Repudiators of merit and heralds of God's Grace!

      Given some of the nonsense coming out of the mouths of self-describing Christians, we might do well to focus our attention on Jeremiah this morning and remind ourselves of the roles of false prophets and ends that God pronounces for them.  Given the anxieties of the world, I suppose we should not be surprised.  But I have to admit the focus shocks me, and some of the prophesies leave me gobsmacked.  One politician was on television, Friday I think, exhorting her supporters that it was her privilege to cause Jesus to return.  Something about her policies and her words were meant to hasten His return and judgment Day.  We wonder why people hate Christians?  For my part, I could not change the channel fast enough.  I had a couple visitors in the office who expressed that I needed to rally y’all to support a particular party because I was risking your souls by allowing you to vote according to your own conscience (as if I can MAKE any of y’all do anything!).  I even received a wonderful mailer about the end times, how some guy has figured out the time of the eschaton (yet again) and in spite of Jesus’ reminder that it is not for us to know the times.  Good, you are snorting, so I am guessing you do not need to be vaccinated against that skubala.  If you do, though, feel free to swing by or call me.  We can commiserate together and then figure out our roles in that mess.

     Instead, I was drawn to the Gospel passage for us today.  I am hoping that those who need the vaccination against the nonsense of the false prophets and politicians of our day well be given a firm foundation to resist the allure of such false teachings.  Better still, I hope all of us will be reminded of our where our focus should be as we head toward the end of the Church and calendar year and prepare ourselves for Advent and the Incarnation.

     Our reading from Luke today is rather short, especially when compared to our selection from Jeremiah.  It is only six verses, but the spiritual wedgie might be third degree!  Jesus tells the parable to those who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded other with contempt.  Right off the bat, we are warned that only those who trust and themselves and loathe others need to pay attention.  Of course, a quick glance around or personal inventory will remind us all that we all find ourselves in need of this teaching from time to time.  Some of us more than others!  Don’t despair.  God is not shocked.  And Jesus knew we would sin, and still He loved us to see our salvation through.

     Human beings are well-versed in creating in-crowds and marginalized people, us and them.  Think of the war in Ukraine.  How do the Ukrainians view the Russians now?  Orcs.  Most of us realize that the Russian soldiers have no idea why they are in Ukraine fighting their cousins.  Now, with the recent call up’s of those who could not flee the country, there are 2-300,000 more soldiers who do not want to be fighting deployed to the front lines.  We understand why Ukrainians hate the invasion.  We know that on some level they understand that the guilt falls on Putin.  But should they be thinking of most Russians as orcs?  Not if they are faithful Christians.  Those Russian soldiers are human beings, too.  While there are some evil soldiers who like stealing and raping and destroying, most just want to live.  But, all are dehumanized so that no one feels remorse about their deaths.

     It’s harder to tap into that in America.  I learned pretty quickly that people in Tennessee like to pick on people in Alabama a lot.  I guess, thanks to college football, that’s a rivalry of sorts.  When I lived in Iowa, we sort of had a rivalry with Missouri and Wisconsin and Missouri.  Since I was not from there, it was hard to become emotionally invested in the rivalries, though I laughed at the toothbrush joke.  Haven’t heard it?  Why don’t we call a toothbrush a teethbrush?  Because it was invented in Missouri.  Take your time.  It’s not that subtle.

     I grew up in West Virginia where our big rivals for status in the United States are Mississippi and Louisiana.  Imagine living in a place where you get excited you are 49^th or, dare to dream, 48^th in whatever ranking.  But football does seem to contribute to the creation of “others.”  Marshall fans and WVU fans do not get along.  At all.  It’s like an Alabama-Auburn hatred or a Florida-Georgia loathing.  It’s just that nobody else cares because, well, sometimes we are 49^th and sometimes we are 50^th.  I suppose we did export a feud, though.  Everybody knows about the Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s, right?  We love to believe we are the good guys and the others, whoever the others happen to be, are contemptible.  Hmm.  That sounds like political speech, doesn’t it?  It is and it is not.  The issue is the sin of pride or the virtue of humility, if we want to speak positively about this.  But sin touches every interaction in this world, be they social or political or economic or cultural or anything else.

