Habakkuk 1.1-4, 2.1-4; 2nd Timothy 1.1-14; Luke 17.5-10
What is your favorite book in the Bible: the Psalms; Ruth; one of the gospels—Luke, maybe, because of all his stories about healing? I’m guessing the Old Testament prophet who is the source of today’s first reading would not be at the top your list: Habakkuk.
Maybe the problem starts with how to pronounce his name: Ha-BAK-kuk, HAB-a-kuk; Po-TAY-to, Po-TAH-to. Some names from the Bible are still common in our day. For girls, you might know Mary, Naomi, or Eden. For boys Jonah, Elijah, and Micah. I have baptized Hannahs and Samuels. I have even baptized the mythological Norse god Odin—two Odins, as a matter of fact. But I have but never baptized a Habakkuk. That name and this prophet aren’t particularly familiar to us. Still, there is something about Habakkuk that makes me think we should know more about him, something about the time he lived in and the message he preached that can speak to us.
Habakkuk is among the biblical writers who don’t hesitate to lay it all out before God when things go wrong. There are many of example of lament in the Bible: Job particularly; the prophets and psalms; St Paul; Jesus himself. Count Habakkuk among them. He had plenty of reason to lament. He prophesied in the nation of Judah at a time of great national and cultural instability. One powerful nation, Assyria, was collapsing while another, Babylon, was gaining dominance. As a result, Judah was vulnerable to external military threat. Within the nation of Judah and among God’s own people, things were also bad. There was widespread injustice and a broken judicial system, violence, exploitation of the weak, corruption among the powerful, spiritual confusion.
Habakkuk reads the headlines of his day and takes his lament directly to God. It’s the beginning of today’s first reading. “O Lord, how long will I cry for help and you will not listen…Why do you make me see wrong-doing…The wicked surround the righteous.” Yet it’s not only headline-making news that raises questions like “How long?” It also happens close to home and behind the door of our heart: suffering and sadness; loneliness and doubts; hurts we never share with anyone or fears we can’t shake. Our lives are fragile even as we try to project a brave front. Psalm 13 echoes Habakkuk’s question and makes it personal. “How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever?” Lament is a part of faith. And Habakkuk’s experience is not so far from our own. The message he preached can speak to us. That makes this prophet worth knowing and listening to.
Today, Habakkuk offers ballast to give us a sense of stability through troubling times—faith. “The righteous live by their faith.” In the gospel, the disciples are also looking for the strength that faith provides. Earlier, Jesus had sent them out to be people of peace and well-being but he also warned that they would face challenge and resistance; they would be sent “like lambs in the midst of wolves.” Aware of the work that Jesus had given them to do, and aware that it would not be easy, they pray, “Lord, increase our faith!” Give us what we need, and enough of it!
Now maybe it is natural, when we are aware of great challenges and needs of our own to look inward to ourselves and question our faith, whether we have enough. An internal voice raises doubt. ‘Maybe my life is in the shape it’s in because I lack faith. If I had more faith, things would get better.’ You’ve maybe even heard that from others. ‘If you believe enough, things will turn out fine.’ But what’s enough? So you start checking your beliefs, measuring what you think you have. ‘Does this look like a ¼ cup of faith to you? Or is it half a cup of faith mixed with a half cup of doubt? Maybe if I had a full cup of faith, things would work out.’
Jesus’ response to the disciples’ request, “Lord, increase our faith,” is curious. “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed,” he says. ‘Mustard seed’ is the Bible’s way of saying ‘not measurable at all.’ If you could hold it in your hand, it would be like a speck of dust, barely visible. Tim Keller, in his book, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, reminds us that, “It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you.” If you climb a tree and scootch out to sit on a branch, Keller observes how “Strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a strong branch.” Habakkuk offers ballast and a sense of stability through troubling times. He turns attention away from ourselves and to the strength of God, even as we lament.
So instead of thinking about faith as something you can measure out, or as a list of beliefs you must check off and tally up, think of faith as ‘trust in a person.’ In Habakkuk’s case, this means looking outward to God.
I like the image that priest and writer Robert Farrar Capon offers to picture faith as trust in a person. Suppose I’m in the hospital for an extended period of time, not only bedridden but, the costs of healthcare being what they are, broke. My friends who come to visit start telling me that if I don’t get my house painted, my siding is going to rot. Only there’s nothing I can do about that given the condition I’m in. Besides, I wouldn’t have the resources to hire help even if I wanted to. But one day you come to visit and tell me that the painter you hired to do the outside of my house has just finished up the trim and put the finishing touches on the whole job. What’s my response to your news? I suppose I could not trust what you said and continue to be miserable about the condition of my house. But that seems unnecessary. Or I could trust your word, be thankful for the work you’ve done and the gift you’ve given, even find a bit of joy. And notice how the amount of faith I have in your word isn’t what matters. Whether I trust you a lot or a little, weak and little as a mustard seed, your gift is a strong branch in my difficulty. My faith didn’t make that happen. You did. Faith is trust in a person.
When the prophet Habakkuk declares that “the righteous will live by their faith,” he is speaking to people caught in the tension between God’s promises and the harsh realities of their world and their lives as they know them in the present moment. As we live, even as we live by faith, we struggle with pain and doubt. There are, and will be, plenty of things that increase both.
Note, for example, how your gift of fixing up my house doesn’t take away the fact that I’m still bedridden and broke. Faith doesn’t take away the troubles we see in the world or the hurts we face in our lives. Yet to ‘live by faith’ in Habakkuk’s sense is not passive resignation to reality or clinging to naïve ideas of God that can’t withstand the winds of real life for five minutes. The prophet Habakkuk is worth knowing because he points us to God whose steadfast love and faithfulness have the capacity to give us stability in our present need and whenever we cry out, “How long?”
Faith is a way of life grounded in the confidence that God is still sovereign, even when the world is out of joint. This is how Paul describes faith in today’s second reading. “Relying on the power of God who saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to God’s own purpose and grace.” Faith is endurance, a steady trust that God’s promises will prevail over the apparent triumph of evil. Faith trusts the strength that God gives even when there is no visible reason for hope.
And did you hear how Habakkuk says that the opposite of this faith is not doubt but arrogance, the arrogance of the proud who rely on their own power, exploit others, and imagine themselves secure. In contrast, Habakkuk says, the righteous live not by what they see, but by the unseen faithfulness of God. “Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith.”
When everything around shouts arrogance and doom, Habakkuk’s word that “The righteous live by their faith” is a whispered word of courage and hope for you. For Habakkuk and for us, faith is the lifeline that connects us to God in a broken world. It enables us to endure without bitterness, to hope without denial, and to act with integrity even when everything around us seems corrupt. To live by faith is to live in trust that God’s justice will come, and that God’s steadfast love and faithfulness are stronger than the world’s brokenness. The author Flannery O’Connor once wrote in a letter to a friend and said, “Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it you are always making your way in the darkness.” But we can make our way through, as Paul says, “relying on the power of God who saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to God’s own purpose and grace.”
When Paul wrote those words, he was writing from prison. Even with faith, this great apostle suffered. Yet he could also say, “I know the one in whom I have put my trust” When the disciples, aware of their great need, ask Jesus for more faith, he promises to be with them and work through them in the least likely and smallest of all places: mustard seeds barely visible or measurable. They don’t need great faith, but the steadfast love and faithfulness of a great God. This same steadfast love is Jesus’ gift for you so that you can rely on his grace in your life, a Spirit-filled word of courage and hope spoken today, and each day, to you by Habakkuk. “The righteous live by their faith.”
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