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 2nd chapter, verses 1-5.
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.
2 Then the Lord answered me and said:
Write the vision;
make it plain on tablets,
so that a runner may read it.
3 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.
4 Look at the proud!
Their spirit is not right in them,
but the righteous live by their faithfulness.
5 Moreover, wealth is treacherous;
the arrogant do not endure.
They open their throats wide as Sheol;
like Death they never have enough.
They gather all nations for themselves
and collect all peoples as their own.
This is the word of God for the people of God.
About the sermon – not the sermon I wanted to preach, but I honestly got stuck on finding the right words to make sense of 9/11, even 25 years later. If you, like me, think this message ends abruptly, I apologize, but 9/11 was a defining moment for my generation which I always struggle with no matter how often I try to discuss it.
I Will Stand at My Watchpost
We left Habakkuk last week standing in a gap he couldn’t close. He’d confessed who God is — everlasting, holy, the Rock who doesn’t pass away — and he’d still pressed his hardest question: how can a God like that preside over the destruction Habakkuk sees coming? Chapter one ends without an answer. Chapter two opens with Habakkuk deciding what to do in absence of a clear answer from God.
Faithful still in this God he confesses, but doesn’t understand, Habakkuk doesn’t storm off, and he doesn’t stop asking. He tells us exactly what he’s going to do: “I will stand at my watchpost, and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what God will say to me, and what God will answer concerning my complaint.” Rather than resign, he’s resolved. Habakkuk doesn’t have an answer yet, so he chooses a posture he can hold until one comes, positioning himself as a watchman who scans the horizon, waiting for whatever comes next.
What happens next is as much a lesson as anything that will be said: when Habakkuk gets out of his own way; when he shuts up and just listens, then he hears God. This lesson bears out across the Bible which reveals that the saints of God need to take the step that so often comes hard to humans: being quiet, letting God be God, and trusting that an answer will indeed come.
When Habakkuk brought his first complaint, part of a larger and much longer complaint, God’s response came as an announcement about the Chaldeans. This time, God tells Habakkuk to do something practical: “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it.” Whatever God is about to say isn’t meant to stay private, locked up in one prophet’s head. It’s meant to be recorded, displayed, made legible enough that someone can quickly deliver it to busy people and move on to others. Habakkuk’s watch isn’t just for himself. He’s keeping it on behalf of everyone else who needs to see what he sees.
Then comes the substance of the answer: “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.” God doesn’t deny that the vision might feel delayed. God says it plainly: if it seems to tarry, wait for it. That’s an acknowledgment that waiting on God can feel like waiting on something overdue. But God pairs that honesty with a promise: it will surely come. From where Habakkuk is standing, on the rampart, scanning an empty horizon, those two things — it might feel late, and it will not actually be late — have to be held together rather than resolved into one or the other.
Then we come to the verse that grounds the whole passage, one of the lines writers in the New Testament will return to: “Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith.” Paul and the Protestant reformers will use this verse along with others to build entire theological systems. But for Habakkuk in this moment, on this rampart, the meaning is narrower. He’s contrasting two ways of getting through a moment like this one. The proud, the arrogant, the ones whose spirit isn’t right within them, can’t hold the tension we just named. They need the answer now, need certainty now, need the horizon to resolve on their own schedule. The righteous live differently. They live by faithfulness, by staying steady, staying planted, continuing to trust and continuing to watch, even while the vision tarries. Faithfulness, here, isn’t a private feeling. It’s a way of enduring delay without abandoning the watch.
The chapter’s fifth verse turns toward what’s coming for his people. Habakkuk describes something like an insatiable appetite: wine that betrays the ones who drink it, an arrogance that doesn’t last, a hunger as wide as death itself, gathering up nations the way Death gathers up everyone eventually. It’s the beginning of a series of accusations Habakkuk is about to level, one after another, against exactly the kind of pride he’s just named as the opposite of faithfulness.
Twenty-Five Years of Waiting
At 8:46am on September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. I was in the eighth grade at St. Benedict School in Cambridge, OH. None of us had cell phones and news alert pop-ups were still rare so I’m not sure how we knew anything had happened, but I remember a murmur about a “small plane hitting the World Trade Center.”
