Playing Games and Climbing Towers - Sermon 4th November 2007
Habakkuk 1:1-4 ; 2:1-4. Luke 19:1-10
When I was small, I did animal experiments. I'm not proud of this. We're not talking vivisection here - but did you know that, when you throw a pingpong ball from behind your brother, and it hits him on the head and bounces down in front of him, he turns round to look where it came from? Yes, you probably did. But did you know that if you do the same experiment with a cat, the cat will look to see where the ball went?
And there were others...
This fascination in behaviour has persisted, though the urge to experiment has been replaced by a horror of any form of exploitation of animals, and even brothers.
Yet sometimes, if I've been out with the dogs, and they are standing at the back door, I make a bit of a performance out of opening it - because the results are worth seeing! The dogs line up at the crack in the door, trembling with anticipation - they know that there's a biscuit waiting for them! If I put my hand on the doorhandle and flick it, they surge forward - and stop, because the door hasn't opened. I can do this again and yet again, and - same result. If I then open it a crack, they surge forward more excitedly - and stop when it's obvious the door hasn't opened properly. But none of the excitement and anticipation has drained away. And I can go through this performance five, ten times over about a minute, and they are still as excited as ever. I can't bring myself to do it more than that, because then it stops being a game for me.
In fact, I quickly begin to feel unworthy, because the dogs are there keeping faith with this game, and I'm somehow not keeping faith with them. They don't stop waiting. They don't get fed up or cynical. They don't lose sight of what the game actually is. It's "When do we get our biscuit..." And of course I'm playing the same game, only for me it's "When do you get your biscuit...?" The transition, for me, would come, if, without changing what I was doing, I changed the game. Changed it into "How long can I do this before they start getting fed up?" At that point, the game would have turned into an experiment. And I would have broken faith with them - long, long before they would have broken faith with me.
And faith is a good word to use. Sigmund Freud famously said that dogs are capable of completely selfless love. They are also capable of keeping faith. We refer to them as "faithful hounds". Words clearly mean something - why "faithful"?
Faith for us human beings is not the same as it is with dogs. Well - duh... But think of it! With us, it's mixed in with so many other things - emotions, understandings, suspicions, fears. We easily begin to entertain the suspicion that we're being played games with. And that the game is stacked against us. That's why so many adverts appear on our televisions that portray life as a series of pranks played on us - like the one in which a woman switches on the light - and the bulb blows. She goes outside, and it starts to rain. She opens one of those mini-umbrellas, and it half-opens then sticks horribly. And then she steps in a deep puddle. The message is that at least the medication she now takes is efficient and trustworthy - but the understanding is that life isn't. I won't mention what the medication is, but there might be a small prize for the first person to tell me correctly...
That's a very trivial advert, but it's effective because it taps into something remarkably deep. Something, in fact that surfaces all the time in the psalms, a sense of unfairness and frustration at the heart of living, of things that don't change, or that do when we look for them not to, of conditions of living that thwart us, and make us to feel unfree, captive to circumstances. And it isn't just in the psalms, either:
The oracle that the prophet Habakkuk saw. O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you "Violence!" and you will not save?
The little book of Habbakuk is about keeping faith in a world where that isn't easy. It's a fascinating text, but a nightmare to interpret. But there is a pattern in the book that is quite easy to grasp, and it's set out nicely in the two short passages which are stitched together in our reading this morning. The prophet is set in a corrupt and decadent society, and he asks God why.
Why do you make me see wrong-doing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law becomes slack and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous-- therefore judgment comes forth perverted.
And then he speaks of the assurance that God will answer. And indeed, God does. But look at the shape of this little passage.
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. Then the LORD answered me and said: Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it. 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...
Then he adds: "The righteous live by their faith."
What is this faith? Habakkuk answers that question by embodying faith, by offering a living picture of what faith is, what it looks like. Who is the prophet? He's the man who goes out to the edge of things as they are, and looks beyond them. The watchpost, or tower, the rampart of the city walls - these are powerful images. The prophet's complaint comes from the heart of the community; it's about what surrounds him, what seems inescapable. But he is the man who goes to a place where he can look beyond things as they are, and look for a sign of the coming of things as they should be. There is a vision - an alternative way of looking at things, an alternative to the way things are - and it's coming. The thing is to be ready for it. To keep faith with it. To be ready to go with it when it comes.
So he goes up to his tower. Climbs up to where he can look beyond things as they are. But he isn't up there to "get away from it all." He's up there to look for something he knows is coming. He's up there because he knows that when this thing comes, he will have to go with it. To run with it.
Faith isn't just faith that there is a "beyond" to things as they are, a sort of "someday, over the rainbow". Faith is a waiting, but it's much more than that. Faith is faith that there comes a point where, in an amazing phrase of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's, we encounter the "beyond in the midst". Faith is an active waiting for this encounter, for God and what God makes possible. A strange sort of active patience. Which is odd, because for us, patience usually means resignation, passivity. What on earth would an "active patience" look like?