     In any event, I share all that because Jesus’ example will not hit us the way it would have hit his or Luke’s audiences.  Jesus tells us there were two men, one a Pharisee and one a tax collector.  Pharisees would seem a modern oxymoron.  They were the religious lawyers of the day.  Most of us seem to think lawyers are anything but religious, it might surprise us to learn that the Pharisees were studious articulators of the torah.  Now, in theory, we are Anglicans, and Anglicans have an appreciation of canon lawyers in our tradition.  We don’t in America, but we have people like Hilary and Oliver who can tell us about them from the motherland.  In the beginning, Pharisees helped Israel figure out disputes.  Those who were judged to be closer to God’s intention were deemed righteous by the courts.  Note, you could have been going sideways to God at 90 degrees and be more righteous than someone running away at 180 degrees.  Neither, though, would be in a relationship with God which we would call intimate.  Human beings being human beings, though, Pharisees eventually decided God needed their help.  As one commentator I read put it, they created, at least in their minds, the shield around the torah which kept Israel from breaking the Covenant with God.  The idea was noble.  If you keep our instructions, you will never run afoul of God’s instructions.  But, thanks to Jesus’ interactions with them in all the Gospels, we understand that sin of pride grabbed them by the throat.  They elevated themselves and their role in society to the role of God’s defenders, as if He needed anything from any human being.  While the intention was, perhaps, noble in the beginning, it certainly morphed as time passed.  Eventually, the Pharisees created so many shield laws that they earned Jesus’ condemnation for creating an oppressive system rather than leading people to the worship of God.  The fruit of their sin in illustrated in the Pharisee of our story today.

     The Pharisee begins with what we would call the formula for a prayer of praise of thanksgiving.  Those who study the psalms can talk to you during the coffee hour, but a prayer of praise or a prayer of thanksgiving is mostly self-evident.  The prayer is meant to praise God or thank God or both for fulfilling a need of or delivering the one praying from danger or threat.  To give us all a bit of a spiritual wedgie this morning, it’s the kind of prayer we all promise to make if God will get us out of our current predicament but seldom follow through praying.  Ouch?  I see the squirms.

     Such prayers are meant, as we would expect, to focus on the blessings or deliverance that God has provided.  More specifically, the prayers are meant to focus on God Himself.  In two short verses, though, the Pharisee makes it clear that God is not the focus of his life.  Five times he uses the pronoun “ego.”  Verbs in Greek, like many other languages, has the pronoun included in the verb.  The use of the pronoun occurs when one wants to emphasize that pronoun.  This Pharisee’s grammar makes it clear to those hearing Jesus’ teaching or reading Luke’s account that the subject of the Pharisee’s prayer is himself.

     We think it a horrible prayer, of course, and we love to assume that it is a problem for people then or for “other” people, but it is often one of those prayers that is hidden in the heart.  One example is the “There but for the grace of God go I.”  I am certain that none of us present have ever said that with pride in our hearts, but have we ever heard the prayer and wondered whether the person saying it was thankful to God for the blessings He has provided them or pleased in themselves?  To cut a bit closer to the bone, what about pronouncements involving “those people”?  We serve a God who instructs us that He created everyone wonderfully and in His image; how quick are we, though, to draw borders, to label those different as “other,” and to treat them as anything but a brother or sister?  And what of our treatment in the Church of each other’s denominational affiliations?  This group mocks that group, and that group mocks another group.  And even within our denomination, look at the “those people” discussions. 

     As I named earlier, the sin is pride.  We elevate ourselves, and those things that we value, to be equal to God or the things that God loves.  To be sure, I have been blunt.  Many who have this in their heart know they have to be careful in how they make their statements.  But it is a condition known by them and God.  They are trusting in their own sufficiency, of their perception that God needs them, that Jesus died for others, but not themselves.

     Against the prayer of the Pharisee stands the tax collector.  Tax collectors were loathed in the ANE, but in Judea especially.  Think politicians with soldiers under their control.  Tax collectors got their licenses by bidding on the areas.  There was lots of bribery involved in getting the choicest regions.  Of course, it really was a license to steal with soldiers to enforce the theft.  Tax collectors recouped their bribes by making residents and businesses pay more taxes.  If you protested too much, you got the point . . . of a spear.  Think modern politicians + traitor + control of a military unit, and thank God neither party’s politicians control armies themselves!

