Sermon: Stay at the Watchpost

Church of the Nativity - Fayetteville, GA

October 5, 2025

17th Sunday After Pentecost Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4

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I have to admit, when I sat down to look at the readings for today, they all felt heavy and hard. The last time I preached, the texts weren’t much easier. So, I’m beginning to think Father Brian knew exactly what he was doing when he handed out the preaching schedule!

But in truth, I’m grateful for these difficult texts. Because they don’t let us stay on the surface. They invite us to wrestle with what’s real.

That’s why I felt drawn to speak about Habakkuk this morning. This short book, just three chapters, is one we rarely hear from in worship. In fact, this passage is the only text from Habakkuk that appears in all three years of the lectionary cycle. 

We don’t often linger with the prophets, maybe because their language feels foreign or their tone uncomfortable. But as Richard Rohr writes in his newest book on the prophets, The Tears of Things, they are not fortune-tellers or doomsday preachers. They are truth-tellers. They stand in the tension between God’s vision and human reality. They see the world as it is and refuse to look away. Rohr says the prophetic voice is always “anchored in grief and love,” grief for what is broken, and love for what could be.

And that’s what Habakkuk offers us, the courage to look at the world and ask hard questions about what faith should look like. The disciples ask for more faith, and Jesus talks about the power of faith in today’s gospel reading. But what does that faith look like, really?

Habakkuk is a book of lament. We have, in many ways, lost the art of lament in the Church. We’ve forgotten how to bring our pain, our questions, even our anger, honestly before God. Yet Habakkuk reminds us that the problem of suffering is real, and that faithful people don’t ignore it or explain it away. Faithful people learn how to ask their questions to God rather than about God. Habakkuk begins his book with a cry that feels painfully familiar: “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?”

A little background helps here. The Minor Prophets are the 12 books of Hosea through Malachi. Habakkuk is the 8th of these. All we know about him is that he lived around the late 7th century BCE, in Judah, likely during the last decades before the Babylonian exile. The great Assyrian empire was collapsing, and Babylon was rising in its place. The people of Judah had already seen their northern neighbors conquered. They were trying to hold onto faith and identity in the face of political chaos, greed, and fear. 

Unlike the other prophets, Habbakuk doesn’t accuse Israel or even speak to the people on God’s behalf. Instead, he stands on the edge of history, watching the world he knows unravel. And instead of offering easy answers, he does something radical: he complains to God. Chapters 1 and 2 are a back-and-forth argument between the prophet and God. Then, in Chapter 3, he points to the past story of God’s deliverance of the people in Exodus as an image of the future exodus God will perform, bringing justice to all people and rescuing the oppressed.

This short and powerful book shows us that true faith laments. We’ve often been taught that faith means having the right answers. But the prophets teach us that faith means having the right questions.

To lament is not to doubt God; it’s to refuse to let go of God when life doesn’t make sense. It’s saying, “God, I know who You are… so why does it look like You’re not being Yourself right now?” That’s an act of deep trust. Because it assumes that God is who God has always been—just and merciful—and that somehow, beneath what we see, God’s goodness still holds.

Habakkuk’s first complaint in chapter 1 questions God’s inactivity. He asks, “God, why don’t you stop all this?” He cries out, and God does answer, but not in the way he expects. God says, “Look at the nations and see! For I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if you were told.” Well, that sounds hopeful, until we realize what the work is. God is raising up Babylon, a violent and ruthless empire, to bring judgment on Judah.

It’s as if God says, “Yes, I see the injustice. But my way of addressing it is going to make things a whole lot worse before they get better.” Wait a minute, God, Habakkuk says. “How can a holy and just God use an even more corrupt nation to bring justice on his own people?” He is asking. This is the moment where faith meets the real world. 

It’s the point at which our theology collides with our experience, and we’re left asking: Can God still be good if this is what’s happening? It’s the same question so many of us have asked in our own times of suffering: when violence fills the headlines, when illness strikes without reason, when the world feels upside-down.

Here is where we enter the realm of theodicy, a term that comes from the Greek, meaning “justifying God.”  Theodicy is a philosophical argument that wrestles with a hard question: how can an all-powerful, all-good God allow suffering and evil to exist? Why do the righteous suffer while the wicked prosper, at least for a time? Habakkuk’s struggle is our struggle. And it is okay that it is. Wrestling with these questions is part of faith. Honest questioning does not disqualify us from trust; it deepens it.

This is what makes Habakkuk’s response to God so important for us. He doesn’t turn away from God with his questions. He turns toward God again. He brings his protest into the relationship, trusting that God can handle it. Lament, in Scripture, isn’t a lack of faith. It’s one of the truest expressions of it. To cry out, “How long, O Lord?” is to still believe there is a Lord who hears.

So, here is the hinge point of this book. Faith, here, is not blind belief. Real faith waits. I love this about Habakkuk. His is not a passive waiting but really a stubbornness of faith. He says: I will stand at my watchpost, and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what he will say to me, and what he will answer concerning my complaint.”

It is the posture of staying put and holding steady, almost saying, “God, I’m not going anywhere and you’re going to have to answer me here.” Real faith trusts God’s character and refuses to leave the conversation with God, even when we are afraid, confused, or angry. And it’s there, in the waiting, that God speaks again, this time not with a plan, but with a promise: “The righteous shall live by faith.” 

