Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday October 30, 2022 – 21st Sunday After Pentecost
First Scripture Reading:
First Reflection
This is the lament of the prophet Habakkuk. Habakkuk was a prophet around the time of the exile to Babylon. He had seen some horrible things happening in the time and the place where he lived.
A generation before Habakkuk, the Assyrian empire had overtaken the northern kingdom of Israel, and Jerusalem and the rest of the southern kingdom of Judah had been filled with refugees fleeing that fighting. And now it was the Babylonian empire who was knocking on their door.
Judah didn’t fall peacefully – they fought back against the empire, but the empire was stronger. Violence was followed by a siege of the city of Jerusalem, which was followed by more violence, which was followed by the destruction of Jerusalem, including the temple which was believed to be the home of God, which was followed by exile to a foreign land.
And surrounded by all of this devastation – violence and death and starvation and loss of home and loss of family and loss of everything that is familiar – surrounded by all of this, Habakkuk pours his heart out to God.
How long, O God?
How long will you ignore my cries for help?
How long will this violence continue?
How long will injustice and oppression be the norm?
How long will wickedness hold more power than goodness?
Lament is powerful. When we lament, we pour our hearts out to God. When we lament, we are free to complain, we are free to be sad, we are free to be angry with God. And yet lament is an act of deep faith – if we didn’t think that anyone was listening to our lament, what would be the point? When we lament, when we weep for the state of the world, we trust that God weeps alongside us.
Many of us have been living through a very difficult couple of years for a number of reasons. I was talking with a friend a couple of weeks ago about trauma, and the collective trauma that we, as a society, have faced with this pandemic. You may have seen the same meme circulating as I have – it says something along the lines of, “We’re not all in the same boat together, but we are all facing the same storm.”
Each one of us has experienced the pandemic differently, and so many people have been traumatized by it in different ways. Maybe your experience was one of loneliness and isolation, cut off from your friends and family. Maybe you lost a loved one in the middle of a lockdown and weren’t able to gather together to grieve properly. Maybe you were in hospital and weren’t able to have your family visit you; or maybe a loved one was in hospital and you weren’t able to visit. Maybe you were working in health care, or another essential service, and your experience has been one of stress and burnout. Maybe you were trying to navigate the balance between working from home while supervising the online schooling of your children who were just not able to focus. Whatever your experience of the pandemic, there is so much trauma in our world today as a result of it.
And the pandemic isn’t the only reason to lament. Systemic racism that is embedded into our way of being has been exposed over the past decade or so. We, as a country, have been lamenting our colonial past as the unmarked graves of Indigenous children who died because of colonization were brought to public attention. Climate change continues to cause anxiety, especially in younger generations who wonder what sort of a world they are going to be living in, decades from now. Inflation and increased costs for food and shelter are resulting in so many hungry people, and so many people with no housing or precarious housing. Homophobia and transphobia continue to be a thing that threatens the wholeness and wellness of so many people. War rages on in Ukraine.
There is so much that we can lament in the world today.
If you were to write your own lament, what might it sound like? How would you pour your heart out to God?
How long, O God?
How much longer until healing will be stronger than the trauma of the pandemic?
How much longer will racism and colonialism infect the way that we live as a society?
How much longer will this beautiful planet that you created continue to burn?
How much longer will there be hungry people in the world?
How much longer will wars rage,
and will people be scared of nuclear threats?
How long, O God?
Second Scripture Reading:
Second Reflection
The second half of our reading today begins again with Habakkuk, the prophet. Habakkuk declares that he is going to keep watch to see how God responds to his complaint. He is going to station himself on the city walls without resting until he hears an answer from God.
And God does answer him; but the funny thing, if you listen carefully to God’s answer, is that it is almost a non-answer. God describes what the answer is going to be like. The answer is going to be so plain that even someone running past it would be able to read it. The answer may feel delayed, but it is trustworthy and it will come. The answer is God’s dream, God’s vision for the time that is coming.
But what is this vision? In other places, the vision is fleshed out, but here it is left up to our prophetic imagination. We are invited to join Habakkuk and the other prophets to let God’s vision be realized through us.
Now this can be frustrating to anyone who likes clear descriptions and concrete answers; but it is also a beautiful response in its open-endedness. Just as the specifics of Habakkuk’s lament – war and siege and exile – are different than the specifics of our lament, so too can the specifics of God’s response to Habakkuk be different than God’s response to our lament. For Habakkuk and the people of Ancient Jerusalem, even though it took 70 years, in time the people did eventually return from exile… or at least their descendants did… and the city and the temple were re-built.
And what might God’s vision for our time be? A world without racism and homophobia and transphobia? A world where gender-based violence and discrimination is no longer a thing? A world where there is no such thing as a nuclear threat, and where people have forgotten what a war is? A world where resources are shared fairly so no one ever goes to bed hungry? A world where every single person is valued for who they are rather than for what they contribute? A world where every member of the community of creation, living and non-living things alike, are able to fully be what they were created to be?
For God does have a vision for the appointed time; and God’s vision is trustworthy, and God’s vision is good – is better than anything we could ever imagine.
And we are called to join our imagination with God’s imagination until this vision becomes a reality, even if it doesn’t happen in our generation but for some generation in the future. We are called to trust in this vision. We are called to hope. We are called to live our lives today as though we know that this vision is going to come to pass. And may God’s Holy Spirit fan the flame of hope within us so that we can trust, with our whole lives, that the time is coming. Amen.
(This was a good opportunity to sing one of my favourite hymns this week - one that is more familiar in the Lutheran Church where I used to play the piano than it is in most United Churches: If You Will Trust in God to Guide You.)
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