     The tax collector knows his standing before God and cannot bring himself even to look up at God in the Temple.  He asks God to be merciful to him, a sinner.  That’s it.  No flowery speeches.  No “don’t hate the player hate the game” speeches.  He simple asks God, of His mercy, to be merciful to his sinful self.

     No doubt the crowd expected Jesus to praise the Pharisee.  After all, the Pharisee fasts twice a week and gives a tenth of all his income.  The tax collector works for the oppressing government and is a known cheat and thief.  We, of course, know how Jesus often turns expectations on their heads.  Using a word with loaded meaning to us, Jesus says the tax collector went down to his home justified rather than the other.

     There are a couple reversals of expectations that fall beneath our radar.  The first is that Jesus describes a situation which caused the Pharisees to come into being way back when.  Two men are acting differently, who is closer to God’s will?  Notice, Jesus does not say either are sinless or holy or anything close to what God calls them to be.  Both should be glorifying God in the lives.  But, by comparison, the tax collector is acting and praying closer to God’s instruction than the Pharisee.  I bet some in Jesus’ audience snorted at the irony.  I am certain that Pharisees added this parable to the pile to fuel their hatred of Him and their determination to put Him to death, a trial which will see all their rules, and God’s instructions, set aside to get the desire result.

     The second big, and more important to us, reversal is the reminder that “the other” is loved by God, which means God is willing to extend to “the other” mercy and grace just as He extends them to us.  Neither we nor “the other” are deserving of God’s grace or blessings or anything good, but it is His good pleasure to be merciful to those who trust in Him, to those who seek Him, to those who know they are insufficient for their salvation or deliverance.  So often, we long to be compared relatively to others.  I give more time.  I give more money.  I pray more frequently.  I come to church more often.  We think that because we do things “more” than others, we are “more valuable” to God.  The great reversal is the reminder that all are equally valued, equally loved, by God.  God’s standard is God’s standard.  It is an absolute, not a relative value.  And to build on last week’s reminder, the more we wrestle with God the greater the danger that, because He is not dislocating our hip—to extend that analogy—the more He must value us and the things we value.

     How do we tell the difference in ourselves?  How do we navigate the challenge of falling prey to sin and to the world’s chorus that some are just better than others?  The highlight of the passage provides us with a great evaluator.  As one commentator blunted reminded me this week, pride preaches and teaches merit; God calls for compassion.  How do we respond to “the others” in life.  Do we tell them they need to work harder, to be better, to suck it up?  Or do we offer a helping hand or acknowledge their pain and their hurt?

     I know the danger of such a reminder today.  It is easy in light of all the blessings most of us have in this parish and in this area to have become convinced of one’s merit.  The world’s chorus is really a seductive siren’s song.  But against that cacophony of merit sings the Gospel of Christ.  None of us deserved God’s love.  None of us deserved the blessings He offers those who claim Him as Lord of their life.  But it is His good pleasure to deliver and redeem all those who claim Him Lord, all those who have died to self in the Sacrament we call Baptism, all those who come to this Table seeking the heavenly refreshment necessary to go back out into that world to do the work that He has given us to do, of His mercy!  That, my friends, is His promise.  And that we might know He has the power to redeem all our sufferings and all our sins, He raised the Teacher on that Third morning, teaching us that not even death can keep Him from fulfilling His promises.

     And what if, listening to me or, more significantly, listening to God you have discerned you are an articulator of merit in your life, a proponent of pride in your life?  Is there anything you can do?  Of course!  Our sins do not surprise Him.  Even when He was hanging on that Cross He know our sins and follies and willed Himself to stay there so that we, in turn, might be delivered and justified through Him.  And so, in that wonderful Sacrament where He promises to deliver us, He instructs us to repent and return to Him, to come again to this Table seeking His nourishment, and to once again be reminded of His unfailing love for us, that we might be fit humble heralds of His grace and His mercy, which alone truly delivers and redeems, to the world!

 

In His Peace,

Brian†

On leprosy, baptism, pink skin, and newness of life in Him!

