We’ve been sitting now for four weeks at the feet of some of God’s prophets, the ones at the end of the Old Testament that we call the “minor” prophets. The messages we have heard have not been easy ones. I find myself wearily lugging them around all week. And to be honest, if I had my own choice, I would tend to give you much more of what you can find a hundred places: positive thinking, affirmation, the walk-out-of-the-sanctuary-floating kinds of words, “inspirational.” But if we’re going to read the Bible, we will have to accept what God may have here for us…rather than what we think we need.

Through these prophets, God’s Word has come. Uncomfortable at times, but God’s voice has spoken.

The same voice which spoke the world into being at creation, “And God said “Let there be light!” and behold, there was light.”

The same voice that spoke to Abraham and said “Go from your country and your family…to the land that I will show you.”

The same voice that spoke to Moses in the burning bush and said “I am the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob…and I have heard the cries of my people.”

The same voice that spoke through the prophets, and that we have listened to these weeks:

Hosea: Return to me.

Amos: The way you live proves you don’t know me.

Micah: You can’t do it alone, you need a Savior.

Zephaniah: God’s judgment will serve God’s mercy.

This morning we come to a prophet with one of those tough names to pronounce, that makes us wonder if we’re taking a Bible trivia quiz: Habakkuk. (Everywhere I looked it up, said it differently. I’ll use HabACKkuk.)

Habakkuk comes from roughly the same time frame and situation as Zephaniah. It is somewhere around 600 BC, and Habakkuk is probably in the area of Jerusalem. Jerusalem and the whole country of Judah, the Southern kingdom, have enjoyed a brief respite under a good king, Josiah, who instituted a great many civil and religious reforms, and briefly turned the people of Judah back to following God. But with Josiah’s death in 605, the country has returned to immoral and violent ways. What we know, but they didn’t, within just a very few years a new player on the international scene, Babylon, will come and capture Jerusalem.

Rather than simply relaying information from God to His people, Habakkuk offers us something different: a conversation. While the other prophets have brought God’s word to US, Habakkuk also brings our questions to God. And if we listen in to this conversation, we will hear the murmurings of what it is to authentically live by faith.

• Habakkuk 1:1-3 (complaint)
• Habakkuk 2:1-4 (watch, wait, righteous live by faith),
• Habakkuk 3:2 (now, wrath-mercy)
• Habakkuk 3:17-18 (resolve to rejoice).

“GOD! Where are you?! How long do I have to cry for help? Why will you not listen? Why will you not save us? Look at my life, our world, it’s a mess! Where are you?!”

We don’t have to read a prophet from 600 BC to hear that voice, do we? It comes out of the mouths of our neighbors. It comes out of the mouths of people skeptical of faith… “if God won’t take care of me, why should I believe in him?” It comes out of our own mouths, when we dare to speak honestly to God.

Is it okay to talk to God like that, to be honest? Won’t we get hit by a lightening bolt, or have something worse happen to us? Habakkuk seems to show us: It’s okay to wail. Apparently God is able to handle our cries, our pain.

“God, I’ve asked and asked, begged and begged, and you are silent.”

Where was God when your parents’ marriage fell apart?

Where is God when you lost your job?

Gangs run rampant in our cities, our leaders take bribes and our laws often protect criminals. Where is God?

The questions get pretty tough. Habakkuk was crying out because his world, his culture was full of evil and violence. The wicked prospered! “God, won’t you do anything?”

If we can take Habakkuk’s relationship with God at face value, then it’s okay to wail. To lament, cry out and argue with God. God doesn’t ask us to put on a false face for him, or to let real things sit festering in our heart…while only things that are neat and tidy come out of our mouths. Talk to God, argue, doubt, question, wail!

Now, sometimes we wail because of circumstances which are our own fault. Our sin, or our failure to repent puts us in hard places and our cries are ill-placed. But not always. There is also injustice and evil and hardship. “Will you do something, God?”

We wail, we cry out in prayer. But, we must add…be careful what you pray for.

Habakkuk was so disgusted by the evil and decay of Judah and Jerusalem, he wanted God to act to clean it up. God did answer Habakkuk and said “Okay! Another country, Babylon is rising up, and will come from far away. I will use them. The evil of Judah will be submerged by the devastation of an oppressor, Babylon.”

It wasn’t what Habakkuk expected or wanted. Habakkuk was looking for an end to an immediate problem. God was looking at a sweep of history far greater than Habakkuk could see.

It’s one of the problems in reading these prophets. While God seeks the welfare of all creation for all eternity…we are stuck with individual situations and people which seem microsopic in comparison, yet no less important. It’s easy to say that God is ultimately in control of things, but ultimately in control doesn’t do much when it’s your family who is hurt, your friends who are wronged.

Habakkuk doesn’t like God’s answer. How can using a heathen nation full of oppressive evil like Babylon to overthrow Judah going to help things? He complains again. But his relationship with this God-he-is-not-happy-with goes further.

Having voiced his concern, heard God and again voiced his concern…he resolves himself to watch for an answer. In a curious turn of Hebrew, he says “I will keep watch to see what He will say to me,” as though one can see an answer. So Habakkuk goes up on the wall of the city, to the lookout, to the top of the wall of the city where he can keep watch for God.

I wrote in the Bethany Briefs this month…I feel like this is exactly what I’m in training for, learning to watch for God, to see what He is doing. I have spent most of my life doing the reverse: plunging ahead, and turning around to look and see if God was following. To see if His head were nodding approval or not. I think I’m finally learning that it works the other way. God is already at work. The Holy Spirit of God is working: in us, around us, through us, even in spite of us. The question is, am I watching or not?

