Write The Vision

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4

There are two visions in Habakkuk: first, the one that he sees, full of helplessness, violence, wrongdoing, trouble, wickedness; then, there’s the vision of God, which God asks to be written up big, bold, and legible…but what, what is it that God sees?

We see violence all over the news…not that there’s any more or less of it than there’s ever been, just now there are cell phone cameras capturing it. Forcing us to reckon with it. It’s big, bold, and in our faces. Surrounding us with images of dead and bleeding children in Allepo, Syria, videos of black men shot to death (another video this past week showed a shooting in which a 6 year old child was killed by shots fired at the vehicle he was in—you can hear their horror was they realize what they’ve done), videos of police offers being attacked, pictures of refugees fleeing war, videos of bomb blasts, protests at political rallies turning quickly to fisticuffs. It’s hard to look at. I was grabbing lunch with a friend last week, and he asked me if I’d seen a video of a recent shooting. It had popped up on my Facebook feed, someone had shared it, but I couldn’t watch it. He called me out: “The point of watching is to know what’s going on, and to be uncomfortable with it.” I didn’t want to watch, because I didn’t want to be uncomfortable. In that way, prophecy was kinda like the cell phone video of days past, “Can’t you see what’s going on?”

I was tempted to just skip Habakkuk’s cries…but I found myself resonating with them. “Why do you make me see wrongdoing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise.” I have a feeling that the ugliness of this election season is far from over, there is more strife and contention to come. My guess, no matter who you favor, is that you’re quick to condemn your opponent for being the stubborn one, but reluctant to confront the flaws of the candidate you support, unwilling to confess your own hypocrisy. Why? It’s simple. We don’t want to be uncomfortable.

If you’ve ever been to the gym, however, you know that there’s no growth without discomfort. We’ve tried to avoid it, but it just doesn’t work. I’m picturing an old black-and-white video clip of women at the “gym” standing in front of machines that shook them with belts or streamlined their legs with rollers. Perhaps that’s a good metaphor for our approach to God justice. We talked a few weeks back about how God shakes things up. But we can’t just strap ourselves in and consider ourselves “doers of justice.” We must see and reckon with the reality of injustice and violence before we can do something about it. God calls us to participate, but God can’t do the workout for us. True justice takes some discomfort on our part.

“Why do you make me see wrongdoing and look at trouble?” God wants us to look at it so that we can see and reckon with it. God’s not the one dropping bombs, pulling triggers, or implanting us with bias and bigotry. God’s not writing foreign policy, turning away refugees, or building walls. God’s not underfunding education systems, throwing out food while children starve, or foreclosing on unpaid properties. These are things that humans do, that we do…sometimes in God’s name, but God is not doing these things. The problem we face, and the problem Habakkuk faces is that God doesn’t seem to be doing anything about these things, either.

For Elizabeth Achtemeier, Habakkuk typifies “the faithful person who has to live in the world as it is and who has grown weary with the world’s ways of wickedness. When he looks about him, he sees those on every hand who do not care a whit for God’s will—those who take the word of God and twist it to their own purposes; those who openly break every code of decency and morality and yet who justify their ways; those who seek their own selfish ends and who stamp their self-seeking on a whole generation; those who violate and cheat and deceive and yet who are honored in societies eyes.” The wicked surround the righteous.

The world lives under slavery to sin. Abolishing that slavery will take work, and will be uncomfortable at times. That discomfort, for Habakkuk, in conjunction with his faith raises the questions that resonate most with us: “How long shall I cry for help and you will not listen? How long will I cry “Violence!” and you will not save? Why do you make me see wrongdoing and look at trouble.”

Habakkuk waits, and receives a vision from the Lord, but taken out of context this vision seems little more than a burden. God’s response to Habakkuk’s complaint is, essentially, this: “I haven’t changed. My vision still stands, my creation will be restored to the goodness in which I created it, all families of the earth will still be blessed. You’re waiting on me…but I’m also waiting on you.”

God’s waiting on us, too. “I’m upholding my end of the covenant,” God tells Habakkuk. “But look at the proud…something about their spirit just ain’t right.” The proud, it seems, are entirely too comfortable. “We don’t have a gun violence problem. Racism is over. Refugees aren’t our problem.” There’s something about the spirit of those comments that just ain’t right. “The righteous live by their faith!” is a rallying cry from God, to see, by faith, what is possible with God. But it’s also a call to recognize what we’ve “accomplished” without God, or under the guise of other gods. Habakkuk was a prophet to the people of Israel during a time when the Babylonian empire dominated the region.

Babylon was a “Have it Your Way” kind of empire…might makes right, Habakkuk says in 1:11 “they make their own might their god.” They are powerful, and they are proud… But don’t get any ideas, God says, “their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith.” Righteousness has to do with relationships, in this particular case it’s a relationship with God which is fulfilled by faithfulness, trust, dependence. Faithfulness is life by God’s power, according to God’s vision. This is what Rally Day is really about: recommitting ourselves to God’s power, God’s vision, and God’s purpose for our life together. We do this every year in hopes that we don’t get too comfortable with our own vision, our own programs, our own ideas.

It’s easy to turn a blind eye from the world, to avoid the things that make us uncomfortable, to use the church as an escape from worry. But that is not God’s vision for the church. God wants the church and its sacraments to be sources of strength and courage for our faithful participation in God’s vision for a world enslaved in sin. We have something Habakkuk didn’t have: we have Jesus Christ and the Kingdom he preached to reinforce that vision, to assure us of God’s faithfulness to us. We also have the Spirit which Jesus sends to us in bread and cup. That same Spirit filled the Apostle Paul when he wrote “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not drive to despair; persecuted but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed;"--and here’s the kicker--"always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.”

Perhaps one of the most discomforting things to reckon with in the Christian faith is Jesus’ death. And Paul says to carry it around in our bodies. When we gather at the Lord’s Table, we are literally bringing together members of Christ’s body to “re-member” Christ in our midst. It’s a powerful witness to the resurrection, and to the vision of God. All of us broken and weary people coming together to write the vision. But what is this vision, what is it that God sees? It’s the same thing God has always seen when God looks at creation: its original, intended goodness. We live by faith into this vision of goodness. But how do we live like goodness is possible in a world powered by pessimism? Bob Marley gives us a clue in his song One Love, “let’s get together and feel alright…” Get together. Rally together.

Sin would separate us. Keep us apart. Sin drive fear in between our cultures, our classes, our religions, our ideas. It’s a powerful witness to the goodness of God that still dwells in all of creation, in each of us, and in our neighbors, that we would get together…that we would rally for the goodness of God against the forces of sin. It’s a powerful witness to live with hope that the vision of God is true: “as it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end.”

This life, God tells Habukkuk can only be lived by faith. Faith is what it takes to live and prosper in the sometimes uncomfortable time in-between when God’s vision has been revealed, and when God’s vision will be realized. Faith is the way we claim our place in that vision. Faith is how we write the vision on our lives so that everyone who passes you by on the street can see something of God’s goodness in you, something of the goodness God sees in you, and something of the goodness God sees in them. Friends, trust God. Have faith. Write the vision with your life. Amen.