      Nearly all my conversations this week were in and about the wider Church, which makes it challenging for me to preach a sermon on readings that speaks into your lives this week.  That is not to say that God was not in those conversations.  One, in particular, was memorable for the fact that the lady could not identify the heroine in our reading from 2 Kings today.  This visitor was mad that we respond with Lord and Him and call God Father in our liturgy.  I was clearly a misogynist and led a bunch of misogynists in worship thinking that God was a misogynist.  Good, y’all are laughing, especially the ladies.  I tried explaining that I hoped no one at Advent would ever think, let alone speak, the idea that God hates women.  I told her I knew we had some “slow” men, but all had figured that lesson out for themselves thanks to their moms, and wives, daughters, and granddaughters.  Ok, ladies, let’s be careful we don’t break ribs with those elbows you are using right now.

     We are laughing, but we need to understand there is a segment of the Church that really and truly believes that women are the source of evil in the world and that women are inferior to men and that God declared/ordained it so.  The lady who entered my office was clearly a victim of such teachings.  She was not hearing what God was saying to her, but she was sorely wounded.

     For my part, I tried my best.  I laughed that she had come in to visit and chew me out given this week’s readings.  She did not get the joke, so I showed her the story and asked her who the hero was.  Her first time through, she told me Naaman.  The second time through, she told me Elisha.  The third time through she asked, a bit on the irritated side, if I meant God.  After a couple more readings, I pointed out to her that the hero of the story was the slave girl.  Her faith, her confidence in God’s faithfulness, causes the conquering general to recognize the truth that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel.  Our walk-in, of course, was not having it.  If the girl was so important to God, we would know her name.  If she was so important to God, God would never have let her be enslaved in the first place.

     I recognized in her passionate anger that I was not going to get through to this lady.  I reminded her that sinful men can be misogynistic, but that God most certainly was not.  She was created in His image every bit as me or any other man in her life.  When men use gender to beat down women, especially in the Church, it is not of God.  But again, at Advent, I was certain she would discover women who were certain of their worth in God’s eyes, who had zero qualms about telling misogynistic men where they could go or what they could do with their attitudes, both in the wider word and wider Church.  I see the nods and a couple giggling shoulders.

     I invited her to join us for worship.  I invited her to join us for the Bible studies, to be a Berean, to use Larry’s exhortation on Sunday mornings. 

     After some time, she left.  I am quite certain she still thinks I and you think God is misogynistic.  All I can hope is that I scattered seeds or tilled the earth in her life.  God will see to the harvest.

     Another exchange that day, though, convinced me I should probably address the sin of misogyny so that we would all be prepared to engage it in the world and Church around us and spiritually vaccinated against it.  One of my groups was defending a particular preacher against his sins of adultery.  Notice I say sins and not sin.  This particular preacher had multiple affairs.  But it was not his fault, according to the group.  It was the fault of the women who had a spirit of Jezebel in their hearts.  Yes, your laughter indicates you know how well that went.  If you do not understand, the group was blaming the women for tempting the man of God, that he fell because they wanted to destroy his ministry.

     Tell me again how we in modernity are so much more smart and advanced and whatever . . . I hope, if nothing else in my time with you, y’all have learned that the upward spiral of humanity is a horrible and destructive myth.  Worse, it is a lie.  But that is a sermon for another day.

     So, I felt called to preach on 2 Kings, but what new lesson was there for Adventers?  I felt pretty sure that most of you would be able to identify the hero of the story.  I convinced myself that some, if not all, would understand the world’s effort to fight God and His revelation.  Naaman, as a conquering general, would have a bit of an ego.  His country, Syria, has defeated Israel.  That means his god has defeated Israel’s God in the heavens.  If Naaman believed that his god won the cosmic battle that was reflected on earth, Naaman would only be insufferable.  But what if Naaman believed his victory gave his god the power to defeat Yahweh?  Modern western Christians do not have a monopoly on believing God needs them to accomplish His purposes.

     For all that should have been boosting Naaman’s confidence, the little slave girl’s should have been shredded.  Her country has been defeated in battle, meaning Yahweh has lost.  Either she has been captured and carried off or her family has been killed.  Neither reinforces the idea that Yahweh cares about her, let alone has a covenant with her.  In any event, she is now a slave, forced to serve the wife of the man who led the enemy in battle.  If she knows her people’s history, she finds herself right back where her ancestors found themselves in Egypt.  But how does she respond?  “If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria!”

