You’re doing it right. You’ve got the fly in the right place, you’re handling the line well, and you are totally ready for a fish. But you’re too tense, too keyed up. If you keep doing that all day, you’ll have a sore back and miss more fish than you will catch. Stand up straight, relax a little. Stay ready, keep watching, but rest and enjoy yourself a little more. The fish will come. Just wait.”

I think Habakkuk’s example of waiting for God is something like that more peaceful, relaxed form of fishing my guide was trying to teach me. It wasn’t passive at all. I had to keep casting and putting the fly down the trout’s feeding lane. I had to keep stripping it back to make it look like a wounded minnow. But at the same time I could do that in a more relaxed peaceful way, trusting in my guide’s advice and in the fish’s natural inclination to eat. Something like that is how we as Christians may wait through long, difficult times, trusting in God and His natural goodness toward us.

I was able to trust my guide because he was right there beside me in the river. Habakkuk trusted God because in the beginning of this chapter, the top of page 199, he saw God there with his people:

I see God moving across the deserts from Edom,
the Holy One coming from Mount Paran.
His brilliant splendor fills the heavens,
and the earth is filled with his praise.

As Kendal also pointed out, you and I must not forget that we have, in fact, seen God come to us in His Son Jesus Christ. We celebrate the splendor of His coming every Christmas. We rejoice in His power and victory over evil and death every Easter. Down at the bottom of page 199, Habakkuk says, “You went out to rescue your chosen people, to save your anointed ones.” Our Lord Jesus has done that. He has come and died and rose again to save us from sin and death. It’s in that faith that we can be faithful to Him and wait both actively and patiently for Him to come again and heal our world, to heal us.

Yet one final theme is in Habakkuk’s prophecy and in the way he waits for the Lord. Habakkuk is hopeful. In the end, he even says there on page 200 that he is joyful. “Yet I will rejoice in the Lord!” But he only says that after he has named off, in agonizingly beautiful images, some of the sorrows which already or soon will confront him and his people in the aftermath of the Babylonian invasion. He says he is going to wait for the coming day of the Lord,

Even though the fig trees have no blossoms,
and there are no grapes on the vines;
even though the olive crop fails,
and the fields lie empty and barren;
even though the flocks die in the fields,
and the cattle barns are empty,
yet will I rejoice in the Lord!

Somehow Habakkuk’s active but patient waiting on God is able to hold together both joy and sorrow. At the very same time he declares his intent to rejoice in God, he looks around and, I think, with tears in his eyes names some of the losses his people suffered, remembers their pain, recalls their devastation. This hope, this faith, this waiting that he does, that God’s people are called to do, is an incredible balancing act of lamenting and rejoicing, of tearful sadness and bright-eyed happiness.

Part of the pain of the world right now is that many, many people, including Christians and other people of faith, don’t know how to strike that balance. It’s either wallow in all the evil that has happened—210,000 dead from COVID-19, black bodies that have been abused and murdered by police, homes that are just heaps of ash and rubble—and just get lost in sorrow. Or else we go blithely forward in eternal optimism—there will soon be a vaccine, just get rid of a few bad officers, start rebuilding those houses—and we ignore all the pain around us. But we need both. A picture in Thursday’s paper showed the chief of the McKenzie fire district sifting through the debris of her own home. She talked both about the hope of rebuilding and the loss of her grandfather’s World War II medals. It’s both.

Habakkuk shows us the way to somehow carry both those realities, the pain and the hope, the sorrow and joyful trust in God’s future for us, in our hearts at the same time. So he says,

The Lord is my strength!
He makes me as surefooted as a deer,
able to tread upon the heights.

That image of surefooted deer on the heights made me remember another story. A few years ago on our church backpack trip a few of us wanted to climb Sawtooth Mountain, a rugged ridge of rock that looms above the lake where we camp. I had climbed it before, but that particular day I balked near the top. One last bit was a precarious little stretch of maybe 40 or 50 feet over a relatively thin edge of rock with long drop-offs on either side. It must be my age, but I didn’t feel as surefooted as I was a few years before. The possibility of falling to one side or the other just seemed so strong, I couldn’t quite make myself go forward. So I just sat down to wait while others went up and came back down.

“The Lord is my strength!” said Habakkuk said in his own precarious times, in his own temptation to fall off into despairing sorrow or presumptuous joy in the death of his enemies. The Lord made him surefooted enough to walk that balance, to lament what was lost while rejoicing in the hope of what God had done and was still going to do. Jesus our Lord is our strength for that kind of surefooted balance in these times.

Let us Christians be willing to weep for the dead of this year, especially those who did not need to die, while hopefully and actively and even joyfully praying and working and voting for medicine and measures and leaders who will change that picture soon. Let us cry our hearts out for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and all the black bodies unjustly broken and incarcerated in this country, while standing up or kneeling down to affirm that black lives matter because they matter to God. Let us sorrow with those who have lost homes in our state and in Washington and California, while at the same time giving them help to rebuild and calling for fair and just disaster aid.

How do we balance all that? Honestly, I don’t know. It should be obvious that it’s not as simple as voting for this party or that party. It’s trickier than just making a donation here or there. It’s a balance between letting our hearts be broken by what breaks God’s heart, like Nahum’s and Habakkuk’s and Jeremiah’s hearts were, and letting our hearts be filled with the strength and joy that God’s Holy Spirit pours into them through faith in Him, like the hearts of those prophets were filled and overwhelmed by God’s presence.

So we wait, but it’s a balanced, surefooted sort of waiting. We trust, but it’s an active, joyful trust which acknowledges at one and the same time the sorrow of this world. Jesus wept for His dead friend Lazarus even as He knew He would raise Him from the dead. It is our calling to be like Him, to joyfully share the good news of eternal life with tears in our eyes for all the present suffering of those around us.

We wait patiently and quietly, contemplating the world’s pain. We wait trustingly and joyfully, anticipating the salvation our Lord has already provided for all creation. Let us move forward in that joyful trust, surefooted on the heights because our Lord is there. Amen.