At 9:03am United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center. A few minutes later Sr. Miriam, our principal, interrupted our English teacher who quickly wheeled out the classroom TV so that we could watch the news. At this point people were still cautious to use the words “deliberate” and “terrorism,” but it was hard to deny that this was some kind of attack. At 14, that was obvious to me.
At some point our teachers decided that we needed to go outside for PE. At 14 that seemed like the last thing we needed to do. At 39, I understand what they were thinking. When we came inside there was a rumor circulating that another plane had crashed, this time into the Pentagon. Several of my classmates started to cry and I tried to reassure them that this was just a rumor – remember there were many rumors that day most of which were revealed to be false. Unfortunately, our 8th grade teacher quickly ordered us to our seats to inform us that at 9:37am American Airlines Flight 77 had indeed crashed into the Pentagon.
That night my home church was scheduled to hold a parish retreat. There was pressure to cancel it because people wanted to huddle together with their families in the relative safety of their homes. My mom, one of the organizers of the retreat, insisted that where else should we be if not at church? The retreat quickly turned into a space to bring fears, concerns, and the ultimate silence of people who didn’t know what else to do but knew that something had already changed.
On Friday we marked the 25th anniversary of that tragic and fateful day. Perhaps more than remember the day itself and the 2,996 people who killed, we were compelled to remember the lives lost since and the fundamental ways in which our lives were changed. Anyone living in the United States and in grade school through college likely knew a handful of people who enlisted in the armed forces immediately after 9/11 or as soon as they could. The 20-year War in Afghanistan directly resulted from 9/11 and many people invoked 9/11 for the invasion of Iraq, though the two conflicts had little to do with each other. Even now as the Trump administration remains entrenched in a war with Iran that it started and continues to prolong, the specter of 9/11 looms large both in propaganda and in our collective memories.
I remind us about September 11, 2001, and tell a piece of my story from that day, because so many of us found ourselves 25 years ago this week watching and waiting on God. We gathered in churches, fellowship halls, in our homes, and surrounded by family. We mourned and we prayed. We asked, “how could this happen?” And we prepared for war. Twenty-five years ago most Americans couldn’t locate Afghanistan on a map or knew anything more about it than it leant its name to a type of blanket and a breed of dog.
September 11, 2001, gave us nothing useful to do with our hands. There was no watch post to so tall that we could climb and see the future. We had nothing to do except wait. But in that waiting we prayed. We filled sanctuaries that had been half-empty the Sunday before. We lit candles on sidewalks and stood in vigils that stretched past midnight. Our only posture was waiting.
That response, unfortunately, didn’t last long. Rarely does it or can it last. We turn back to our lives and unless we’re confronted with reminders of the tragedy, we sink back into our ruts and move on. Grief has its own timeline, and so does the kind of communal watching Habakkuk describes. But it does leave us with a question worth asking on an anniversary like this one, twenty-five years out: how do we wait upon God now?
Since 9/11, approximately 9,400 people have died from toxic exposure linked to the collapsed towers in New York. Another, approximately 240,000 people lost their lives in the War in Afghanistan and the total loss of life due to the War in Iraq has been estimated at as many as 1 million lives. In the midst of those wars and such incredible loss of life the unity so many people felt in the days right after the attacks, the flags on every porch, the sense of a country briefly speaking with one grieving voice, didn’t hold. It frayed, and then it fractured, along lines that have only widened since.
And long before the hate embedded in those fractures fell on immigrants and Trans people, our Muslim siblings bore the brunt of suspicion and violence. They were caricatured as the nation’s idea of an enemy. Their mosques vandalized, families surveilled, and neighbors treated as threats for no reason beyond their faith and their names.
Yet for all the challenges of the last twenty-five years and those times we felt like we have so little to offer, we’ve stood at our watch post and stationed ourselves on proverbial and literal ramparts. We’ve kept watch to see what God will say to us and how God will answer our prayers.