From his place of waiting, Habakkuk finally hears God’s response again: “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it. For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay.”

It’s as if God is saying: Don’t lose sight of what is true, even when everything around you feels uncertain. Hold onto the vision of justice and mercy that I have promised. It will come. It just might not come on your timetable.

And then comes the line that echoes through Scripture for centuries to come: “The righteous shall live by faith.” This is the heart of Habakkuk’s message, and it’s no small statement. Faith, for Habakkuk, isn’t about blind belief or passive waiting. It’s about living—continuing to act, to hope, to love, to do justice—while trusting that God’s promises still hold, even when you can’t yet see their fulfillment.

When Paul quotes this verse in Romans and Galatians, he’s not talking about an abstract kind of belief. He’s talking about a way of life. To “live by faith” is to align your life with the trust that God is still at work, even when the evidence seems thin. It means we keep showing up. We keep praying. We keep forgiving. We keep seeking peace and doing good, not because it always feels effective, but because that’s what faith looks like in motion.

The psalm today echoes the same truth: “Do not fret because of the wicked… Trust in the Lord and do good.” It’s not about ignoring evil or injustice. It’s about not letting them dictate who we become.

When the world seems to be unraveling, faith isn’t pretending everything’s fine. It’s living differently in the midst of what’s not fine, rooted in the trust that God’s purposes are still unfolding, and that love will have the last word. 

Remarkably, the story doesn’t end there, though. By the end of the book, nothing in Habakkuk’s world has changed. His nation is still in danger, and injustice still lingers. But he has changed. His complaint becomes a song. His fear becomes rejoicing. He writes a declaration of trust in Chapter 3: “Though the fig tree does not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines… yet I will rejoice in the Lord. The Lord, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the deer’s; he enables me to tread on the heights.”

Chaos, scarcity, and uncertainty remain. And yet, something in Habakkuk has changed. What has shifted is not his circumstances, but his posture. Habakkuk moves from demanding answers to embodying trust. He moves from complaint to watchfulness, and from waiting to praise. Faith has taken root so deeply that he can rejoice even when the evidence for hope is absent.

Habakkuk models for us what it looks like to live by faith. Faith is not merely enduring suffering; it is engaging it, responding to it, and ultimately choosing joy. He shows us that praise, even in the absence of resolution, is an act of spiritual courage.

As I was reflecting on this kind of faith this week, I heard a beautiful example of someone who lived this out in our time. In addition to being here with you on Sundays, I am serving as a chaplain intern at The Church of the Holy Comforter in Atlanta. It is part of a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, in which we learn about being present with people in times of deep suffering. We are learning about spiritually integrated therapy and pastoral care, asking how do you show up for people in these places of darkness, hold their stories, and sit in that place of discomfort? 

I read in my studies this week about someone who, in the darkest of circumstances, came to a similar conclusion as Habakkuk about what it means to live with faith in the midst of suffering. Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist who, even in the horrors of Nazi concentration camps, discovered that human beings could still find meaning. Before the Holocaust, he was involved in organizing counseling centers in Vienna and specialized in treating suicidal patients. 

He was interned in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, where he lost his wife, parents, and siblings. His experiences in the camps led him to develop logotherapy and write Man’s Search for Meaning, with the central idea that meaning is the primary motivation of life. Frankl observed that those who held onto a purpose in the camps—whether a loved one, unfinished work, or the belief in something greater than themselves—were the ones most likely to endure.

He wrote: “If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering… The salvation of man is through love and in love.” Like Habakkuk, Frankl faced suffering he did not choose, could not control, and could barely comprehend. Yet both of them discovered that even in the midst of darkness, faith remains possible. 

Habakkuk’s song, rising from uncertainty and fear, and Frankl’s reflection, forged in unimaginable suffering, converge across time. Both teach us that we can respond to life’s hardships not with despair, but with trust. Both remind us that our posture—how we choose to stand, and wait, and live—matters profoundly.

And that brings us to us to today, in our own lives. We may not face Babylonian armies or concentration camps, but the world still trembles with natural disasters, global conflicts, personal struggles, sickness, and loss. Like Habakkuk, we may wonder: How long, O Lord? Why, O God?

Faith does not mean we have all the answers. Faith means we stay. We stay at the watchpost when we cannot see what is coming. We stay when God’s ways confuse us. We stay, trusting that God loves this world more than we can imagine.

We don’t have to like it. We don’t have to understand it. We just have to not leave, and in that waiting, something changes. Not the world, at least not yet. But us—Our hearts, our trust, our capacity to live by faith. So, here’s the invitation from Habbakuk: Stay. Stay at the watchpost and keep trusting that God will act. 

And with that invitation, will you pray with me?

God of justice and mercy, we cry out to You in the midst of suffering. We see injustice and oppression, hunger and war, grief and loss, and our hearts grow heavy. How long, O Lord, must the faithful endure such pain? Yet even in our lament, we lift our eyes to You. Teach us to wait and to trust.

Strengthen our trembling hands, steady our uncertain hearts. When the world feels dark, remind us that You are light. Even when the fig tree does not blossom, let us still rejoice in You, our strength and our salvation. Amen.