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All You Need is All You Have
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| 10/7/2007 |
The readings are found here.
There’s a woman – let’s say – standing and looking at all the violence and unfairness around her. And she sees hunger, and lack of medical care and doctors; or maybe she sees guns, maybe she even sees the barrel of a gun; or she sees a military junta that has all the power when she doesn’t trust them with any. And she sees people around her, maybe even her own children, who are powerless, and getting more so.
Whatever the specifics are, the point is, the balance is going the wrong way. And nothing seems to be stopping it.
And her heart breaks in two, and rage just roils up, both at what she sees and at how helpless she feels – because no one person has enough power to make this all right.
No one person – but God. Now, God supposed to have that power. So why the heck isn’t God doing anything?
So this gal who’s standing there, filled with pain, starts to shake her fist up at the burned-out roof of her place in Myanmar or Darfur, or the busted-out street lights in Northern Philly, and she shakes her fist and says,
“Yo, God – I’m talking to you. I yell out, ‘Violence,’ and what are you, deaf? Why do you make me see wrong-doing and look at trouble? Why do you put this in my face? The law is slack – it’s a deflated balloon, it’s a joke. Justice doesn’t prevail. The wicked surround the ones who aren’t hurting anybody – so judgment gets out of whack. Why?! And you know what, God? I’m going to stand here and wait for your answer.”
Wow – now there’s a biblical witness. Some people say the Bible tells us nice ways to act. Nah. The Bible tells us to yell at God, among other things. The point isn’t being nice – it’s being honest in our struggle to find God. It’s being honest about how God is appearing to us – or not.
And while these painful words about injustice and violence could have come from a woman in Darfur, or Eastern Asia, or Philly, as it so happens, these words were, of course, the ones just read from the Hebrew prophet Habakkuk. Words that could so easily come out of us, and so many people in the world, also came out of someone, probably a guy, in Judah, what is now southern Israel, sort of, in around 600 BC.
And what this guy tells us is a lot.
He tells us that aggression and violence are a reality that we’ve been capable of all along.
– his people were about to be carried off to exile in Babylon in chains, losing almost everything they had as a society, and though they don’t know it yet, the signs are all around.
And this prophet names what it’s like to feel powerless and angry about that. Just like we, too, can feel voiceless, like there’s no way to make the world change, and like we’ve come up the edge of giving up. Monks facing down guns in Myanmar and then having their Internet pulled so that sending the world photos of it all is impossible, people facing all kinds of injustice right here in Philly – some of which we can see, some of which we can’t. Violence can be very obvious, but it can also be very politely hidden.
That’s the edge the prophet brings us to. Teetering on that edge of both unfairness and powerlessness.
So where do we go from there? What happens next?
Well, we’ve got several options. A sense of hopelessness, the belief that everything is so relative so there’s no way to figure it out anyway. We can have anger be an end in itself – it sort of becomes where we choose to stay. We can feel like all we can do is try to be happy in our own lives.
Those are all options we’ve probably all used.
But this voice that’s speaking to us from probably around 600 BC, give or take, tells us about at least one other possibility. One other way someone can say, “This is where I’m staking out my ground, this is where I’m staking out my identity.”
And that option is – “I’m going to argue with God; I’m going to listen for an answer, and dang it, I’m going to expect one – I’m going to be a watchman for it.” In other words, “I have told you, God, that this is no longer acceptable, and I’m ready for your answer.”
That was this prophet’s choice – a real stance, almost drawing a line in the sand and saying to God, Step up. Step up.
Which may sound almost like blasphemy, especially in some religious circles – how could you argue with God. How disrespectful.
Except – no. This prophet, this ancient text that, as far as I’m concerned, sounds like it could have been written on the basis of yesterday’s New York Times, is not being disrespectful. In fact, this prophet is doing the most respectful thing possible, something I believe, I hope, God cherishes – and that is, this prophet is bringing his whole self before God.
He doesn’t leave out the parts that say, “Hey God, how can these things be happening and you still call yourself God”; he doesn’t leave out the parts that say, “I just can’t make easy connectors between the pain and upset I feel and all the stuff people say about God’s nice plans” – he puts that square on the table. He doesn’t leave out the part that says, “I don’t see how this works.”
He brings it all to God. And that’s our ancient biblical witness today. From the depths of pre-exilic Judah, we are told, “Don’t edit yourself. The violence, the world, and how God works don’t make sense to you?? Then say so. Because God can deal with it.”
God can deal with it.
That’s the other part of what this prophet shows us, the other little chunk of Scripture today.
God doesn’t blow him off. And neither does God blow him off the map. We don’t get either silence or punishment. We get – “and God answered me.”
And what’s so exciting, the really cool thing here, is what the answer is. It’s not a grand or easy explanation about how it all works. Explanation is important, but explanations usually lead to more questions – they’re supposed to. And God wants to give Habakkuk something much bigger, some point of arrival, some assurance, about where it’s all going to end up.
So God says, Write the vision. That’s the answer – Write the vision big, be patient, but basically, Take the vision, and write it.
And I love that. Because it totally twists around things we usually think of as opposite.
First of all, the most obvious thing is – write a vision. What is that supposed to mean? It totally mixes up the ideas of what we hear, what we see, and what we communicate so that all those things aren’t so compartmentalized. It’s a bit more like some of the Eastern religions.
And then there’s the whole vision thing. It could mean either a vision of the future, though if so, we’re never told what it looks like. Or – and to me, this is maybe more likely – the vision is the experience of God itself. Maybe just God’s sheer presence is answer, is vision, enough.
Habakkuk did get an answer, he did get an exchange with God. But instead of a chalkboard diagram, instead of a postcard with cherubs and pink clouds, God gave him God’s own presence – and that’s an answer in and of itself. More than anything that’s said, more than anything that’s argued or explained, God’s own presence is the biggest answer of all. It says, I’m here. I’m really here.
Now, I don’t mean there’s not more to the book of Habakkuk – there’s a lot of complexity here. But I think this basic idea about God’s presence is what’s useful to us right now, even given that each one of us in this room is a different place in how we see all this.
That belief in God’s presence, belief that it’s all going to end up ok – it’s really hard sometimes, all of the time, actually. But still, this prophet manages to say, “I have to stake myself somewhere, I’m somehow got to see things through. So this is the process I’m going to give over to, even if it means shaking my fist at God. Again and again and again.”
Which, as ornery and imperfect and incredibly unattractive as that sounds, is really nothing less than a perfect and incredibly beautiful act of faith.
It’s like the mustard seed in the Gospel. Augustine, one of the great church fathers, writing centuries ago about this, said that, on one hand, the mustard seed is tiny – you couldn’t see it without your glasses on. But if you bite down on it, crunch down hard, it bites back. It’s strong and spicy and bitter. Its power isn’t evident from the outside. Its effect is something totally different from its size.
I think Habakkuk had the mustard-seed thing down pat. It probably didn’t look like he had much faith in God, he probably didn’t feel like he had much faith in God. But when he really dug in, when he really bit down, there was spice and spunk there. Which meant there was plenty.
As Tim was saying at our first DOCC session this past Tuesday, “all you need is all you have.”
Faith isn’t quantitative, it’s not about “how much.” It’s more about simply “how.” Which is what each one of us can write for ourselves. Step by step, question by question, prayer by prayer.
Write the vision.
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