But First, Celebrate

Exploring the Book of the prophet Habakkuk and how it speaks to us today

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Transcript

Sermons from 

Mission Hills UCC

San Diego, California

Rev. Dr. David Bahr

david.bahr@missionhillsucc.org

November 9, 2025

“But First, Celebrate”

Habakkuk – selected verses – Common English Bible

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• God, how long do I have to keep asking for help and it feels like nothing happens?
 • Why do you make me watch all this pain and destruction?
 • How many times do I have to scream, “This is violence!” and still nothing stops?
 • Bullies surround us and justice is warped.
 • Your ways do not seem to work because justice never lasts.

God, how long?

How many times throughout history have these questions been asked and these cries been shouted, begging for a real answer? How many times have you asked them yourself? Not just about the world today, but about all the hard things happening inside our own personal lives right now. Finances. Health. Family dynamics that exhaust us. God, how long do I have to keep asking for help and it feels like nothing happens? There may not be a more human prayer.

Habakkuk demands action. He tells God, “I am going to climb up on the walls of the fortress and watch to see if you act.” He stands there shaking his fist. “Are you going to respond to my complaint?”

And God does respond. God tells Habakkuk there is a vision. But before Habakkuk can ask what it is, God turns the question back on him. That’s the danger of asking God such questions. What are you going to do about it? No. What are you going to do?

God said, “There is a vision. Write it out. Make it big enough and plain enough that someone running by can see it and understand.” 

Habakkuk is a minor prophet, and for most people he is quite obscure, but I’m betting you have heard some of his lines before.  “Write the vision” gets used all the time for capital campaigns and stewardship.  But beyond that, I’ve actually preached on Habakkuk a number of times.

For example, in 2004, my sermon focused on the verses in chapter 3:

Though the fig tree does not bloom,
 and there is no produce on the vine;
 still, I will rejoice in the Lord.
 The Lord God is my strength.

My message was that when everything in your life feels like it is falling apart, God is still with you. It was Habakkuk as comfort. A gentle hand on the shoulder. If I lose everything else, God will still be with me because God is my strength and that means I will make it through.

The next time I preached on Habakkuk it was in 2008, and the economy had just collapsed. Remember the neighborhoods filled with foreclosure signs and families in food bank lines. That year Habakkuk was not just internal comfort, but a moral critique. The fig tree became Wall Street. The empty stalls became shuttered factories. This was a public crisis as well as a private one.

I preached from Habakkuk again after I traveled to El Salvador in 2009.  I went with a group from my seminary for the 30th anniversary of Archbishop Oscar Romero’s assassination by the right-wing government, an attempt to silence their critics. While there, we were asked to visit a small mountain village whose drinking water and farmland were being threatened by a Canadian gold mining company.  For what possible reason could they want seminarians and clergy to go there I didn’t understand, until they explained the simple act of our showing up meant the world was watching. As Americans, we had a power we didn’t want to acknowledge. And that was my Habakkuk chapter 2 moment. Faith is not waiting for God to fix things. Faith is taking whatever power you have and using it toward life.

The next occasion was 2018 – just after Charlottesville. One verse from chapter 1 cried out from scripture: “Some people’s desires are truly audacious; they do not do the right thing. But the righteous person will live honestly.” 

Remember the white supremacists in streets with their tiki torches screaming “You will not replace us.”  Into those streets clergy marched singing “This Little Light of Mine.” It was Habakkuk live streamed. Violence. Outrage. The world drowning in fury. Those clergy expressing moral outrage but through singing because they refused to let hatred decide who they would become. They – and all of us – need both outrage and something more than outrage, something deeper, if we are going to keep breathing.

But singing This Little Light of Mine in Charlottesville was actually carrying on the tradition of people who sang it through the civil rights movement – people like Fannie Lou Hamer. Fannie attended a mass meeting in 1962 and heard someone say that as a United States citizen she had the right to vote. She said it felt like a religious awakening, like the Holy Spirit had set her bones on fire. 

