Sunday morning worship: Majoring on the Minors - Habakkuk, the patient prophet

READING: Habakkuk 1, 2, and 3

A wee reflection as if from Habukkuk's point of view: 'Climbing';
a story - rewritten but keeping to the spirit of the one told by Saki: 'Falling';
and a sermon: 'Three questions'...
helped us to discover more about God's message through his prophet Habakkuk.

Here, below, the sermon

SERMON/
Let’s pray: May the words of my mouth, and the thoughts of all our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer, Amen.

‘Are you listening?’
‘Will you save me?’
‘Will you deal with all this bad stuff?’

Three questions.
Age-old questions.
Questions that people of faith have asked God down through many a generation.
Questions that cut right to the heart of faith:
of the nature of God – the One in whom we place our faith;
of the nature of faith itself;
and, of how we live as people of faith.
These questions,
asked by Habakkuk the prophet toward the end of the 7th century
are questions still pertinent to us, sitting right here, and right now.

If we make time and space for them,
if we sit with them awhile,
if we wait on God and tune in and turn up our spiritual antennae,
the Minor Prophets –
these obscure books, generally neglected at the back of the Old Testament...
do have something to say to us still.
We just need a little patience
and patience is the key word
when it comes to unlocking the message of God through his prophet, Habakkuk.
Our man, Habakkuk, and his oracle,his prophetic message,
is a little different to the other chaps we’ve so far encountered.
In the main, all of the other prophets have proclaimed God’s message to an audience –
the kingdoms of the north and south: Israel and Judah.
Here, Habakkuk is doing something a little bit different.
Where our other prophets were preaching, Habakkuk’s a praying prophet:
what we’ve heard from him is a prayer –
a conversation with God,
a conversation where he asks God those big three questions.

You see, Habakkuk’s been looking around.
Like our other prophets
he’s seen the corruption and misuse of power;
he’s seen the nation rotting from within and without;
he’s seen the bad guys crushing the good guys way too many times...
And he’s upset.
He looks around and what he feels he doesn’t see
is God doing anything at all about it.

And so, right from the very beginning of his message, he wastes no time:
there’s no wee biographical introduction –
no ‘the son of whoever, who was the son of so and so,
during the time of the King What’s-his-name’.
Habakkuk gets immediately to the point:
‘How long, O Lord, must I call out for help, but you do not listen?’
...Are you listening?
‘Or cry out ‘Violence!’ but you do not save?’
...Will you save me?
And a little later on:
‘Why do you tolerate the treacherous..
Why are you silent while the wicked swallow up those more righteous than themselves?’
... ‘Will you deal with all this bad stuff?’
He is distressed.
His heart belongs to God,
his life’s aim is to follow in God’s ways,
his task is to point to God
so that the people of God continue in God’s ways....
Why?
Because in faith, Habakkuk understands that to follow in God’s ways,
to place your trust in God,
is to not only make your own private world
a better, more ordered, more content place,
but it makes the world itself a better place.
Fulness of life, a life worth living.
He is distressed
because people aren’t listening,
aren’t following in God’s ways,
and individual lives,
the life of the nation
and the life of the world
- it's all going from bad to worse.
He watches the mess people make of their lives and of the world around them
and begins to wonder:
if the people aren’t listening,
is God?
Because, it really doesn’t feel like it.
He is distressed –
he has some major issues with God:
‘Are you listening?’ he asks.
And having got that off his chest,
he takes a deep breath and takes up his post as God’s watchman:
a watcher on the wall looking out for signs of God,
even though he feels God is off having more fun elsewhere.
Habakkuk leans into his faith,
tries to get past this hopeless feeling,
and gets back to his job at hand...
Faith involves patience –
this is what we learn from Habakkuk.

What we also learn is that,
even though it may feel that God is not listening,
or that God is not at work in the world,
God’s own nature –
as the One who loves the world –
is why God can’t do anything else
BUT listen,
but be involved and active.
But you need to look at the world through the lens of faith.

Habakkuk is distressed.
Habakkuk is frustrated.
Habakkuk throws out the questions:
‘Are you listening?’
‘Will you save me – the nation – the world?’
‘Will you sort the bad stuff?’
And God comes right back at him and says
in no uncertain terms:
‘Yes. Write this down.’
And the message is this:
‘Be patient.’

Then you get a very interesting thing happening as God
continues to answer Habakkuk’s questions –
especially on the matter of staying silent,
of tolerating the wicked...
letting them ‘get away’ with their wickedness.
God points to the behaviour of those who are doing wrong
and says ‘watch closely’
and shows Habakkuk an age-old truth:
that God doesn’t have to do that much –
you reap what you sow.
Whether your entire focus is trying to get one up on your neighbour,
as in the case of Mrs Packletide,
or whether you’re hell-bent on grabbing power,
at some point,
the obsession will cause you to overreach yourself
and you’ll find yourself falling.
For the most part, God doesn’t have to do overmuch in the case of the wicked:
generally, they sow the seeds of their own destruction.
Or, to use that other old expression:
‘live by the sword, die by the sword.’

God’s answer to Habakkuk is to be patient.
It’s to keep watching, to keep waiting.
But waiting isn’t necessarily a passive thing –
to wait is an act of faith,
believing that God hears,
that God will do something,
that God is playing the long game
and in God’s good time
all will finally be ordered
in God’s good way.
To wait, in faith, is an active thing:
we trust in the vision of the future
that God shows us,
and, as God’s people,
we invest our own lives in working towards that future –
climbing up our watchtowers to see what’s happening in the world
and to hear God speaking...
and also climbing back down to be in the world
to be God’s messengers both in word and in action.
I’ve said it before,
I’ll say it again:
one person can make a difference.

A year ago, a lone 15 year old girl decided to go on strike from school.
She sat, by herself, against the wall of her country’s Parliament,
with a placard with a message about climate change.
Nobody knew her name then.
A year ago.
Now, unless you’ve been living in space, everyone’s heard of her:
Greta Thunberg.
And on Friday she made her protest again in New York,
except this time, millions of people around the world decided to join her
as she proclaimed her message.
Sure, there was the thorny matter of trying not to create a bigger carbon fooprint
than she needed, to get to New York, but she made it work in the end.

As God’s people, we have a message to proclaim.
And as we proclaim it,
we have to deal with the thorny issue of working out how to live this odd life of faith.
What is faith?
The reformer, Martin Luther said that:
‘Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, 
so sure and certain that the believer would stake his or her life on it.’
It’s ‘a divine work in us which changes us and makes us to be born anew of God.’
Faith is daring to believe that the God of the universe
does hear us when we pray, just as Habakkuk prayed.
Faith is daring to believe that God will save:
us, our nation, the world...
Faith is daring to believe that, when it comes to the wicked,
God has that one covered as well.
And faith dares to believe that,
as we go about our everyday lives, our everyday work,
just as Habakkuk did,
that God uses us in the big and in the small
to change the world.

Habakkuk asked three questions of Gd:
‘Are you listening?’
‘Will you save me?’
‘Will you deal with all this bad stuff?’
I think those questions can be flipped
and asked of us:
‘Are we listening... to God?’
‘Will we save others... as God has surely rescued us?’
‘Will we deal with all this bad stuff – working alongside God,
inspired by God’s vision of the world?’
Amen.