A Sermon Based Upon Habakkuk 2: 1-4.
By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
Sunday, July 20, 2014
“….but the righteous live by their
faith (Hab 2:4 NRS)
“Just the facts, Ma’am! Just the facts.” That’s what television detective, Sargent Joe
Friday once said while questioning a lady.
It became a standard line to be immortalized when the TV series
“Dragnet” was made into a motion picture.
It even became the title of the autobiography of Jack Webb, who played
Sargent Friday on the popular TV series.
It’s a good line, and it’s where most
people are, most of the time. We want
the truth. We want the facts. We try to live by the facts we know to be
true. But what happens when we
can’t? What happens when the facts have
it wrong or become too hard for us to bear?
A couple of weeks ago, two U.S. citizens became Bonnie and Clyde like
villains who lived and died just to oppose the law and the government. They did not want to live by the facts of the
way things are, so they started to make up a world based on their own
rules. They went out and shot a couple
of Las Vegas police officers and then turn their weapons upon themselves. The fact of the way the world is was too much
for them. They did not want to live by
the facts.
But I can think of better ways to deal
with a world we can’t stand or don’t like, can’t you? I can think of more constructive ways to
disagree with the government, to challenge the laws of the land, or to make a
protest against how unfair things are.
All of us will run up against difficult ‘facts’ or grim truth from time
to time, but we don’t kill people over it.
A CRISIS OF FAITH
Habakkuk’s also has a problem with the facts around him. The truth of how things are, seem very
difficult for him to swallow. The
opening lines of his prophecy gives us the troubling facts: “O LORD, how long shall I
cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you "Violence!" and
you will not save?
3 Why do you make me see wrongdoing
and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and
contention arise.
4 So
the law becomes slack and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the
righteous-- therefore judgment comes forth perverted. (Hab 1:2-4 NRS)
Have you ever prayed and it seemed God
wasn’t listening? Have you ever seen
wrongdoing that you didn’t want to see happening? Did you ever see people, who were not as
nice nor as good as you, doing much better than you are? Now, that can be some pretty difficult facts
to swallow, aren’t they? These are the same
kinds of difficult facts of life that Habakkuk sees.
At some time or other, perhaps sooner
rather than later, you will come to a moment in your life when you too, have
more questions than answers. Some call
it the “dark night of the soul”. This
phrase goes all the way back to the 16th century, to a poem, La noche
oscura del alma, which was written by a Spanish catholic, now
named Saint John of the Cross. In that
poem, Saint John suggests that until the soul journey’s through the
difficulties of a dark times, it will never try to get close to God. But that ‘dark night’ is also a moment that
can shake you to the core and make you lose faith altogether. It’s the kind of moment Dietrich Bonhoeffer
had, as he was arrested for conspiring to kill Hilter. He was arrested and put into prison for over
a year, and just days before the War was over,
Bonhoeffer was hanged. During
that time Bonhoeffer struggled with his own understanding of God, but he never
lost his faith.
At the heart of Habakkuk’s struggle was
the question, “How Long, “O Lord…” It was question about the world that seemed
‘unanswerable’ at the time. We’ve all
been there, if we’re honest. Most of us
have been through a spiritual crisis, similar to St John of the Cross and to Jesus on the cross when he cried, “My God, why have your forsaken me.” (Mat. 27.46).
If Jesus had not prayed that prayer, I
don’t think many people would faith at all when the facts of life become dark
and difficult. At least we can love
Jesus because we identify with his weakness, but it’s a lot harder to identify
with a God who allows us to feel forsaken.
The pain of love and life can be excruciating. Life itself can seem unfair or too
short. God can appear to be absent when
you need him most. When the darkness
overtakes you, you can wonder to yourself, as the popular movie and song once
put it, “What’s it all about, Alfie?” Sometimes, life moves along and you don’t
have time to think and reflect. But
there are also those difficult and dreadful times, when life stands still and
you wonder to yourself over and over, “Why?”
What is it all about?
Habakkuk’s own ‘crisis of faith’ aims at
the core of all religious doubt which is still encountered by people of faith today. Habakkuk believes in a God who is sovereign,
all-powerful, and in control of the world, but sometimes the world seems to be
out of control. Bad things happen to
good people. Good things happen to bad
people. And if that’s not enough, when
Habakkuk cries out to God in prayer, it appears God ‘does not listen’ (Hab.
1.2) or answer prayer. Though our faith
says God is a savior, there are all kinds of bad things we are not being saved
from. Besides this, the other problem
Habakkuk sees is that there seems to be very little connection between doing
what is right and having a good life.