     Namaan eventually goes to Samaria to see the prophet, but not until he gets a letter of instruction from his king and until he gets a caravan together for a thank offering, if he needs to bribe this prophet in Samaria.  But despite all that, and even the method of his cure, Naaman knows that there is no God in all the earth except Israel.  Yet again we see God’s covenant with Abraham playing out in ways none would ever expect.  A slave girl?  Other servants?  An enemy of God’s people?

     But, y’all know all this.  It could have been a very short sermon today.  It could have been so short that you would be complaining you dragged yourselves out of a warm bed on a chilly fall morning for this, were I to have stopped there.

     As I said at the beginning, I was struggling to apply the sermon to our lives today in Nashville.  Everything I have said y’all knew to be true, but was there a real impact in how you will live your lives this week and going forward?

     So I plumbed the depths of my commentaries and histories.  Greg and Jeri are just happy I had to unpack more stuff from the painting and carpeting of the office this summer so they can get their bins back!  But I came across some sermons and teachings on this passage in the writings of our Church fathers.  I won’t bore you with the details of the teachings except to say I was stunned.  I have read this and the Gospel passage on the lepers for decades.  I have preached on both repeatedly.  But until I read our Church fathers, I never made the connection of the stories with the Sacrament of baptism.  Ah, I see, now I have your attention.  Lol.

     Just so we are clear, and so our medical folks understand I am not oversimplifying, leprosy in the Scriptures does not necessarily refer to what we name Hansen’s Disease.  Any skin disease or skin discoloration could be considered leprosy in the ANE.  Things like eczema or a rash or edema could have been considered leprosy by the priest.  Yes, I said priest.  Yes, there were doctors in the ANE, but leprosy was important for community and worship, so priests decided what was leprosy.  If a person was judged to have leprosy, they were sent out of the camp or village to avoid contaminating others.  A diagnosis of leprosy by the priest was doubly impactful on people.  Not only were you considered sick and possibly contagious, but you were not allowed to worship or enjoy fellowship.

     Since priests made the diagnosis, guess who declared people healthy?  Right!  The priests!  Now you know why Jesus tells the lepers in his story to go to the priests.  Leviticus 14 covers the ritual, but if one was judged as no longer leprous, there was a cleansing ritual to be observed.  A clean bird was killed over a clay jar filled with running, that is living, water.  Then, the healed individual was sprinkled seven times with the water and blood and declared clean, able to rejoin the community and the worship of God!  You are squeamish at the thought of a bird being killed, but God reminds us over and over in the OT that life is in the blood!  But back to our lepers . . .

     As one ancient commentator put it, we are all lepers before God.  By virtue of our sins, we live in broken relationship with Him and with our neighbors.  How are we restored?  Through the Body & Blood of Jesus Christ!  We make a public profession of our need for Jesus and of our willingness to live as He taught us, both by word and by example, right?  We promise to gather for the prayers and worship of God, right?  At this gathering, we pray, we are instructed, and we remind ourselves that Christ died for us, that God raised Him on the Third Day, and that He will One glorious Day return to judge humanity.  On that Day, we understand that we will be fully restored to God, that we will be able to see Him face to face and as a friend, not a stranger, to use the words of our burial right.  We know that we will live with God and with all those who proclaimed Him Lord of their lives, and that He will dwell among us.  Good, I see the nods.

     But do we better appreciate the work that Jesus did on our behalf today?  Think of all your rashes and eczemas and allergies.  How many times might you have been kicked out of the camp or the village by the priest in your lifetime.  Each time we have sinned against God, we have similarly been in the same circumstance.  But there is one substantial difference.  Jesus!  As we renounce the forces of evil and turn to God and declare our intention to follow His teachings in the liturgy of our Baptism Sacrament, we remind ourselves that we will fail and fall into sin.  No matter how earnest our efforts or how mightily we struggle, we will sin.  It does not seem particularly inspiring to remind ourselves that we will fail, does it?  But it is true, as we can all attest.  We are reminded, therefore, in the Sacrament that all we need to do is to repent and try again.  We repent to God and we repent to our neighbors.  We recognize that our sin causes our relationships to both to be broken.  But unlike the lepers in the ANE, we have the living water and Blood of Jesus to restore us.  Just as we ask to be forgiven and to forgive others, God and others show us the same mercy!  As a result, we are restored to both.  And we are reminded of this truth each and every time we gather to give thanks to God for the healing work He has done in Christ Jesus, both in our lives and in the lives of those in our community.  He takes outcasts like you and me and serves us Himself, that others might know we are His beloved sons and daughters.  Armed with that reminder and fortified by His Body and Blood, we are sent back out into the wilderness, to find those who have been abandoned, marginalized, kicked to the curb, by virtue of their sins, and to invite them to His Table and to His Kingdom.

