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 3rd chapter, verses 17-19.
17Though 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.
This is the word of God for the people of God.
Friends, after today we will have spent eight weeks with a prophet many of us had never read before this summer. Though I didn’t publicize it much, I’ve been calling this series “Call and Response: Considering the Book of the Prophet Habakkuk.” That’s exactly what it’s turned out to be: Habakkuk calling out to God, and God answering back in ways Habakkuk rarely wanted and almost never expected. We’ve watched him argue, go quiet, climb a rampart, tremble at a vision too large for his own body, and now, tonight, say something close to the opposite of where he started. I know you’re with me in experiencing some “Habakkuk fatigue,” so instead of walking back through the verses we’ve considered, I want to pull on three threads that have run through this whole book, see where they end up, and then let Habakkuk’s own final words close the series for us.
What We’ve Carried with Us
The first thread is waiting. Habakkuk opened this book demanding to know how long he’d have to cry out before God listened. His waiting was restless at best and at worst almost accusatory. God’s first answer didn’t satisfy him: an empire marching toward his own people, and his waiting turned into a second complaint, sharper than the first. By chapter two, that restlessness had matured into something steadier: “I will stand at my watch post, and station myself on the rampart,” a prophet choosing to keep watch rather than walk away, even with no answer in hand. By chapter three, waiting had changed shape again, into something quieter still, a kind of settled dread Habakkuk could hold even while his own body trembled, legs failing under him, bones gone rotten with the weight of what he’d finally been shown. Each time we met this prophet, waiting looked a little different, restless, then resolved, then quiet and trembling, but he never once stopped doing it. The posture kept changing. The commitment underneath it never did.
The second thread is the contrast between pride and faithfulness. We heard it most clearly in chapter two: the proud, whose spirit isn’t right in them, against the righteous, who live by their faithfulness. But that contrast showed up everywhere once we knew to look for it. The Chaldeans worshiped their own strength as a god that would eventually fall, the way every empire eventually falls. The idol makers trusted something they’d built with their own hands, gold and silver with no breath inside it, makers bowing down to what they made. Even the five woes we spent a Sunday unpacking all came back to the same root: plunder, violent gain, bloodshed, humiliation, and idolatry, each one someone trusting what they’d built over the God who’d made them. Pride, in this book, always looks like trusting something you made instead of the God who made you. Faithfulness always looks like staying planted anyway, even without that certainty. We even found a version of this contrast inside God’s own character, when we asked whether there’s anything God can’t do, and found an answer that had nothing to do with weakness: God’s faithfulness to God’s own nature runs so deep that acting against it was never a live option in the first place.
The third thread is mercy inside wrath. Habakkuk’s prayer in chapter three asked for exactly that: “God, in your wrath, remember mercy.” The whole book had already been building toward that plea. Habakkuk wanted judgment on the injustice he saw in his own community’s courts, and he got it. Then he wanted to know how a God too pure to look on evil could use a nation more wicked than Judah to deliver that judgment. We spent time sitting inside that question, naming the real theological gap between what God can’t do and what God, for reasons Habakkuk doesn’t understand, for reasons that we continue struggle with, hasn’t done. Neither Habakkuk nor us ever got a clean answer to that question, only an invitation to keep watching.
By the time we reached the theophany, judgment had grown even larger in scale: mountains shattering, seas fleeing, and nations trembling at a glance from God. But judgment was never the last word by itself. Even inside all of that terror, God’s whole purpose was named plainly: to save your people, to save your anointed. Wrath and mercy, running together the entire time.
Though…Yet
All three threads meet in the three verses we’re ending on tonight. Listen to what Habakkuk names first: “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.” That’s not hypothetical language. That’s a total agricultural collapse for a culture deeply tied to the land and the literal failure of everything a household depended on to survive. Habakkuk isn’t picturing a hard season. He’s picturing the worst one imaginable. It’s the kind of situation where families go hungry and people consider leaving their homes for the resources of other nations and peoples.
And he says all of that before he says the next word, which is simply: “yet.” Yet I will rejoice in the Lord. I will exult in the God of my salvation. Notice what hasn’t happened here. The fig tree still hasn’t blossomed. The flock is still gone. Nothing in this verse has been resolved. Habakkuk doesn’t rejoice because the crisis lifted. He rejoices in the middle of it, with the empty fields still empty. After three chapters worth of argument, accusation, trembling, and vision, that small word, “yet,” is doing more work than almost anything else in the book. It’s the hinge the whole series has been swinging toward.
In the first thread, the prophet’s waiting has matured to praise in the midst of suffering. Not waiting for rescue before he’ll trust God, but trusting God while the waiting continues, with no promise of when it ends.
It’s also faithfulness over pride, the second thread. The proud, we were told back in chapter two, need the answer now, need certainty now. Habakkuk, standing in front of total loss, doesn’t have certainty about anything except God. That’s the faithfulness this book has been pointing toward the whole time: not staying because you’ve been proven right but staying planted when you haven’t been.
And it’s mercy inside wrath, the third thread, playing out in Habakkuk’s own body instead of in a vision. He asked God to remember mercy inside judgment. He doesn’t get to see, in these verses, whether the judgment on the horizon ever lifts, or whether the Chaldeans he feared ever actually arrive. What he gets instead is this: “God, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer and makes me tread upon the heights.” Not rescue from the hard ground. Strength to walk on it anyway, sure-footed, even in the hardest and highest places, the kind of ground a deer can manage and most of us would stumble across. That’s what mercy inside wrath ends up looking like by the book’s final line: not an exemption from difficulty but footing solid enough to keep moving through it.
Closing
Eight weeks ago, we started with a prophet few people preach and probably just as few routinely read, asking a consistent and age-old question: why God lets the worst things stand. We walked with him through a silence he couldn’t explain, an empire he couldn’t control, a catalog of woes against everyone too proud to wait, and a vision of God too large for his body or any human’s body to hold steady. We’re ending with the same prophet, still standing in loss, still questioning without ready answers, but proclaiming, “Yet, I will rejoice.”
Habakkuk never got the tidy resolution he wanted for himself, for his people, and for us. The fig tree in his story never blossoms. We never find out if the flock comes back. Instead, what he received was a way to rejoice without any of that being resolved. That’s what he leaves us with tonight, and it’s enough to carry out of this room, out of this series, and into whatever’s next: not every answer, but somewhere solid enough to stand.
Here’s what I’d ask us to take with us. Somewhere in your own life right now, there’s probably a version of Habakkuk’s fig tree, something that hasn’t blossomed yet, something that’s failed to blossom like it used to, and might not blossom on any schedule you’d choose. You don’t need that situation resolved before you’re allowed your own “yet.”
You’re allowed to name exactly what’s missing and still choose the next word. Whatever threads you’re carrying out of these weeks, the waiting, the question of what you’ve built your trust on, or the hope that mercy is somehow still inside whatever wrath you’re facing, Habakkuk’s left us a pattern for how to hold all of it honestly, without needing it resolved first. That’s the gift this strange, short, rarely preached book has turned out to give us.