He says “The law become slack and
justice never prevails”. Instead of
being on the side of those who do right, it looks like the law is being used to
favor those who would break it. What
kind of God allows things to happen like this?
This is Habakkuk’s problem (See Hab. 1: 1-4).
Habakkuk’s problem is still around. Today, in seminaries and theological schools
it is called, Theodicy, or the Problem of Evil. We all encounter such hard realities and
challenges to our faith, but we don’t all lose faith. Yet some have, and others will. In
the 1950's, Charles Templeton was a friend and contemporary of Billy Graham. Both of them were holding crusades across
North America. Charles Templeton started
the Youth for Christ movement that brought thousands of teenagers to a personal
relationship with Jesus Christ. One day
this newspaper and magazine reporter turned evangelist had a change of heart.
He went to his friend Billy Graham and confessed that he could no longer
believe the Gospel. A troubled believer
lamented to his friend, "How can a loving and omnipotent God allow such horrors
as we have seen this century?" Charles
Templeton was converted not to God, but from God. Years later in his book,
Farewell to God, he explained his disbelief:
“If God's love encompasses the whole world and if everyone
who does not believe in him will perish, then surely this question needs to be
asked: When, after two thousand years, does God's plan kick in for the billion
people he 'so loves' in China? Or for the 840 million in India? Or the millions
in Japan, Afghanistan, Siberia, Egypt, Burma ·.. and on and on?......
Why would a God who 'so loved the world' reveal his message
only to a tiny minority of the people on earth, leaving the majority in
ignorance? Is it possible to believe that the Father of all Mankind would
select as his Chosen People a small Middle Eastern nation, Israel, reveal His
will exclusively to them, fight alongside them in their battles to survive, and
only after their failure to reach out to any other group, update His plan for
the world's salvation by sending His 'only begotten son,' not to the world but,
once again, exclusively to Israel?” (https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/603808-farewell-to-god-my-reasons-for-rejecting-the-christian-faith).
I can complicate Templeton’s questions
even more. “After God reveals his love
through Israel, and Israel does not understand God’s love to the whole world,
God then gives them the boot too, and as of late, he has finally rained down
his wrath on them during the holocaust. And
the hell of the holocaust is nothing compared to what God is going to do with
those who don’t love him in the hellfire that is still to come. What kind of God loves all people and then enjoys
watching them all burn if they don’t love him back? Is that the kind of God you would like to
love? Do you see how easy it is to find problems in
some of the historical teachings of the Christian faith? We all can have difficulties that in life
that can lead to a crisis of faith, and we can have questions about some very
some of the most basic faith claims, but
some never work through these questions.
Some, like Charles Templeton, will lose their faith because of such
unanswered and perhaps even, unanswerable questions.
BEING
HONEST WITH GOD
Several years ago, a prominent British minister, John A.T. Robinson, wrote a book
that created a firestorm. He posed the
possibility of doing religion in a different way. He proposed not doing religion like it’s
always been done, but he decided to be ‘honest to God’ about what he believed
and what he didn’t. One of the most
controversial parts of that book was when he suggested that Christians stop
believing that God is ‘up there’ or ‘out there’. He suggested rather, that believers should
realize that God is more like the ground
of our being than a being who lived high above the ground. Such a view of faith challenged the most
basic understanding of God and sent our shockwaves everywhere. When another British Christian, C.S. Lewis,
was asked about Robinson’s new perspective, he responded, “I prefer being honest, than being honest to God.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honest_to_God).
C.S. Lewis did not believe that we have
to change our understanding of God in order to be honest to God. We can just be honest. This is what Lewis attempted to do when his
wife, Joy Davidson, was dying with Cancer and the whole ordeal sent him into
his own ‘Shadowlands”. When Lewis later writes
about “The Problem of Pain in his own book, Lewis does not think we have to change our
view of God in order to keep trusting in God, but he does say that we may need
to change our view of what pain and suffering are about. He writes: “God
whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our
pain; it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
Perhaps Lewis is right. It could be that God uses pain and suffering,
even to get his message of love and hope across to us. But even if this is true, such philosophical
answers don’t help us that much when we are going through pain ourselves. It didn’t help Charles Templeton either. He looked at the pain of the world and he
said he could not believe in a loving God.
Maybe you’ve experienced pain and
unanswered prayer in life too. So have I. You might even think that your life is
filled with fewer answers than questions.
So have I. You might even think that life has not been
fair to you, and that God has not given you a fair deal. So have I.
