Baptist Bookworm

Wednesday, 7 December 2022

The light of the world

A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

11 December 2022

Isaiah 42.1-9

Our reading this morning is one of the four so-called “Servant Songs”
  that we find in the book of Isaiah. [1]

The Christian church has traditionally seen these texts as pointers to Jesus,
  which is not a bad move in itself,
  unless it becomes a way of distancing ourselves from this scripture.

What I mean by this, is that just because Christians
  have read these passages as pointing to Jesus,
this doesn’t mean that they were originally intended to be read in that way.

The book of Isaiah has had a long life outside of its Christian usage,
  and we must do justice to that context
  if we are to truly get to grips with its message.

And we need to remember that Jesus took part of today’s reading
  as his text in the Luke 4 sermon
and even angered some of his congregation
  by telling them they were witnessing its coming to pass.

I don’t know if you’ve ever read it through,
  but he book of Isaiah is quite a long book, and it contains a series of prophecies.
It has some predictions about the future in it,
  some which were fulfilled long before Jesus was born
  and some which have been taken to refer to Jesus himself

But prophecy in the Bible is a whole load more than just making predictions,
  it is more often the speaking of The Lord’s words into a particular situation.

And this is what most of Isaiah is about:
  It gives The Lord’s perspective on what is happening
  to the nation of Israel – to the people of God.

What we tend to think of as one book – the ‘Book of Isaiah’
  is in actual fact three books,
  between them covering a period of about 200 years.

The first book is what we call chapters 1-39
  and it was probably written by the real man called Isaiah,
he was a prophet who lived in Jerusalem,
  about 750 years before Jesus.

By his time, the nation of Israel had split in two
  having previously been united under the reigns of David and his son Solomon
              about 200 years before Isaiah
  but things had gone downhill badly from then on.

Solomon’s two sons Jeroboam & Rehoboam had divided the kingdom
  into north and South

And any similarity between this and a devolved Scottish parliament
  is purely accidental!

So Israel was now two countries:
  there was the northern kingdom – still called Israel,
  and the southern Kingdom - called Judah,
– with its capital in Jerusalem.

During the time of Isaiah
The Northern kingdom fell to the Assyrians.

So Isaiah, who lived in Jerusalem in the south
  spent much of his time saying
              “aha – see what’s happened in the North
                          That’s The Lord’s judgment on them
              If we don’t clean up our act here in the south
                          and get back to worshipping The Lord properly
              The same thing will happen to us!”

So we can locate first the first 39 chapters of Isaiah
  to this period of political instability
around the fall of the northern kingdom to the Assyrians
  and the rising threat to the kingdom of Judah.

Then we come to the second part of what we call the book of Isaiah – chs. 40-55
  which was written well over a hundred years
after Isaiah the prophet had died

By this time, the Babylonians had stormed into Judah
  destroyed Jerusalem
  and taken most of the Jews off to Exile in Babylon

The prophet who wrote the second book of Isaiah
  was one of these Jews taken into exile
              he is writing in Babylon
              and he is writing for his fellow exiles.

So in second Isaiah, from which our reading this morning comes,
  we find the words of a prophet
  written to a group of Jews who were far from home,
              exiles in a strange land,
  trying hard to keep faithful to The Lord
              in a context of religious, political, and economic pressures
  to start worship the Babylonian gods

And so our passage and the other chapters around it
  reflects this prophet of the exile addressing issues
which were relevant for the Jewish exiles to Babylon.

The third book of Isaiah – chapters 56-66
  was written later still
sometime after the Jews had returned to the land of Israel
  and it reflects their context of rebuilding Jerusalem and the Temple.

But for today we’re firmly in the time of exile,
  a time when all hope was lost,
  and the prospects of a better future seemed very bleak.

[the following section is drawn from Juliana Claasens]

Louis Stulman and Hyun Chul Paul Kim
  describe prophetic literature as
  “meaning-making literature for communities under siege.”

