"When Faith Trembles"
Biography
The Rev. Dr. Prathia Hall has been pastor of the Mt. Sharon Baptist Church in her native Philadelphia since 1978. She graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and is ordained in the American Baptist Church, where she has served on the Advisory Council of the Women in Ministry Project. Dr. Hall was Dean of Spiritual and Community Life, as well as Director of the Harriet Miller Women's Center, at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta. Prathia Hall was dedicated to the struggle for justice and equality. She participated in the freedom rides and served with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960's. Prathia Hall died on August 12, 2002, following a long illness. Ebony Magazine ranked her as the greatest female preacher; our research supports that conclusion!!!
"When Faith Trembles"
Do you question God? Some will answer: Never! Others will answer: Of course I do, all the time. Most of us, however, will respond: I try not to; but yes, sometimes I do question God. We often have feelings of anxiety and discomfort when we question, sensing that it is irreverent to question God. We feel that we are stepping outside the appropriate boundaries of the created to creator relationship. When we are in those desperate spaces, when we feel that our backs are pressed to the walls of life, we pray for the faith of Abraham or of Job in his illness when he declared, "Although God is killing me, yet will I trust God." We pray as in that very old hymn:
...for a faith that will not shrink
Though pressed by every foe;
That will not tremble on the brink
Of any earthly woe.
Habakkuk is the story of a question written against the pain of ancient Israel's struggles with internal injustice, military defeat, desperation, decimation, deportation and destruction. The prophet Habakkuk had been praying a very long time. But the divine response was a long, frustrating and, I think, enraging silence.
Finally, Habakkuk could take it no longer and so he pranced into the holy presence wringing his hands and even shaking his fists at God. God, what's the matter? Is it you, or is there something wrong with my prayers? How many of us stand in Habakkuk's sandals? We have been praying so long and God is silent? We begin to wonder--has God heard us? Or does God care? Habakkuk had some urgent questions for God:
How long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you, "Violence!" and you will not save? Why do you make me see wrongdoing and look at troubles.... The law becomes slack and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous--therefore justice comes forth perverted.
Finally, God answered:
Habakkuk. Look and Wait! 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.
God explained that the Chaldeans or Babylonians were being raised up as instruments of God for the correction of the nation's wayward injustice. Habakkuk persisted:
God, why are you silent when the wicked swallow the righteous?
Soon there was need for deliverance from the deliverers. God's answer was:
Write the vision. Make it plain. If the vision seems delayed wait for it. It will surely come. (And in the meantime let) the righteous live by their faith.
Next, God's promised vision was that of woe to the wicked:
Woe to you who heap up what is not your own.
Woe to you who get evil gain for your houses
Woe to you who build a town with bloodshed
Woe to you who (worship stone and wood, gold and silver)...
See there is no breath in it at all.
But God is in God's holy temple; let all the earth keep silent before God.
God's reply moved Habakkuk from complaint to fervent, reverent prayer:
Lord, I have heard of your greatness and I stand in awe of your work. Now, in our time, Lord, revive it, in our own time make it known; in wrath may you remember mercy.
So many of us have prayed this prayer, "God you are so great and so good. Please show up right now, in our time. Make your greatness and your justice and your mercy known right here and right now."
Finally, Habakkuk testified of a new vision. Not of deliverance via another nation. Not of woe to the wicked. No, this vision was the appearance of the Almighty God. The objective conditions have not changed. Wicked still swallow the righteous and justice is still perverted. The change is in what the praying prophet sees. Habakkuk tells us that he saw God, marching from Sinai toward Edom, for the deliverance of God's people. He tells us that God's glory covers the heavens and the earth is full of God's praise. God's brightness is like light rays flashing from the divine hand. The earth shakes and the nations tremble before the divine gaze. The eternal mountains are shattered and the everlasting hills sink low.
The prophet looked, listened and gave witness. "I hear and I tremble within. My lips quiver at the sound, rottenness enters my bones, my steps tremble beneath me."