When I reflect upon my own life, I can
remember a lot more unfair things than the fair things. I remember a terrible car wreck that wasn’t
my fault and how is practically destroyed my left foot. I also remember how Teresa and I, people who
loved children, could not conceive and bear children on our own. It was so unfair to see other people not
care about the children they had, but we cared. I also remember going to the mission field
for a career, and then having to come home to care for my parents. I wanted to stay, even though the job was
sometimes difficult. I also remember
being pastor of a couple of churches and having to deal with some cruel,
heartless people. I was pastor of a larger
than average church, but I wanted to become the pastor of a mega-church, but I
didn’t get there. Finally, I also
remember how our adopted daughter showed signs of an inherited mental illness,
and how we still feel the pain, including the pain of having to put our
grandchildren into foster care. I don’t
know about you, but even when you try to do right, life does not always end
with blessings.
If you think about your life, for very
long, and especially if you are honest about it, you too might be able to find
just as many ‘unfair’ and ‘unjust’ events that you did not bring upon yourself,
just as Habakkuk does. In fact, Scripture as a whole suggests that if
you do good in this world, and if you try to be a good person, you’ll probably suffer
more heartbreak that way, than if you didn’t care. It was surely that way for Jesus. Scripture says Jesus ‘went around doing good’ (Acts 10:38) and we know what that got
him---the cross. For the person who
tries to live a good, righteous life, the outcome may more probably be like “Job” than like “Solomon” and “all his glory” (1 Chron. 22.4; Mat. 6.29). If this is how it is, or how it will be, then why be good? Why do good?
Why care? Why pray? Why live a righteous life? Why believe in God, especially when belief in
God seems archaic, antiquated, out of step, perhaps even dangerous, especially
when religion become deadly to others or might cause you to endanger yourself? Aren’t there all kinds of better options
available to give yourselves to?
LIVING
BY FAITH, NOT BY THE FACTS
Whatever we can say about the questions
Habakkuk raised at the beginning of his short prophecy, they are true, honest questions, as they are
the kinds of questions Christians still encounter and must face, when we too
have to face the hard ‘facts of life’. We can still find our answer in Jesus, as most
of us do, but this does not meant that we have all the answers. Questions still come. Unanswerable questions will come to us
all. Some of us will be able to live
with the questions better than others. Others
of us might even learn that living and loving the questions could be more
beneficial than having the answers. How do you think Habakkuk lived with the
questions he could not answer? When you
think about it, if you earned your living as a prophet, it’s not really a good
strategy to tell people you don’t have all the answers, especially when you are
trying to get people to consider your message.
Just how smart is it to begin your message about God by raising your own
honest struggles with God?
It may not seem smart now, but it might
just save your life later. Let me
explain. The only ‘answer’ to the
‘unanswerable’ questions in our lives, is what Habakkuk goes on to give us in chapter
two. Habakkuk does not give up because he doesn’t
have all the answers, nor does he give in to the despair of the moment. Habakkuk says rather, that he ‘will keep watch to see what (God) will say in answer to (his) complaint. “ (2.1). When
God does finally answer him, Habakkuk is
told to: “Write the vision; make it
plain on tablets so the runner may read it….” (2.2). In other words, the answer is for everyone,
both for the one who hears it originally and for the one who gets to read about
it. What is this answer, when the facts
of life are hard, when unanswerable questions arise, or when our answer from
God does not come and life seems unfair?
God declares to Habakkuk “There
is still a vision for the appointed (or
right) time….” (2.3a). He is told to ‘wait for it”, because it will ‘surely
come’….(2.3). The “proud’ can’t wait for it, nor can they live
this way, because “the spirit is not
right in them” (2.4a), but the righteous must live this way, because the righteous can live this way. The righteous can live without all the
answers, because ‘the righteous live by their
faith’ (2.4b). The righteous choose
not to simply live by the facts in life, but they choose to live beyond the
facts of what is going on around them, toward the faith in what God is going to
do next.
Of course, this does not mean that the
righteous are oblivious to the facts, deny the facts, or ignore the facts. But the ‘righteous’
live by a different level of ‘facts’ which brings them to faith rather than
take faith away from them! Look at the
different kinds of facts which led Habakkuk to keep faith in God. He writes:
Look at the proud! The spirit is not right in them…. (2.4) “Moreover,
wealth is treacherous, the arrogant do not endure…like death they never have
enough”(2.5). Have you also seen
what only living for money and wealth does to people? Think also, Habakkuk says, what a city looks
like, when people build it on ‘bloodshed’
or when they ‘found a city based on (sin
or) iniquity!” SIN
CITY sure sounds fun; the room rates are low, the food is scrumptious, and the
shows are great (that’s what a Deacon once told me about why he liked to go to
Las Vegas) and besides that, “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”, but maybe
not. So perhaps we (and he) should think
again. Do you realize what you are
risking or promoting when you give our money and faith to lesser things in life
or when you only live your life based on what happens, or what you want to have
happen. Let me put it this way, if you
think it’s hard to have faith in a world like ours, it’s even harder to live
your life if you only live by the ‘facts’ of how things are, by what you want, or
you live for what people want or expect of you, or what brings pleasure in this
moment.
