Last week, we read from Jeremiah, who
brought a message for those of us who have some power—to care for the
immigrant, and the widow, and the orphan. Well, this week, we turn to Habakkuk,
who is bringing a message of hope for those same folks who are oppressed. But…
it might take some time.
I often think about what it would be like
to live in the times of the prophets. Let’s say you hear this message from
Habakkuk. You’re an Israelite living in the Promised Land six-hundred or so
years before Jesus. The Babylonians are beginning their march toward the place
where you live. Things moved slow in those days—it might be years until they
got there—but you know when they arrive it’s going to be bad. So, you’re a Jew
living in the land promised to you by God, knowing that within your lifetime
outside invaders are coming to take it away, and everything you have—your property,
your work, your place of worship—is going to be taken from you. And into this
anxiety comes a prophet, in Habakkuk, preaching a message that says, “There is
hope, but it may take a while.”
Now, imagine you can see the future and
know that that hope is coming in six hundred years. Not only will you not see
it—neither will any of your children, or grandchildren, or anybody else in
living memory. By the time that hope arrives, you will be forgotten. This is
the context of Habakkuk. It’s all going away, and it won’t be made right for a
long, long time.
Frankly, this is why I get so agitated when
people read from Jeremiah and pull out that one verse (Jeremiah 29:11) and talk
about God knowing the plans he has for us and giving us a future with hope,
because the prophets are talking about the same thing here! This is hope for a
nation. It is hope for a telos—God’s ultimate purpose for creation. It is not a
promise that life will be peachy in the meantime or that everything that is
happening is according to God’s plan. This is, in fact, the opposite of what
the prophets are preaching. They are telling us that things are most definitely
NOT happening according to God’s
plan, and that’s why the nation is being displaced, and anxiety is rampant, and
this hope is far, far off. The prophets are saying that things are, in fact,
really bad, and the hope we have is not one for this world, because most of us
won’t see it.
At first this doesn’t feel like a better
kind of hope. I can understand why we want God to tell us that it will all work
out for us in ten years, because we want to experience that telos on this side
of death. We want to see our children and grandchildren fulfill our hopes for
them. It’s perfectly natural to give God our timetable. The problem is that it
doesn’t always happen that way.
And this
is precisely why we need the words of Habakkuk. There is no guarantee that
things will all work out perfectly in the end, if by “the end” you mean the
life you want for yourself and your children. Habakkuk promises hope that comes
in a long ways off in the distance. The people in the Promised Land didn’t know
it would look like Jesus; they didn’t have a clue what the Messiah would be.
They, even more than us, had every expectation to see resolution of their hope
before their death, not sure what the afterlife looks like.
As Christians, we have a different kind of
hope. It’s about Jesus; it’s not about us. It’s not about our best life here
and now. It’s just not. There are plenty of reasons to live with hope in this
life, but none of them are because we are promised good things for following
Jesus. Instead, because of the telos of creation in Jesus, we are now free to
respond to grace with a different hope not dependent on the whims of the world.
This is hope that is bigger even than six hundred years of sorrow.
This hope is either extremely pessimistic
or extremely optimistic—there’s almost no room in-between—and it depends
completely how you hear it. Though I suspect if you have a terminal cancer
diagnosis, or if you lose a child, or if you are feeling anxious and depressed,
or if you feel out-of-control with no clue how to fix it, then this may be the
best word of hope of all. Habakkuk’s hope is that God holds the ending, and
what doesn’t make sense here and now will be made right in the end—beyond the
boundaries of life down here. We don’t have a clue what this looks like until Jesus.
Even more specifically, we are blind to this until Easter Sunday, because this
hope is a hope that doesn’t come back from near-death—No! This is a hope that
dies and rises again. In order to have hope, first you have to have death.
That’s the only way to resurrection.
Last Wednesday, I told our Confirmation
students about one of the limitations we have around the way we do baptism. Our
symbol of it is actually fairly weak, since we only lightly pour water over
infants’ heads. That’s not really an apt representation of what we’re doing
when we are literally saying they are drowned in the waters of baptism. The
Confirmation students laugh whenever I say this. “That’s a good joke, P. Frank.”
Except I’m not joking. This cute thing we
do with babies is about life-and-death. They might appreciate that. But, if
they do, it tends to be about insurance against hell or something banal like
that—some work of the law. That’s not it either. No, baptism is about drowning
your old self—putting that old sinful Adam to death. I always tell them about
the pastors, a few of which are in Latin America, who say not “I baptize you in
the name…” but “I kill you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy
Spirit.” The only way to find hope is through death, and Jesus has led the way.
Habakkuk says, “Though the
fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of
the olive fails, and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from
the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I
will exult in the God of my salvation.”
Why?
Because you don’t fear death when you worship a God of resurrection! And if the
people of Israel could trust in that word in a day and age where that hope was
a long way off, and when they still believed in a Messiah who looked like a
conquering king, then how much more should we trust, who have some idea what
this hope looks like? We have Jesus. And Jesus is not going to make your life
good and easy. But he also isn’t up in heaven devising a difficult plan that
will eventually lead you to growth. He doesn’t need to do that, because the
world is plenty good at beating you up on its own.
Jesus
doesn’t sit up in heaven playing the marionette. Instead, Jesus runs to the
ones who need him, and what does he do? Not pick them up, dust them off, and
set them on the better track. Rather, he says, “Come, sinner. Come and die.”
And if that doesn’t sound hopeful, I hear you. Just wait. That’s what we do in
Advent, after all. Wait on it. Because, like it or not, the way to hope leads
death. You need to die to experience resurrection. That’s what hope does: It
resurrects. Anything else is not enough.
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