SURVIVAL TACTICS

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-3; Romans 12:1-21

My professor Bob Shelton used to always say to us

that if a sermon is a good sermon,

you don't need to change it

if a crisis occurs during the week.

It will still preach.

Bob was a pastor inMemphis in the late sixties

before he came to Austin Seminary.

And he told us that when Martin Luther King was assassinated,

he didn't change a word of the sermon he'd already prepared.

I think he's nuts.

This is a week that I had to change my sermon.

Maybe he'd say

that the one I had been working on wasn't a good one, then.

That's debatable!

But after having lived through the kind of week

that you and I have just lived through,

it just seems to me

that certain things need to be said.

This has been one of the most discouraging weeks

in recent memory.

Depending on where you stand,

we've either heard all about government corruption in DC

or politics as usual.

On Monday there was the tragedy at Virginia Tech,

where a mentally-ill student killed himself and thirty-two others

Then on Wednesday,

we hear that more than five times as many people

were killed in Iraq in one day

as there were that died on campus.

Then there were two more in Houston on Friday

as a NASA employee got a bad job review

and chose to take it out on his boss.

And these were only the big things.

There were lots of other little things

that happened to you, and me,

and to our children and our parents

and to people we know and love:

a sudden pain that has no explanation,

a party we didn't get invited to,

a freak accident which changed our lives forever,

abuse we did not deserve.

By the end of the week,

after all the things we'd heard and seen and lived through,

it was all we could do to get out of bed.

I think Habakkuk was right.

Some days it just feels like we cry for help

and God can't do a thing about it.

You and I are basically good people -

imperfect for sure,

but basically good.

We expect that if we try to be as good as we can,

and follow the rules,

and work hard and study hard

and stop at red lights when no one's looking,

then God will treat us well

and nothing bad will happen to us.

That's what thirty-two people in Virginia thought

as they woke up on Monday morning

and got dressed for class.

That's what a hundred and seventy-two people in Bagdad thought

as they went about their lives on Wednesday.

There are no good answers why,

so I'm not about to try and give you one.

What I do know is this:

None of them deserved it.

None of them deserved it

any more than any of us deserved not to be there.

Tuesday night at the memorial service on campus,

professor and poet Nikki Giovanni

said it more eloquently than anyone.

She said,

"We do not understand this tragedy.

We know we did nothing to deserve it,

but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS,

neither do the invisible children walking the night away

to avoid being captured by the rogue army,

neither does the baby elephant

watching his community being devastated for ivory,

neither does the Mexican child

looking for fresh water,

neither does the Appalachian infant

killed in the middle of the night in his crib

in the home his father built with his own hands

being run over by a boulder

because the land was destabilized.

No one deserves a tragedy."

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So what can be done?

What can we do

that would make any difference?

There are all kinds of options.

We could do nothing.

We could let the news wash over us

without having any effect,

and go back to our pleasant lives

snuggled away in Bonham Texas

as though nothing had changed.

Better yet,

we could cancel the newspapers and unplug the TV

so that we'll never hear any news like that

ever again.

We could give in to cynicism,

and move from cynicism to despair,

if we believed that things will always be this way

and not even believing in God will make it any better.

We could give in to paranoia

and live behind locked doors,

isolate ourselves and trust no one,

spend lots of money on increased security,

and never go anywhere so that nothing ever happens to us.

Which means that we'll get exactly what we asked for!

Those are all possibilities.

But I think there are three things that we can do

that together would be a much healthier response,

one more faithful to who we claim to be

as children of God.

The first one

is to grieve,

and to share our grief

with the God who grieves right alongside of us.

Not only does no one deserve a tragedy,

God did not create us for tragedy.

God created us and created us good.

Our confessions tell us that our chief purpose in life

is to glorify God and enjoy God forever,

not to suffer in any way.

Events such as those we have experienced this week

not only grieve us,

they grieve the heart of God.

God was in the waters of Hurricane Katrina,

God was in the World Trade Center on September 11^th,

and God was in the classrooms at Virginia Tech this week,

and in Iraq,

and at NASA,

and in your home and mine

in each instance holding God's children close

and walking with them in their pain.

In our grief,

it is just fine to do like Habakkuk

and to cry out to God.

God feels the same way.

Events like these are not to be celebrated,

and they are not to be ignored.

They are to be grieved,

and those of us who call ourselves sons and daughters of God

have the gift of deep relationship

with the God who loves us.

That relationship both allows us and requires us

to share everything with God,

the good, the bad and the ugly.

We can and we must grieve evil

for the damage it hurls at our brothers and sisters in Christ,

and the damage it hurls at us and those we love.

The next thing that we can do

is to hope:

to hope for God to prevail,

and to wait with expectation

for the day we will see God's justice come to pass.

This kind of hope is neither meaningless nor naïve.