And a prophet like Second-Isaiah
  who speaks to exiles still recovering
  from the trauma of the Babylonian invasion
can be characterized as
  “a map of hope for disoriented and dislocated people
  at risk of losing their bearings.” [2]

So how does a prophet go about talking to people
  who have been completely traumatized
by seeing their city destroyed,
  their family and friends killed or taken away in shackles to a foreign land
and who even feel that God has deserted them?

The prophet in Second-Isaiah definitely did not have an easy task.

But throughout the chapters of this central part of the book of Isaiah,
  the prophet uses some creative imagery
  to help people think anew
as to how to live in the midst of the terrible chaos
  that unexpectedly broke into their lives.

For instance, in Isaiah 40.10-11,
  God is depicted in one breath
  as a mighty warrior who will come deliver his people
  and then as a shepherd who presses the little lamb tightly to his bosom.

And further on in Isaiah 42.13-14,
  the prophet is using yet another unexpected combination of images
when the divine warrior image
  is juxtaposed with the image of God as a woman in labour.

In our lectionary text for today, Isaiah 42.1-9,
  we encounter for the first time the image of the (suffering) servant of God
that serves as a wonderful example
  of the meaning-making nature of the prophetic task
  (see also Isaiah 49:1-13; 50:4-11; 52:13-53:12).

In Isaiah 42:3, the servant is described
  as “a bruised reed” and “a dimly burning wick.”
However, because of God’s spirit that works through him,
  the servant will not be broken or quenched,
rather he will faithfully continue his mission
  of establishing justice on the earth.

The servant, as Isaiah portrays him, offers a profound example
  of power in the midst of vulnerability.

The power that is held up in the servant
  is a different kind of power to what you might expect.
It is a power that does not scream or shout (verse 2),
  which offers a sharp contrast with the brutal force
  executed by the empires of the day.

However, the servant image introduced here in Isaiah 42,
  continued in Isaiah 49 and 50,
  and culminating in the famous sections of Isaiah 52-53,
encapsulates a life-giving power
  that will have an impact far beyond
  the narrow confines of Israel.

The book of second Isaiah is characterised
  by a number of surprising and radical reversals
such as the appearance of a highway through the desert in Isaiah 40:3-4;
  water suddenly found in the wilderness in Isaiah 44:3-4;
the wilderness unexpectedly bursting into flower and becoming like Eden in Isaiah 51:3,
  and fertility happening where there was barrenness in Isaiah 54:1-3.

And in perhaps the greatest reversal of them all
  the suffering servant is said to give sight to the blind,
bringing light and life to those
  who find themselves trapped in dark dungeons (verses 6-7).

The remarkable thing we see in this text
  is how the people who have been traumatized
are called to not do that typically human thing
  of uniting defensively against a perceived common enemy.

Edward Said, the Palestinian-American academic and literary theorist,
  warned that nationalism quite often tends to arise
  as a natural consequence of collective trauma.

It would be so easy to find in these texts from Isaiah
  what Said calls “an exaggerated sense of group solidarity,
  [and a] passionate hostility to outsiders,
  even those who may in fact be in the same predicament as you”. [3]

However in Isaiah 42,
  the prophet offers a vision of the world
in which an individual or a group of people
  in the midst of brokenness, in spite of brokenness,
  and maybe even because of the brokenness,
  will be a light to the nations.

For people today who all too often find themselves
  in a state of chaos and despair,
this powerful depiction of the (suffering) servant in Isaiah 42
  may speak in a number of ways:

First, in the midst of those times when chaos is rampant,
  when we are weighed down
  by the forces that seek to destroy life as we know it,
we need to accept the fact
  that we often are no more than “bruised reeds”
  and “dimly burning wicks.”

As the Jewish-Canadian songwriter and theologian Leonard Cohen
  says so beautifully in his song, “Anthem”:
“Forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything,
  but that is where the light gets in.”

That is where the light comes in.

God’s grace and power works exactly there where we are broken,
  where we are most fragile.