To only live by the ‘facts’ its much
like the person who decided to take every bit of advice Oprah ever gave and to “live
her best life’ by only buying and living the way Oprah recommended as the ‘best
life’ Robyn Okrant devoted the whole
year of 2008 adhering to all of Oprah’s suggestions and guidance given on her Television
show, and today, her website, “LIVING OPRAH” is a month-by-month account of
that year. After 365 days of following
Oprah, spending over 5,000 dollars, committing to 57 ongoing Oprah challenges,
do you think the result was her ‘best life’?
In Forbes Magazine, Okrant’s answer was that doing everything ‘right’,
as Oprah suggested, ‘was incredibly draining, and made her sad.’ Especially when she put her marriage and her
husband under the microscope, trying to make their marriage better, it put them
both on shaky ground, and it made both her husband and her, miserable. Living the gotta be, gotta have, and gotta go
and gotta read life was not the ‘best life’, nor did it improve ‘well-being’. “Striving to live her best life, kept her
from living her real life.” (http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/07/oprah-winfrey-robyn-okrant-advice-forbes-woman-well-being-self-help.html).
Most of us would never do something as
stupid as Living Oprah, but it is just as stupid to think that you have
to have all the “best” answers to have faith in God or to kept faith going in
your life. If we are going to believe in
the future, we all must have faith. Faith
is not about knowing everything or having everything, but as the book of
Hebrews rightly says, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the
evidence of things not seen. (Heb 11:1 KJV). Living by faith is
about learning to live your life, not based on the facts of how things are, nor
is it having everything the way you want, but ‘faith’ is about trusting God,
doing good, and moving on toward the good God is going to bring into this
world. It is not about settling into ‘how
things are’ but it’s about seeing ‘how things will be’ because God is
sovereign, God is eternal, and God is not finished with us, nor is he finished
with this world as it is right now.
Habakkuk ends his prophecy, not with a complaint, but with a prayer. His prayer starts right after the end of
this chapter, where Habakkuk reminds us all, what we really should do, when
life starts to cave in on us: “But the LORD is in his holy temple: let all
the earth keep silence before him” (2.20).
When I consider this text, in the context of all that Habakkuk has said
about his own struggle to have faith, I’m reminded of the way I learned to deal
with Thunderstorms as a child. I was
never really that much afraid of lightning and thunder, but I guess if you don’t
have some respect for it, it could kill you.
My mother and her family tradition made sure I developed a certain kind
of respect. When a storm would approach,
my mother would make me stop playing and come and sit down beside her. “Why do I have to sit down, mother?” I would ask.
She would respond, “Because the
LORD is at work”. She would make me
sit down and be still and silent, while the LORD was doing his work through the
thunder and the lightning.
Today, as an adult, it sounds a little
silly to think that God is using thunderstorms to get his point across or to do
his most important work in the world. I
can think of a lot more things God is busy doing that could be considered much more
important, like saving a soul, helping a mother have her baby, or helping
people love each other. This is not to
say that ‘thunderstorms’ are unimportant.
I’m sure lightening does some
good, like perhaps, releasing positive energy and nitrogen into the air. It
can be dangerous, but it’s still good. But
what mother was teaching me in those moments of stillness, was much more about
how to face life, not just about how to deal with thunder and lightning. She
was reminding me to face the scary, difficult, deadly and most threatening
moments in life with reverence, stillness and prayer.
Does it work? Well, I can tell you that today I respect
lightening, but I don’t have to hide in my closet or get into my car out of
fear, like a couple of adults I used to know.
But even more than this, those
habits of being still, respecting God, and having faith, even in the midst of
the storm is how my mother showed me, in the most practical terms, what having
faith and what living by faith means, not just when the weather gets bad, but
when life turns dark and difficult. This
is when you need to know the most that, even in these dark, deadly, and difficult
moments, even when you don’t understand, God is ‘in his temple’ and God is
still at work. This is when we all need to keep our mouths
shut, our minds and our hearts open, to live by our faith, to pray, and to wait
and see what going to happen next. Living
by the facts is too predictable and closed ended. Living by faith means so much more. Amen.
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