Nonetheless

Nonetheless

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 2, 2016

Scripture: Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

You know, the Bible truly is a remarkable book. The newest parts of it were written nearly two thousand years ago, the oldest parts of it more like three thousand years ago or more. Yet sometimes when we read a passage in it we could swear that it is talking about the world today. I suppose that’s largely because, as the depressed author of Ecclesiastes says, there is nothing new under the sun. Our world is different from the worlds of the Bible in many ways, but the people of the Bible were just as human as we are. I suppose that truth explains some of why the Bible sometimes sounds so contemporary. Maybe the Holy Spirit has something to do with it too. Whatever the reason, somehow the Bible has spoken to people of vastly different cultures, times, and places for a very long time, which I suppose is why we still turn to it as a source of spiritual and worldly wisdom. The book of the prophet Habakkuk from which we just heard a couple of passages dates from the around the turn of the seventh to the sixth century BCE, that is, from around the year 600 BCE or so. It is very ancient; yet when we read those passages we just heard during the clergy lectionary group that I attend on Monday mornings, my colleagues in that group and I all were struck by how much it sounds like this ancient Hebrew prophet was describing our world today.

The prophet cries: Violence, and he thinks God doesn’t answer. His world was indeed filled with violence. The ancient world in which Israel tried to exist was a world of empire after empire acting the way empires always do. Empires are violent. They invariable use military force to try to expand their borders or at least their power over other people. Israel often bore the brunt of that imperial expansionism. By the time Habakkuk cried out against the violence of his day the Assyrian Empire had already wiped the northern of the two Hebrew states of the time off the map for good. The Babylonian Empire had conquered the Assyrian Empire by force and was expanding toward Jerusalem in an attempt to expand its borders and create a buffer between itself and the Egyptian Empire to the west. The ancient world in which Habakkuk lived was a world filled with violence at every turn. It was more technologically primitive violence than is the violence of our world, but it was still violence.

Habakkuk cries that God isn’t paying attention: “Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrong?” The world is a mess! There is injustice everywhere? How long, Lord, how long? I don’t know about you, but think I know what Habakkuk was feeling. See, I know that there is a lot of good in the world. I know that there is a lot of love, compassion, and justice in the world, but these days it’s so easy to forget all that and just see the violence and the injustice. The Russians just bombed a hospital in Syria. I don’t know how many innocent people, most of them Black, have been shot in our country in the last 24 hours, but far, far too many. Heck, one is too many. A grade school boy who was shot at school has died. A grade school boy! Really? What’s going on in this country of ours, in this world of ours? There is way too much shooting. There is way too little justice. I get it when Habakkuk screams “How long, Lord?” I feel like screaming the same thing.

Well, in our passages from his book this morning Habakkuk gets his answer from God. God tells him that there still is a divine vision for a better future. That vision is not false. It will come in due time. Then God tells Habakkuk how he is to live in the meantime. Our passage ends “but the righteous will live by faith.” God tells Habakkuk, and tells us, that God calls us to live by faith in the teeth of all the violence and injustice in the world. God’s answer, for now, to us who live in a far from perfect world is: Live by your faith.

Folks, that, I think, is one of the great things that having faith does for us. I allows us to live when we know that things should be different in our lives and in our world. There is a great Canadian theologian whose work is foundational for much of my understanding of the Christian faith. He’s quite old now, and he’s retired from many years of teaching at McGill University in Montreal. His name is Douglas John Hall. Maybe some of us can read some of his work together sometime. In one of his great books he tells us what faith is, or at least one of the things that faith does. He says that faith is the ability to look reality squarely in the eye and say “nonetheless.” Actually, he says look reality squarely in the eye and say “dennoch,” because for some reason he thinks it sounds better if he says it in German. But dennoch is just a German word that means nonetheless. Faith in God and Jesus Christ gives us the strength to look all the world’s evil squarely in the eye and say nonetheless I believe. Nonetheless I will keep on living. Nonetheless I will keep working for peace and justice. Nonetheless I will believe that God is good and that the good will eventually prevail. Folks, faith is the only thing that can do that for us.

I frankly don’t know how people with no religious faith deal with the world except by ignoring everything that’s wrong with it. With faith we don’t have to ignore what’s wrong with it. With faith in God’s compassion and justice we can not only see what’s wrong with the world, we can work to make what’s wrong right. With faith we can live nonetheless. May God help us as we do. Amen.