As Paul puts it his second letter to the Corinthian church:

But we have this treasure in clay jars,
  so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power
  belongs to God and does not come from us.
⁸ We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed;
  perplexed, but not driven to despair;
⁹ persecuted, but not forsaken;
  struck down, but not destroyed;
¹⁰ always carrying in the body the death of Jesus,
  so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.
   (2 Cor. 4:7-10)

Second, in the midst of these most difficult times,
  when we feel helpless and out of control,
we learn from the example of the suffering servant
  that we should seek to cultivate the power that we do have
  in the midst of our current state of vulnerability.

Even in the midst of the most dire of circumstances,
  we still have the power to make a difference
  in the lives of the people around us.

As we have seen in the case of the suffering servant,
  this power is a remarkable power
— not like the power of the worldly institutions
  but a power that grows out of compassion,
  out of being concerned with the needs and concerns of the other.

Even if we find ourselves in a completely hopeless situation,
  we can nurture compassion’s power
that means that even in the most disturbing of days,
  we have the ability to do good things,
  to look beyond our own problems,
  and to direct our focus to the other.

And it is this capacity to hope against hopelessness,
  that shapes the people of God to be the light to the nations
  that Isaiah speaks of in his prophecy.

[Rebecca Wright:]

From a biblical perspective, light is a fascinating subject.
  It is used metaphorically in both the Old and New Testaments [4]
and in many cases the metaphor is used
  with the sense of the insiders being light for others.

Although a metaphor, it has a basic, easily-grasped meaning.
  And yet there is a deeper meaning too,
because light is in at least one dimension different from other quantities.

If we are in a small heated room in a large cold building
  we will want to take care that the door remains closed,
  lest the heat leak out into the hallway and dissipate
  to the point of no longer being useful to those of us in the room.

Imagine that someone in the cold hallway knocks on the door
  and asks that we keep it open so that they can share the heat.
That would be a foolish thing to agree to.

We would do better to invite the person into the room to share its warmth.

Now change the story slightly.

Imagine that temperature is no longer the issue.
  Imagine that our room is the only one in the building with working lights.
Now if someone asks us to open the door
  to share the light out into the hallway,
  we would have no need to hesitate.

Whatever light is in the room will not diminish perceptibly
  by throwing the door open.

(There may be instruments sensitive enough
  to measure a difference in the room’s remaining light.
But I do not think that anyone in the room
  could tell the difference with the naked eye.)

Unlike heat or air-conditioned air
  or food or money or nearly anything else,
light can be shared with no diminution to those doing the sharing.

Another property of light is important
  to the Bible’s use of it as metaphor:
light does not exist for its own sake alone.

That is, the point of turning on a light in a dark room
  is not so that everyone may stare at the light fixture.
Rather, the light makes it possible for people to see other things
  that would be invisible to them otherwise.

So how do these two properties affect our reading of Isaiah?

It is not clear whether the “you” in verses 5-9
  is the same as “my servant” in the preceding section,
although clearly Jesus reads them that way
  in his inaugural sermon in Luke 4.

In addition to its other layers of meaning,
  God is calling the people of God to be a light to the nations.

And no matter how enthusiastically we live that calling,
  it will not cause us to end up in darkness.

Whatever light we have
  will not be dangerously diminished by our sharing of it.
And the results of that sharing
  will be allowing the possibilities of other things
  than people staring at us.

Light-bringers and light-givers are often noticed individually,
  but the larger point is the light itself and what it makes possible.

The work of building justice
  can be compared to shining a light on a situation.
It begins with our willingness to look, to see, and to understand
  where injustice lies
  and what the causes of injustice are.

The prophecy of Isaiah tells us that the servant of God
  ‘will not grow faint or be crushed
  until he has established justice in the earth’,
and this same prophecy says that the people of God
  are called to be, ‘a light to the nations’.

The light we are called to bear in the world
  is the light that gives rise to justice,
by shining on oppression
  and highlighting God’s intolerance
  of those who harm both nature and other humans.

