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Habakkuk 1: 2-3, 2:2-4 + Psalm 95 + 2 Timothy 1: 6-8, 13-14 + Luke 17: 5-10
The prophet Habakkuk lives in a time when his country of Judah
is torn apart by violence and evil.
All the prophet can see are ruin and misery.
So Habakkuk turns to God, lamenting God’s seeming inaction and questions God’s ways.
His prayer is a prayer on the lips on every person of faith from every age of history:
“How long?” “How long, O Lord?”
This is what faith looks like—this conversation, this turning to the Lord God in the midst of darkness and struggle and suffering.
This crying out, this lament, comes from a person of faith who relates his anguish to God.
The prophet Habakkuk seems to have lost everything,
except for his trust that God can still be trusted even when God seems to be silent.
The response from God to this lament of Habakkuk—
write down the vision and wait on it---it will come to fruition.
The prophet’s understanding of that vision is that his people will be liberated
from all that oppresses them and that God will bring peace to their land once again.
But the prophet’s vision is too small, too limited,
as are all human visions of what God is about.
Habakkuk could not begin to imagine a grander plan, a larger vision
which God has for God’s people.
God’s plan is to set all people free from the oppression of sin,
to free them forever from the shackles of death, and grant them a share in divine life.
The One who brings God’s plan to fulfillment teaches us how to trust in God’s plan.
Jesus, the One who embodies this vision of God, shows us what faith looks like.
We tend to think of faith as something, that if we just had more of this thing
then we could more easily deal with the disappointments of each day,
with struggles and suffering.
Just give us more of this, Lord, and then we’ll be able to deal with that.
But Jesus is clear—faith is not about something but about a relationship with Someone,
with him as the King of Kings and Master of the Universe!
So, faith is not about quantity at all but about the quality of one’s relationship with Jesus.
Can we trust him and his love for us even in the darkest and most miserable of times?
This relationship with the Son of God, as we give our hearts to him daily
and receive from his heart divine love, does not protect us from anything.
Just because we “have faith” does not mean we are protected from suffering and struggle.
But it does mean that we know we are sustained in everything, in every trial,
the Lord is with us giving us strength and courage to persevere in trusting love.
This relationship with the one who is our Lord, whom we serve with all we are,
draws us into relationship with our Heavenly Father from whom all good things come.
United to the Son, empowered by the Spirit, we are drawn to the Father
who always has more to give us: more life, more love, more joy, more peace.
Entering more deeply into the life and love of the Trinity,
we learn that every trial is an opportunity to grow in love;
every suffering an opportunity to grow in joy.
But we can become discouraged because the “Kin-dom” which Jesus initiates
does not seem to be coming to its fulfilment.
All we see are divisions, hatred, factions, violence, clamorous discord.
Where is the Kingdom of Peace and Justice that you came to establish, O Lord?
What are we to be about in the meantime while waiting for the fulfillment of the vision
of the “Kin-dom of God”?
We are to live as servants of the Lord, doing what we are obliged to do.
We do our duty. This is the quality of discipleship we learn from Jesus today
on our Journey up to Jerusalem with him.
Because we know we owe everything to God, we live a life of dutiful love.
There is no room for the “Look what I’ve done” attitude,
because there is always more we can do and ought to do.
So we go about doing our duty—loving God in all things
and loving our neighbor as ourselves.
We do what is right and do it boldly, even when others appear to profit
from doing the wrong.
With Jesus, the One who came to serve, we embrace a servant’s heart.
We are dutifully faithful to our commitments in the small stuff of our lives
and in the big stuff as well.
We plant seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We cannot do everything,
But we can do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for God’s grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference
between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not Master Builders; servants, not the Master of the Universe.
This is what it will take to bring fulfillment to God’s saving plan:
servants who know and fulfil their duty,
Or as the poet Tagore says:
“I slept and dreamed that life was joy.
I woke and found that life was duty.
I acted and found that duty was joy.”Fr. Joseph A. Jacobi