You go out to save your people. For the salvation of your anointed you smashed the head of the house of wickedness, laying bare the foundation up to the neck. Selah 14 You pierce the head of his warrior with his own spear. His warriors are driven off, those who take delight in oppressing us, those who take pleasure in secretly devouring the poor. 15 You make your horses tread on the sea; turbulent waters foam. 16 I hear and my insides tremble. My lips quiver at the sound. Rottenness enters my bones. I tremble while I stand, while I wait for the day of distress to come against the people who attack us.
17 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 are cut off from the pen, and there are no cattle in the stalls; 18 I will rejoice in the Lord. I will rejoice in the God of my deliverance. 19 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. (Common English Bible)
“Treading on the Heights:
A Lent Alongside Habakkuk,” Week Six
The
slopes of Aoraki/Mount Cook jut upward among the New Zealand alps on the south
island of the faraway country. It served
as a home base for Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the first two people to summit
Mount Everest, to train for that historic 1953 climb, and it continues to serve
as a public and popular park for hikers and mountain climbers alike.
At
the very start of the climb, though, there is, at the end of a short but steep
offshoot of the main trail, a monument in the shape of the mountain itself—a broad
stone base sharpening up to a pointed peak—that bears a mess of plaques on
nearly every side of it. These plaques
bear the names of each person who has died on Aoraki/Mount Cook, and there are
dozens of them, with an array of diverse names reflecting the diversity of the
people themselves: people from all over the world, but who were brought
together by one common finality: where they died.
This
monument stands as a tribute to a mountain whose Anglo name of course comes
from the explorer Captain Cook, but whose indigenous Maori name, Aoraki, was
traditionally rendered into English as “the Cloud Piercer,” for its
unparalleled height on the island: it could, and does, pierce the clouds that
surround it, and those who stand on its summit are treading on great heights
indeed.
And
they do so—and Carrie and I were able to do so, not on the summit, but on
Aoraki’s slopes—even though there is such a strong symbol of lamentation at the
beginning of their path, a symbol that serves as a reminder of our most urgent
limitation, our deepest inhibition, and our most inescapable reality: that we
are all mortal.
Yet
still, we tread upon Aoraki’s heights.
Just as Habakkuk did, as he finishes his book, by recognizing the
genuinely lethal harm that lays before him and his people, and that not even
that will ever prevent him from exulting in the God of his salvation.
This
is the last installment of a sermon series for the now rapidly-ending 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 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. Then we heard the
prophet’s clearly anguished reply to this plan of God’s—he didn’t like it at
all, and he still had difficulty grasping God’s greater intent in everything
that was happening.
So
God replied once more, and in that reply—a harangue, really— and God does not
let up, tearing into Jerusalem for its excesses—drinking its fill of dishonor
while also making one’s people drunk—and for its idolatry, but in truth, excess
and idolatry go hand in hand.
Last
week, we finally arrived at Habakkuk’s ending reply to this condemnation from
God, and it fills the entire third and final chapter of the prophet’s
book. It also contains the pivot point
in which the prophet finally moves from lamentation to reassurance and
rejoicing in God, and that rejoicing culminates in this final song of praise
that the prophet sings, and that we read, here today.
It
is a song that I have preached on a few different times now, most memorably for
me on the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks, which
fell on a Sunday—the Sunday, in fact, before I officially began my ministry here
in 2011. I try not to preach so
frequently on any given text out of fear of consigning myself to my “canon with
the canon,” those collection of texts and stories that tend to speak to each
person the most, that they know the best, and that they may spend the most time
with at the expense of the entirety of Scripture.
But
I must confess, it is awfully hard to resist.
Here we have spent the past five weeks reading in fine detail a
genuinely anguished and profound back-and-forth between God and one of God’s
servants, and that sort of pushback to God really is unique among the Hebrew
Bible prophets. Habakkuk helps humanize
them for me. He helps me see something
of their own relationship with God even as they push me—sometimes extremely
hard—to be a better believer and pastor.
In
other words, Habakkuk helps me to see a bit of the person behind the name, in
the same manner that I wished were the case when I ran my hands along the
plaques of the monument upon Aoraki.
Because what Habakkuk is describing is really a very similar thing: even
if the trees and fields produce no harvest, even if there are no more animals
left in the flocks, even if I am so weak that I feel rotten on the inside and I
tremble as I stand, even when that manner of calamity strikes, yet still,
Habakkuk says, I shall rejoice in the Lord.
Even
when I am faced with the very evidence of the death that has been wrought upon
the people who have come before me on this paths, yet still I am meant to
rejoice in the Lord, and to exult in the God of my deliverance. It is a simple message, a simple truth, but a
difficult one to always remember, and an especially difficult one to always
live out.
Because
really, fair-weather faith, like fair-weather friendship, is easy. It takes little to be grateful to God when
things are going well—although sometimes, sadly, we manage to mess up even that—but
to be grateful to God when things are looking the worst they have ever
been? That takes real faith. That takes a real connection, a real
relationship, with the divine.
In
the face of your own limitations, or the limitations of your own circumstances,
to which are you most liable to reach for first? The madness and hatred of Satan, the
adversary, or the exultation and rejoicing in our God? Are we able to still see where God is in our
lives when our lives have been brought low, or do we even bother trying to do
see? And do we succumb to the
temptations of giving up on ourselves, on our world, or on our God rather than
resist those destructive allures?
Put another way, are we able to focus on celebration rather than limitation, on celebrating God rather than giving up to our own mortal limitations?
These
choices take place amid a backdrop of faith—faith in the life God gives to us,
and in the renewal of that life that was incarnated in the resurrected Christ
whose empty tomb we celebrate exactly one week from today.
So
rather than the death that our limitations lead us to, Habakkuk instead recalls
the renewal God leads us to, and he celebrates it, as well he should, as well
he ought.
Which
means that the metamorphosis of the prophet is complete. He recognizes the evil in the world, but he
does not forget the good. He recognizes
that the evil is not what God would have wanted, or wished for, but that in
spite of our own evils, God still created us to be good.
That’s
an incredible thing to remember, and really, an incredible thing to ever
forget. But I know I have on
occasion. You may have too at some point
your life. I know that looking at the memorials
of people who have been taken, from Aoraki to the World War I memorial in my
hometown of Kansas City, to Yad Vashem in Israel, or any number of memorials to those we lose violently and unjustly, I can very, very easily
forget that God made me, and us, for good.
I
would imagine that Habakkuk had probably forgotten that singular truth as
well. But he has since recovered
it. And with that one great truth in
hand, he is once again able to celebrate the God who is so good in the first
place. No matter the scarcity, no matter
the extremity, no matter the manner and form of death that may be put in his
place, Habakkuk rejoices in God and exults in the deliverance that God has
promised him, and, by extension, has promised to each and every one of us.
I
do not know if I will ever always be so profound, so poignant, so deep, in my
praises to God as Habakkuk is here. I
hope I am. But in truth, I myself have
not faced down the sorts of evil that Habakkuk is presently facing down. Maybe you have. But I have not had the quaking, demoralizing
experience of looking into my own crystal ball and foreseeing only exile and
death for me and for mine.
I
hope I never have to. I hope you never
have to, and that if you have, you never have to again. But I also hope that your faith
is such that it could deliver you even through an experience such as that.
It
was so for Habakkuk, one of the great wrestlers with God of all the Bible. Because he, like us, is a child of God, and that is no empty title.
And so may
it be so for you as well. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
March
20, 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment