Two Meditation on “Wachet auf, ruft uns Stimme”
Sermon by Cynthia A.
Jarvis
December 16, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
Habakkuk 2:1-3
Matthew 25:1-13
I Thessalonians 5:1-10
Revelation 19:6-9b
“I will take my stand to watch, and station myself on the tower, and look forth to see what he will say to me, and what he will answer concerning my
complaint.”
The hour is midnight. Twelve dotted notes on the strings in the first four bars of Wachet Auf wake us to the prophetic voice of the watchman. Bach
surely took pleasure in the knowledge that the first prophets in Scripture were musicians whose playing prepared minds of old for God’s word and whose music
served as the vehicle for prophetic speech. “As you come to the city,” said Samuel to the newly anointed King Saul, “you will meet a band of prophets coming
down from the high place with harp, tambourine, flute and lyre before them, prophesying.” Likewise this morning, a band of prophets has come to prepare our
minds for God’s word.
But by the time of Habakkuk, the late 7th century prophets had become lonely watchmen turned toward the nation in general and the king in particular. On
Habakkuk’s watch there had been violence and wrong-doing, strife and contention. Unrighteousness preyed upon the people from within while the Babylonians
marched against Judah from without. “The law is slacked and justice never goes forth,” the prophet cries.
That is to say, Habakkuk’s watch was much like our own. Turning toward the nation in general and its rulers in particular, we watch and see justice
perverted, iniquity erased as though torture were of no consequence, violence and wrong-doing. Where is the watchman for these times? Neither a prosecutor
specially appointed to play the role of prophet nor religious politicians watching the polls will do! Habakkuk’s still prescient plaint echoes down the
millennia and must be enough for now. “Why” the prophet cries to God, “do you look on the treacherous and are silent when the wicked swallow those more
righteous than they?”
In passionate expectation of an answer, Habakkuk stations himself on the rampart to watch and listen. There I imagine the prophet hearing, as we have in the
opening chorale, the sounding of the midnight hour. Without dispelling the darkness, God breaks the silence. “Write the vision,” God commands and then
immediately counsels patience: “If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay.”
Habakkuk’s lot, nevertheless, was delay—the delay of defeat and exile. In truth, delay has been the lot of all who must go down to the grave before the
bridegroom comes again. Yet, says preacher Edmund Steimle turning us toward the parable, “we will miss any coming, any visitation, any assurance of God’s
presence, any heavenly banquet, if we are not first prepared for the delay, for God’s absence. The unfaithful ones in the parable were ready for a ‘coming’
but not for a delay.” How are we to ready ourselves? Habakkuk was readied by rejoicing: “Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the
vines…yet I will rejoice in the Lord,” he concludes. To rejoice rightly, the postscript to his book presumes, a prophetic band is needed once again!
Therefore Habakkuk ends with these words, “To the choirmaster: with stringed instruments.”
“As the bridegroom was delayed, they all slumbered and slept.”
Now come Lord Jesus! “The condition of [our] relation to God” proclaimed Paul Tillich in a sermon entitled simply Waiting, “is first of all one of
not having, not seeing, not knowing,…not grasping….It is not easy to endure this not having God, this waiting for
God….It is not easy to proclaim God to children and…skeptics…and at the same time to make clear to them that we ourselves do not possess God,
that we too wait for God….God is God for us just in so far as we do not possess God.”
Yet here, following Jesus’ lead, Bach would seem to dare the possession of lover and beloved. In the first duet, the soul’s yearning for God clearly is the
subject. Now it seems we are about to witness the joy of love consummated between Christ and the soul. The waiting is over! As musicologist Calvin Stapert
notes, “C minor has given way to B flat major, the highest key of any movement in the whole cantata. The slow 12/8 meter has been replaced by a lively 4/4
meter. The piccolo violin has yielded to the oboe, the instrument Bach so often associated with the love of Jesus.”
There is about this duet the breathlessness of the love, requited or not, for which we mortals long. Yet is this a love possessed? Again writes Tillich, “I
think of the theologian who does not wait for God, because he possesses [God], enclosed within a doctrine. I think of the Biblical student who does not wait
for God, because [she] possesses God enclosed in a book. I think of the churchman who does not wait for God, because he possesses [God], enclosed in an
institution. I think of the believer who does not wait for God, because [she] possesses [God], enclosed within [her] own experience. It is not easy to
endure this not having God, this waiting for God.” Still, is the soul not about to possess God, enclosed in her rapidly beating heart?
Listen again to the words Bach’s music exegetes. For the love of which Jesus sings is not his love of the Soul but his love of the Father. While the Soul
sings “My love is mine,” (possessive) Jesus responds “And I am His (God’s).” That is to say, in Christ and through Christ our love that is mortal and
possessive is resisted and finally redeemed!
"Is it not clear," asks Karl Barth in an Advent sermon, "that the best in our lives is not knowledge and power [and I would add not even the love between
lovers], but our deep longing for redemption….For we live not by the few answers which we know how to give to the question of our existence, but by the
quest for a wholly different answer, for the answer which God alone can give….There is not a moment in time that, in its finiteness and limitations, does
not cry out for eternity."
So the bridegroom comes just in time, comes swiftly in response to the cry we barely know enough to cry or how. In the fullness of time and into the heart
of darkness at midnight he comes: comes to the tawdry places of our every temptation, to the tender places of our misplaced loves, to the fearful places of
our hidden failures, to the harried places of our misspent days. And he will not let us go, will not let us be, until his grace alone welcomes us, ready or
not, into the joy of God’s glad hall of eternal love.
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