Hidden Gems:
2.
“Yet
I Will Rejoice in the Lord”
Habakkuk
3:16-19
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
July
3, 2011
“Living
by faith is a bewildering venture.”
So
says the prophet Habakkuk. Habakkuk
is one of the Bible’s twelve “minor” prophets, so named not because their
message is not as important as the “major” ones, but because the books of
the Bible that carry their names are brief by comparison to the likes of Isaiah,
Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Living by
faith is a bewildering venture that can confuse and confound, but Habakkuk, as
we shall see, knows the antidote.
Sometimes, we equate faith with
entitlement. You have heard people
say things like, “Why did she get
that terrible cancer? Why did he
lose his job just as his kids were entering college?
She is, he is, such a good person, believes in God, goes to church.”
The age-old question on which a mountain of books has been written asks,
“Why do bad things happen to good people?”
It seems reasonable to expect that in exchange for our commitment to God
we should receive favorable or preferential treatment.
We have talked ourselves into believing that faith ought to afford us at
least some basic protections and that things should go better with God.
But that is not what scripture says.
Jesus reminds us that God makes the sun to rise on the good and
on the evil and sends rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous.
And we know what happened to Jesus as a result of his
faithful living. Or
We are not the only ones who think so.
The premise of the book of Job, and of Job’s friends, is that a good
and righteous person should not suffer the slings and arrows of life like
someone who cares nothing for God. The
psalmist in Psalm 73 openly admitted that trying to figure out why the wicked
seem so often to make out so well while righteous people falter was a
“wearisome task” that he did not begin to understand until he rooted himself
for the long haul in a worshiping congregation.
Habakkuk is a little different than
most of the other prophets. Normally
prophets speak God’s word to us.
They are preachers who call us to hear and heed God’s word of
judgment and then exhort us to change, to repent, to walk in the ways of God.
The prophets with their verbal scalpels take surgical aim at our hubris
and tell us to pay attention to God, or else.
Habakkuk, though, speaks our word to
God. He gives voice to our
consternation, to our attempts to make sense of life, even intimating a sense of
frustration with God’s performance:
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.
The law becomes slack
and justice never prevails.
(Habakkuk
1:2-4)
The circumstance that aroused
Habakkuk’s ire was his discernment that God was going to use the godless
military machine of
How long are you going to let this
go on?
Will you let this Babylonian fisherman
Fish like a weekend angler,
killing people as if they’re nothing but fish?
Habakkuk did not understand.
It did not make sense. If he
had known the phrase, he would have railed at God, thundering, “What in the
Sam Hill is going on here?”
We all have been in a similar place,
have we not, where we have felt besieged and beleaguered?
You have tried to live a good life, but things are falling apart.
Or you are overlooked as others less qualified are chosen. Maybe
you feel as if you have been abandoned by the people on whom you have counted.
You cannot comprehend why you have gotten sick so young or why your child
has died or strayed into wayward and ruinous living.
How could it be you who is downsized out of a job after you have given so
much for so long to the company?
But then Habakkuk remembers God’s
faithfulness through all the generations. See,
I love this and it is, to me, one of best parts of being a Christian.
The story of our lives started long before we arrived on the scene.
The story of my life did not begin September 12, 1955.
It began, as yours did, at the event rhapsodized by the immortal words of
Genesis 1:
In the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness
was on the face of the deep. And
the Spirit of God moved
upon the face of the waters…
And my life continued in Abraham and
his sojourn by faith toward a land he did not know and in Moses and that
archetypical journey of God’s people wandering in the wilderness toward
freedom and community. It continued
in the psalmists who said things like “The
Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” and “Where
can I go from your spirit? Or where
can I flee from your presence? If I
ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of
the sea, even there your right hand will lead me, and your right hand will hold
me fast” and “The Lord will keep
your going out and your coming in from this time on and forever more.”
My life carried on in David and Mary and Joseph and Jesus and Paul
and Augustine and Hildegard and Teresa and Calvin and Christian congregations
through the ages and it continued in my mother and father and it continues in
you and the life we share together. Our
lives are not short stories but have long and sturdy histories.
Living by faith may sometimes be a bewildering venture, but it has a
solid and grace-filled track record.
Habakkuk, remembering the larger story
of his and
O Lord, I have heard of your
renown,
and I stand in awe, O Lord, of
your work.
In our own time revive it;
in our own time
make it known;
in wrath may you
remember mercy.
