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 8th 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 7th
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†
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