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“Reality, Grief, and Hope: The Prophet’s Call”
Rebecca L. Hemphill Homily at Hope in the Desert Episcopal Church,
October 2, 2016
Lectionary: Habbakuk 1:1-4, 2:1-5, Psalm 37: 1-10, 2 Timothy 1:1-14,
Luke 17: 5-10
Good morning. I’m Rebecca Hemphill a member of this
congregation. I am up here again today at the request of Father Dan who
is away at a conference. Please join me in praying that the God of all
Hope will open our hearts here and now to the living Word of Truth.
Amen.
I recently watched a video of Paul Simon at ground zero in New
York City at the remembrance ceremony of the 15th anniversary of the
9/11 assault on our country. Looking out on the mourners and the
dark holes of the footprint pools of the World Trade Center Towers, he
strummed his guitar and sang a stark, solo version of the darkly
beautiful song, The Sounds of Silence. (Some of the younger among us
may know the band Disturbed’s powerful recent version of the song.)
Hello darkness, my old friend
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I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
...the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement
halls,
and whispered in the sounds of silence.”
Simon sang these words to the people at Ground Zero and across our
proud nation, as we remembered and Lamented anew the unthinkable –
that even in our power and might and goodness we are vulnerable, and
somehow, sometimes, God allows terrible things to happen to good
people.
(Pause)
“Prophets look into the desolation that is often in this world and
are able to perceive the dream of God for us.” I am quoting Old
Testament scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann from his recent
book, Reality, Grief and Hope: Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks. (Repeat the
quote.)
Before Jesus and the sending of the Holy Spirit, God raised up
prophets to be God’s voice in the world. Again and again, over a
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thousand years, the prophets spotlighted reality, grieved, and
proclaimed God’s dream for us, to transform and transcend the ugly
truth. (Walter Brueggemann Reality, Grief and Hope: Three Urgent
Prophetic Tasks, 2014)
The prophets spoke truth to the powerful and complacent. They
Lamented the evil their people brought upon themselves. And through
the prophets, God spoke renewal and hope, like these words of the
prophet Isaiah:
Do you not know, have you not heard? The Lord God strengthens the
powerless…The Lord shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with
wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and
not faint. (Isaiah 40:28, 31)
Sometimes the prophets’ words changed hearts and the course of
events. Sometimes, not – their words echoed in the sounds of silence.
Habakkuk, was a prophet in a time when the unthinkable worst
happened to the Hebrew nation. A time when the Babylonians invaded
and conquered Judah, destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, and carried
away the best and the brightest of the nation of Israel into exile.
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It was a time when God’s chosen people –people who had been
powerless exiled slaves until God saved them -- had become full of
themselves. By the time of Habbakuk, they were literally paying lip
service to their part of the relationship covenant with God– saying the
right prayers, singing the right songs, assuring themselves that they had
a lock on Divine favor. Instead of faith in God, their faith was in being a
nation of God’s Chosen people. One scholar describes this as a period
when faith and nationalism merged. (Understanding the Old Testament)
What does that mean, “when faith and nationalism merge?” Well,
it would be like me feeling confident that I am a Christian woman of
faith because I am an American: because I say, “One Nation Under God,
when I pledge allegiance to my nation’s flag. Or, I am Christian because
the American money in my wallet says, “In God We Trust.” -- No need
for my behavior to correspond to Jesus or the cross and resurrection, no
living into Christ’s call to care for the least of these. My faith would be
just pride in the US of A, and an assurance that God has chosen my
country over all others. My nationalism would be my faith.
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The prophet Habbakuk witnessed this reality in his nation. He
saw all the signs of his people forgetting God; he saw looming evil and
destruction. And he called out to God in a Lament.
O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,
and you will not listen?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
and you will not save?
Why do you make me see wrongdoing
and look at trouble?...
Destruction and violence are everywhere!
Everybody’s disagreeing and quarreling about what to do!
The law you gave us for our well-being is so loosely followed.
Justice is twisted in our society!
It wasn’t in today’s reading, but listen to how God answered
Habbakuk:
Look at the nations, and see!
Be astonished! Be astounded!
For a work is being done in your days
that you would not believe if you were told.
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It sounds like God is about to do a wonderful new thing in response to
Habbakuk’s complaint. “Tadaah!” here’s the miraculous rescue! Be
astounded!
But no.
God goes on to give a horrific vision to Habbakuk:
God reveals that the Lord of the Israelites is waking up a vicious enemy
to destroy the nation: the Babylonians are going to sweep through the
Promised Land, leaving nothing in Jerusalem but the lowliest people,
and a stripped temple where your priests promised that God lived.
