Then the Lord answered me and said, Write a vision, and make it plain upon a tablet so that a runner can read it. 3 There is still a vision for the appointed time; it testifies to the end; it does not deceive. If it delays, wait for it; for it is surely coming; it will not be late. 4 Some people’s desires are truly audacious; they don’t do the right thing. But the righteous person will live honestly. 5 Moreover, wine betrays an arrogant man. He doesn’t rest. He opens his jaws like the grave; like death, he is never satisfied. He gathers all nations to himself and collects all peoples for himself.
6 Won’t everyone tell parables about him or mocking poems concerning him? They will say: Doom to the one who multiplies what doesn’t belong to him and who increases his own burden. How long? 7 Won’t they suddenly rise up to bite you? Those who frighten you will awaken; you will become plunder for them. 8 Since you yourself have plundered many nations, all the rest of the peoples will plunder you because of the human bloodshed and the violence done to the earth, to every village, and to all its inhabitants. 9 Doom to the one making evil gain for his own house, for putting his own nest up high, for delivering himself from the grasp of calamity. 10 You plan shame for your own house, cutting off many peoples and sinning against your own life. 11 A stone will cry out from a village wall, and a tree branch will respond. 12 Pity the one building a city with bloodshed and founding a village with injustice. 13 Look, isn’t this from the Lord of heavenly forces? Peoples grow weary from making just enough fire; nations become tired for nothing. 14 But the land will be full of the knowledge of the Lord’s glory, just as water covers the sea. (Common English Bible)
“Treading on the Heights:
A Lent Alongside Habakkuk,” Week Three
Down
in Phoenix, Arizona, something mighty interesting is a-brewin’, but that
something has its roots right here in Washington state, just a couple of hours
north of us on I-5.
The
Trinity Church is a brand-new church plant in Phoenix that is led in part by
Mark Driscoll—the same pastor who co-founded the Mars Hill Church in the
Seattle area twenty years ago in 1996, grew it to fifteen satellite campuses as
its main teaching pastor, and then saw it all come crashing down around him
amid numerous accusations of abuses of power, misuses of church monies, shunning
of former church members, and a preaching message that denigrated women and
GLBTQ Christians.
Driscoll
announced his resignation from Mars Hill in the fall of 2014, and less than two
months later, Mars Hill announced that it was closing its doors for good.
Now,
let it be said that I am all about providing (I hope) relevant and engaging
preaching. But when a church shuts down
less than two months after its *only* permanent teaching pastor resigns, you
can be reasonably sure that what was being worshiped there was neither God or
Christ.
Back
in Phoenix, the website of Driscoll’s new church plant states he has taken this
past year-plus “to learn, repent, grow, heal, and meet with many people
involved” from the pain he left behind at Mars Hill. And Lord knows we love a good redemption
story. And despite my criticism, that is
what would have been great to be able to share with you. But when one journalist at The Daily Beast reached out to
multiple former Mars Hill members and elders, each one who replied “said they
hadn’t heard from him since his resignation, and they didn’t know of anyone
else among them who had.”
It
is incredibly painful to go through spiritual abuse—and I know this from those
of you who have gone through life in an extremely strict or fundamentalist
church before coming here—and if you can, imagine a God who sees an entire
nation full of such abuse, and an unwillingness by those in power to actually
repent, heal, and become better leaders of their people.
Only
then, I think, can we begin to grasp the true depths of the searing indictment
of the people that God hands down to Habakkuk in this second chapter of the
prophet’s book.
This
is a new sermon series for the church season of Lent, which commemorates the 40
days and nights that Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness and being tempted by
Satan, and the season takes us all the way up to Good Friday, Holy Saturday,
and then Easter Sunday.
Traditionally,
Lent is a penitential, even penal season: it is when we are supposed to give
something up, but in more orthodox settings, those fasts are much more
extensive—daylong entire fasts, or fasting from multiple different foods for
the entirety of Lent, not just beer and chocolate.
In
that wrestling with penitence and punishment, then, Habakkuk serves as a vivid
and sympathetic guide. We know very
little about him personally except that he served as a prophet during the
twilight of the kingdom of Judah, after the capable and righteous king Josiah
dies in 609 BCE, it is less than twenty-five years to the catastrophic sacking
of Jerusalem by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, and in between those two
events is likely when Habakkuk is prophesying.
Habakkuk,
though, is really more conversing with God—arguing with God, really—rather than
prophesying to us, which is what makes him such a compelling character, at
least, to me. We began by going through
the prophet’s first back-and-forth with God, about the injustice the prophet
sees around him and God’s response that the Babylonians are being roused to
attack Judah. Last week, we heard the
prophet’s clearly anguished reply to this plan of God’s—he didn’t like it at
all.
