Call and Response: Considering the Book of the Prophet Habakkuk
Preached at Blue Ocean Faith Columbus on Sunday, August 9, 2026
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 2-17.
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.
5 Look at the nations and see!
Be astonished! Be astounded!
For a work is being done in your days
that you would not believe if you were told.
6 For I am rousing the Chaldeans,
that fierce and impetuous nation,
who march through the breadth of the earth
to seize dwellings not their own.
7 Dread and fearsome are they;
their justice and dignity proceed from themselves.
8 Their horses are swifter than leopards,
more menacing than wolves at dusk;
their horses charge.
Their horsemen come from far away;
they fly like an eagle swift to devour.
9 They all come for violence,
with faces pressing forward;
they gather captives like sand.
10 At kings they scoff,
and of rulers they make sport.
They laugh at every fortress
and heap up earth to take it.
11 Then they sweep by like the wind;
they transgress and become guilty;
their own might is their god!
12 Are you not from of old,
O Lord my God, my Holy One?
You shall not die.
O Lord, you have marked them for judgment,
and you, O Rock, have established them for punishment.
13 Your eyes are too pure to behold evil,
and you cannot look on wrongdoing;
why do you look on the treacherous
and are silent when the wicked swallow
those more righteous than they?
14 You have made people like the fish of the sea,
like crawling things that have no ruler.
15 He brings all of them up with a hook;
he drags them out with his net;
he gathers them in his seine,
so he rejoices and exults.
16 Therefore he sacrifices to his net
and makes offerings to his seine,
for by them his portion is lavish,
and his food is rich.
17 Is he then to keep on emptying his net
and destroying nations without mercy?
This is the word of God for the people of God.
Friends, we’re starting something new this evening which will continue for the six weeks after I return from vacation. We’re going to live inside a book of the Bible that many of us may have never read and likely most of us have never heard preached: Habakkuk. It’s one of the Bible’s shorter books at just three chapters and 56 verses and tucked between Nahum and Zephaniah, in the part of the Bible often referred to as the Minor Prophets. Before we go any further, we need to get acquainted with Habakkuk himself. Who he is, when is he writing, and why on earth should we spend a month and a half here instead of somewhere more familiar?
Who Is This Prophet, and When Is He Writing?
I hate to tell you that we don’t know much about Habakkuk. Think about other Biblical writers: Isaiah has a narrative of his life and call. We even hear about his family. We learn about Jeremiah’s hometown and the name of his scribe Baruch who takes dictation. Ezekiel has visions so specific we can practically draw them. Habakkuk has none of that. No genealogy, no hometown, no account of how he came to speak for God. Scholars are even divided on his name which appears at most three times in the Bible: twice in the book that bears his name and one additional time in something called the “Additions to Daniel” which are not included in most Protestant Bibles and only in the Apocrypha of some Anglican and Lutheran Bibles. Some scholars think his name comes from an Akkadian word for a fragrant garden plant; others trace it to a Hebrew root meaning “to embrace.” Given how little we know about a historical figure named “Habakkuk,” it’s possible that, similar to other books of the Bible, Habakkuk may not have been a person, but rather a group of writers or a community which produced this book. What we do know is that Habakkuk is treated as God’s word and a prophecy from God by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Where we know so little about the author, we do know the time and place in which Habakkuk was active. Writing around 615 BCE, Habakkuk’s world is one in flux. The Neo-Babylonian Empire, which the text calls the Babylonians or the Chaldeans (people with their origins in modern day Iraq) has just crushed the ancient empire of Assyria and then dealt a devasting blow to another familiar empire, Egypt. The Chaldeans have emerged from these conflicts as the new regional superpower, and everyone in Judah can feel the ground shifting. Within twenty years, Jerusalem will fall. Within twenty-five, the temple will be reduced to ruins, and the leadership of Judah will be marched into exile. Habakkuk is writing on the edge of catastrophe and he knows it.