Can you imagine?! That would be like our crying out to God after
9/11 to save us from the many sources of terror we now see in the
world, and God answering, “I’m empowering ISIS to overthrow not only
the entire Middle East and Europe, but to cross the Atlantic and wipe
out the United States.”
Habbakuk responds, ‘WHAT!!? Why are you bringing them to
destroy us? Where’s the God I know?! Are you a different God from the
one who has always has saved us?!! ‘I’m staying right here on the
ramparts of this watchtower, waiting and watching until I hear you, God,
answer me.’
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God answers, “Take that vision I just gave you…of the invasion
and destruction. Write it down in large print so that it can be read by
people on the run.” ‘The vision I have given you, Habbakuk, is
“a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it
seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay.”
And then God tells him, why this disaster is being brought upon Israel.
“Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them.”
Your nation, my people, are full of pride and their spirit is not right
within them.
God follows this condemnation with words the promise survival and
hope, for some:
…but the righteous live by their faith.
(Pause)
Habbakuk and the Babylonian exile introduced into the Hebrew
faith a new way of talking to God. Lament. Lament happens when we
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can no longer avoid a heartbreaking reality, and all our ego and defenses
are stripped away. It is the voice of humbled grief.
Lament is not something we modern Christians have much
interest in or experience with. We see ourselves as winners! Once the
Roman Empire became Holy and Christian, it made us winners. We like
Winners! Not Lamenters!
Just so, the Israelites under their kings and priestly elite
developed a religion that highlighted their exceptionalism and
triumphalism as God’s chosen people, and erased their origin as people
crying out in weakness and exile in Egypt. They preferred thinking of
themselves as God’s chosen because they were special, rather than being
a nation that existed solely because God had chosen to show love for a
“not special” people. Until the Babylonians destroyed the last vestiges
of their nationhood, the Hebrews behaved as though God was their
sure-thing: no matter that for centuries they broke their side of God’s
covenant promises and commandments.
(Pause)
The last time I was up here, I spoke about how saving hope only
comes through suffering and giving voice to that suffering. That was
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what Walter Brueggemann finds in the story of the Exodus. But less
theologically inclined folks have discovered the same thing. None other
than flamboyant Oscar Wilde wrote, “Where there is sorrow, there is
holy ground.”
When we admit and face our reality, that we are vulnerable…
When we grieve the truth of our weakness and cry out to God in Truth,
God shows up and things shift—we begin to be filled with the spirit of
love and self discipline, just as Paul promised Timothy. It is through
Lament that we enter and receive the hope where God makes things
new and lifts us up on wings like eagles.
But, even today, like the ancient Israelites, we tend to avoid this
painful portal to holy ground like the plague.
We have “unrealistic notions of entitlement, privilege, and
superiority,” says Brueggemann. We feel we have a right to be RIGHT!
Yet, when we remain proud, insisting we should be exceptional
and immune to suffering, we have, as God said to Habbakuk, a spirit that
is not right in us. God wants better for us. God will inevitably, in God’s
goodness and love, strip away our pride and blindness to bring us into a
new reality where our relationship with God is intimately genuine.
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As theologian Richard Rohr puts it: The work of God’s Holy Spirit
is to keep us vulnerable to Life and Love, and resists all that destroys
God’s flow in us. (Rohr Daily Meditation 9/27/16).
(Pause)
The words of the prophets – God’s guiding wake up calls to us –
did not end with the Old Testament, or even with Jesus. So, what might
the prophetic voice of the Holy Spirit be revealing to restore our
vulnerability and humility and God’s loving flow in us?
To get to the answer, maybe we can ask ourselves: When do I feel
superior? What makes me feel proud that I am in the right and others
are wrong? And what threatens my sense of safety and specialness?
Terrorism? Mass shootings? Nuclear proliferation? Gun purchase
regulations? Deaths of the innocent? Droughts? Floods? Dangerous
world leaders? Viruses? Candidates for president? Peoples and religions
we don’t understand?
PAUSE
Watch TV. Go on Facebook. The signs are everywhere. We are a
frustrated people lashing out at everyone and everything that we think
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contributes to our feeling vulnerable. We point fingers and blame
anyone but ourselves. And, underneath all our anger is the beginning of
lament. How are we to make it through? Aren’t we good? Aren’t we the
best, and God’s chosen? Where IS God in this mess? Isn’t God wrong
not to be making it clear that we are right? …Making it clear God is on
our side and not theirs?
Remember God’s words to Habbakuk of assurance about how to
survive. God says, “The righteous live by faith.“ He’s not saying, “those
who think they’re in the right live by faith.” God is saying, the righteous
will survive by faith.