     I see the puffed-up chests and looks of wonder.  Good.  Most of you had never seen this link either.  It is always dangerous for a preacher to get fixated on something like this.  Either we show our ignorance or we are so far in the weeds that we waste the times of our congregations.  I must admit, though, God was not done with this teaching.  I ended the sermon at 8am there, reminding them that we invite those in the world out there to an eternal fellowship and Great Marriage Feast.

     But, as is so typical and humorous of God, one of the early attenders grabbed me.  You know, Father, I really enjoyed your sermon.  We need more on our BCP like this and the Articles of Religion last week.  But I’d like to ask you a question.  In the Rite 2 liturgy, you lay your hands over the wine and hosts pray that they become the holy food and drink of new and unending life, or something like that, right?  I agreed.  And we talk about the newness of life in Him in other places.   And some churches are really big about being reborn, right?  They even speak of baptism as a rebirth.  Again, I agreed.  I always think of how new babies have that soft pink skin when I think about those statements.  Do you think God’s metaphor is even deeper than you just taught us?  I asked what he meant.  Are we supposed to see ourselves with that same soft, pink skin as a newborn?  That the disease of sin and the consequences of sin have been washed from our bodies for a time?  We will get more uncleanness each week, as we live.  But on that Day when He returns, we will be like babes even in that, except we won’t have to worry that our skins will be damaged by our sins and the sins of others any more?

     Yes, you and I worship God with other saints in our midst.  Yes, even those ordained in God’s service need to be taught.  Yes, even those who have handled seven infants of their own need to plumb their experiences and the metaphors of God!  But think of the image and the teaching.  We live in a world that values thick skin, just as it values fatty hearts.  But you and I are reminded that our hearts need to be circumcised and that we are called to care about those things which God teaches us.  We value the worship of Him.  We are called to value all those whom He created.  Most amazingly, though, we are sent out with that hope, that promise, to a world that chooses darkness over light, evil over good, isolation over community, and hard-heartedness over compassion.  But like the little girl in 2 Kings today, we know the end of the story.  No matter how much the world and those in the world rail against Him and fight Him, His Will will not be denied.  One Day, we will truly be reborn; one Day, all that went wrong will be undone.  And we will laugh and play and sing and feast like the children we are called to be, and finally made to be, through His Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

 

In His Peace,
Brian†

We wait and work trusting in His power and promise to judge . . .

      We have another one of those readings that we only see once every six years.  We, of course, are fortunate at Advent, because some churches do not alternate tracts every three years.  In those places, people will not ever read from the “Prophetic” tract, as opposed to the “historical” tract.  To be fair, though, not much is known about Habakkuk.  He is the 8^th of the so-called minor prophets.  Unlike the other prophets, though, we have no idea what he did before God’s calling on his life, where he is from, or even where he spent most of his time ministering.  Those details are provided by the books that bear the names of the other prophets, but Habakkuk was not moved to share those details with us.  Unlike the other prophets, we do not even know what Habakkuk means.  Heck, PhD’s have been granted arguing that the name is Semitic or Babylonian or Akkadian.  If we do not know the culture from which the name is derived, you can imagine the guesses about the meaning of the name!

     Though you may not ever have heard Habakkuk’s name, you have been influenced by at least one clergy’s wrestling with his writing.  Nearly five centuries ago, a man by the name of Martin Luther was reading Habakkuk.  Luther, for his part, was wrestling with the prophet’s declaration that the righteous live by their faith.  Out of that wrestling eventually came the slogan of early Protestantism, that we are justified by faith alone!  Good, I see nods.  Some of you stayed awake in history classes.  Yes, an argument can be made that Habakkuk serves as one of the underpinnings of the Reformation, yet how few of us pay attention to the book?