What makes Habakkuk unusual isn’t just so much his moment, it’s his method. Most prophets speak for God to the people. They stand in the town square and shout, “Thus says the Lord.” Instead, Habakkuk speaks to God on behalf of the people. He argues. He accuses. He waits for an answer, and when the answer comes, he argues some more. In that sense, Habakkuk belongs to a smaller though consequential lineage in Scripture. It’s the lineage of Abraham bargaining with God to save Sodom if there are but five righteous men in Sodom (remember God finds zero such men). It’s also the lineage of Moses breaking the first set of stone tablets and standing in the gap after the incident with the golden calf, and it’s the lineage of Job refusing to accept easy answers for his suffering. It’s the lineage of Jonah trying to run away from God’s call on his life and Mary instructing the stewards at Cana to do whatever Jesus told them. These are the ones who understood faith not as silence in the face of God, but as the nerve to bring forward a case.
The Book of the Prophet Habakkuk itself has a shape worth naming before we dig in. Chapters One and Two are structured as a dialogue, really more of a dispute, between the prophet and God: a complaint, a response, another complaint, another response, and finally a series of woes pronounced against the oppressor. Chapter Three shifts entirely. It becomes a psalm, a theophany, a vision of God appearing in power, and it ends with one of the most remarkable declarations of trust in the whole Bible, trust that holds even when Habakkuk names, explicitly, the worst-case scenario.
“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,
18 yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will exult in the God of my salvation.
19 God, the Lord, is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer
and makes me tread upon the heights.” (Habakkuk 3:17-19).
And running underneath all three chapters in this text written 2600 years ago are questions we’re still asking. Why does evil prosper while the righteous suffer? Is God actually sovereign over the nations, even the terrifying ones? What does it look like to keep watch for an answer that hasn’t come yet?
Chapter Two will give us the famous line: “the righteous live by their faith.” That line will be picked up by Paul and will echo through the work of Martin Luther, the Reformation, and a substantial volume of Protestant theology. Though for Habakkuk, that line isn’t about individual salvation so much as it’s about staying faithful, staying steady, when an empire is at the door and God’s timeline doesn’t match yours.
It also helps to remember where this book sits. Habakkuk is one of what our tradition calls the Minor Prophets, twelve short books, from Hosea through Malachi, that ancient Jewish scholars copied onto a single scroll and referred to as “The Twelve.” Minor, in this sense, doesn’t mean unimportant. It just means short. But shortness has a cost: these are the books we’re least likely to have heard preached from, least likely to have committed a verse to memory, most likely to skim past on the way somewhere more familiar. In Christian Bibles, the Minor Prophets are the last section of the Hebrew Bible before the beginning of the Gospels.
Habakkuk is short, a little strange, and largely unread by contemporary Christians, which is precisely why it deserves the kind of slow attention we’re about to give it.
A Complaint, an Answer, and a Second Complaint
Today, I want to dive into the first chapter as a whole. We will stay with this chapter for the first three weeks of our series as we look at the first complaint, God’s response, and Habakkuk’s second complaint. We don’t need to do much unpacking tonight, but I do want discuss the shape of it, because the shape is the argument.
The chapter opens with a sharp complaint: “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen?” Habakkuk names what he sees around him: violence, sinfulness, destruction, strife, and contention. He says the law has gone slack, that justice never quite arrives, that the wicked embed themselves among the righteous, and that judgment, when comes at all, is twisted. His complaint isn’t about a force from outside the community, Habakkuk is looking at his own society, its courts, its leaders, its unanswered violence, and he’s demanding to know why God is letting it happen.
Then God answers and God’s not particularly happy either. “Look at the nations, and see! Be astonished! Be astounded! For a work is being done in your days that you would not believe if you were told.” God doesn’t respond to Habakkuk’s accusations so much as God says, “Y’all have made this so bad for yourselves that I’m not inclined to save you from the Babylonians.” Here’s a nation that has already conquered two of your most feared ancient enemies and, bad news, they’re coming for you next. The imagery that follows is meant to terrify: horses swifter than leopards, more menacing than wolves at dusk, troops who come from far away and fly in like eagles swooping to devour prey. These people mock kings and laugh at fortified cities. And then comes the line that gives the whole passage its edge: their own strength has become their god.
