Today's teaching scripture comes from the book of Habakkuk.
Habakkuk. It's one of those, I promise.
Chapter 2, verses 1 to 4. Habakkuk Chapter 2, verses one
to four. I will stand at my watch post
and station myself on the rampart.
I will keep watch to see what He will say to me and what He will
answer concerning my complaint. Then the Lord answered me and
said, Write the vision. Make it plain on tablets so that
a runner may read it, for there is still a vision for the
appointed time. It speaks of the end and does
not lie. If it seems to Terry wait for
it, it will surely come. It will not delay.
Look at the proud. Their spirit is not right in
them, but the righteous live by their faithfulness.
This is the word of the Lord All.
Right. Hi, everybody.
Good morning. Welcome.
I've I've missed you, Jared and I were away.
So for those of you who may be newer or weren't aware, for a
couple of weeks, we were visiting some of Central
vineyards work with Asia's Hope in Cambodia.
So I spent something like 16 days there.
Jared was there for a little bit more than a week.
And before we get into the text this morning, I want to just
take a few minutes to share with you a little bit about our trip
because I think it actually sets the scene really well for what
we're looking at together. So, you know, we, we partner
with Asia's Hope. They support vulnerable kids
through family style, residential care, education,
discipleship in Thailand, Cambodia and India.
And we had the opportunity to spend time with the leaders
there, to visit the student Center for college students that
Central Vineyard supports, to spend time with the kids.
They're in the homes we worship with the kids.
We met the staff, we spent time listening to people's stories,
and we were there to deepen this partnership.
And speaking for myself as someone who is actually still
relatively new to this community, I've not yet been
here for two full years trying to understand the long history
that Central Vineyard has with Asia's Hope.
And really just the the substance, the meaning of this
work that we get to do together to to ask strategic questions
about the future and to clarify what our church's role can and
should be over the coming years. And so this is going to be, you
know, way shorter recap of the trip than I would like to give
you. I'd love to be able to stand
here and go through all of the, you know, 1400 photos and, you
know, the stories of like, every day that we spent, you know,
doing what we were doing and all the delicious food and wonderful
conversations and so on. But we don't have time.
I just want to say this plainly. This is one of the most
impactful and strategic things that our church could possibly
be involved in. And so over the coming weeks and
months, we'll get to share this story in more detail.
We'll get to share more of our hopes in in greater detail for
what the future of this partnership will look like.
But friends, I just want you to know that the work that we get
to support with Asia's Hope makes a tremendous, tremendous
difference in the lives of many kids there.
And it is thanks to the generosity of this church, of
this body. And so I want to thank you those
of you who have been around for a long time giving to this
partnership, or even those of you who have just started, thank
you. It's incredibly powerful work.
And the whole time I was there, I was thinking, I wish you could
all be here with me experiencing this.
And we'll take more trips. We'll go.
So we'll talk about that later. But guys, the thing that
continued to sort of stand out to me while we were there, I was
thinking about this passage and and, and this week, knowing that
I was going to come back and preach this text.
And as I sat at table after table in Cambodia, Can you give
me the the picture of the the beautiful.
Oh, this is go back. This is good.
Sorry, I thought that was behind me.
This is just, you know, a handful of the kids and the
parents receiving us at the airport when we got there.
But the next one that look at that.
So as I sat at table after table in Cambodia with beautiful
spreads in front of us that looked like this, with fish and
fruit and herbs and the aromas, all of it, I, I found myself
thinking about the beauty and the joy and the abundance of
those moments. Particularly because tables like
this sit in a country where a genocide that killed as many as
2 million people is close at hand in living memory for the
people that we were spending time with.
Where dissent against the government is complicated.
Where it's not uncommon to know someone who's been retaliated
against for speaking negatively about their government on the
Internet, per SE. Where evil once tore through
neighborhoods that still bear the scars of that period of
time. And Even so, life goes on and
everywhere you look, there's beauty and there's joy and
there's connection and friends. This is just one example of the
way that this works out all over our lives.
We see this, you know, places like Sanctuary Night where just
tremendous adversity faces people in our city, in our
community. And yet beauty and joy and
goodness breakthrough every day as people sit around tables, as
people unpack their experiences of life and the kindness and the
tenderness of Jesus meets them there.
This kind of stuff is happening on every street corner in our
neighborhood. It's not just in Cambodia with
beautiful spreads like that. Or if you go to the next
picture, maybe it's it's, it'll happen.
Cute kids like this who have just, you know, known tremendous
pain in their stories, but you see them experiencing the joy
and the welcome of family. And I was, I was struck over and
over again by this joy rising through scar tissue.
How do people live like this? How do we find joy in a world
that has known real evil, where just, you know, in our personal
lives, in our life together, we have faced down tremendous
challenges. And Even so, goodness continues
to breakthrough. And so I'm asking this question
in part because that's precisely what the prophet Habakkuk is
writing about in in the short book that we're looking at
today. So we're in this series where
we're talking about the Minor Prophets or what's sometimes
called the Book of the 12. And Habakkuk is an interesting
one. It's one that I was excited to
preach because this is one of the only prophetic books, I
think maybe the only prophetic book where there is actually no
pronouncement to the people from the prophet.
So the three short chapters of Habakkuk are just conversation
between the prophet and God. There is no thus saith the Lord
to the people. There is no command, there is no
charge brought against the people.
It's the prophet sort of trying to sort out what is this
confusing evil world that we live in and how can I make sense
of it in light of a God who I'm told is faithful and good and
kind. Have you ever found yourself
asking that question? I would have to think that more
than one of us have have looked out at the world and thought,
how can this possibly be? And so this entire book, it's
it's sort of a lament in the passage that Jared read to us,
we hear the prophet demanding, you know, God answer, answer my
question. Help me make sense of this.
Habakkuk looks around at his own society.
And in ancient Israel, the Torah is paralyzed.
People are not following the the good law that God has given
them. Justice never seems to win the
day. Corrupt leadership is running
the show and he's not being dramatic.
This isn't for effect. He's grieving.
He's a heartbroken prophet who is reluctant to accept the way
that things are. And he does something remarkably
faithful in this book that I think we would do well to learn
from. He brings his complaint to God
and and it is has the audacity to demand that God act on behalf
of his people and God answers him, but maybe not in the way
that he would expect. God says I am doing something
and then the next part is troubling.
Babylon is rising and Babylon will invade Israel.
Not exactly the hopeful answer that I think Habakkuk had in
mind. And so he pushes back and he
says, in effect, how can you, a holy God, use a corrupt nation
as your instrument? How can you use a people even
more violent than us to judge us?
How does that make any sense? And in fact, the passage in
Habakkuk that's worth camping out on for just a moment in the
1st chapter, it, it's, it's really interesting because it's
one that gets referenced a lot out of context.
There's a line in Habakkuk that that usually gets quoted by
itself in isolation. And Habakkuk says to God, your
eyes are too pure to behold evil and you cannot look on
wrongdoing. And that half verse is often
used to support the idea that God is so holy that he literally
can't bear to look at sin, that God sort of turns his face away,
and that this holiness of God is primarily defined by distance.
It sounds a little bit when you read that half verse by itself,
like the prophets talking about God's fragile ego.
But that's not what Habakkuk is doing.
He's not offering a statement about God's fragile ego.
He is arguing with what seems to be God's persistent tolerance of
human sin. Because the verse continues.
So why do you look on the treacherous and are silent when
the wicked swallow those more righteous than they?
So the prophets not saying, oh God, you're, you're, you're too
holy to to look at sin and human evil.
You hold us at a distance. You don't participate in our
struggles. What he's saying is God, you are
so holy. I know this about your goodness
and your kindness. So why is it that you look on
while evil continues to unravel in the world around us?
And So what unsettles Habakkuk isn't God's distance.
It's it's this divine patience that's troubling to Habakkuk
because he looks at the world around him and he says, I can
barely tolerate this. How can you?
And you know, this isn't theoretical for us.
I mean, over the years, I've watched leaders in my own life
who have trusted fall away in ways that hurt people deeply.
I felt the disorientation of that kind of thing.