What does “righteous” mean? How do we make ourselves
“righteous?” I looked it up. Righteousness doesn’t mean right.
Righteousness means that God molds us, even though we don’t merit it,
by grace, to the image of God, in childlike innocence and simplicity.
(Leo G. Cox, Beacon Dictionary of Theology, ed. Richard S. Taylor, et al) .
God is saying, we will live –not be destroyed – by being like trusting,
simple children, soaking up God’s perfect goodness and the gift of faith.
Neither righteousness nor faith are things we can conjure up on our
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own to make ourselves feel good or powerful. Because we are not right!
Only God is right. We are not powerful. Only God is powerful.
Doesn’t that look like what Jesus is teaching in today’s Gospel?
His apprentices and friends are asking him how they can get more faith
–and it sounds as though he knows what they’re asking for is more
power, more things to make them special. He tells them, the power of
faith has nothing to do with how much or how big it is. A tiny amount of
faith – that gift from God that you yourselves cannot manufacture or
conjure up– makes the impossible happen. Get over asking how you can
get more of this special power – faith.
Then, in what feels like a non-sequiter, he tells them the story of
the servant who finishes his assigned chores and then expects to be
treated like the person in charge. Jesus asks, is it right to feel so
exceptional that when you do one day’s worth of what you’ve been
called to do for a lifetime, you’re ready to seat yourself at the head of the
table and be served right alongside the master – as though you are equal
to the God who gave you life and work to do?” No. It is gift enough to
know and serve God; you are not God.
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My preaching mentor suggested I read a dense sermon by Danish
philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard to get ideas about our
rightness vis a vis God. (I feel your collective eye roll and hear your
sighs. “Oh no! She’s going to talk about Kierkegaard now?!” Bear with
me, please. It’s all about love, and I’m nearly done!) The sermon
explores our human tendency to forget that God is God and we are not,
insisting that we are in the right. Its text is Luke 19, where Jesus
prophesies and laments the coming of yet another destruction of
Jerusalem and the temple, this time by the Romans. Another moment of,
“How could you let this happen, God?!” (“The Edifying in the Thought
That Against God We Are Always in the Wrong.”)
Kierkegaard argues, like the prophets of old, that it’s good that
“God is ALWAYS right!” And that means that when it comes to the times
when we feel we have been done wrong by God, we are not right.
But it’s hard to get to that point because we humans love feeling
that we’re in the right! Kierkegaard explores this smug and satisfied
feeling about being right. And he reveals that we actually don’t feel
quite so good about being right if the person we insist is wrong is
someone we deeply love. Love makes it easier to be wrong. The more
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we love, the less we consider whether we’re in the right or not. Our
deepest selves know God is love, even if our ego doesn’t. Our soul can
only find rest and joy in our beloved being right. And that frees us from
trying to be as right or righter than God.
We’re enabled by God’s righteous love, to face all the other truths
about ourselves and the world – even the hard, unpleasant truths.
When we see the full reality, we fall on our knees before God in awe and
humility.
This is when the words of the prophets no longer echo in the
sounds of silence! Instead, we join the prophets and cry out the voice of
God in our hearts. We perceive and lament injustice. We become
empathetic to others and grieve their pain. As God said through the
prophet Ezekiel, ‘God gives us a new heart and God puts a new spirit
in us; God removes our hearts of stone and gives us hearts of flesh:’
hearts able to open and love. ‘ (36:26)
(Pause)
Before I close, let me just tell you what happened to the Hebrews
after their “rightness” of prideful exceptionalism was stripped away. A
transformation of their whole understanding of God and their
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relationship to God is what happened. In the Babylonian exile, they
experienced a spiritual renewal, unfettered by the old religious
formulas, and beyond all bounds of nationalism. Deprived of an earthly
kingdom, “Israel began to vision a Heavenly Kingdom…[and] a new and
nobler conception of the character of God...” The ground was laid for he
coming of the Messiah. (J.C. Muir, quoted in Exploring the Old
Testament.)
If we can, like the prophets, allow God to show us the reality of
the ways we diminish God and glorify ourselves, if we grieve honestly
how we are wrong, we will be filled with hopeful courage: with a spirit
of a divine power of love and self control, and with the mustard seed of
faith that allows us to pray expectantly for the unimaginable.
I invite you to join me in praying Habbakuk’s hope-filled closing
prayer:
“Oh Lord…I stand in awe of your work. In our own time revive it; in our
own time make it known; in wrath may you remember mercy…I will exult
in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet
like the feet of a deer, and makes me tread upon the heights.” (Habbakuk
3:46) Amen.
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