Pentecost 20 (10/07/07) “Clinging to God”

Text: Habakkuk 1.1-4; 2.1-4

This morning’s Old Testament lesson is from the prophet Habakkuk. We hear from this prophet directly only one Sunday in three years, so we probably should pay close attention to him this morning while we have the chance! Actually, we hear from Habakkuk indirectly more often, because chapter 2, verse 4, the last verse of this morning’s lesson, is quoted several times by St. Paul and other New Testament writers, and it has been a very influential verse in the development of Christian thought. But let’s take the opportunity to listen to it this morning in its Old Testament context, which is rather different from the use that Paul makes of it.

Habakkuk was writing at a time when the world seemed to be falling apart, and God seemed to be absent. “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you, ‘Violence!’ and you will not save? Why do you make me see wrongdoing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise.”

Words from 26 centuries ago, yet words that are strangely, eerily modern. We often think that our contemporary problems are unique and unprecedented, but the Bible shows us that humanity has been in the same boat for virtually all of its existence. Things happen in the world that make no sense, and that make us afraid.

Sometimes those things have to do with our community as a whole, our society. We watch with dismay as war and violence continue to be part of the reality of our world. If you read the Sacramento Bee, over the past few weeks there has been one incident after another of shootings, brutal murders, one of an infant in a car seat. “Destruction and violence” indeed!

Sometimes the things that confuse us are terribly personal. A child’s tragic death. A loved one’s ravaging illness. A friend’s slow descent into the dark world of alcoholism or drug abuse. We all know these things, and we all wonder, even if we seldom allow those wonderings to form words. A few years ago an off-Broadway plan called “Kingdom Come” depicted the saga of Norwegian Lutheran pioneers in South Dakota. The heroine of the play endures a series of unbelievable hardships, finally culminating in the death of her husband in a snowstorm. She clenches her fists toward heaven and cries out, “Won’t you please explain what you’re trying to do with us, Lord?” Who among us has not felt that desperate question lurking in the depths of the heart?

In introducing the book of Habakkuk, Martin Luther said that his purpose was to encourage God’s people, to comfort them, to reassure them of God’s presence “however strangely things may go.” How do we hear that word? How do we survive in a world where things sometimes seem to go very strangely indeed?

Habakkuk’s answer is not an easy one for us. “There is still a vision for the appointed time,” he says. “It speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay.” Habakkuk says we must wait, and that is not advice we like to hear.

A woman waited with her young child for an airplane badly delayed because of bad weather somewhere else in the country. The little girl was restless, bored, irritated. “You might as well relax, honey,” her mother said. “You’re going to be waiting like this all your life.” There is a kind of resignation there that makes us weary. We are no strangers to waiting. We do not like it.

And yet the waiting of which Habakkuk speaks is something different. “I will stand at my watchpost,” he says, “I will keep watch to see what he will say to me.” This is an active kind of waiting. Its keynote is not resignation, but hope and expectation and trust. It is, the Bible says, an important ingredient in faith.

You see, when questions are instantly answered and events immediately revealed, there is no need for faith. The book of Hebrews calls faith “the conviction of things not seen,” and that is what Habakkuk means, as well. Faith is, we might say, the ability to wait, clinging to God with trust and dependence, regardless of external events or things happening around us.

A young man’s wife was killed in a traffic accident, leaving him the grief-stricken father of a three-year-old daughter. The night after the funeral, he was putting his child to bed when the lights suddenly went out all over the house. Deciding to go to the basement to investigate, he said to the girl, “I’ll be right back; you just lie still and wait here.” But she was frightened and begged to be taken with him. Taking her in his arms, he found his way down the darkened stairs. As they entered the basement, the child said, “Daddy, it’s so dark, but I’m not afraid because you’re holding me.” The father began to weep, understanding that what the girl said was true for him, too, that it was dark, as dark as it had ever been, yet his Father was holding him and he did not need to be afraid.

