This Week's Sermon: "The Aurochs' Story"

Habakkuk 1:1-3 and 3:17-19

The oracle that Habakkuk the prophet saw.

Lord, how long will I call for help and you not listen? I cry out to you, “Violence!” but you don’t deliver us. Why do you show me injustice and look at anguish so that devastation and violence are before me? There is strife, and conflict abounds.

3:17-19:

Though the fig tree doesn’t bloom, and there’s no produce on the vine; though the olive crop withers, and the fields don’t provide food; though the sheep is cut off from the pen, and there is no cattle in the stalls; I will rejoice in the Lord.

I will rejoice in the God of my deliverance. The Lord God is my strength. He will set my feet like the deer. He will let me walk upon the heights.

To the director, with stringed instruments. (CEB)

“What’s Asked in Worship Stays in Worship: Banned Questions About the Bible,” Week Three: Why Doesn’t God Intervene in a Disaster?

The aurochs’ story began as the brainchild of one woman, and of a single one-act play.

Because any disaster, any sort of crisis, puts us into preservation mode, concerned with damage control.  “How can I preserve what I have left?” we ask ourselves.

It is what many are asking themselves after having everything destroyed by Hurricane Sandy just a few short weeks ago, or those who lost everything in the High Park fires in Colorado.

The last time a hurricane caused such damage to us, it devastated New Orleans.  You say the words, “Hurricane Katrina,” and instantly, everybody knows what you’re referring to.

And it is in such a situation that the aurochs appear, for a little girl in this one-act play that would eventually become a movie.

She lives in the Louisiana bayou, outside the protection of the levees of New Orleans.  And a hurricane is fast approaching.

At school, she is learning about the way our prehistoric ancestors did art—by cave paintings.  They painted depictions of these extinct—but real—animals called aurochs.  She is taught that the cave people wanted to preserve something of their life…so they painted it into the earth.

In a small child’s mind, though, what once lived but is now extinct becomes the stuff of fairy tale and folklore, of myth and of magic.

And so as the storm bears down on her impoverished, unprotected home, she sees not just rain or thunderclouds coming for her, but these beasts of lore, coming as a herd to hurt her, to consume her.  Until the storm comes.  And in her imagination, they protect her instead.  And she survives.

It is, in my entire life, one of the most creative and moving ways to depict divine intervention.  Why would divine, mythical creatures be there for her in her need?  Because she dreamed it so.

This is a four-week sermon series that takes us up to the week of Thanksgiving.  Thematically, this new series does a lot, I think, to build upon our previous sermon series, “They Like Jesus, But Not The Church.”  That previous series was based on peoples’ impressions of us that they are sometimes afraid to share, and this series is based largely on peoples’ questions for us that they—or even we—are sometimes afraid to ask, perhaps because church is seen sometimes as a place not to ask questions, only to receive answers.  But, in order to receive the right answers to begin with, we must start by asking the right questions.  And one of my fundamental, non-negotiable beliefs about what church is, and what church should be, is that we must be in the business of encouraging people to ask the right questions, the tough questions.  Not the clichés, not the easy answers that you can recite the same way a child recites their favorite McDonald’s order.  So for this and the following three weeks, we’ll be looking at some of those big theological questions, guided by the book “Banned Questions about the Bible,” which is edited by Disciples journalist and blogger Christian Piatt.  We began with the question, “Is there a right or wrong way to read the Bible?”  Last week, the questions got even tougher: “How can God be all-loving yet allows people to be thrown into hell?”  And today, the questions don’t let up, as the theme for this week’s message is: “Why doesn’t God intervene in a disaster?”

As Christian Piatt writes in “Banned Questions about the Bible,” in part:

I remember how repulsed and angry I felt when I heard preachers claiming that the catastrophic floods in New Orleans were a consequence of the city’s immoral living practices.  It seemed such a medieval, judgmental way of thinking, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

But on a much smaller, more benign scale, many of us do something similar on a regular basis without knowing it.  Ever heard someone say something like, “everything happens for a reason?”… (But) some things are simply senseless, meaning human logic can’t untangle them.  But that’s just it: we get tripped up when we try to apply human reasons to God.  In doing that, it seems we’re trying to stuff God into a pretty small box.