     One of the few things that we do know about Habakkuk is that he served as God’s prophet near the end of the 7^th Century BC.  Many experts place the book’s authorship around 612 BC, thanks to some textual clues.  Certainly, it was written before the Babylonians rose to power and carried the northern kingdom of Israel off into Exile.  It does not take too long for us to figure out why God caused this book to be collected and studied by us, some 2600 years later and 9000 miles distant.  We have a war that has been going so long it barely gets coverage on the cable news circuit.  For some of us, the nuclear saber rattling has caused childhood anxieties to return.  Notice I said childhood, as in those stupid drills we did to hide under our desks in the event of a nuclear attack, and not childish.  There is nothing childish about taking a despot at his word.  I know the pandemic was declared over last week, but we still know people who are afflicted with the virus, and all of us are impacted in various ways by our last 2 ½ years’ experience.  Inflation is out of control.  For those of us on fixed income, that is a scary reality.  But for workers, it is worse.  Although wages have been behind now for some three decades, the gap is far more noticeable today.  But at least our public servants are working hard for us, using their wisdom and expertise to create a soft landing, solve housing and food cost issues, fix the supply chain issues, and deal with all those other pesky issues like immigration and education and whatnot, for which we elected them.  I mean, it could be worse.  We could be living in a time like Habakkuk’s, in which the rich and powerful care only for themselves and work to aggrandize themselves and their lifestyles.  Wow!  Groans and snorts?  I could go on and on.  I have not mentioned the ravages of broken bodies or other diseases and their impacts on us, nor have I discussed the number of struggling relationships in our midst.  We have not talked about shootings or other strife and contention arising among us.  The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same, right?  We should give thanks to God that we are not His chosen country, that America is not the new Israel, right?  Because then we should truly be studying Habakkuk’s words and worrying about our future and the looming judgment.

     Truly appreciating the words of Habakkuk today does require a bit of word study, though.  In particular, there are three words whose interplay in the passage that are essential, so on the weekend of the barbecue, I have a nice three-point sermon.  The first word I want us to see is mishpat.  I translators clearly understood the challenges of rendering mishpat in English.  In verse 4, they render it as justice, but then later in the same verse they went with judgment.  Mishpat is the act of deciding a case.  The closest word in English is judgment.  Of course, modern Americans do not like to use or hear the word judgment, except when we are judging others – that’s a sermon for another day – and so judgment is treated worse than a four-letter word.  If the case is not decided, neither the plaintiff nor the defendant experience mishpat.  Indeed, those who are rich and powerful often seek to delay courtroom proceedings resulting in their victims getting the very opposite of mishpat.  Mishpat, for its part, was concerned with doing those things that God commanded, and not doing those things which God commanded us not to do.  Put in English, God declares justice to us.  We, like teenagers, focus on fairness, but God loves and is justice, just as He is love and all those other predicate adjectives we adore.  To be declared just meant that one did closer or avoided more fully those things instructed by God.

     I have been here now almost eight years, so some of you will be sick of hearing this, but God called His people to study, to digest inwardly His torah.  The king was commanded to study the torah night and day, so that he could educate and disciple the people in God’s ways.  The old men who sat at the gate deciding cases were chosen by the village because they were esteemed for their knowledge of God’s torah, at least they were supposed to be, and their piety.  Fathers and mothers taught their children.  The promise of God was that if Israel kept the torah, He would bless them.  If the people of God ignored His torah, though, and ignored His subsequent warnings, He would call the Land to disgorge them.  They would become objects of scorn and derision.  In case you have not figured it out or paid attention to history, Israel does not choose wisely, nor does it listen to the warnings of the prophets.

     For his part, Habakkuk sees the perversion of justice.  The very people who should be keeping the torah the best, those who are rich and powerful and have idle time for study, are the ones who twist God’s word, who keep mishpat from those whom they oppress.  And God does not seem to care.  Were He truly concerned with mishpat, He would judge them for the twisting.

