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Sermon: The Eighth Sunday after the Epiphany (A) - 27th February 2011
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping Evensong 6pm
Readings: Habakkuk 2;1-14; Psalm 15; Hebrews 10:19-39
Please do not think I have mistakenly started to give the sermon at this point in the service, before the Old Testament reading! Rather, I have chosen tonight to divide what I have to say into three parts, giving a brief introduction to each of the lessons in the hope that if the context is set, the reading will speak more powerfully of itself and there will be no need for longish explanations later. Then it will be left to me simply to try to pull a few threads together to conclude our reflection.
Of Habakkuk, the minor prophet who wrote our first lesson, we know absolutely nothing except for his name. Some say the name comes from the Hebrew word “to embrace” and that signifies the kind of person he was in his relationship to God – one who was clearly close to God, in that sense of to embrace, but one who also held on to tussle and wrangle with God. Because of certain events he cites in his little book, we can be fairly confident that it dates from about 600BC. In the chapter preceding our reading, the prophet protests, complains and questions God, baffled as he is by the discrepancy between God’s revelation and his own experience. He is the first prophet to berate God rather than the people of Judah and to call God to account. Some scholars believe that rather than being a spontaneous thing, this is a technique that Habakkuk employed, complaining and questioning to drive home his powerful message about the approaching judgment of God. Injustice is rampant, the righteous are Sur rounded by the wicked, the law seems powerless and God does not seem to care about the plight of his people. Why, wonders Habakkuk, is God allowing these things to happen? The first two chapters of the book are in the nature of a meditation or speculatory poem about this. And are we, surrounded and distressed by so much natural disaster, so close to home this year, not also wondering why? Our reading tonight has Habakkuk looking to God for an answer that he can give to the people. “I will stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts; I will look to see what he will say to me, and what answer I am to give to this complaint.” Then the Lord replied. There follows a catalogue of the shortcomings of the people with a statement about the futility of going after idols.
So, now the reading…
Of the author of our New Testament reading, we also know nothing from history. The scholar Origen, about 1700 years ago said that only God knows who wrote Hebrews. The content of the letter, or “word of exhortation” as the author calls it, does give some clues about its author. The writer seems to have been influenced both by Greek and Hebrew thought. The Greeks had long been haunted by the contrast between the seen and the unseen world, the temporal and the eternal. The great task for their philosophers was to reach for the reality beyond the shadowy and the imperfect of this world. That is just what the writer of the epistle claimed that Jesus could enable them to do. But the writing also shows that the author also had a Jewish background. He refers to the great day of Jewish worship, the day of Atonement, when the High Priest briefly entered the Holy of Holies where the very presence of God was held to dwell. The covenant God had made with his people was kept by their keeping of the law. When the Israelites sinned and broke the law, a barrier thus stopped access to God and the system of priestly sacrifices was instituted with the purpose of reopening that closed way to God. Experience showed it was ultimately ineffectual and needed to be repeated over and over. What humankind needed to be in constant, unbroken relationship with God was a perfect priest carrying out a perfect sacrifice so that once and for all the way of access to God was opened. That, said the writer to the Hebrews is exactly what Christ did.
So, now the reading…
To the Hebrews, the writer of the epistle effectively said “All your lives you have been looking for the perfect priest who can bring the perfect sacrifice and give you access to God. In Jesus Christ you have him.” And to the Greek, the writer of Hebrews effectively says: “You are looking for the way from shadow to reality. In Jesus Christ you find it.”. It is surprising that this great book was not at first definitively accepted as part of the New Testament; this did not come till the middle of the fourth century, the time of Athanasius.
From the content of the letter, it is clear that it is written to 2nd generation Christians, and to a group where some leaders had died for their faith, and with comment about the risk of persecution to come. That puts the letter between the periods of Christian persecution, safe to say about 80AD, 680 years after Habukkuk. It is written to a well established church which had known great days, and great teachers and leaders. It was marked by generosity and liberality. I wonder if it was a first century equivalent of St Alban’s. It is written to a small body of like-minded persons, a scholarly group. Best indications are that it was written to a little group in Rome who had been under instruction and were preparing to become teachers of the faith. In my mind’s eye, I see the complex of churches that evolved here and there in Italy to serve such communities between the fourth and seventh centuries. There are in the very north eastern corner of Italy, well preserved churches from that period where there is the seekers’ or enquirers’ or catechumens’ church quite separate from the church where the baptized community worshipped. Records indicate that people gathered here over a period of three years to be instructed in the faith before passing through an atrium and via baptism into a separate eucharist church into which they had not previously been admitted.
It is moving and salutary to realize the seriousness of their resolve to follow Christ and to commit to the faith. Our reading calls on us not to abandon our confidence, and to show endurance. It is said by one commentator that the epistle to the Hebrews is written with incomparable skill and beauty about Jesus who is the way to reality and the way to God. In it, the original hearers and we today, as their successors in the faith are urged to draw near, to hold fast to the confession of our faith without wavering. It is the kind of encouragement that could well have been written to people who were losing heart.
In the two readings tonight, we leap over the chasm of the 680 years separating the writings. From Habakkuk 2, the words “the righteous shall live by faith” link closely to the exhortation to the Hebrews “Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.” When Habakkuk quite provocatively sought God’s answer to his dilemma, the thoughts had in them the seeds of the Gospel, recognizable in the doctrines spelt out by Paul especially in Romans and Galatians. These thoughts about Jesus were distilled eloquently by the writer of the letter to the Hebrews, and used to exhort and encourage. ”Don’t throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded. You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised.”
The whole pattern is not yet clear to us, but the parts that are, reveal a God of long-suffering mercy and grace, a God who calls us to go on in unswerving commitment with the promise and assurance that he will be faithful. In dark days and days of uncertainty, we need to try to be open for God to be present to us and in us and for us to enable others to find God present in the midst of sadness, difficulty and adverse circumstances. Recently I thought how confused the theology of a Queensland leader, admittedly in the public light and under great strain with the tragic unfolding of events in that state, who spoke about feeling grateful things weren’t worse – I wondered grateful to whom, but then was added “What we need is a lot of luck, a few prayers and some fingers crossed”. I would like to share with that person the alternative, the outlook embodied in our readings and put by theologian Mary Grey, in a slightly different context that ours “is a way of seeing in the dark rather than an end to darkness”. The call to us is to “consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds”, not neglecting to meet together but encouraging one another.
Earlier I made reference to the nature of the first two chapters of Habakkuk. To conclude tonight, I would like to use some of the poetic third and final chapter of his little book. There is a total change of mood; the head-on, challenging prophet, having wrestled with God over his apparent carelessness of His people, prays in an eloquent, poetic way, a sustained hymn of praise, a pattern for our response in time of adversity:
“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 will I 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.”