This
week, God replies once more—and it is a reply long enough that we will have to
cover it in two weeks, this week and next, and yet again, God shows Habakkuk
incredible patience by taking the prophet even deeper into God’s thinking and
way of being and seeing humanity.
The
trouble is, how God sees humanity at that point in time is negative to say the
least—extremely negative. God basically
says to Habakkuk, “Okay, I’m going to tell you this again, and make sure you
get it right, every single word of it, so that someone else could read it,
because this is important: You.
Are. The. Worst.”
It’s
hard to know where to begin in this screed: multiplying what doesn’t belong to
you (that is, stealing), plundering many nations (again with the stealing),
cutting off peoples and founding villages on injustices…all of this makes the
people weary, God says, from making just enough fire.
Just
enough fire for what? To keep warm at
night or to send all of Jerusalem to the ground in a blaze of looting and
sacking that is to come as Nebuchadnezzar II prepares for war against Judah?
Or
just enough fire to keep yourself from completely shivering in the cold, but
not enough to actually exude the warmth and light that God demands?
Or that the people themselves are the fire, seen as nothing more than kindling to be thrown into the bonfire of altar sacrifices to oneself rather than one's own God?
Making
just enough fire is what the church has sentenced itself in many congregations,
in many places, to, and we, like God, should have had enough of it a long time
ago.
Church
was never meant to be a cult, a place where your deep-seated hunger and thirst
for faith could or should be taken advantage of.
Church
was never meant to be a country club, a place where your want to remain in your
comfort zone and hear feel-good messages about chewing with your mouth closed
was catered to.
And
church, like Jerusalem, was never meant to be a place where people were meant
to be content with only making just enough fire to get by, or to be thrown into the fire, no, but to be on
fire, to be passionate, to seek God not simply for one hour a week, but as a
lifelong journey towards their redemption.
We
lose sight of that sometimes, I think.
We forget just how bad the people of, say, Habakkuk’s day, or of a
church like Mars Hill may really have had it spiritually, and economically as
well. We have this amnesia that doesn’t
want us to remember just how bad we can make things when we really put our
minds to it.
Israel,
though, was not like us. The
heartbreaking memory of going into exile in Babylon stayed with them for
centuries, to the point that Babylon is cited in the New Testament separately
by three different authors: Matthew in his recitation of Jesus’s ancestry, by
Stephen the martyr in his impassioned defense in Acts 7 by Luke, and most
famously by John of Patmos in Revelation.
They
did not forget the bad in favor of reaching only for the good. They remembered it, vividly.
We
may need a little of that ourselves, to remember just how bad some of our
neighbors, our friends, our loved ones, strangers, and yes, maybe even people
sitting here with us, have had a time of it in their lives—not to pity them, oh
no, but to respect them rather than to dismiss them.
We
need to end our practices that God enumerates to Habakkuk here—our building up
our own assets through stealing and plundering, maybe not in the manner of a
mugger in an alley, but certainly in the manner of taking advantage of the slave
labor and exploitation of others. We
need to stop our all-too-strong willingness to build our cities and our villages
on bloodshed and injustice.
That
doesn’t sound like us, does it? None of
us killed another person for our lands or our houses.
But
that’s not the point. God knows that
most of the Israelites themselves did not build their homes on bloodshed and
injustice, because their homes are so threadbare and inadequate that they were
more apt to be built in spite of bloodshed and injustice, not because of them.
But
that does not mean God wants us to tolerate such pain inflicted on others by
the people around us, and the leaders who govern us. God does not look kindly on those of us who
know, in their heart of hearts, just how deep the wounds of the world are and
then shrug and say, “Not my job.”
Part
of being Christian is giving up the right to draw up your own job description,
and to allow God to poke you and prod you in the direction God wants you to go,
rather than simply you want to go.
Make
no mistake—you can still go the way you want to go. The leaders of Judah did.
But
we far too often make the mistake of assuming that what we want and what God
wants is the same thing. That is the
mistake, I reckon, that Mark Driscoll made, again and again at Mars Hill, and
that many of us pastors make in different ways, including even me at times.
Truthfully,
we all do. We are not in tune with God’s
will 100% of the time; if we were, we would be living in heaven, not on earth.
But
that does not mean that we should not try to improve our attention to God’s
will in the meanwhile, for we will have made the world, God’s creation and
kingdom, a better place for our having done so.
Habakkuk
is slowly getting there, to that ultimate conclusion. May we arrive there with him.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
February
28, 2016
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