And so we speak out:
  we speak out about the injustices we see in our city,
and we speak out about the injustices we see internationally,
  from the streets of Palestine to the streets of the West End,
our calling is to bear the light of the world
  who comes into the world in Bethlehem,
  and who continues to come into the world through us.

And as we approach Christmas,
  let us hear the again the words of Jesus,
  the suffering servant of God,
who said:
  "I am the light of the world.
  Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness
              but will have the light of life." (Jn. 8:12)

[1] This sermon draws extensively from the commentaries on Isaiah 42.1-9 by Rebecca Abts Wright https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/light-to-the-nations-2/commentary-on-isaiah-421-9-8 and Juliana Claasens https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/light-to-the-nations/commentary-on-isaiah-421-9
[2] Louis Stulman and Hyun Chul Paul Kim, You Are My People (Nashville: Abingdon, 2010), 22.
[3] “Reflections of Exile,” 178
[4] Jesus to followers about them: Matthew 5:14. Jesus about himself: John 8:12 and 9:5, Luke 2:32.

Thursday, 1 December 2022

Hurry down to Bethlehem

A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

4^th December 2022

Luke 2.1-20

Mural in the Franciscan Church of the Shepherd's Fields, Bethlehem

On our recent church trip to Palestine,
we were collected from the airport by a minibus,
which was to be our main mode of transport for the next ten days.

We decided that it needed a name,
  and because it was carrying us to Bethlehem,
  in quite a bouncy manner,
we christened our minibus ‘Little Donkey’,
  and the name stuck
as our tenacious beast of burden and its driver
  time and again managed to make progress
  on roads that would have had most vehicles giving up in disgust.

I’m sure we all enjoyed singing the carol, ‘Little Donkey’ just now,
  and I’m sorry if you find it stuck in your head for the next week!

But of course, the donkey of the nativity story
  is a later addition to the narrative,
  not mentioned in the Bible at all.

I don’t personally think this matters too much,
  after all, as my Dad often says,
  ‘don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story’.

But it does raise the question for us
  of the relationship between Luke’s gospel
  and the historical context in which he sets his story of the birth of Jesus.

In fact, Luke goes to some pains
  to set the birth of the Messiah
  within the wider context of Roman and Jewish history.

Right through his gospel,
  Luke gives us lots of little historical clues,
so much so that he has sometimes been described
  as a bit of an amateur historian.

However, the problem we have
  with his version of the birth of Jesus
  is that he doesn’t get his history entirely right!

As far as we know, there was a census in Judea (it just wasn’t empire-wide)
  and it took place, as Luke suggests, under Quirinius,
  but the problem with it is that it happened in the year 6 A.D.!

However, this is only part of our historical conundrum:
  The other issue is that Herod the Great,
  who, according to Matthew’s gospel
  was alive at the time of Jesus’ birth,
  actually died in 4 B.C., some nine years before the census…

And the thing we need to hold on to here,
  is that interesting though such historical background might be,
              Luke’s purpose in telling his story the way he does
  is to contrast the Roman Emperor Augustus,
  a man who held worldwide political power,
  with a seemingly insignificant birth in Bethlehem.

Luke’s story is told the way it is, historical inaccuracies and all,
  to reflect the fact that Jesus was a Galilean from Nazareth, of all places,
  which is a bit like saying he’s a Scouser from Newcastle,
and also to show that the birth of this ‘working class northerner’
  fulfilled the prophecy of Micah 5.2
  that the ruler of all Israel was to come forth from Bethlehem.

But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days. (Micah 5:2)

So Luke tells his story
  to show that it was the Emperor Augustus who unwittingly enabled Jesus
              to be born in the right place, by calling the census,
  thereby demonstrating that the final power belongs to God,
  and not to any human forces at work in the world.

The circumstances of the birth of Jesus
  point to the life of one who will have nowhere to lay his head (Luke 9.58);
  born as he is in a borrowed stable,
  but they also indicate that the child will be a Saviour;
  in fact he will be the Messiah, the Lord,
              far outshining even the emperor.

