Note - There was a video I wanted to share, but it didn’t work during the service. That video is available for you below.
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 5-11.
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!
This is the word of God for the people of God.
Before we get into tonight’s text, I want to show you something.
[Video]
In case you missed it, there’s apparently a resistance army forming to defend Canada in a trade war with the United States. Complete with an anthem, a music video, and a level of politely terrifying resolve, fully integrated with nature, which only Canadians could manage. I mention this because Habakkuk is about to do something similar. In the second third of chapter one, God responds to his first complaint and the prophet describes an invading army in the most over-the-top, spine-chilling terms he can find: horses faster than leopards, cavalry fiercer than wolves at dusk, an empire whose own strength has become its god. If the Canadian Resistance Army gave you a little taste of that mix of dread and absurdity, hold onto it. Habakkuk’s about to do the same thing, minus the maple syrup.
Last week we sat with Habakkuk’s first complaint: the cry that opens the book, the accusation aimed at God over a justice system that had stopped working. We left him there on purpose, with no answer, just the question hanging in the air: how long, O Lord? Tonight, God answers, and it isn’t that we would expect or that we would have chosen.
Who Were the Chaldeans?
God’s response begins with a command: look at the nations, and be astonished, because God is about to do something which the people will consider to be as strange as it is radical. God is raising up the Chaldeans.
The Chaldeans are the Neo-Babylonian Empire, a dynasty that had climbed to power only a few decades before Habakkuk wrote, built on the ruins of an Assyrian empire that had dominated the region for centuries. “Chaldean” originally named a smaller group from southern Mesopotamia, but by Habakkuk’s time it had become shorthand for the whole ruling dynasty of Babylon, founded by a general named Nabopolassar and, within a few years of this book, carried to its height by his son Nebuchadnezzar. By the time this book takes shape, the Chaldeans have already crushed Assyria and dealt Egypt a decisive defeat. They are, in every sense, the rising power of the moment, the empire everyone in Judah has been watching with dread, the one that will, within a generation, destroy Jerusalem and its temple and march its leadership into exile. Habakkuk’s original hearers wouldn’t have needed a history lesson to feel the weight of this name. But many people in Judah and Israel, two kingdoms at this point, did think the Chaldeans would come to dominate their areas. No matter what they thought about themselves, their territory and their influence was relatively small. The Chaldean leaders weren’t all that interested in them.
Think about to our study of Undoing Conquest and what Dr. Kate shared with us. This is the same time that the supposedly righteous kings are rewriting the law and sacred texts to write a female deity out of the practice of the Hebrews. Those same leaders, emboldened by the Chaldean defeat of Egypt will decide to establish itself as a greater power by trying to win their own victory in Egypt. It won’t work. Not only will the Hebrews fail to conqueror Egypt, but they will also draw the attention of the Chaldeans who will quickly decide that the Hebrew kingdoms warrant invasion.
That’s the reason that God’s description of the Chaldeans is meant to terrify. They’re called fierce and impetuous, a people who march across the whole breadth of the earth to seize homes that don’t belong to them. They inspire dread and fear whenever they’re mentioned. Their horses run faster than leopards and hunt more relentlessly than wolves at dusk. Their cavalry comes from far away and flies in like an eagle swooping to devour something already caught. They gather captives like sand, more than anyone could count. They scoff at kings and laugh at every fortress, piling up earth against a city’s walls and simply taking it. And then the line that closes this section, the one that gives the whole passage its edge: they sweep by like the wind and pass on, guilty people whose own strength has become their god.
Notice what God doesn’t say here. God doesn’t say the Chaldeans are righteous, or chosen, or good. God says they’re terrifying, violent, and guilty and God is still the one who raised them to power. That’s worth sitting with, not rushing past. This is God’s actual answer to Habakkuk’s complaint about a broken justice system: not correction from within, not a restored court, not a reformed law, but an empire marching in from outside, one whose only god is its own strength. If that unsettles you, it should. It unsettled Habakkuk enough that next week’s text is his second complaint, aimed squarely at this problem: how a God too pure to look on evil could use a nation more wicked than Judah to punish Judah at all. We’re not going to resolve that discomfort tonight. We’re going to let it sit exactly where the text leaves it, because pretending it isn’t there would be its own kind of dishonesty.