Well, perhaps you could start by thinking of two spaniels, their noses lined up on a crack in the door. There is an amazing patience there, borne of the fact that the door isn't open yet, but also of the faith that it will, any minute. But maybe that strikes you as a trivial illustration.
Try this one, from the New Testament. From the Gospels.
A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way.
The story of Zacchaeus is fascinating, because it's very different to the stories of, say, Jesus calling his disciples - even Matthew the tax-collector. Peter and Andrew, James and John, are fisherman sitting by their nets and boats, when Jesus comes along, and calls them, and in an instant they know that what they are called to be is bound up with this man. Same pattern, in a very different setting, with Matthew, sitting at the tax table, with all the ill-gotten money that was what gave his life its meaning spread out in front of him, and Jesus comes by and says "Follow me!" And he too, in an instant, gets up and goes with him. But the moment is created by Jesus. He appears, he calls, he invites. The new disciple grasps the moment, yes - but the moment comes right to him.
With Zacchaeus, it's importantly different. He is already curious about Jesus. He leaves his work, and risks the crowd, who wouldn't have liked him, in order to see Jesus. And when jumping up and down at the back, and standing on things, doesn't work, he climbs a tree to get some kind of view. Now certainly, it's Jesus who looks at him, Jesus who calls him down from the tree, Jesus who creates the moment. Just as with the disciples.
But there is something going on with Zacchaeus before ever Jesus arrives at Jericho. He is curious. Maybe he is refusing to admit it even to himself, maybe he is masking it all in cynicism, maybe he tells himself that he just wants to look at the man at the centre of all this fuss - but Zacchaeus goes to remarkable lengths to satisfy his curiosity. It's very hard to resist the thought that, at some level, Zacchaeus is desperate for his life to change, and for something to happen to make that happen. So, in a way like Habbakuk, he climbs away from the sordidness and cynicism of life - in this case, though, his own life - to look for what might happen. To look for what faith still believes could happen. Something - anything - with God in it.
And Jesus of Nazareth passes by. And pauses, and calls to him. The door is suddenly open, and Zacchaeus, out of all this crowd, is in position to rush in through it.
Do we say that Zacchaeus, in the tree, already had faith? That it was some species of faith that put him in the tree, to wait for Jesus to come by, for the door to open?
Christmas is - what? Seven and a bit weeks away! It may be me, but I wonder if the shops and the whole apparatus of advertising and consumption-creation has quite switched on this year yet. Never fear - it will! And we'll be left swimming in a sea of hype, and desire, and artificially-induced looking-forward to a traditional, as-always, Christmas that never was, but must be repeated in every detail! And we'll be simultaneously attracted and repelled and attracted again by the whole business - as always! Tens of millions of people all eagerly awaiting - something.... Something that we're told is to be found somewhere among the toys, the perfume and aftershave, the electronic equipment, the clothes, the food, the parties, the alcohol and chocolate, the tinsel and mistletoe, and all the rest. All the stuff we preachers are supposed to condemn, and decry.
And I can't. Not straightforwardly. Because in all of it, there is a tiny element of something - a genuine looking and searching, a genuine desire for something that will make everything different. People aren't stupid, even when they are being stupid. Most people know at some level that a Christmas which is purely made up of these things, is a settling for something less. The things which make up even the most materialistic, hedonistic Christmas, are really a desperate attempt to fill a void. The expense and sheer volume of these things just go to show how big the hole is.
Zacchaeus stands here. He is the person who has everything, and suddenly sees with absolute clarity that he has nothing. And he climbs away from it all, and like Habbakuk, looks out, to see what God might bring. As Christmas comes, there will be people who, like Zacchaeus, are drawn to see what this Jesus is all about, drawn by something in them to see what this might mean for them. People who are open in ways even they themselves might not understand - just like Zacchaeus - to the possibility of change and the radically new, radically different, radically from-God. In fact, that description could well cover us, too.
Our job as the church in the world is to climb up and watch for God's alternatives to the way things are. To watch and wait for the door opening. The space we share is a space of expectation and hope and faith. Things are as they are, but when God comes - when the beyond is in the midst - possibilities are opened to faith that simply weren't there before, and couldn't be there in any other way.
It's perhaps easier to see this at Advent than at any other time. Ours isn't an unfocused expectation, a vague looking forward to the "festive season". The Church in faith waits for what God will do - and gets ready to go with it, when it happens. And people will come among us to see what we are looking at, and what we are expecting. Like Zaccheus.
Like Habakkuk, we wait for the vision - the God-given sense of where we go from here, and the God-given possibility of getting there. The Kirk Session have decided to invite the whole congregation to approach Advent like this, this year. The invitation is simply this - that we think, all of us, of taking Advent with complete seriousness this year. That we promise, as far as we can, to be there at all the services, from Communion on the first Sunday of Advent to the short half-hour of thanks on Christmas Day. That we do this in the spirit of a congregation looking for what happens next, and for what God will bring.