That’s a profound truth—trying to apply human reasons to God usually gets us nowhere—and it’s one that God has to teach us over and over and over again in Scripture.  God puts it in black and white language to Moses, saying, “My ways are not your ways.”  Jesus says in John’s Gospel, “You weigh (or judge) by human standards, but I judge no person.”

But nowhere else—save maybe for Jonah—is there an entire book of Scripture devoted almost entirely to that singular lesson: that what we want and what God wants are seldom the same thing.  As the old saying goes, “When God wants to punish us, He answers our prayers.”

And so enter Habakkuk.  We really know very little about the prophet himself, except that his career, like those of many of the Old Testament prophets, coincided with the rise of the Chaldean dynasty, the dynasty of Babylonian kings who would go on to conquer Judah, and that singular event alone would be enough to cause the prophet’s concern, worry, and fear, and not without reason—the Babylonian invasion and subsequent exile from the Holy Land would set the Israelites back decades compared to their surrounding kingdoms.

We don’t quite have an equivalent situation to point to—unlike the Israelites, we live in a superpower country, about as protected as one can be, thanks to the veterans who are honored on this day.

Instead, probably the closest equivalent is, in fact, a natural disaster, because it can cause death and destruction and loss of faith, but just like Habakkuk, foreshadowing the coming of the Babylonians and the destruction they would wreak, so too do we now receive advance warning—weeks in advance—of many natural disasters.  We have “seasons” for tornados and hurricanes, we can detect tremors along the Pacific Ocean fault lines and predict tsunamis, and while we have not mastered nature, we at least have some inkling of when to get out of its way.

But just because we can flee such destruction doesn’t make it feel right.  We cast about for answers still, which leads some of us to say that such disaster is divine punishment upon us for, I don’t know, dancing or R-rated movies or the Giants sweeping the World Series.  I tend not to buy into that, and neither does Habakkuk.

Because you can boil the entire argument between Habakkuk and God into one single question, “Is such destruction ever fair?”  And God, in His own way, gives Habakkuk, in chapter two of this three-chapter dialogue, his answer: that this doesn’t make God any less present, or any less sovereign, and that, as one of my commentators put it: “…in his own way and at the proper time, he will deal with the wicked(ness).  In the meantime—in fact, at all times—the righteous shall live by their faith, a persistent, patient, and tenacious adherence to the instructions and promises of God.”

Again, there’s that little notion poking its head out—in God’s own way, and in God’s good time.  But if God is meant to be steadfast in this story, Habbakuk is, like almost all other Biblical heroes, entirely dynamic.  Just as Moses and Paul were murderers in search of redemption when called by God, just as David was an adulterer and Jacob a liar, Habakkuk is still called by God despite his doubts, despite being defined by his angst more than probably any other prophet save, again, for Jonah.  God calls Habakkuk regardless, and reminds him as God has for so many of His servants, that as the writer Graham Greene put it, we cannot “conceive the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.”  In other words—we cannot comprehend God’s own being.

But, why the change of heart?  How can Habakkuk go from sort of the before guy to the after guy--you know, the late-night infomercials hawking weight loss or spray-on hair--the before and after guys.  This is what we're seeing from Habakkuk.  He goes from screaming at God in anger and frustration, “How long must I cry out before you listen?  How long must I cry out before you save?” to, quite literally singing for joy—note that the book ends with the instruction, “to the music leader.”  From screaming to singing, from anger to ecstasy, Habakkuk’s transformation defies description.  And it is, because like a little girl, conjured up by a dramatist in an obscure one-act play, Habakkuk dreamed it so.

Because what Habakkuk receives isn’t simply an answer—it’s a vision.  Chapter three begins with him actually envisioning the God who has just answered his prayers of anger and frustration.  It makes his faith in God complete once more, even if his idea of God, like ours, never will be.  This is the Zen part of it all—it made Habakkuk secure in the incompleteness of his own notions of divinity, and that security is why he can now praise God even in the worst of times and the most calamitous of natural disasters back then—a famine.

And so it is not that Habakkuk’s God actively creates punishment and destruction…it is that God is present in it.  Habakkuk had begun this book so distraught he wasn’t even demanding intervention anymore—he needed to know that God would listen, and that God would speak, and that God would uplift before we even cross that bridge of intervention.

And God did all those things.  It was enough for Habakkuk.  It was enough for his faith that causes him to tread, as he sings, upon great, great heights.  Let that be enough for us as well.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

November 11, 2012