Threats from Outside, Threats from Within
Here’s what I want us to notice about the shape of this, because I think it’s the real hinge of the passage. Last week, Habakkuk’s complaint was entirely about what was broken inside his own community: corrupted courts, slack law, and wickedness surrounding the righteous. This week, God’s answer turns Habakkuk’s gaze outward, toward an empire on the march. And it would be easy to hear that as a kind of deflection: as if God is saying, stop worrying about your own courts, look at this much bigger threat coming for you instead.
But that’s not actually what’s happening here, and it matters that we see the difference. God isn’t distracting Habakkuk from the internal problem by pointing at an external one. God’s saying the external threat is the consequence of the internal one. The corruption Habakkuk named last week hasn’t just been a private failure with no cost attached. It has left the whole community exposed, unprotected, without the internal strength that might have let it withstand what’s coming. The threat from outside and the rot from inside aren’t two separate stories. They’re the same story, told from two different angles.
This pattern and problem are by no means unique to Habakkuk’s moment.
Communities, including our own, tend to find it easier to unite against a threat from outside than to do the harder, slower work of confronting what’s failing on the inside. Leaders seeking unity and national resolve often look to outside forces because an outside threat is clarifying. It gives people a common enemy, a shared fear, a reason to set differences aside. In the months after September 11, 2001, there was a PSA which showed a street in Anywhere, USA, with a banner that read “September 10, 2001.” Then the shot transitioned to the same street, every house with an American flag and a banner that read “September 12, 2001.” The clear message being that the tragedy had brought the country together in ways that nothing else could.
An inside failure is different, and it can take one of several variations. Sometimes internal problems are easy to explain and normalize. In other cases, they can be used to create discord and sow fear of our neighbors. We’re led to believe that we’re not the threat, so the threat has to be someone else, but whom? People in power create a bogeyman out of whoever doesn’t meet their narrative of acceptability. This is precisely the way immigrants and Trans people have been marginalized in 21st century America. It was the way Jewish people were marginalized in the early 20th century Third Reich. It’s almost always more comfortable to organize around fear of what’s coming than to do the work of repairing what’s already broken.
We do this at every scale. A household will pull together in a crisis and still avoid the harder conversation about what’s been quietly wrong between two people for years. A congregation will rally around a shared cause outside its walls while leaving its own unhealthy patterns untouched. A nation will unify, at least for a season, against an external adversary while the institutions meant to protect its own people keep eroding underneath everyone’s notice. None of that makes the outside threat imaginary. Habakkuk’s Chaldeans were entirely real, and devastating, and coming. It only means that outside threats can become a place to put our attention instead of the places that most needs it.
Habakkuk doesn’t get that comfortable option. God, through the text won’t let the external threat replace the internal reckoning. If anything, it makes the internal reckoning more urgent, because now the stakes of ignoring it are visible on the horizon, marching closer with every verse. Whatever we’re tempted to fear from outside, the deeper question this passage is asking is what’s been left unattended on the inside, the courts gone slack, the justice grown twisted, that leaves a people so exposed to it in the first place.
What Comes Next
We’re going to leave the Chaldeans right there tonight, still marching, still terrifying, still somehow raised up by the very God to whom Habakkuk brought his complaint. That’s not a comfortable place to stop. It isn’t meant to be. Habakkuk doesn’t stop there either. Next week, we’ll hear his second complaint, and it’s sharper than the first one, because now he’s not only asking why God allows injustice to stand inside his own community. He’s asking how a just God could answer that injustice with something that looks, by any measure, more brutal than the crime itself. That question deserves its own week.For now, we sit with an unwanted answer, a threat that’s genuinely terrifying, and a reminder that whatever’s coming from outside our walls, God’s word to Habakkuk suggests it’s never entirely separate from what’s already broken within them.