Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
Friends, listen for a word from God in the Book of the Prophet Habakkuk, the 1st chapter, verses 2-4.
2 O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,
and you will not listen?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
and you will not save?
3 Why do you make me see wrongdoing
and look at trouble?
Destruction and violence are before me;
strife and contention arise.
4 So the law becomes slack,
and justice never prevails.
The wicked surround the righteous;
therefore judgment comes forth perverted.
This is the word of God for the people of God.
Good evening, friends. Two weeks ago, we met Habakkuk, a prophet we know almost nothing about, who was writing on the edge of his society’s collapse, doing something most prophets don’t do. He doesn’t so much speak for God as he delivers the cries and complaints of the people to God. Tonight we’re returning to the beginning of the first chapter and Habakkuk’s first complaint. But first let’s remember the structure of the chapter. English translations don’t do a good job at delineating that there are two voices in this chapter. The first, Habakkuk, declares his first complaint in verses 2-4 (that’s what we’re looking at tonight). Then God responds in verses 5-11 and Habakkuk offers a second complaint in verses 12-17.
Remember, Habakkuk doesn’t get a response to either of his complaints until Chapter Two and we aren’t going to get a response tonight either. That’s not only ok, it’s in fact one of the points of this chapter.
A Cry Without an Answer
Chapter One opens with Habakkuk’s cry to God which is as direct as it is timeless. “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?” Pay attention to the phrasing in “how long.” That’s not a first attempt at prayer or supplication. The Hebrew tense here suggests something ongoing. Habakkuk has been making this complaint for a while. He’s cried out before and he feels like he hasn’t gotten anything back. And now he’s naming that silence aloud to God again.
He says God has made him look at wrongdoing, made him stare straight at trouble. Destruction and violence sit right in front of him. Strife and contention keep rising around him. And in the face of that suffering something as gone wrong in the structure of his society. The law has gone slack, and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous, hemming them in, and when judgment finally does come, it comes out twisted.
Habakkuk’s addressing a situation we can recognize in our own country. The threat isn’t just from some outside force. The real threat is deeply embedded in the fabric of the nation. Violence and conflict aren’t happening because of an enemy force, though for Habakkuk that will be the situation soon. No, the Hebrews are experiencing violence from within. The government creates situations where torment becomes lawful. Courts no longer render fair verdicts. Laws exist on paper but in reality carry no force or those laws are applied differently based on a person’s identity, wealth, or influence. Habakkuk isn’t standing outside his community pointing at some other nation’s violence. He’s naming what he sees inside his own nation and the very institutions that were supposed to protect people, worn down until they no longer do.
The Hebrew word translated as “law” here is torah, and torah means more than civil and criminal statutes. It means instruction, the whole shape of how a people are supposed to live together, handed down, taught, and trusted. When Habakkuk says the law, the torah, has gone slack, he’s not only complaining about a courtroom somewhere failing to convict the guilty or erroneously condemning the innocent. He’s saying the whole framework holding his community together has stopped functioning. He’s not the first prophet to say something like it. Amos accused the courts of his own day of turning justice into wormwood. Micah accused the leaders of building a city on bloodshed. Habakkuk stands in that same line, watching the gap widen between what his people were taught they owed each other and what they were actually delivering.
We know what this feels like. Our generations were raised on moral lessons about a Jesus who dined with sinners, preferred the company of the poor, and made clear that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than a rich man to enter heaven. And, having had that vision driven into our heads by both church and media, we resolved to do something about it. Yet soon we were hit with claims that we were failing in our walk as Christians and, perhaps even worse, we were communists, socialists, and un-American. We were labeled like Archbishop Hélder Câmara who famously said, “When I feed the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor are poor, they call me a communist.”
Habakkuk doesn’t file away these transgressions of his leaders. He doesn’t quietly endure it and call that faithfulness. He takes the issue straight to God and demands to know why God is letting it stand. That’s the whole of verses two through four. A cry, a description of what’s being destroyed and what’s already broken, and an accusation aimed at God who, at least Habakkuk believes, has the power and the obligation to act.
Learning to Complain
Most of us have prayed some version of Habakkuk’s opening line, even if we didn’t recognize it as or mean it as prayer. How long? Why, God, are you letting this happen?
When my mom got sick in 2024 and then went through months upon months of time in several hospitals; when it became natural to spend Saturdays in her hospital room watching Ohio State football and keeping her company. My recurring prayer was, “God how long is this going to last?” Yes, I thanked God for saving her when we needed a miracle, but why were we still there and why wasn’t she going home?
We’ve all prayed some version of these prayers in hospitals and doctor’s offices. After phone calls from home when we’ve been far away and in the days and weeks after job interviews and meetings about promotions. We’ve prayed them in times of grief when we’ve wondered when the shadows would lift. And we likely felt bad about some of those prayers. Haven’t we learned that God works in ways that are fundamentally different than ours? Who are we to question God’s plan?
Habakkuk gives us permission to say it out loud and models for us what that honest, visceral prayer can be. So does the book of Psalms, which is full of prayers just like his that cry out and name pain, name confusion, and even name frustration with God, without apologizing for any of it. Even Jesus on the cross called out to God with the first line of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Perhaps a surprising portion of the psalms follow a similar pattern: an opening cry, a description of the trouble, and a demand that God do something about it. For the Hebrews, communal suffering deserved communal lament. They had entire liturgies designed for these moments of community grief, seasons of fasting, and mourning where the community brought its collective grief to God as one body. Complaint, in Scripture, shouldn’t be interpreted as the opposite of faith as American preachers have often held. Rather it’s a form of faith, one that is practiced and embodied throughout the Bible.
Think about it, you only argue with someone you believe is actually listening. Habakkuk wouldn’t bother demanding an answer from God if he didn’t think there was a God or if he didn’t think God was capable of acting. The complaint itself is a confession that God is real, present, and responsible.
That’s true for us too. But notice, Habakkuk doesn’t stop at the personal. We shouldn’t either. The complaint isn’t “why is my life hard?” The complaint is “why is our system of justice broken.” Habakkuk is speaking for the whole community watching its justice fail. That complaint is difficult because it asks us to grieve something we didn’t cause and something we can’t fix on our own. It precisely asks us to notice injustice that doesn’t touch or oppress us directly and, because of our identities and privilege, we might be able to ignore. Yet, we are called to bring that complaint and that grief to God anyway, often on someone elses behalf.
Not only do we have to name the complaint because it supports our communities, but left unspoken, that kind of grief tends to foment into cynicism, resignation, and the all too often hardened shrug that says nothing will ever change. Spoken to God, however, it stays alive as prayer.
Habakkuk’s Time and Ours
Friends, we don’t have to work very hard or look very far to feel the resonance across centuries with Habakkuk and the situations he’s describing. We know what it feels like to watch an institution stop doing what it exists to do. We know what it feels like to ask, quietly or aloud, whether anyone in charge is going to answer for it.
Habakkuk doesn’t offer us a solution to that feeling immediately. But he offers us the permission to name it and bring it before God. Like him, we still believe that God is listening, even if in silence. While that may be a smaller gift than we want, it’s still a gift given in hope.
Next week we’ll discuss God’s answers. That answer isn’t necessarily what either Habakkuk or we may want, but it forms a part of the narrative. Tonight, we sit with the complaint itself, unanswered, the way Habakkuk had to sit with it, and we let it be honest before we rush anywhere else. Blessed be that waiting.