And in in those moments, you don't just question maybe people
you've once trusted. You question systems.
You question people's callings, even your own judgement.
And the biblical story assumes time and time again that God
looks directly at human rebellion and continues to
engage with us, continues to call, continues to wait.
Habakkuk is is wrestling with why God's judgement seems so
slow. It's a very different problem,
and it's one that's a lot closer to our real experience of life.
This is a prophet who's wrestling with history and with
geopolitics and with the moral confusion of watching evil
compound on itself. But he's saying something to us
who have experienced betrayal and hurt very close to our own
personal lives as well. God, how long can this go on?
And so God responds by giving Habakkuk a vision.
He tells him that the proud will collapse under their own
idolatry, but the righteous will live by faith.
And I don't know about you, but that phrase the righteous will
live by faith is one that I've heard lots of times over the
years, almost to the point that it's begun to lose its meaning a
little bit. It's it's one that, you know,
sort of becomes so abstract that we we sort of think, well, this
could apply to almost anything or almost nothing.
But what's happening here is the violence of the nation's their
economies that exploit their slave labor, they're intoxicated
and immoral leaders. Their worship of money, their
worship of military strength creates a cycle of revenge and
oppression that cannot sustain itself forever.
I don't remember where I heard it for the first time, but I've
been thinking a lot about this, this statement.
You can't. You can.
You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can't bomb the
world to peace. The good news is that the loving
God who made the world and seeks after every human bearer of the
divine image also promises us that the meek will inherit the
earth, that the vulnerable will be vindicated, that the poor in
spirit will be blessed, and that Babylon, time and again will be
held accountable for the ways that people are taken advantage
of and harmed. But how long do we have to wait?
Habakkuk is asking the question that people in every generation
will eventually ask. If this cycle keeps repeating
itself, will it ever end? And the prophet sees a vision of
God confronting evil in a way that echoes the Exodus.
God crushing the head of the evil house, judging what
destroys human life, and at the same time saving his people.
And the Exodus becomes this pattern.
In the Hebrew Bible, the defeat of Babylon becomes part of a
larger promise that God gives to the people.
Evil will not have the last word.
If there's one thing that the long arc of the story of the
Scriptures teaches us, it's that evil will not have the last
word. And the compassion and the
kindness and the justice of Jesus will prevail in the end.
So the line the righteous shall live by faith keeps echoing
through the Scriptures. The apostle Paul repeats it.
We've often misunderstood it, but in its original setting, it
wasn't some kind of a slogan about private spirituality.
This is a a, a survival word. It's something that that's
intended to give people a handle to hold on to in a confusing and
disorienting world. Babylon in this story represents
more than one empire. It represents a pattern, a
system that runs on pride and domination and intoxication with
its own power. A nation that worships money and
military strength and national security.
A society convinced that survival justifies injustice is
the thing that the prophet is speaking against here.
And the sobering truth is that this is not unique in human
history. We see this repeated time and
time again. God tells Habakkuk that Babylon
will not have the last word. The promise of the prophet is
that he will hold oppressive nations accountable for unjust
economies, for slave labor, for corrupt leadership, for
idolatry. And that cycle of violence and
revenge will not go on forever. But if we're honest, it feels
persistent. It continues.
Babylon falls and another Babylon rises.
Empires shift, but the pattern of oppression remains.
So what is it that God is actually promising?
Because when we look at this, it feels a little bit
contradictory. Babylon will be held
accountable, but Babylon's come and go, and people continue to
struggle. And maybe the closest picture
that I can think of to help us sort of wrap our minds around
this a little bit. You know, the table in Cambodia
is 1. But there's a scene from The
Shawshank Redemption that I've been thinking about as I've been
reading this text. There's this this moment where
Andy locks himself in the warden's office and plays Mozart
over the loud speakers. Do you guys remember that one?
And for a few minutes, the entire prison yard goes
completely still as they hear this music.
Nothing structural about the way that the prison operates has
changed. Nothing about any of these
people's circumstances has demonstrably changed.
The men are still incarcerated, but they remember, even briefly,
that they are more than prisoners.