For the time being, however,
  the birth is announced only to humble shepherds.

They hear the heavenly host singing an angelic song,
  which echoes the cry of the seraphim in Isaiah 6.3.
Heaven and earth are now indeed full of God’s glory.

Nativity plays and popular culture often cast angels as female,
  when, as we all know,
              in the Bible angels are universally encountered
              as male messengers from God.

However, there is a further possible gender confusion in Luke’s nativity story,
  and this time it's one which goes the other way.

In traditional Bedouin societies,
  it was the women who often looked after the flocks,
and it is certainly at least possible that these shepherds,
  who rushed to the scene of a new born baby, were women.

Of course, at the end of Jesus' life,
  those who remain with him to the very end are the women,
  and the first witness to the resurrected Jesus also is a woman.

Add all this to the fact that his mother is a teenager and unmarried,
  and take it in a context where women were more commonly
  regarded as property than persons,
  and a peculiarly liberating picture of Jesus emerges...

This is a messiah for all people,
  not just for powerful men.

His birth may have been set against a backdrop
  of Emperors, Kings and governors,
but he will be a messiah for those whom society devalues,
  a messiah for shepherds and refugees,
  for single parents and frightened fathers,
  every bit as much as he is a messiah for the wise,
  the educated, and the prosperous.

The challenge for those of us who follow him
  is to never lose sight of the one in whom, as St Paul said,
  there is neither male and female, neither slave nor free,
  neither foreigner nor native. (Gal 3.28)

The message of the Christ child
  is that in his kingdom all are included, all are welcome.

And so the shepherds are vociferous in their excitement and amazement,
  they sing and babble and shout the good news
  of a messiah for all people.

But Mary needs to contemplate quietly,
  keeping her thoughts to herself.

‘Mary treasured all these words.’ Says Luke.

After Jesus’ birth there is no song of magnificat
  to mirror the song she sang when first told
  that she was going to have a child as a gift from God.

It seems that Mary found no words
  for such an overwhelming experience:
A young woman, pregnant out of marriage,
  far from home, giving birth in poverty,
  facing a long journey, with our without a sturdy donkey,
  and shortly to become a refugee
  on the run from a murderous tyrant.

Is it any wonder that her words ran out,
  and her song fell silent.

Christmas is a complicated time for us all,
  just as the birth of Christ was complicated for Mary.

For some of us, Christmas is a time of joy,
  as our Lord comes to us in the midst of our happiness and festivities.

But for others, our experience can be closer to that of Mary,
  as we struggle to find the words to combine reality with hope.

Sometimes, the coming of Christ is not to a world made easy,
  but to the difficulties, arguments, griefs and conflicts
  that make up the reality of our lives.

But whether we are sad or happy this Christmas,
  whether we mourn or rejoice
nonetheless it is to us that the Christ child comes,
  as hope arises in the midst of despair,
  and good news breaks into our reality,
as God takes human form and comes to the world once again.

And as God draws near to us,
  we too draw near to God,
making our own journey to Bethlehem,
  to worship with the shepherds
  the one who is the good news of God,
  for all people, in all places.

Amen.

Thursday, 24 November 2022

The faith of defiance

A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
Sunday 27^th November 2022. Advent 1.

Habakkuk 1.1-4; 2.2-4, 20; 3.1-6, 17-19

For our engagement with Habakkuk this morning,
  I want to acknowledge my debt to Juliana Claassens’ writing on this book.
She is Professor in Old Testament at Stellenbosch University in South Africa,
  with a focus on human dignity and female resistance.[1]

Preachers don’t often show their working, so to speak,
  although my online sermon scripts often have footnotes
  to show what I’ve been reading.
But I think it’s helpful sometimes for those listening
  to know that the person preaching is also a student,
  learning from the wisdom of others.

And I don’t know about you,
  but I’ve not spent much time
  with the writings of the prophet Habakkuk over the years?