Habakkuk is now ready and willing to wait for God's action. He says, "quietly will I wait for the day of trouble to come upon those who attack us." Habakkuk then gives to us one of the most profound canticles of praising faith and faithful praise in all the liturgy of worship:
Though the fig tree does not blossom and no fruit is on the vines, though the produce of the olive falls and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exalt in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord is my strength, God makes my feet like the feet of a deer and makes me tread upon high ground.
Wow! Is this the same person who pranced into the holy presence and shook his fists at God? How has this transformation occurred? What brings a believer from the point of excruciating questions, to such exultant praise?
Habakkuk has had a vision of God. There is the ancient tradition that one cannot look at God and live. Yet it appears that in the Bible, every time God wants to use a person in a powerful way, that person has a visual encounter with God. Prophesy itself can be understood as a glimpse of God. The biblical roll-call includes Jacob, Moses, Job and so many others. God shows up in places God was believed to have abandoned, but we must also ask, could we have ever received that marvelous hymn of praise in Habakkuk 3:17, if ages before, the weary anguished prophet had not trusted God enough to ask God his questions?
Do we dare question God? In faith, I must answer, yes! Definitely! By all means! God can handle our questions. Do we believe for one moment that when questions press us to the wall, God, who knows us by name does not know that there are questions tearing at our very being? So when the questions rage, hang up the telephone. Your conversation partner has questions too. Why not take them directly to God?
Faith is not faith until it is tested in the crucible of struggle and the fiery trials of life. Elizabeth Achtemeier writes that Habakkuk's questions are not born of doubt. They are questions born of faith. I agree. After all, if all we know about Job is his patience we have not-read the book. Job had raging questions and he confronted God.
And even from the cross, our Lord Jesus utters the most agonizing question ever to pierce a grieving heaven and a hurting earth: "My God. My God why have you forsaken me?"
God can handle our questions. There seems to be a profound relation between the quality of the hymn of praise and the vehemence of the prophet's questions. Some might consider Habakkuk's exuberant pledge to rejoice in God even when there is famine and utter desolation in the land, foolish gibberish. But Habakkuk's own witness is that there is blessing in the praising. There is strength in the joy. There is power in the prayer. Habakkuk can now wait for God because he has already seen that for which he waits.
I have stood in Habakkuk's space. I am sure that you have too. Many of the faithful before us have stood there also. Martin Luther King was fond of quoting James Russell Lowell's wonderful hymn, written for just such moments in our lives when faith trembles. For our time, I paraphrase Lowell slightly:
Truth forever on the scaffold
Wrong forever on the throne
But, the scaffold sways the future and
beyond the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadows
Keeping watch upon God's own.
Rev. Dr. Prathia Hall
Interview with Prathia Hall
Interviewed by Lydia Talbot
Lydia Talbot: Dr. Hall, your powerful message centered on the Prophet Habakkuk's enraged dialogue with God, his shattered faith yet ultimately sustained. Can you talk about when your own faith has trembled; when you too stood in his sandals?
Prathia Hall: Oh, my. There have been my moments. There were certainly times back in the Civil Rights Movement when we faced so much pain—shootings, burnings of our churches, the killing of loved ones. Those were difficult moments and yet we were surrounded by God's presence and that's really all we need.
Talbot: And the loss of your own daughter, Simone?
Hall: Oh, yes.
Talbot: Her tragic death.
Hall: I am still learning to live in that space. My daughter suffered a massive stroke at the age of twenty-two and died three years later at the age of twenty-five. And it is an awesome question to learn to live in a space without the physical presence of the child of your own body and one who had been in your life for twenty-five years, but I am learning by living the question.
Talbot: And your faith is sustaining you?
Hall: There is no other way. I have learned through this experience that faith makes it barely bearable.
Talbot: The crucible of struggle that shows us the way. Thank you so much, Dr. Hall, for your powerful message.
Hall: Thank you.