Hope is an action verb.

It's one of the most defiant things that we can do

in the face of what we have lived through this week.

The things we have witnessed

give us no reason to hope.

In fact, if we let ourselves get wrapped up

in 24-7 news coverage,

whatever hope we might have left on our own

is sucked right out of us.

But if we instead let ourselves get wrapped up

in the God of Abraham and Sarah,

and Mary and Martha and Moses,

we can tap that inner spring of strength

given us by Holy Spirit

and hope like there's no tomorrow

that God will redeem even this time,

even this situation,

even this life.

That's what Habakkuk was up to.

In his time of grief,

he let God have it with both barrels.

And then he waited.

He trusted that God would respond,

and sure enough, God did.

God told him

that there was still a vision for the appointed time,

and that even if it wasn't on his timetable,

that didn't mean it wasn't going to happen.

And so Habakkuk practiced that defiant hope.

By the end of his prophecy,

he is able to say this:

"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 field,

and there is no herd in the stalls,

yet I will rejoice in the Lord:

I will exult in the God of my salvation." (3:17-18)

It is natural and right for us to grieve.

But even more is it our job to hope:

to wait for God's promises,

to trust even when there is much evidence to the contrary,

to remember who we are and whose we are

and to live into that knowledge

with utter confidence.

Then, after we grieve and while we hope,

we can be the church.

We can continue to love each other,

to serve,

to live hopefully as God's children

so that evil does not have the last word.

When we give in to cynicism or to despair,

we are saying that God doesn't get the last word, after all.

But as we live out of that hope we know as God's children,

God is honored and life goes on.

Here's what the apostle Paul would say:

"Do not be conformed to this world,

but be transformed by the renewal of your minds,

so that you may discern what is the will of God,

what is good and acceptable and perfect."  (Rom 12:2)

In our reading from Romans,

Paul gives us a whole laundry list

of things we can do to be the church.

Hate what is evil.

Hold fast to what is good.

Rejoice in hope.

Contribute to the needs of others.

Practice hospitality.

On and on and on.

Then, finally,

perhaps the main thing we need to hear today:

"Do not be overcome by evil,

but overcome evil with good."

Don't give in to cynicism or evil or even grief,

but move through it

by being the church:

by being God's beloved people

and living like you know it.

It doesn't mean it will be automatically easy.

It will definitely not come naturally.

But the love of God

that we know in our Lord Jesus Christ

will give us every ounce of strength and will that we need

in order to carry it through.

Marva Dawn tells the story of a Chinese friend

named Chi Ping.

Chi Ping was a new Christian

from a family of Buddhists,

so he didn't exactly get a lot of support around the house

for his newfound faith.

One day Chi Ping was riding the train in China,

which as usual was terribly overcrowded.

He looked up at one of the stops

and realized that the drunk, bedraggled man

that he just saw get on the train

was headed towards the empty seat next to him,

and there wasn't a thing he could do about it.

He scooted over as close to the window as he could,

but even that

couldn't get him far enough away from the man's stench.

It was obvious he hadn't had a bath in ages.

Chi Ping held himself tightly

so that he wouldn't have to touch the man

and risk coming in contact with germs or lice

or whatever else the man might have on his body.

But even as he pulled away,

Chi Ping was bothered by the fact that,

as a Christian,

he should love this man too.

He began to think of the stories he had read about Jesus

and the love Jesus had for lepers

and other unclean people of his day.

And as he recalled these stories,

he began to pray

that God would fill him with the Holy Spirit's perfect love

for this clearly unclean person

who had invaded his space on the train.

He knew that it wouldn't be possible to fake this one.

This object of God's love

was too overwhelmingly undesirable

for him to pretend that he cared.

Whatever he did

was going to have to come from above.

Contrary to every logical bone in his body,

all of a sudden he felt his arm going up,

and to his great surprise,

he found himself putting it around the man's shoulders

and drawing him close.

Who knows when the last time was

that anyone had given this man a hug.

The man wept

at the real and unbelievable love

that Chi Ping was able to share with him in God's name.

Maybe that's what we can do.

Most of us will not likely be on a train in China anytime soon.

But we will see things that disgust us,

or endure experiences which make us cry,

or witness tragedies which break our hearts.

Rather than be paralyzed by evil,

we can move through it

by grieving, and hoping,

and by being the church:

by being God's beloved people

and living like we know it.

Don't be afraid.

"There is still a vision for the appointed time."

"Do not be overcome by evil, 

but overcome evil with good."

Amen.

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Nikki Giovanni's words were quoted in Jim Wallis' "Sojomail" newsletter, 4/19/2007. accessible at www.sojo.net.

The story of Chi Ping can be found in Marva Dawn's book on Romans 12, Truly the Community (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1992), pp. 139-40.