They are human beings, and something beautiful touches the
depths of who they are. It's sort of accesses this, you
know what I would say is the the Spirit of God poured out on all
flesh, testifying to the value, the tremendous value and beauty
of human life. That's Habakkuk.
Babylon is still rising. This cycle of pain has not
ended, but he dares to say something like the righteous
shall live by faith, knowing of an impending judgement on the
nation that he's living in, knowing of struggle and pain all
around him. It's not a denial of that
suffering. There is a persistent refusal to
allow these circumstances to define the way that he
understands his relationship to God.
Unless you think that I am only talking about geopolitics.
This is what it's like to be human.
This is our everyday life. Christ promises to build his
church and churches fracture and leaders fail.
We live in a world that's entangled with all kinds of
relational brokenness on a one to one level, probably even
people in this room who have something against a brother or
sister. Chronic loneliness, persistent
illness, depression, loss of purpose, these are the things
that surround us. And yet the prophet's word to
people surrounded by this kind of struggle is that the
righteous shall live by faith. The righteous believe a
different story about the future when the present is unchanged.
And friends, that's the hope that I want to call our church
to that I that I want to call, you know, my friends to the
people that I spend time with in my day-to-day life.
This idea that there is a different story that we're
invited to believe when the present circumstances around us
remain unchanged. Scripture promises that the
kingdoms of this world will become the Kingdom of our Lord,
and the headlines feel cyclical at the same time.
But we have a choice to make. We have a choice to make about
where we put our hope and where we look for joy as we live in a
world that seems dominated by that kind of cycle.
The gap between this promise of restoration and lived reality is
where the prophet is standing and and it's hopefully where we
stand as a church. To live by faith is to refuse to
let Babylon determine the shape of your soul.
It's to remain loyal to God's covenant hope when this the
resolution of all of these problems in front of us feel
delayed. And that's why the early
Christians clung to this line from Habakkuk.
That's why the Apostle Paul quotes that righteous shall live
by faith because he he isn't writing from a comfortable
place. The early church understood the
struggles of the prophets who were writing these words because
they were writing from inside of another empire.
Rome looked pretty permanent to the Apostle Paul.
Rome had roads and legions and aqueducts and architecture and,
and, you know, a sort of infrastructure that dominated
the landscape of his day. Rome looked inevitable and
unbeatable. And when Jesus was crucified, it
looked an awful lot like another victory for Babylon in the long
course of history where empires continue to get the best of the
good guys. And if you're standing at
Golgotha on Friday, it would not look like the Kingdom had come.
It would look like the cycle had continued again.
It would look like we've circled back to the beginning.
Another righteous man swallowed by power.
And that's the moment where either cynicism or joy and hope
can be born. The great writer Fyodor
Dostoyevsky understood that instinct.
And on the plane on the way to Cambodia, I I was reading notes
from underground again, just a short little Dostoyevsky.
If anybody knows that one. No, it's it's a bummer.
It's a massive bummer. So, you know, if you're thinking
about reading it, maybe don't. This is the underground man.
So, you know, he looks like a real joy to be around.
But in this in this short work, the narrator looks at the world
and sees it full of corruption and self-interest.
And he decides that hope is naive.
He basically says, you know, from from where I sit underneath
the ground, all of this is bunk. And anybody who's hopeful really
in any way, shape or form has got it wrong.
And he chooses this life of resentment over a life of trust
in anybody but himself. He thinks of himself as
intelligent and sophisticated because it feels a lot safer
than being vulnerable with his fellow humans.
And when his disappointment builds over time, he sort of
sees that you can. You can try to cling to a
promise that feels delayed or might not ever come, or you can
just withdraw and protect yourself with sarcasm and irony
and contempt. And friends, listen, I've been
there, and I suspect that maybe a few of you have too.
You know, to have sort of a cynical, negative, ironic view
of the world might actually feel a lot safer than this business
of investing in some kind of hope or joy that feels like it's
so far down the line that you're not sure how you could ever
access it. The cross could have produced
that kind of underground faith, bitter and sarcastic and waiting
for revenge. But resurrection happens.
