Eyes Up

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.06.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Habakkuk  (it's short. read the whole thing.)

When I was a youngling, in second and third grade, my mom and I would conclude most days by sitting and reading stories together.  This was aeons ago, of course, back before we knew the joys of everyone sitting alone in a different room with their very own screen.  

Hey, we made do with what we had.  For a couple of years, what we did right before sleep was read aloud through the Narnia books, one after another, cover to cover.  Rich books they are, and full of memorable characters and subtle, gentle hints at the best and greatest purposes of Christian faith.  From those pages, there came a character I loved, one that I identified with so very much that my mom started calling me by his name.  A marshwiggle he was, an amphibious flipper-toed humanoid, tall and lean and sallow.  Puddleglum was relentlessly certain that the worst would come of everything, which was just the way of the world, which he endured with a wry stoicism. 

As a child, I was that marshwiggle.  Not because my toes were webbed, which they aren’t, at least the last time I checked.  It’s that I was consistently and insistently pessimistic.  

My assumption, no matter what, was that the one great law governing the universe was Murphy’s law.  If something can go wrong, it will.  

If I had a test the next day?  I was going to fail it, as I’d suddenly forget everything I’d been studying for over the last week and my pencils would all break.   Just got an awesome new flying gas-powered toy plane that I’d bought with all of my birthday and Christmas money?  It would never start.  Ever.  It was just my operating assumption about the nature of things, and I was content with it.

Whenever I would make some pronouncement along those lines, which I did often, my mom would say, “Oh, Puddleglum.”  

There was a logic to that approach to existence, as I reasoned it.  Being a pessimist means that if things go wrong, at least you knew it was coming.  And if your grim assessment proves incorrect, and the world comes up roses, and you ace that test?  Well, then you’re happy.  So the pessimist is either right or happy, which means you’re pretty much never disappointed.  Ah, the seamless logic of the eight year old mind.

And feeling grim about the world has been easy lately.  It seems like an increasingly safe bet.  Human beings are always just a wee bit on the difficult side, as a species, but lately we’re not exactly rocking it.   

This week around here in particular, it was a festival for pessimists.  Watching as our government pointlessly, meaninglessly was ground to a semi-halt was difficult enough in the abstract.  For some reason I have a fondness for this country, and watching as even the most basic processes of our Constitutional governance became mired in pointless, unconstructive gamesmanship was not easy.

That it seemed both so easy to avoid and inescapable didn’t make that any easier.

This went a little bit beyond the usual media grimness, the relentless toll of negativity that can often consume us as we compulsively check the news apps on our pocketscreens.  Those you can shut out or turn off, retreating to your garden or to your work.  It was different because this was going on all around.  Seeing neighbors and friends out for walks with their kids in the middle of the day is usually a pleasant thing.   When traffic is notably lighter than usual as you go pick up your kids at around 5:15 in the afternoon, you usually marvel at the Good Lord’s blessings.  This week, those things had a different feel.  Fighting and stalemate, grandstanding, blood, gunfire and madness, dead mothers and weeping children.  It was a mess, even by Washington standards.

When bad news is all around, when it’s in the stories that are being told around you and humming through the community all about, it’s easy to become consumed by it.   When our existence seems defined by the negative, that becomes all we think about.  It becomes the defining feature of our existence, consuming our thoughts.

That’s the struggle facing the prophet Habakkuk this morning, as he wrestles and tussles and struggles with the impossible mess in the world around him.  Habakkuk is one of those books that we don’t spend a whole bunch of time hearing about in church, perhaps because it’s really, really easy to miss.  Three short chapters, a couple of pages, and it’s easy to truck right on by this little book.  

It’s a pity, because this is a remarkably rich little text.  We know almost nothing about Habakkuk, other than that this book must have been written at some point in the sixth and seventh century before Jesus.  We know that because he references the Chaldeans...meaning Babylon...which apparently had not yet quite gotten around to crushing Judah yet.

What’s striking about this teensy little book is that it’s what is called a “theodicy.”  That means it is a divine indictment, a challenge offered up by someone who is calling into question whether or not God is holding up God’s end of the whole “being your God” deal. 

Habakkuk is laying out a question, one based on what he’s seeing and experiencing in Judah.  What he’s observing is a wreck of a society, in which the essential balance of the culture is shot.  Nothing seems to work.  Everything he saw was fighting and self-seeking, as the powerful sought more power and justice is trampled.

Nothing at all like today, in other words.  Ahem.

Standing in encounter with this text, there are three takeaways that we should be able to carry with us on our own journeys through times of challenge and hardship.  Because after almost three thousand years, human beings remain rather frighteningly similar.

First, that acknowledging and naming the negative is an essential part of covenant.  If all we want to show the world all the time is shiny happy people holding hands, then we’re not really standing in encounter with the world.   There are broken things here, hurts and horrors, predation and monstrousness.  

Those powers can be huge, walking the world like the giant monsters in that Guillermo Del Toro film I never got around to seeing this last summer.   They can also be as tiny as a virus, worming their way into us, tearing us from the path of grace God sets before us.  If we don’t name them, if we don’t call them out and challenge them, then they’ll consume us.

It’s the call of a prophet to name those things as Habakkuk named them.  It’s also the prophetic call to challenge those things, calling their validity into question against the essence of covenant.

And that gets us to the second takeaway.  Habakkuk is challenging the reality he encounters, casting it into stark contrast against the essence of his sense of covenant with God.  He’s not just tearing down for the sake of tearing down.  He’s not abandoning his relationship with his Creator.  He is not becoming a cynic, in other words.

The cynic doubts everything, and believes that things are broken because that is just the way things are.  The prophet challenges the broken things, knows that they are wrong and off and horrific.  They know that even more deeply than the cynic, because for the cynic, there is no contrast between what should be and what is.  Of course things are horrible, says the cynic.  Things are just horrible, period.

The faithful soul knows that this is not true, that there is, hidden within the mess, the potential for things to be whole and healthy...and that potential is what God desires for us.  Theodicy is not shaking ones fist at God, but going deeper into that relationship of covenant.

And that turns to the third takeaway.  Just as Habakkuk stands on the watchpost and looks out for what God might bring, we’re called to turn our eyes up and away from the broken things, and towards that place where justice and restoration stand.

This is not easy.  It is much easier, particularly if you’re of a marshwiggly temperament, to simply let yourself get mired in the mess.  That means doing nothing, or worse yet, becoming so consumed by the hopelessness of the broken world that it becomes all that you see, and the thing that you let define your being.

If we let our vision become only for our brokenness, and do not also have an eye towards who we know God wants us to be, then we are lost.  It is the great purpose of faith to give hope and meaning in those times.

Name those broken things you encounter, and know that you are called to challenge them.  Stand in confidence that you are in covenant relation with your Creator, and let that be the ground of your challenge.   And keep your eyes up, not letting them be clouded by the darkness you encounter.

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.  God, the Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, and makes me tread upon the heights.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.