The oracle that Habakkuk the prophet saw.
The prophet complains
2 Lord, how long will I call for help and you not listen?
I cry out to you, “Violence!”
but you don’t deliver us.
3 Why do you show me injustice and look at anguish
so that devastation and violence are before me?
There is strife, and conflict abounds.
4 The Instruction is ineffective.
Justice does not endure
because the wicked surround the righteous.
Justice becomes warped.
The Lord responds
5 Look among the nations and watch!
Be astonished and stare
because something is happening in your days
that you wouldn’t believe even if told.
6 I am about to rouse the Chaldeans,
that bitter and impetuous nation,
which travels throughout the earth to possess dwelling places it does not own.
7 The Chaldean is dreadful and fearful.
He makes his own justice and dignity.
8 His horses are faster than leopards;
they are quicker than wolves of the evening.
His horsemen charge forward;
his horsemen come from far away.
They fly in to devour, swiftly, like an eagle.
9 They come for violence,
the horde with all their faces set toward the desert.
He takes captives like sand.
10 He makes fun of kings;
rulers are ridiculous to him.
He laughs at every fortress,
then he piles up dirt and takes it.
11 He passes through like the wind and invades;
but he will be held guilty,
the one whose strength is his god.
The prophet questions the Lord
12 Lord, aren’t you ancient, my God, my holy one?
Don’t let us die.
Lord, you put the Chaldean here for judgment.
Rock, you established him as a rebuke.
13 Your eyes are too pure to look on evil;
you are unable to look at disaster.
Why would you look at the treacherous
or keep silent when the wicked swallows one who is more righteous?
14 You made humans like the fish of the sea,
like creeping things with no one to rule over them.
15 The Chaldean brings all of them up with a fishhook.
He drags them away with a net;
he collects them in his fishing net,
then he rejoices and celebrates.
16 Therefore, he sacrifices to his net;
he burns incense to his fishing nets,
because due to them his portion grows fat
and his food becomes luxurious.
17 Should he continue to empty his net
and continue to slay nations without sparing them?
I will take my post;
I will position myself on the fortress.
I will keep watch to see what the Lord says to me
and how he will respond to my complaint. (Common English Bible)
“The Minor Leagues: The “Minor” Prophets of the Bible,” Week Nine
The lightning bolt struck down frighteningly near the university student—close enough for the student to cry out to the mother of Mary, Saint Anne, and exclaim, “I will become a monk” if he were saved from immediate danger. And he was.
And so began the theology career of one of the most consequential religious thinkers of the western world—Martin Luther. Through basically a bargain struck out of existential fear came a Reformation that changed Christianity forever. All from a university student bargaining with God through a saint.
I should add that by this point, Martin Luther had already quit law school and was studying philosophy—which I am not so sure is really an upgrade, but having been raised by attorneys, I certainly empathize with running from the prospect of law school to a career in the ministry. All I needed was the bolt of lightning striking near me to seal the deal.
But bargaining is a tried-and-true way of humanity communicating with God. Abraham did it, to try to talk God down from destroying Sodom and Gomorrah, eventually bargaining God down from fifty righteous persons to just ten. Moses did it at Sinai, after h
is brother Aaron created the golden calf, in an only partially successful effort to sate God’s upsetedness at this newfound idolatry.
Bargaining does not even have to be so dramatic or high-minded, it is as basic as my sister, when she was my daughter’s age, bargaining with our mother for M&Ms. It is even one of the stages of grief, of loss. Bargaining is something that is with us from beginning to end, whether we like it or not.
And, here at the start of the book of the prophet Habakkuk, we see a bit of bargaining as well—asking God for an answer in the face of manifest pain and injustice, and then when God deigns to give the prophet an answer, the prophet basically replies with, “Well, God, that’s not good enough!”
Say what you will about Habakkuk, but he had some cojones.
It is August now (wow!) so this is *definitely* not a new sermon series anymore, but it takes us all the way through the summer, from Memorial Day weekend up to Labor Day weekend, and truthfully, it is a series that I have wanted to give for a long time now, almost a decade. But it never quite fit into the arc of my ministry until now. After all the work that we as a team put into resuming in-person worship services after fourteen months of online-only worship, a few months of a relatively simple series has, I know, helped me get back in the rhythm of preaching to a sanctuary of people and not a computer screen of faces!
So, this sermon series was born. Each Sunday, we are hearing from one of the twelve (or thirteen) minor prophets of the Tanakh (Old Testament), so-called because the books attributed to them are much shorter in length than those of the three “major” prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. As a group, I have found the minor prophets especially dear and compelling, but I acknowledge for some, maybe many, of you they may seem unfamiliar or even intimidating, and this series is meant to help chip away at that. The sermons are designed to be standalone, so that if you do some traveling this summer and miss a Sunday or three, I do not want you to feel like you have fallen behind everyone else. So I hope by the end of this series come Labor Day, we have discovered newfound affinity for these so-called minor prophets, and elevated them closer to major status in our faith.
To best facilitate everyone following along, we will read the prophets in the order they appear in the Protestant versions of the Tanakh. So, we began with Daniel, and followed him up with Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Larry, Curly, and Moe (just checking to see if y’all are paying attention), and today we arrive at one of my absolute favorite prophets, one you heard me preach on when I first started here: Habakkuk.