So it was something of a surprise to me
  to discover that at one point in the mid-20^th Century
  it was deemed to be a ‘dangerous book’.

Apparently, in 1940, in the early years of the second world war,
  a church newspaper in Basel in Switzerland published a column under the title:
  “Word on the (Current) Situation”
  that included an excerpt from the book Habakkuk.

The military censors then banned the newspaper
  because they viewed this text as a critique of the Nazi regime of the time.

And I want us to hold on to this story,
  because I’ll come back to it later.

Habakkuk is a dangerous text,
  it is a book that inspires defiance.

It’s origins are found in an exceedingly traumatic time in Israel’s history,
  in about the year 605 BCE

Not long before, the mighty Assyrian army had destroyed one city after the other,
  brutally killing vast swathes of the population of Northern Israel.
And now the threat to the Southern Kingdom of Judah,
  where Habakkuk lived under the reign of King Jehoiakim,
  was coming from the Babylonian empire.

Habakkuk 1.6, which is outside of our selected verses for this morning,
  helps us contextualise the book,
because it references the battle of Carchemish,
  where the Egyptian Pharaoh’s army was defeated by the Babylonians,
and marked the point at which King Jehoiakim of Judah
  started paying tribute to Babylon
  in the hope of avoiding a confrontation or invasion.

And we know that not long after Habakkuk was written,
  the Babylonians under king Nebuchadnezzar
  would three times attack Jerusalem,
  taking the leaders and skilled citizens into exile,
  and in 587 BCE, just twenty years after Habakkuk
  the Babylonians would destroy both the city and the temple.

Indeed, as Habakkuk puts it, violence is all around,
  and the question that is uppermost in his mind, is why?

Why does he witness violence and injustice,
  and what is God going to do about it?

This text might be over 2,500 years old,
  but it still rings very real in our contemporary world,
where we too see violence, oppression, and injustice;
  and on a scale that Habakkuk would have found incomprehensible.

It is this wrestling
  with the gap between the world as we believe it should be
  and the reality of the world as it is experienced by us,
that lies at the heart of Habakkuk’s message.

Why are things not the way they should be?
  And what, in God’s name, is happening about this fact?

Well, the lectionary text for today
  gives us three short sections from this fascinating book,
but if you have the time,
  I’d recommend reading the whole thing through later,
  it’s not very long.

In chapter 1 verses 1-4 we see how the prophet looked around
  and was overwhelmed by all the violence he saw.

In verse 3, he asks why God is tolerating all these evil deeds,
  and why he has to see all the injustice, the oppression,
  the strife, and the terror around him.

And then in verse 4, the prophet laments
  that the wicked are overpowering the righteous,
  and that justice is being perverted.

Actually, the force here is more visceral than this,
  and it comes with a trigger warning.

What Habakkuk is saying,
  is that justice is being raped and violated before his eyes.

And in a world where sexual violence
  is still used as a weapon of war,
and where domestic violence and sexual assault are rife,
  I think we need to hear again the shocking truth
  that injustice and sexual violence often go together.

The Babylonians used rape as part of their domination strategy,
  as se find reflected in the book of Lamentations 5.11,
and Robin Parry comments on this passage,

‘In the ancient world rape was often used as a deliberate strategy of humiliation
  to signal to opponents that they could not protect their own women.
Even after the siege and fall of Jerusalem the situation remain[ed] one
  of ongoing violence in which the women of Judah are raped…
There is nowhere safe.
  Judah’s enemies want to make clear who is in control’ [2]

Within in this context of violence, we hear Habakkuk’s lament:
  “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen?”

In the midst of this nightmare,
  the only thing the prophet can do
is to help his people voice their pain,
  to cry over the anguish they are experiencing.

Echoing the Psalms of lament as well as the book of Lamentations,
  we hear how the prophet cries out to God:
“Lord, how long?
  Lord, help me … ”

Habakkuk’s lament joins contemporary laments from all around the world
  in which people have found the words
  to name the situations of violence and injustice in their lives,
so resisting whatever is threatening their well-being and happiness. [3]

And here’s the cruicial thing:
  to lament is not to give up, lie down, and die,
  it is rather to resist,
  and it does so by naming the evil,
  by not allowing the injustice to escape unacknowledged.

