Yet I Will Rejoice in the Lord

Sermon

It’s Transfiguration Sunday, although today’s sermon has nothing to do with that particular story. It’s a transitional day, marking the end of Epiphany and next week, the beginning of Lent. In terms of our preaching texts, it’s transitional too. Some of you might be thinking “hallelujah!” as it’s our last day in the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. We’ve journeyed through Genesis, Exodus, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and four of the minor prophets. Next week we turn to the gospel of Matthew, and will stay in the New Testament for the next six months.

 Today, our last day with the Hebrew scriptures for a while, we learn that the prophet Habakkuk is pretty unhappy with God. He lets God have it. Unlike so many of the other prophets we have heard in these past few months, Habakkuk is not warning the people of God’s impending judgment; rather, Habakkuk defends the people to God, and calls God to account for the suffering that they endure.

 The gist of Habakkuk’s complaint is this: because of Israel’s own unjust leadership, the kingdom of Judah is under immediate threat by the superpower Babylon. Babylon has already begun invading the land and with that invasion has come a lawlessness that has disempowered the core of the Torah, a lawlessness that led to pervasive injustice for the weak and the poor.

Specifically, Habakkuk calls God out for allowing violence to tear up the people and tear up the land. The Hebrew word for violence – chamas – means more than just physical hurt. One commentator defines this violence as “a cold blooded and unscrupulous infringement of the personal rights of others, motivated by greed and hate and often making use of physical violence and brutality.” (H. Haag in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament)

 Habakkuk laments the suffering of his people and the destruction of his native land, and he wants God to answer for it. If indeed these are the chosen people, if indeed God is their God and they are God’s people, if indeed God’s primary means of relationship is chesed, loving-kindness, then how can God turn a blind eye to all that is happening?

 I have been amazed, in these last few months with the Hebrew prophets, just how contemporary their words sound. Because really, there is still so much injustice and suffering in the world, and still, God has not made it all right.

 You know what I mean. It’s that thing that you pray and pray and pray about, that you beseech God for, that thing that keeps you up at night and ties knots in your stomach and makes your head pound that neither gets better nor goes away.

Choose your poison here. The thing causing you anguish might be the coronavirus threat, and the difficulty in containing it, and the fear that overwhelms. We see that in death counts, and face masks worn by so many in airports, and the strange, secretive communication systems in China.

The thing keeping you up at night might be the rise of hate crimes in the world. Just this week in Germany a right-wing extremist who published horrific racist views shot and killed nine people in two bars in the immigrant areas of the city of Hanau, before killing his mother and himself.

The thing you have prayed and prayed and prayed about might be a relationship that seems irreparably broken or a health crisis compounded by medical debt. Maybe you have prayed and prayed to find a job, or to find love, or to find some semblance of hope.

It is the human experience among the faithful to lift up these things to God and say, with varying degrees of politeness, “do something about this.” The fancy word for this is theodicy, and it begs the question of why an omnipotent and loving God allows evil and suffering to persist. As you might imagine, theologians have tied themselves into Gordian knots in answering the question.

Responses to the theodicy question and the persistence of evil are as diverse as humanity itself, but broadly speaking there are a few ways we respond. One is to say that it’s not as bad as it seems, whatever the “it” is. April showers bring May flowers and the sun will come out tomorrow. Or we might say that eggs have to be broken to make a good omelet, that ultimately evil contributes to the good. Either response might get us through the day but might not get us through life.

Christianity does not sugarcoat evil or take a Machiavellian approach that the end justifies the means. Remember that our faith is steeped in a story in which the Savior is killed by injustice and with terrible violence. The story ends with resurrection, but the empty tomb never erases the cross.

So in light of the reality that evil and injustice persist, even though God is omnipotent and loving, what are we to do?

Habakkuk faced a similar situation. God did not stop the Babylonians. God did not protect the temple from being destroyed. God did not save the people from exile. The thing is this is not about what God does or doesn’t do, but is about who God is and who God isn’t.

Habakkuk reaches the decision to rejoice in the Lord in spite of everything. It’s his choice – his not to give evil any kind of ultimate power. His choice to find some hope even in the midst of suffering. He does this because he knows who his God is and what is the essential nature of his God. As one commentator noted, “…no matter how dreadfully the Torah has been perverted by the evil [king], no matter how grossly the poor and the needy have been abused in a land far from God, no matter how monstrously the conquering Babylonians will treat the people and land of Israel, yet [God] will not forget them.”
(https://www.patheos.com/progressive-christian/righteous-faithfulness-john-holbert-10-28-2013.aspx?p=2)

It is not the nature of God to abandon the chosen, beloved people. That is the word that Habakkuk has to proclaim and an invitation he offers to the people not to give up on God. His is a word of waiting, and what to do while waiting, and how to hold on to hope.

 We have been in a time of waiting for about 2000 years now, but for the faithful, for the followers of Jesus, it has not been an idle waiting. You can do a lot while waiting. If I have an appointment in fifteen minutes, I know that’s not enough time to start a big project. But you would be amazed at how many e-mails I get through, how many papers I recycle, and how clear my desk gets while I’m waiting for my friend to show up.

Former Presbyterian Co-Moderator Jan Edmiston tells a story that might help us understand a little about faithful waiting. She had attended a talk by Eboo Patel, who founded the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based international nonprofit that aims to promote interfaith cooperation. She writes, “Eboo Patel always inspires me and makes me want to be a better Christian. When he spoke [last] Tuesday night at Queens University in Charlotte, he told a story about Martin Luther King, Jr., that I’ve been trying to find with no luck, so I’ll share the gist of it here.

“It was the late 1950s/early 1960s and Dr. King was living in a violent and dangerous United States. His home had been bombed. … Crosses were burning and Jim Crow was alive and well. In 1963 a Birmingham church was bombed, killing four young black girls. Our nation was on fire.

“Dr. King was asked, ‘If you could live in any time in history, when would you live?’ He pondered the thought of living in the time of Socrates or Plato imagining the amazing conversations he could have. He imagined being with the first followers of Jesus and what he could learn from them. He considered all the monumental times in history and what it would be like to be at the signing of the Declaration of Independence or at the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

“But as tempting as those extraordinary periods of history would be, Dr. King said that he would most like to live in the time he was actually living. Even with the racial injustice, random cruelties, and national divisions he understood the particular time in which he lived to be the perfect opportunity to do good work.”
(https://achurchforstarvingartists.blog/2020/02/20/this-is-a-great-time-to-be-an-american-christian/)

 This is the perfect opportunity to do good work because everything is not yet right. We don’t have to look very far to see the deep truth of that statement. Theologian Shirley Guthrie reminds us that “According to Jesus, the evil that was unleashed at the very beginning of history and has been at work through all history will be there until the very end.” (Christian Doctrine, 1994)

That doesn’t mean God is not at work in us and among us and that doesn’t mean that we are to give up on the work that we have been called to. The injustice and suffering we see challenges our faith, challenges our own wrestling with the nature of God in the midst of all that is wrong. We may lose our faith, but God will not lose us. Or we may echo what Habakkuk says, that in the midst of all that is wrong, “yet I will rejoice in the Lord.”

 So friends, as it has been written, “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justice, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

To the glory of God.