Habakkuk 1:2-3, 2:2-4

Ps 94

2 Tim 1:6-8, 13-14

Luke 17:5-10

Today I get to preach on a really intriguing set of readings which to me seem to be about encouragement, encouragement from God which gets things into their proper perspective, and allows us to do the thing that God means us to do, rather than be ruled by our internal voices, or insistent voices which crowd in on us from outside. I have been in my present post as Vicar in the Isle of Dogs for sixteen years, and I wouldn’t now want to be anywhere else. But it wasn’t always that way, at first every morning was a struggle, and I found that every time I stepped into the shower I had to give myself a good talking to, just to keep going, just to stay where I was, and not to run away screaming.  And in that struggle I found I had an ally in the Old testament, the Prophet Habakkuk. Habakkuk is famously associated with standing on a watch tower, perhaps on the walls of a city. He might well be watching for the opposing armies of the great superpowers of his day, Egypt and Chaldea who used the territories of Israel and Judah as a highway for their troops. He might be watching for them, but in fact his watching is a type of prayer. He is watching to see what the lord God will do, and what he will say. Habakkuk’s patience and vigilance is rewarded and God tells him to write down the vision he receives on tablets of clay. What God says next has become a prayer that I keep pinned to my noticeboard, and every now and then, when I need encouragement, I take it down and read it, and it strengthens me. This is how it goes:

The vision will be fulfilled

In its own time.

If it seems slow in coming,

Wait for it,

For it will surely come.

And as we await,

May all things work together for good,

May we be blessed

With wisdom and discernment

And determination and patience,

May we take the time

To grow in grace

Day by day,

Amen

It is so easy, isn’t it, to assume one of two things. One assumption is that your agenda and time scale is the same as God’s. That makes you impatient with others, and hard to work with. And the other assumption is that the timescale and agenda of everyone else is in tune with what God wants, and it's you that is out of step. And that makes you impatient with yourself. I’m sure that the person who wrote psalm 94 which we said/sung this morning would have recognised both of these assumptions, so easily made, as ways in which we harden our hearts, as ways in which we stop listening to God, and ways in which we put God on trial. And neither assumption is true. God tells us to wait for what will be revealed, but that time of waiting, as the prayer says, isn’t wasted, it’s time for things to work together for good and for us all to grow in grace.   

Saint Timothy too is encouraged by his mentor Saint Paul, but this time the encouragement is not about waiting , but about guarding and treasuring what has been put into Timothy’s care and possession at the moment when he was ordained and commissioned by God. The temptation is to let the gift, the gift of the Holy Spirit slip away, or not to realise the full value of the gift that has been given, and let its light gradually burn itself out. Does that some familiar to you? It does to me. It’s easy to not realise the precious gift of life and faith that we have been given, and feel it slipping away from us, or shrinking away to nothing. Faith, to be real, to be sustaining has to be used. It’s a bit like a muscle. If it isn’t exercised it shrinks. Prayer life is like that too, I always . Use it or lose it, as they say. It doesn’t stay static, it needs to be put to work.  St Paul says to Timothy, but as I equally could say to everyone here, and also to myself ‘You have been trusted to look after something precious, guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit’

The apostles had an inkling that they were in trouble if their faith was not growing. ‘Lord, increase our faith’ they pray to Jesus. But I wonder, looking at what comes from Jesus as a response, whether what they are really worried about is visibility. ‘Lord, make our faith more visible’ they seem to be asking ‘make us seem more important in the eyes of others because of our faith’. Make it bigger, better, harder to ignore. Faith isn’t a show, Jesus seems to respond, and it isn’t a village produce show, with the biggest, fattest vegetables on show and winning prizes. The smallest grain of faith, the smallest seed of faith, by involving God through prayer could bring about miracles, it could move mountains. But that’s not the point here. Jesus won’t allow us to puff our selves up, or make ourselves seem more important than other people because of our faith. In the end faith reminds of our relationship with God. It reminds us that this is a relationship of grace, where we receive far more than either we desire or deserve. That’s the miracle of grace. And it’s the heart of Christianity as a faith. We don’t deserve to be God’s redeemed children, but because of Jesus we are that anyway. Still, at the end of the day we need to say to ourselves, and more so, we need to say to God ‘We are merely your servants; we are merely doing our duty.’