It is significant to note that the violence and terror
  would continue for a long time,
as evident in the ongoing description of violence
  that marks the rest of the book Habakkuk.

Habakkuk’s lament offers no quick fix,
  but typical to the prophetic voice in the Hebrew Bible,
  violence and injustice are not allowed to have the last word.

And then, as we keep reading through,
  God’s answer comes.

But God’s answer
  was not what Habakkuk would have wanted to hear.

God says, “Wait. Be patient.
  Deliverance is coming, but you will have to wait.”

This divine response challenges all the easy answers
  or quick fixes that humans crave.

In Israel’s history, the prophet’s message
  would be followed by many more years of violence and injustice.

Things would get much worse before they were to become better.

However, even amidst the most dire of circumstances,
  we see how the prophet clings to God’s faithfulness and love.

We see this for instance in how the prophet continues to pray.

In Habakkuk 3:1, we read the prayer of the prophet
  that is to be sung on the melody of a lament:

O Lord, I have heard of your renown,
and I stand in awe, O Lord, of your work.
In our own time revive it;
in our own time make it known;
in wrath may you remember mercy. (3.2)

Habakkuk reminds believers millennia later
  how important it is to keep on believing
  in a God that promises deliverance.

This unflinching belief in God’s ability to make an end to violence#
  is precisely the reason why the book Habakkuk was banned in Nazi Germany
  — the idea that God will end unjust power
  was considered too dangerous to be tolerated.

The book Habakkuk also played a role in South Africa’s history
  serving as an important source of resistance
  against the apartheid regime of the time.

So Allan Boesak in the tumultuous 1980s
  preached a sermon in London on Habakkuk 2,
imploring God:
  “Lord, how long must we wait before you help?”

In his book The Tenderness of Conscience, Boesak says:

  Black Consciousness, Black Power and Black Theology
  merged and emerged as the key which unlocked the door
  to the future for the oppressed people of South Africa
  at a time when most of us thought that all was lost.

  It rekindled the almost decayed hope in the hearts of the downtrodden,
  reasserted the faith of the people in the liberation God of the Exodus,
  the prophets, and of Jesus of Nazareth.
  It reclaimed the gospel for the poor and the oppressed;
  rediscovered and rewrote the vision
  and ran with it as the prophet Habakkuk enjoins us to do,
  unleashing the tremendous energies of a people
  who, long before Thabo Mbeki discovered it,
  knew that they were born of a people
  who would not tolerate oppression.

  It came at a most opportune time, a Kairos moment, to put it biblically,
  and it paved the way for the decisive phase of the struggle
  during the eighties
  as it found expression in the United Democratic Front.
  It became a spiritual force without which resistance to apartheid
  would have remained singularly ineffectual. [4]

Boesak also quotes John Calvin,
  who says the following on Habakkuk 2:6:

  Tyrants and their cruelty cannot endure
  without great weariness and sorrow …
  Hence almost the world sounds forth these words,
  How long, How long?

  When anyone disturbs the whole world by his ambition and avarice,
  or everywhere commits plunders, or oppresses miserable nations,
  when he distresses the innocent,
  all cry out, How long?

  And this cry, proceeding as it does
  from the feeling of nature and the dictate of justice,
  is at length heard by the Lord …
  This confusion of order and justice is not to be endured. [5]

The truth that Habakkuk knows
  is that God hears the cries of those who are suffering
  under the yoke of unjust regimes
  and will one day bring an end to violence.

This is good news for those who are being oppressed.
  But it not so good news for those who are abusing their power.

However, as the examples from Apartheid South Africa or the Nazi regime show us,
  situations of violence can last many years and even decades.

Also in our personal lives,
  we may find ourselves in a situation of pain and suffering without end.