Clinging to God with trust and dependence. That is what faith is. Old Testament scholar Elizabeth Achtemeier once put it this way: Faith “means placing one’s whole life in God’s hands and trusting him to fulfill it, despite all outward and inward circumstances; despite all personal sin and guilt; despite all psychological and social and physical distortions.” It means, in other words, waiting with patience, knowing that God is holding you and will not let you go.

The last verse in our passage is instructive here. “Look at the proud!” Habakkuk admonishes. “Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith.” We need to dig beneath this verse a little to catch the import. The word translated here as “proud” means something like arrogant, audacious, reckless. He’s talking about a person who thinks that his own needs and his own agenda and his own desires are the center of the universe. You know such a person has a terrible time waiting. He honestly believes that his time is the most valuable thing in the world, and everyone else can just revolve around him. He does what he wants, when he wants it, and that’s just all there is to it. Habakkuk has harsh words for such people: “Their spirit is not right in them.” What he means is that there is something fundamentally spiritually wrong with such a person. I’ve often told you that a “righteous” person is one who is in a right relationship with God. The person Habakkuk talks about here is just the opposite—he is not in a right relationship with God. The person who is in that right relationship is one who has learned to wait, to cling to God, to let his will and his desire and his plans be subservient to God’s will and God’s time.

The righteous will live by faith. That means, for Habakkuk, that they will put their trust in God, no matter what the present may look like. They will cling to God, even though darkness surrounds them and they do not understand. William Cowper was an 18th century Christian who was the victim of mental illness. At that time they called it melancholia; today we might speak of manic depression. In his lucid times he was only too aware of his disease, and it frightened and disturbed him. Yet he was a man of great faith, who wrote the hymn we know as “God Moves in a Mysterious Way.” He had a sense that God’s ways, though mysterious and even inscrutable, are to be trusted, and that we are to wait for him with confidence and hope:

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,

But trust him for his grace;

Behind a frowning providence,

He hides a smiling face.

His purposes will ripen fast,

unfolding every hour:

The bud may have a bitter taste,

But sweet will be the flower.

Blind unbelief is sure to err,

And scan his work in vain;

God is his own interpreter,

And he will make it plain.

The righteous will live by faith. They will cling to God when the world seems dark, and wait for him, trust in him. He will make it plain—but in his own time, not ours.

In this morning’s gospel lesson, the disciples ask about faith. “Give us more of it,” they beg. Jesus compares faith to a mustard seed, and then he relates this odd little lesson about being a servant. The servant, he says, prepares supper, waits on the master, and then expects no praise but simply says, “I am an unworthy servant; I have done only what I was supposed to do.” It is interesting to think about the word that describes what the servant does for the master: he waits on him. The etymology of the word is a bit obscure, but I suspect there is a strong connection to the kind of waiting Habakkuk talks about. A servant waits on the master—that means the servant’s time is not his own; he is, we might say, on stand-by, waiting to do whatever the master may ask—serve dinner, clear the table, take a letter, whatever it may be.

Perhaps we can read that kind of waiting into what Habakkuk says. The person of faith is the obedient servant, the one who does not need to know why the master asks certain things, or what the master’s purpose may be. The obedient servant just carries out the orders, trusting that the master knows what is best.

Isn’t it like that with God and with us? We cannot know his purposes, his plans, unless he should reveal them to us. But we know that he is good, and that his purposes will be unfolded in his own time. We call him Lord, Master. And so, going back to William Cowper, the despondent poet, we can sing another of his songs, one based on the prophet Habakkuk:

In holy contemplation

we sweetly then pursue

the theme of God’s salvation,

and find it ever new;

set free from present sorrow,

we cheerfully can say,

let the unknown tomorrow

bring with it what it may.

It can bring with it nothing

but God will bear us through:

who gives the lilies clothing

will clothe his people, too:

beneath the spreading heavens

no creature but is fed;

and he who feeds the ravens

will give his children bread.

Though vine nor fig tree neither,

Their wonted fruit should bear,

Though all the fields should wither,

Nor flocks nor herds, be there:

Yet God the same abiding,

His praise shall tune my voice;

For while in him confiding

I cannot but rejoice.

Copyright 2007 Richard O. Johnson. All rights reserved.