Last year, I preached on the very end of Habakkuk’s book, where the prophet sings this beautiful, joyous song of praise to God no matter the hardship that will face him. But to even arrive at that point is a minor miracle when you read the plaintive words with which Habakkuk begins his book.
Habakkuk, then, is something of a unique character among the minor prophets: he is dynamic. He changes noticeably as his book progresses, going from a place of scarcity and woe to a place of reassurance and blessing. So how exactly does the prophet get there—or bargain his way there?
First and foremost, Habakkuk is standing on the shoulders of giants. He sees the looming harm the Babylonians (it’s often translated here as the Chaldeans, but they’re who we know now as the Babylonians) represent, which means he comes after many of the prophets we have already spoken of, like our last three prophets, Jonah, Micah, and Nahum, whose careers all addressed the earlier Assyrian Empire. By the time the Babylonians roll around, they’ve also rolled out the Assyrians. The Assyrians are toast—yesterday’s news.
So Habakkuk now has a centuries-long line of prophets to draw from and stand upon. As do we. And that does not prevent Habakkuk from bringing his vulnerability to God. God already sees it anyway, Habakkuk is simply choosing to be honest with God about it.
Like Habakkuk, we do not have to put on a brave face for our creator. We can—we must—be ourselves, for God knows us anyways, and we must be open enough to continuing to be transformed by God. That is why for me a good-born again story does not culminate in the moment of conversion—no, we choose to be born again each day that we wake up and decide whether we will allow ourselves to continue to be perfected by God…or not.
Habakkuk, truthfully, may already be most of the way there. His concerns at the beginning of the book should be our concerns, and he asks why they do not seem to always be God’s concerns even as so much of Scripture directly addresses God’s passion for justice and peace. That is the core of verses 1-4, which God responds to in verses 5-11, saying that the injustice Habakkuk sees are exactly why the Babylonians are coming, and because Judah has been so weakened by two decades of unrighteous kings, the conquest is by now essentially inevitable.
Faced with both a present of injustice, and a future of violent conquest, Habakkuk is right to take his questioning directly to God, not only because God already knows Habakkuk’s heart anyway, but because Habakkuk’s concerns are precisely what the Bible tells us God cares deeply about too!
And so this back-and-forth between the prophet and God begins, and that is another way in which Habakkuk is something of a unique prophet—most prophetic books concern oracles from the prophet to the people, not a conversation between the prophet and God. Jonah’s book does have some of that, but it is mostly narrative, biographical, whereas Habakkuk’s reads like a screenplay. Jonah is not the only narrative prophetic book, either--the first half of Daniel is mostly narrative. So Habakkuk really stands apart here, but focusing on the relationship between the prophet and God and not that of the prophet and the people.
And that has the chance to let us in just a bit more. None of us may know what it is like to be reverse-sushi in a giant fish for three days, and so we might not be able to see ourselves in Jonah’s story, but if you have asked for God to answer you and then not liked the answer, congratulations, Habakkuk would love to go get coffee with you.
But back to Habakkuk not liking God’s initial answer in verses 5-11: Habakkuk may not like God’s answer, but that does not keep Habakkuk from cutting off his relationship with God. Habakkuk makes his worries about the Babylonians known to God in verses 12-17, but he ends with this from 2:1: “I will keep watch to see what the Lord says to me, and how he will respond to my complaint.”
Despite what God tells Habakkuk is on the horizon, Habakkuk does not want to sever his connection with his creator. Imagine if, at the start of 2020, God said something along the lines of, “Because of the great injustice you see, a pandemic is coming,” which God describes in the violent ways the Babylonians are described. Would we…not believe God, out of a sense of denial? Would we…hang up the phone on God and sever that connection? Or would we push back, as Habakkuk does, because so invested are we in our relationship with God that we must dig deeper?
Now, and this is important—God is omniscient (all-knowing) in that God can see very possibility but knows that of all the possibilities, only one of them will happen as reality. That is what free will means—that God may see all possible futures but knows the one that will ultimately happen is a result of our choices. It was true then for Judah under their puppet kings, and it is true now when we make choices that have made the pandemic more devastating, not less.
Even when we do that, though, God does not give up on us, so how can we give up on God? Habakkuk does not, even after his back-to-back bills of particulars with his Lord. And here is the good news in all of this: even after all of Habakkuk’s grievances, God did not turn away from him. God saw Habakkuk as worthy of conversation, of giving a true answer, even if that answer was not what Habakkuk initially wanted to hear.
God does not turn away from us just for questioning God, because God does not want the greatest hits, God wants our entire collection. God is not interested in a highlight reel, God is there for every game of every season, our bouts of bargaining and outbursts of “that’s not good enough,” all of it.
We are stripped, then, of any reason to try to pretend in front of God, to put on an act for the perceived benefit of our creator. That is not what God is here for, and that is not what God wants from us. God prefers authenticity and honesty over artificiality and duplicity from us.
To bring Habakkuk back to one of his great predecessors in the prophet Micah, what does the Lord require of us? Doing justice, loving kindness, walking humbly, yes—but all from holy authenticity.
God made the real you after all. So why would God not also want the real you?
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
August 1, 2021