And so, you know, as we're in Lent and sort of journeying
toward the Easter story and journeying toward the cross, I'm
thinking about the ways that resurrection is God's
declaration that the promise is deeper than the moment that
we're living in. The promise of hope to come
permeates the fabric of creation in a way that negativity and
disappointment and cynicism cannot.
And so the difference between the underground man and Jesus is
not intelligence. It's where their allegiance
lies. What view of the world will they
be faithful to? One says that we'll respond to a
broken world by retreating into resentment.
The other says the righteous will live by faith and trusting
himself to the Father, remaining open and generous and faithful
to the people around him in spite of the kind of violence
that Jesus takes on first hand. And so, friends, as I read
Habakkuk, as I read the prophet, this is my, this is my prayer
for us. This is my hope is that over
time, we would be formed into a community that becomes
increasingly open and generous and faithful in the way of
Jesus. And so by the time we reach the
end of the book, Habakkuk hasn't received any kind of a timeline
from God about, you know, when will this all resolve?
When will life get better? When will we sort of get past
this rough patch? He's not been told exactly when
Babylon will fall. What he receives is a vision of
God's character and a promise that evil will not ultimately
prevail. And so he prays.
Lord, renew your work in our day.
I have time. I'll just read it to you.
Oh Lord, I have heard of your renown.
And I stand in awe, Oh Lord, of your work in our own time.
Revive it in our own time. Make it known in wrath that you
may remember mercy. And so he recalls the Exodus.
He recalls the story, the original story of God saving his
people from Egypt and God confronting evil.
And the Exodus becomes this, this archetype that God will
once again deal with the head of the evil house as he writes, and
he'll judge what destroys human life.
God won't ignore injustice. And then comes just this
remarkable confession at the end of the book.
Though the fig tree does not blossom and no fruit is on the
vines, though the produce of the olive fails and the fields yield
no food, though the flock is cut off from the fold and there is
no herd in the stalls yet. I will rejoice in the Lord.
I will exalt in the God of my salvation.
I think it's easy for us in a cynical age to hear a prayer
like that and go, that's just denial, you know, that's
spiritual bypassing. That's that's a back at just
sort of accessing something that he's drummed up inside of
himself. But I really think the truth is
this, this kind of an outlook is a gift.
And it's one that, you know, when I think about abundant
tables shared with our Cambodian friends, I think about this kind
of joy. When I think about the beautiful
work that's happening all over our city to serve the dignity of
people, to lift people out of adverse situations, I think
about the fact that this kind of hope, this kind of joy is
present in the midst of incredibly difficult
circumstances. It's not naive.
It's not forgetful. It's a quality of joy that's
passed through suffering. And friends, if you've ever
celebrated with people, if you've ever shared celebratory
meals or celebratory occasions with people who have experienced
real suffering, you've, you've touched this.
You've understood just a little bit about what it looks like
when real hope and real joy breakthrough sort of the the
layer of despair and cynicism that sometimes just sits over
our, our view of the world. So Habakkuk gives us a
direction. The righteous live by faith.
And so I hope by just unpacking this a little bit more this
morning, that line feels a little more meaningful to a few
of you. Is that the case for anyone?
Because I know, you know, before I read this and, and sort of
studied in detail over the last couple of weeks, I, I felt like
that was the passage that I'd talk about.
And I was also kind of dreading it because I was like, I don't
know if I have anything to say about that.
It feels a little, a little thin, but it feels less than to
me. So even even if the cycle of
difficulty, of sickness, of relational disrepair, of
disappointment, of discomfort feels long for you, or you look
out in the world and you just feel this God, how long?
How long will this go on? Our task is to become more like
Jesus in the meantime, remaining open and generous and faithful.
And we'll invite the worship team back up.
But my hope is that if you're here in the room and you feel
tired in some way, like some of these things feel real to you,
they feel just right at your fingertips.
There's something in your life that feels oppressive, that
feels difficult. Relationship, a job, whatever it
might be that makes it difficult for you to hear those words.
The righteous shall live by. Faith makes it difficult for you
to imagine joy and hope peeking through difficult circumstances.
We we'd love to pray for you this morning.