What are you waiting for? [Proper 22C - Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4]

 The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4

 

What are you waiting for?

 

What is he waiting for?  What is this ancient prophet, with his unusual name, waiting for?  What is this holy man, standing at his watch post, shouting from his tattered soul, praying from his deepest depths: what exactly is he waiting for? 

 

Because nothing good is on the horizon; nothing good is coming his way.  Destruction and violence are before him.  Is he waiting for them to finally arrive?  Strife and contention are on the rise.  Is he waiting for them to reach their full stature?  A foreign army is at the gate, eager to seize dwellings that are not their own.  Is he waiting to hand over his keys?  The enemy is on a mission to gather captives like one might gather up the sand of a vast desert.  Is he waiting to be swept up and carried away?  What is he waiting for?

 

The prophet and his people were faced with a hopeless future.  The nation was waiting for the apocalypse.  Like an approaching storm, the people could see the disaster but they could do nothing to stop it.  Just a few years after the composition of this prophetic book, it all came true – every nightmare really happened, every fear was realized.  The fearsome Babylonian army sieged the city.  And when the people of Jerusalem could no longer bear the suffering and starvation, could no longer resist the foreign forces, the empire’s warriors burst through the walls, laid waste to the Temple, and slaughtered the residents in the streets.  Those who survived were gathered like the sands of a vast desert and dragged away from everything they loved, everything that was meaningful or precious in their lives, carried away from home and family and culture. 

 

So horrific was the experience that the poets of the Bible preserved the pain in haunting laments, like this one we find in the psalms: “O God, the heathen have come into your inheritance; they have profaned your holy temple; they have made Jerusalem a heap of rubble.  They have given the bodies of your servants as food for the birds of the air, and the flesh of your faithful ones to the beasts of the field.  They have shed their blood like water on every side of Jerusalem, and there was no one to bury them… They have devoured Jacob and made his dwelling a ruin.” 

 

And in Lamentations: “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow….”

 

That is what the prophet’s eyes can see from his watch post: sorrow and suffering.  He can see the despair of his people.  He can see the devastation in their future.  And it all feels hopeless.  Because his voice is spent and there is still no answer from the heavens.    

 

And so he climbs his watch post, to be a little closer to the sky, a little closer so that maybe his prayer will finally be heard.  But from that vantage point, his eyes see the bad even better.  There is no life on the ground.  Graves are being dug.  Violence is gaining momentum.  It is a sight that makes for sore eyes and broken hearts.  And while the present, what can be seen, is bad; the future is much worse.  “Destruction and violence are before me.”  There has perhaps never been a truer statement spoken.  The prophet and his people: their future was grieving the dead and weeping on the shores of the rivers of Babylon.  Their future was impotent rage and unrealized revenge fantasies and prayers that seemed unheard.

 

And still Habakkuk climbed the watch post.  And he stood there with every defiant bit of faith he could muster.  And he listened for a word that could overwhelm the terrible reality of his life. 

 

And this is what he heard, his prayer finally answered, “There is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie.  If it seems to tarry, wait for it.”  And so he waited, he waited for a dream to come true, one that would displace the nightmare unfolding before his eyes.  He waited for the happy ending to this painful story.

 

From his watch post, the prophet saw clearly the reality of this world, with its violence and pain, its despair and disappointment.  But from that watch post, he also caught a vision, a contagious vision – not of how things were, but of how things could be.  He caught a vision of the world as God intended it to be.  Despite the circumstances, God was imagining a better world into being.  All the prophet had to do was wait for it.

 

As you continue reading this book, which the Bible Study just finished on Wednesday, one comes to understand just how deeply Habakkuk believes in this vision.  He stakes his life on the divine promise, believes with all his heart that that for which he is waiting will come, that salvation will have the final word, that all of the bad will one day fade into distant memory.  He has no evidence, no indication; he has only a vision, nothing more than a dream rooted in stubborn hope.  And it’s enough.

 

The vision does not change his circumstances.  The enemy is still at the gates; injustice still runs rampant; violence still endangers the future.  The situation on the ground is no different than it was before he climbed the watch post and heard the divine promise and caught the vision of a brighter day.  The vision did not change his circumstances; the vision changed him.  Everything in the world was the same; but he was no longer the same.  Because he caught God’s vision for this world.  He saw it coming.  He believed in the promise of God.  It was exactly what he was waiting for.

 

What are we waiting for?  There are, of course, no Babylonians beating down our doors; we don’t have the same worries that haunted Habakkuk.  But also we are no strangers to destruction and violence; the images of destruction and violence mar our lives: Uvalde, Newtown, Orlando, Las Vegas, Ukraine, Rwanda. We are not exempt from the insidious spread of strife and contention; our nation and our world are scarred with ideological and political fault lines.  We are still waiting for thy kingdom come.  Our faith hangs on the promise that the Easter God has something better in mind than the Good Friday nightmares this world too often produces.

 

I don’t know how God turned Good Friday into Easter; I don’t know the ins and the outs.  I don’t know how a bloody cross became an empty tomb; I don’t understand all of the details.  But I believe it.  I don’t how God intends to make this broken, messy world into Heaven.  But I believe in the promise.  I believe in the dream of God.  I believe in thy kingdom come.  I believe in a hope that is worth hoping.  I believe that God is still, and forever, writing Easter endings.  I believe that God has a future for us, for this world, in which there is no more pain, no more sorrow, no more hatred or injustice, no more death.  And that is what I am waiting for.