So she went to register. But not only was she not allowed. The very same day she tried, the owner of the plantation in Mississippi – where her family had been trapped in the sharecropping system for generations – threw her off the land. Which meant her family was forced out of their home that very night.  As she drove away, Fannie was ambushed and shot at. When she kept going anyway, she was arrested and beaten in jail so savagely that she never fully recovered physically. But, although she couldn’t yet vote, the thing they could not take from her was her newfound conviction that she mattered. That her people’s lives mattered. And that God was on the side of the oppressed.

So she carried on and wherever she went, that song went with her. “This Little Light of Mine” became a weapon of dignity in the face of white supremacist terror. It echoed in jail cells, on buses, and in the streets – not as comfort, but as survival. As joyful resistance. As a way of teaching herself and her people how to stay human in a world determined to break them. 

Fannie once said, “To tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I will fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom.” She named the terror. She endured the terror. But refused to surrender her humanity to the terror. Fannie Lou Hamer was Habakkuk’s vision walking around in a cotton dress and a pair of church shoes.

Habakkuk began with the cry: “How long must I watch terror and injustice and you do nothing about it?” Was this his sorrowful lament? Was he outraged? Was he confused? Because his complaint was not unbelief. His complaint was disbelief that God would allow injustice to keep winning. 

Habakkuk’s book is not naïve. He describes two visions, two realities, contending for the same future.

There was Babylon’s vision:
 • power used to dominate
 • truth bent into propaganda
 • fear weaponized as strategy
 • the poor crushed to enrich the powerful

That was Babylon.  And then there was God’s vision:
 • power used to restore life
 • truth that is actually true
 • fear disarmed by mercy
 • those at the bottom raised to the front of the line

You understand, of course, that Babylon still exists. Not as a country but as a mindset – an “audacious desire.” The kind about which God wants Habakkuk to write a vision so large that even someone running by can see it. So, what goes on the sign? “Tell the truth.” “Protect the vulnerable, not yourself.” Maybe “Love one another” says it all.

But does that say enough? We might use “love one another” to avoid conflict. To stay safe, out of the mess. But love that stays safe while the vulnerable are harmed is not love, not the love God is talking about. So when these visions collide and call us to step up, we may be tempted instead to step back, to stay neutral. But neutrality never protects the vulnerable. Avoiding conflict to stay neutral protects the powerful.

The good news is we aren’t called to fight with force, fury, or hate.  And we cannot win through cruelty or fear. The work is not domination. The work is faithful courage practiced in love. Only with righteous love.

But, here is where Habakkuk takes an imaginative turn.  He reassures: liberation will come.  But do not wait to rejoice until after everything is fixed.

• Do not wait until after Babylon collapses on itself.
• Celebrate repair while everything is still broken.
   Celebrate justice while injustice is still winning.
• And enjoy a fig newton before the fig trees have blossomed.

That’s the often-impossible vision written larger than life.  The impossible and sometimes dangerous imagination of the prophets. Celebrate our God who liberates, who restores and heals. Rejoice!
 
 

But not after things are set right and the healing comes. 

• Not after I’m healthy again or my family gets through.
• Not after the grief lets go of its grip on me or the fear inside my chest settles down.
• Not after injustice finally ends and the powerful lose their grip.
• Not after this nation comes to its senses and the cruelty stops calling itself Christian.
   
   

Not then, but right now.  Before anything changes.

• Before the world feels safe again.
• Before the headlines give us hope.
• Before anyone apologizes.
   
   

We shall become known as the people who rejoice in God before the blessing, before the breakthrough. Why?  

• Because joy is not the result of liberation. Joy is how liberation begins.  
• Because gratitude is not the result of healing.  Gratitude is how we begin to heal.

Right here. Right now.  

In our moments of crisis.  In this country today.

That is Habakkuk 2025.