I know you’ve heard people say, when someone died, “Well, they’re in a better place.” or “We’ll all be together some day.” Usually I’m pretty skeptical, because they often come out of the mouth of someone who is decidedly not a Christian, and I want to say “How can you say that? On what basis can you possibly think that?”

I went over to Idaho two weeks ago for the funeral of a great uncle of mine, Uncle Don. He was almost 89. After the service, I was talking to Don’s wife, my great Auntie Kathryn. She’s 88 herself, a wonderful, gracious lady I’ve known literally my entire life. Kathryn gave me a big hug at the reception…she’s only about this tall, so I had to bend way down. She said “Dan, this is really, really hard. But I’m going to make it through. Don’s in a better place.” There they were. And normally, even though Auntie Kathryn is a Christian, I would have shrugged those words aside.

But just a day before going to Idaho, I’d read the one place in the Bible, I Thessalonians, that really does give a picture like this, that in Jesus Christ, it comes true. On the last day, Paul says, “the Lord Himself with calls and trumpet sounds, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever.” God had shown up in Idaho long before me, comforting Kathryn, alone after 66 years of marriage. All I had to do was look for him.

Yesterday I had coffee with a friend whose son committed suicide. It’s a long, hard road. And it will continue to have hard places, of course. But over an hour conversation, my friend probably mentioned five different people who had appeared in their lives in the last month, very unexpected people who offered them perspective, encouragement, and comfort. He received them as specific ways God was showing Himself in his family's lives, which is what they needed to know most…just that God was there.

Watching for God.

Paying attention.

And the more we watch, and the more we share with each other where God is showing up…the better able we are to see Him.

So we join Habakkuk on the top of the wall.

God did answer Habakkuk. He said, in essence, “Write this down. I will appear, I will act, “there is still 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…the righteous will live by faith.”

God shows Habakkuk, somehow, in a vision, that he is not absent. And He will come…but Habakkuk will have to wait. So stand out there, lonely on the rampart, Habakkuk, and keep your eyes open…but also be prepared for the long haul.

We hate to wait, don’t we? We don’t want to wait for anything. That’s why we have to talk on cell phones when we drive, because we can’t wait ten minutes until we get somewhere. It’s why the stores all sell publications that say things like “Lose 60 pounds in a week!” or the Christian version, “Spiritual growth in 2 minutes a day!” We don’t want to wait for anything.

In the old days, when the people of Israel were wandering around in the wilderness, they followed the shekinah glory, the manifestation of God that appeared as a huge pillar of fire. When the pillar moved, the people packed up their tents and their tabernacle, and followed. That was the easy part. The tough part was when they had to wait. They had to sit their in their dirty tents, and learn to deal with each other, and look for food, and wait. That’s almost always when they got into trouble. Waiting is hard.

Waiting is also good. It slows us down. It nudges us towards Sabbath rests. It puts life into perspective. It quiets our spirits so we might have a chance of hearing God’s voice speak. Waiting reminds us again…that we don’t have to do everything, don’t have to be everything. Waiting helps us to remember that we belong to God.

This idea of waiting, of slowing down is becoming more and more difficult.

It’s seemed especially hard in this last month. Maybe it happens every January, and I don’t remember it. Or maybe it’s only when the Seahawks lose in the Super Bowl. All I know is I have had a lot of conversations lately with people who self-describe themselves as being “on the edge.” Too busy, too fried, too overwhelmed, too overcommitted.

Those words have come out of my mouth as well. Some people I’ve talked to were overwhelmed with the busyness of life to the point of paralysis. Our elders each write a monthly report in anticipation of our session meeting. I didn’t add up the numbers, but as I read them last week, it seemed that almost every single person was using those words. “My world is spinning out of control.”

The pulls of our culture and the pushes of technology are only turning the plate faster. We will have to choose, intentionally choose…to go slower. To wait on God.

To not try and do everything. And I’ve said this before, but I honestly think this is one of the most countercultural things that Christians can do in our world to demonstrate to others…another way of living that waits on God rather than periodically checking to see if He’s following.

When I headed back to Seattle from Idaho after Uncle Don’s funeral, through Moscow, Pullman and Colfax, it was nighttime and pitch black on Highway 26. We don’t see darkness like that in the city. I glanced out my side window and saw a white mass in the blackness. It took 2 or 3 glances to figure out what it was. Stars. More stars and constellations than I remember ever seeing in one sky. There wasn’t a farm or light within sight, and no cars coming for miles in either direction so I pulled over to the side, turned off the car and turned out my headlights and opened my window to stare and listen to absolute stillness. It was amazing, this gift from the Maker of heaven and earth. And I would have totally missed it.

Habakkuk, I suspect, was not too happy to get the word or the vision that he did.

The armies of Babylon would come. Judah would be crushed. Yet God was somehow still in control. Watch. Wait. I’ll come. And what about in the meantime? Habakkuk has a choice to make. We do too. What do we do, when it looks dark, when God seems a long way off? “The righteous will live by faith.” God’s people keep walking, trusting that the promises of God…will come true. That God will be with us, that the glimpses of the kingdom of God that Jesus Christ ushered in…will one day be not a glimpse, but our full reality. “The righteous will live by faith.” trusting in God’s promises that no matter what the circumstances might look like, He is with us.

Habakkuk joins all of the prophets we’ve read so far in trusting that God is in control and he will triumph. It just doesn’t always look like it in the moment. It’s often that way. When Jesus was arrested in the garden on Maundy Thursday, it didn’t look like triumph. When He was hung on the cross on Good Friday, it didn’t look like triumph. When the world was quiet on Holy Saturday, it didn’t look like triumph. All of creation, all of eternity wailed, watched and waited. And it was only in the light of Easter morning…that the triumph of God became clear. God’s forgiveness, given to us. The finality of death, broken forever. And so we wail…we watch…we wait. And,

“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 exult in the God of my salvation.”