     That discussion of twisting brings us to our second word today, yatsa.  Our translators render it as prevails in the beginning of verse 4 and as perverted at the end of the same verse.  Yatsa is challenging because, while it does mean come forth or go forth, it includes purpose.  Yatsa does not have a sense of aimlessness.  Why were God’s people called to live according to His torah?  The ultimate purpose was so that the world would be blessed by His people and turn to Him and be saved, right?  Think of why we feed the food insecure in our midst, or anything that we do at Advent, why do we do it?  I hope the ministries in which you are engaged is to glorify God in our midst, that the world might turn to His saving embrace.  God’s people were not called to keep the torah because they were to demonstrate their wonderful ability to follow instructions.  In fact, we would say they proved the opposite.  They proved the need for God to save them, which He did in Christ Jesus.

     For His part, Jesus is the only One ever to keep the torah, right?  He is the only One without sin.  We all participate in Palm Sunday and Holy Week liturgies, so we know the answer: How did we treat Jesus, we who were called to esteem His faithful obedience?  We handed Him over to be crucified.  We taunted Him on the Cross.  One of the pains of those liturgies is that we should see our part in His suffering and death.  God teaches us justice, but we choose our own way.  God instructs us to trust Him, but we know in our hearts He needs our strength, our wisdom, our whatever we think God needs.  All He asks is that we trust Him, and all of us fail many times to do just that.

     Habakkuk teaches us that, when left to our own ways, we twist the purposes of yatsa.  What should be directed toward the glorification of God in our life gets changed and contorted into something else.  Maybe we glorify ourselves in the world around us.  Maybe we glorify idols in the world around us.  Whatever we choose to honor, it is not God.  Left to our own devices, we take what God intend for good and turn it to our evil.

     Such study would rightly leave us hopeless and wallowing in misery, but for the third important word in Habakkuk’s pericope today, moed.  The longer Habakkuk has walked with God, the more evil, perversion, and lack of mishpat he has seen.  Like so many of our biblical heroes, Habakkuk calls out to God, demanding mishpat.  Habakkuk knows he cannot compel God to respond.  Habakkuk vows to stand his watchpost to see what God will answer him.  Unsurprisingly, God does answer the prophet.  God reminds His prophet that there is an appointed time, a moed.

     Moed is one of those words that has several meanings, all of which are significant.  In its first sense, or at least the first way we encounter it in Genesis, it means the time of birth.  The birth of a child was a moed, an appointed and acknowledged time.  As the Hebrews grew in numbers and Messiah did not come, a moed reminded them that one of theirs would participate in God’s eventual reign.

     Later, especially after the Exodus, moed came to be associated with the festivals, the Holy Days of Obligation, to use Christian vocabulary.  The chief moed was Passover, but there were other important festivals in the individual and communal lives of the Hebrews, all of which were meant to remind them that God really was in charge.

     The last use, unsurprisingly, was that most akin to our word eschaton.  It’s actually a Greek word that means end times, Day of Judgment, and, in some circles, the Rapture.  Good, I see the nods.  All the other moeds point to the moed of God finally establishing His reign on earth.  For all our confidence in God’s power and purpose, none of us should have been surprised by the fact that the world perverts the purposes of God, that individuals reject the love of the One who created them in His image, because they think they can do better or know better or deserve better.  Heck, some probably twist God’s words because they think He is not paying attention to the hear and now.  He needs their help running the world and making sure mishpat happens at the right time!  We laugh ruefully, but it is because we all know people like that and, truth be told, sometimes we are even like that ourselves.  The prophet and we are reminded by God that the Day will come.  It may seem to us to tarry, but it WILL come.

     Unlike the prophet, you and I have seen the beginning of that moed.  When mishpat was twisted and perverted for purposes that seemed other than God intended, that is, when Jesus was crucified, died, and buried, God raised Him on that glorious morning, demonstrating to us and reminding us that nothing can thwart Him or His plans, not even death!  And now, like Habakkuk, we wait.  We stand our post at the watch tower.  As Carola reminded you during her interim period here, we faithful people of God live in that in-between time, in that tension between the already and the not yet.  As such, we notice those perversion in our midst, much like Habakkuk and all the prophets before us.  We hear the cries for mishpat from the oppressed.  And we work in the world not to merit our salvation but to point others to the One who will save and will reign that glorious Day in the future that cannot fail to come!  We serve His purposes, trusting like that prophet, that when the appointed Day comes, we will experience all the blessings that He longs to bestow upon His people, not just for a day or a season, but for all eternity!

 

In Christ’s Peace,

Brian†