Habakkuk’s complaint about injustice gets an answer, but the answer is far from what he expects and definitely not what he wants. He wants the God who rends the heavens, parts seas, turns rivers to blood, and kills the first born of every household which refuses to acknowledge God’s power. He doesn’t just want that kind of God, he expects that kind of God. And that’s where the second complaint begins. Habakkuk is stunned into a deeper question than his first one. How can God allow Judah’s destruction? Habakkuk describes his own people as fish, hauled up in a net with no one to stop it, while the enemy rejoices and makes offerings to the very net that caught them, worshiping their own instrument of conquest as though it were divine.
Chapter one ends without resolution, in fact it ends with a question left hanging in the air: is he to keep emptying his net, mercilessly destroying nations forever?
We don’t get an answer in this chapter and that’s deliberate. Complaint, unsettling response, deeper complaint. That’s the structure we’re going to sit with for several weeks rather than rushing past it toward comfort. Habakkuk doesn’t get an easy resolution in chapter one, and neither will we tonight. That’s not a flaw in Habakkuk’s writing or this sermon. That’s an intentional design, because we’re experiencing the same situation today. Worshiping the tools of conquest is a brother to peace through strength.
Notice, too, what Habakkuk does when his second complaint and it’s concluding question initially go unanswered. At the beginning of chapter two he says, “I will stand at my watch post, and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what [God] will say to me.”
Why We Read the Books We’d Rather Skip
So why are we turning to one of the least known Minor Prophets? Why spend multiple weeks in fifty-six verses that almost none of us could quote, when we could be somewhere more familiar like the Psalms, the Gospels, one of the Pauline letters?
Habakkuk almost never gets preached. It shows up in the lectionaries maybe once every few years, sometimes in fragments, usually the famous “though the fig tree does not blossom” verses from chapter three, stripped of everything that comes before it. And in congregations like ours where we don’t adhere to a lectionary, we might never hear from Habakkuk. Most of us could go a lifetime in church and never hear more than a whisper from this scripture. And that’s not unique to Habakkuk. Whole sections of Scripture function this way for us. There are the are the oft traveled Biblical paths worn smooth by constant use, and then there are vast stretches most of us have simply never walked.
That imbalance forms us, whether we notice it or not. A faith built only on the comfortable and comfortable-adjacent parts of the Bible is a thinner faith than the one Scripture actually offers us. It’s a faith that hasn’t had to sit with a prophet accusing God to God’s face. It’s a faith that’s been quietly taught, by omission, that doubt and protest are somehow less faithful than silence. If we really trust that the Bible forms the foundation of our faith, that it’s facts, fables, stories, and narratives are instructive to and about who we are, then we owe to ourselves and each other to walk the paths less taken.
This matters to me, and I think it should matter to us as a congregation, especially right now. As we move deeper into our life together with The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TFAM), we’re not just adopting a new set of relationships. We’re stepping further into a tradition that insists the whole of Scripture belongs to us, not just the parts that have already been smoothed down by centuries of comfortable use; every book, every hard question, every text that doesn’t resolve cleanly. TFAM’s founder and presiding prelate, Bishop Yvette Flunder, has spent decades teaching a gospel wide enough to hold the people the traditional church left standing outside. Part of what makes that gospel wide is a refusal to let anyone tell us which parts of the Bible are ours to wrestle with and which parts aren’t. A refusal to accept that there are parts of the Bible off limits to us or that parts of the Bible are too holy to be questioned, including the whole corpus itself. A whole faith reads the whole book. Not selectively. Not just the parts that flatter us or comfort us, but the parts that unsettle us too, because those are often exactly where God is doing something we wouldn’t otherwise believe if we were told.
So that’s the invitation for these six weeks. We’re going to let Habakkuk ask his questions without rushing to answer them for him. We’re going to sit with an empire we can’t control, a God whose timeline refuses to match ours, and a prophet who models bringing our whole selves, including our anger and our confusion, honestly before God, and then waiting, watching, for whatever comes next.
Amen.