Even the beautiful confession of faith with which Habakkuk ends
  acknowledges that the situation of violence and suffering is far from over.

The fig tree does not blossom.
  There are no fruit on the vines.
              There are no livestock in the stalls.

And yet the wonderful thing about Habakkuk’s confession
  is that the believer can still say,
  ‘I believe in a God that gives me strength to endure’.

Amidst the violence, amidst all the depravity,
  The vision articulated by Habakkuk
  is a vision of another world, of another way.

And as Allan Boesak again puts it,
  the encouragement to overcome lies in

  knowing with God and Habakkuk, that the vision lives.
              Even though evil seems to prosper
                          and the law is paralysed so that justice never prevails,
              the vision lives.
  Even though the righteous are trapped, “hemmed in”,
              have nowhere to turn to and justice is “perverted”,
              the vision lives. [6]

And this is why we have the book of Habakkuk today,
  as our reading for the first Sunday in Advent.

Advent is a time of waiting,
  not just waiting for Christmas,
but of waiting spiritually,
  a time of recognising before God
              that the world is not the way that it should be,
  and of longing with hope
              for a new and better world of justice and peace.

The life of faith is, at its heart, a life of waiting,
  of having faith that God’s coming Kingdom has not just vanished,
and that despite the evidence sometimes to the contrary,
  evil and death do not get to write the last word on our lives.

And so we wait for God to act,
  for God to break into our world, our lives,
  with news of peace and justice.

As we approach Christmas,
  we draw near to the celebration
              of God’s intervention in the person of Jesus,
  but we are conscious that still the world is not as it should be.

From Palestine to Ukraine,
  from South Sudan to Ethiopia,
from Yemen to Myanmar,
  to world is deeply divided and torn by conflict.

And we live in the time-between-times,
  between the first advent and the long-awaited second.

And in this time-between-times,
  we are called to live by faith,
longing for justice with a desire that drives us to our knees in prayer,
  and then from our knees to a life of prayer in action,
as we live into being the promise of the in-breaking kingdom of God,
  living as if it were true, until it is true.

One of the moments that will stay with me
  from our recent visit to Palestine,
was our joining the worship service
  of the Christmas Lutheran church in Bethlehem.

I was invited to assist the minister in the administration of the Eucharist,
  and as he gave the bread, I held the cup for people to dip their bread into.

There we were in David’s town,
  in the church named after the coming of the prince of peace,
and I was ministering to people who live daily with violence and oppression,
  but who nonetheless turn up for church on Sundays
              with the smile of hope on their faces
  to receive the symbol and sign of the broken body of their saviour,
              who was born in their town as a sign of hope.

One of those who came for communion was Daher Nassar,
  from the farm known as the Tent of Nations,
  which has been in his family for hundreds of years.

We had visited the farm a couple of days earlier,
  and this smiling man had shown us how he works his land,
but had also told us how the bulldozers come in the night
  to destroy his olive trees,
and of how young men had come one afternoon earlier this year
  and beaten him and his brother with iron bars. [7]

He had told us how his family farm had been declared state land,
  and of his decades-long legal fight to not be evicted.

But still the stone at the entrance to their property
  bears its carefully written inscription,
declaring the heart of their Christian faith:

‘We refuse to be enemies’.

As the Lord said to Habakkuk:
  ‘Write the vision; make it plain on tablets,
  so that [even] a runner may read it’

It was an immense privilege to be part of his receiving communion,
  and to see his face smile with recognition when he saw me.

Friends, the world is not as it should be,
  and evil and violence and oppression
              still stalk the land where Christ was born,
              and the world he came to save.

Sometimes all you can do is lament.

But we who have lamented with Habakkuk,
  and who have seen with him a glimpse, a vision, of a better future,
will not give up:
  we will live in faith!

And faith like this is an act of defiance,
  faith like this challenges the powerful, and lays low the mighty,
  faith like this refuses to ignore the plight of the suffering,
and faith like this, lived in hope,
  opens the doorway to the new world of Christ’s coming kingdom.