Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Christ Church, Bulkington
Habakkuk 1.1-4, 2.1-4; Luke 17. 5-10
“I will keep watch to see what he will say to me, and what he will answer concerning my complaint.”
“Anarchy and violence break out, quarrels and fights all over the place. Law and order fall to pieces. Justice is a joke. The wicked have the righteous hamstrung and stand justice on its head.” That’s a translation from the Bible version known as ‘The Message’ of the first of our readings today. It was penned by the prophet Habakkuk (isn’t that a great name) in what turned out to be the years just before an era came to an end; something that Habakkuk seems to have understood even as most of those around him scoffed. He wrote at a time when standards had collapsed, when wrongdoers seemed to get whatever they wanted and ordinary people saw no justice, when neighbours were bitterly divided from one another. Nobody really knew how to turn the country round from the decline it had settled into.
Jerusalem is On Fire, from the Art Bible (1896) – public domain image.
Truly, Habakuk was a prophet for our times—but He wrote around the year 600 BC in the Kingdom of Judah. He didn’t know that the Fall of Jerusalem was only a few years in the future, but knew his society was in trouble. Yet he also had faith that his people weren’t coming to the end a story, but merely the end of a chapter. Despite the state of his country, Habakuk still watched and waited for God to speak to him. He didn’t lose faith. And God did indeed speak to him. God told Habakkuk to do something that is now very unfashionable – to wait! – to be patient, for God would indeed grant His people a vision of a better future, but only at the appointed time.
We live at a time when everyone in public life is expected to give an instant reaction to every issue under the Sun, and this reaction has to fit in a two-sentence tweet or thirty-second video on TikTok. We demand our politicians tells us their views about sport and the entertainment business, ridiculing them if they confess to being uninterested in football or too serious-minded for the soaps. At the same time, we demand sportspeople and singers and actors give us their political opinions and act as our moral leaders. Serious problems are trivialised, while trivia is elevated
The same media vortex that produces this endless hysteria aimed at the wrong things also demands that religion becomes a branch of politics. Desperate to have some media coverage in an indifferent world, too often religion obliges, trying to present the Church as the solution to every problem. Potential Archbishops of Canterbury or Popes are scrutinised as “left-wing” or “right-wing” as if they were candidates for public office. At a time when people perceive that politics is failing, one of the many risks of an over-politicised Church is that gets tarnished by the same sense of failure. Most people are bored of politics and cynical about politicians – unhealthily and often quite unfairly cynical about them, in fact – but in that context, they definitely don’t want clergy telling them what to think or how to vote.
As for patience, if you take the time to understand an issue before giving your opinion, the 24-hour news cycle has already moved on to the next feeding frenzy. Snooze and you lose! That reflects what happens throughout society, where we’re encouraged to be impatient, and to see any failure to get what we want when we want it as a sign that our rights are being infringed. Instant consumer gratification is in; patience is out, along with other old-fashioned concepts like duty and restraint. A basic human decency, for now, keeps our interactions with one another in check most of the time, but that is being tested more and more.
In the midst of all this, it’s easy to lose most of our faith that things can ever get better. If you don’t have much faith left in the state of the world, that’s OK. You only need a little. In our Gospel reading, Jesus says even faith the size of a mustard seed is enough to do the seemingly impossible. A tiny little mustard seed is only a millimetre or two across—you could line well over a thousand of them up along the edge of the altar, literally millions of them piled on top of it. Something utterly insignificant. It’s hard to imagine it could grow into a tree big enough for birds to nest in.
To grow like this, it first has to be buried in the ground and become invisible to us. It is below the ground that the God-given miracle of germination and growth begins. Then, it takes plenty of sunshine and a certain amount of rain for the seed to become a fully-sized tree. And for humans to make good use of it, requires faith and patience, when that tiny little seed is put into the ground.
At this time of year, our churches celebrate their harvest festivals. These are partly about celebrating what God gives to us in His natural bounty, the miracle of seeds turning into bread and grass into meat. But they also celebrate the faith and patience of the farmers who produce our food. In this very dry year, the farmers’ patience and faith has been tested to an unusual degree. To eat and drink well, we need to co-operate with God and with one another. The bread and wine at Holy Communion are many things at once – yes, the Body and Blood of Christ, but also much else, and among those many other things, they are symbols of the flourishing that results from the co-operation of humanity with God.
The modern system of food production is both miraculous and frightening. We are nourished by an extraordinary range of produce, well beyond what were once traditional local harvesting seasons, from a magnificently complex network of distribution. Yet that magnificent complexity also breeds a vulnerability. We have seen in the past few years, for example, how the Russian invasion of Ukraine saw food prices spike not only here but across the world. In this country, we import almost half our food; so if there were to be some great interruption to maritime trade, we would find ourselves in trouble quickly.
That is the nature of most human strategies and structures – they are usually devices for making us secure and reducing risk, and in the short-t0-medium term that is usually how they work. But in the longer term, the very security they provide can leave us dependent and unadaptable and therefore even more vulnerable to sudden and dramatic shocks.
This most recent era of our history has seen us told to put faith in human efforts; and of course as beings made in the image and likeness of God, we should have faith in ourselves. But we have forgotten that if they forget their ultimate dependence on God, human strategies always fail in the long run.
But if we wait patiently for God in faith, we will not only receive a harvest of food on this Earth, but at the appointed time we will help Him reap the harvest He treasures most of all, which is to reap our souls to spend eternity with Him in Heaven. Never forget, whether we live through a time of trial or a time of renewal in the coming years in this country, that what you are on the Earth is but a seed; in the world to come, by the Grace of God, we will grow into something much greater than we can now imagine.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