(Habakkuk
3:2)
Habakkuk could look back and recall the
treachery Joseph’s brothers had visited on him and, later, when the tables
were turned and Joseph was in a position to aid his brothers and they asked
Joseph for mercy and the grace of forgiveness, Joseph agreed and said to them, “Even
though you intended what you did for harm, God used it for good, in order to
preserve a numerous people.” And
centuries later, we have the good witness of
So, Habakkuk prayed to God and decided
that even in the midst of trouble, travail, turmoil, and tumult; in the midst of
anger, angst, and anxiety; even when life seemed barren or banal, he, Habakkuk,
was going to trust God. He said it
more poetically than that, though, giving us one of the great hidden gems of
scripture:
Though the fig tree does not
blossom,
and no fruit is on the vines;
though the produce of the olive fails,
and the fields yield no food;
though the flock is cut off from the fold,
and there is no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord…
(Habakkuk
3:17-18)
That,
summer congregation, is faith – trusting that we are in the care and
providence of God when the evidence at hand seems scant or scarce.
It does not take much faith to “rejoice in the Lord” when the gardens
of our lives are lush and green and filled with fruit.
It does not take much faith to “rejoice in the Lord” in prosperous
and promising times. It does not
take much faith to “rejoice in the Lord” when your relationships are right
and your life is full and good. It
does not take much faith to “rejoice in the Lord” when you can see clearly
the way forward in your life.
But often we cannot see.
A pilot this week told me that a part of the training to fly a plane is
to fly “in the hood.” He told me
that as long as we can see the horizon, we can maintain our sense of balance and
thus a pilot can keep a plane in balance, flying right-side up and on course, as
long as he or she can see the horizon. He
said that there is something innate in human beings that enable us to do that.
But if we lose sight of the horizon, we lose that ability to stay in
balance. To mimic that eventuality
as when planes fly into clouds or the dark of night, the trainee dons a hood –
a piece of head armor that has a darkened screen for a face mask – that
prevents him from seeing the horizon. The
only way he is going to be able to fly the plane is by the instrumentation in
the cockpit. Where the pilot cannot
see, he or she must learn to trust the instruments.
Just so, for all those times we cannot see clearly in our lives, we have
to learn to trust the instruments – scripture, Christ, Spirit to name a few
– who teach us to see and to live by faith, by God.
An obscure poet (smile) by the name of
Mary Oliver has a poem that pertains. It
is called At the Pond.
At the Pond
One summer
I went every morning
to the edge of a
pond where
a
huddle of just-hatched geese
would paddle to me
and clamber
up the marshy
slope
and
over my body,
peeping and staring –
such sweetness every day
which the grown
ones watched,
for
whatever reason,
serenely
Not there, however, but here
is where the
story begins.
Nature
has many mysteries,
some of them severe.
Five of the young geese
grew
heavy of chest
and
bold
of wing
while the sixth waited and waited
in its gauze-feathers, its
body
that would not
grow.
And
then it was fall.
And this is what I think
everything is about:
the way
I
was glad
for those five and two
that flew away,
and the way I
hold in my heart the wingless one
that
had to stay.
(Mary
Oliver, Evidence, pp. 34-35)
It does not take much faith when our
lives are like the “five and two” that were able to fly away and follow the
normal course of things. But what
about those times when we are the wingless one and we are left out or left
behind, when the fig tree does not blossom and no fruit is on our vines?
Habakkuk’s answer?
“Yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will exult in the God of my salvation.”
For us rejoice in the Lord in the hard times is not to deny the
difficulties or devastations of our lives when they come but to affirm that
there is something deeper, Someone (to be more precise) in whom we live and move
and have our being whose love will not let us go.
Joy is more than a feeling.
It does not depend on present favorable circumstances.
Joy is trust that all the incongruities of life someday will be resolved.
Joy is the trust that God will make provision for us.
Joy is the faith that even when appearances seem otherwise that finally
and ultimately “all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of
things shall be well” for God is Lord of heaven and earth.
There is an old, traditional, wonderful
hymn of the church whose opening lyrics sing, “Rejoice,
ye pure in heart! Rejoice, give
thanks, and sing! Your festal banner
wave on high, The cross of Christ your King…”
The cross of Christ our
King. Is there any circumstance in
our lives more severe than the cross of Christ?
If ever there was a place where it seemed as if the fig tree had not
blossomed and that no fruit was on the vines; that the produce of the olive had
failed and the fields yielded no food; that the flock was cut off from the fold
and there was no herd in the stalls, it was at that ignominious cross.
But we know what became of that, what God did for Christ at the cross,
for here we are – a congregation gathered two thousand years later in his
name! Even there at the cross and
tomb, especially there, the grace and glory of God shone bright and in that
light, we see light for our lives.
Living by faith is at times a
bewildering venture. No matter.
Whatever befalls us, we keep on trusting God, saying with Habakkuk, “Yet
I will rejoice in the Lord!”
Amen.
Copyright © 2011 by First Presbyterian Church