Sermon: Blessed are the Merciful
The women’s bible study on Friday mornings is reading a book by Max Lucado called “He Chose the Nails” – a series of meditations on the various aspects of Christ’s final hours. Before Chapter 2 – which is called “I will bear your dark side” – there is a quote from Blaise Pascal, the famous French mathematician from the 17th century. He wrote: “Vanity is so anchored in the heart of man that …those who write against it want to have the glory of having written well; and those who read it desire the glory of having read it.”
Anytime I sit to work on a sermon I feel this way – it is arrogant and egocentric to try to say something intelligent about the character of God, and for all you in the seats I am afraid it is vanity too to feel good about sitting and listening and trying to take something away from it. In fact, all is vanity. We cannot escape from our selves and our sinfulness no matter what we do. And yet – we have a merciful God whose death has brought us freedom. Today we are going to talk a bit about mercy. What God’s mercy has done for us, and how we are to be merciful in response.
“Blessed are the merciful for they will receive mercy” is the beatitude we are looking at in this series of sermons about the beatitudes. And the parable that we also read today – about the unmerciful servant - serves to illustrate this beatitude.
The parable is pretty clear – God has forgiven us our debt to him and yet we have turned around and imprisoned others because they owed us a debt. What is the nature of our debt to God? What is the nature of our debt to others, or their debts to us? How are we to negotiate forgiveness, compassion, and mercy towards others without doing more harm than good?
Will you pray the Lord’s Prayer with me – using debts??
I will admit it – I am not in the best touch with my sin-nature. When I converted to Christianity, it was easy to see how sinful I was because I was a pretty bad actor back then. But now, for the most part I walk around thinking I am a pretty OK person. I don’t do all the bad things I used to do before I was a Christian (which now I realize is mostly because I have gotten older and a little more responsible, not that I am somehow fundamentally changed for the good). Now I help my neighbors, I go to church, I give to charity, I raise my kids without intentionally harming them. I am also someone who is pretty convicted about my wrong doing – I really hurt when I realize I have spoken harshly to someone, I am keenly aware of my shortcomings in my marriage, I feel guilty all the time about not doing enough at church or to help friends, I beat myself up for getting angry at my kids. But the true is - none of it really matters – not the good stuff OR the bad stuff. It is not in my deeds that God’s mercy lies. The classic prayer of confession asks for forgiveness for doing that which I ought not to have done or for not doing that which I ought to have done. But my bad deeds are NOT the basis for my condemnation any more than my good deeds are the basis for earning my right relationship with God. My deeds are simply the consequences of my sinful nature. I can change some of my bad behavior, but it is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic – the ship is still going down. And all the frenzy I get myself in about what I should have done, could have done, or didn’t do is, as Paschal says, Vanity. It is a prison of self-centeredness from which I cannot escape.
To get a true picture of the kind of mercy we are talking about in this beatitude, we have to get, again, a sense of the depth of our sinfulness. I know this is Basic Christianity 101. I know we all know this and we do not go to church to get blasted about our sin nature. But it is so slippery. We have to struggle to hold on to it or our vanity gets in the way – just as Paul struggles with it in Romans 17 – he says “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate … but it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.”
So, is there a difference between me and my selfish carping at my children and Gary Sampson’s cold-blooded murder of three people? No, there is not. Although our deeds may seem more or less severe, there is no fundamental difference in our nature. Romans 3:22-23 “There is NO DISTINCTION since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Sampson has been sentenced to death by a judge, and deserves it – he has no chance for rehabilitation, no parole. But he was already under that sentence before a human judge imposed it, and so am I. And so are you. We are finite, imperfect and broken – no rehabilitation, no chance of parole.
The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? Jeremiah 17:9.
I promise that this sermon will not continue to be such a downer, but bear with me.
I have recently had a falling out with a friend – the very friend who I was trying to help so much last Fall when her husband had cancer. It is very painful to me that she rejected me after all I did for her. I could go on and on about her problems and why she is wrong Believe me, I have rolled her faults around in my heart like jagged stones making my heart more calloused and bitter towards her. But in hindsight I have come to see how deeply my vanity ran through all of my efforts on her behalf. And this is true despite my conscious effort to pray and keep my Self out of it. I can see that I was still guilty of doing exactly what I sought NOT to do. Woe to me.
Upon a light reading, the beatitudes seemed to be a prescription for the sort of person we ought to be if we expect to be blessed by God. By listing the quality of the person first (poor in spirit, meek, merciful etc.) and then the positive result that comes from being like that second (ie. you shall inherit the earth), Christ seems be saying “Do this and then you will earn grace from me.” But we know this is not what Jesus is saying. He goes on to say that we must fulfill the law, be more righteous than the Pharisees, that we cannot even lust in our hearts. He goes on to say that we must be perfect, even as he is perfect. That we must pay back every single penny. That we must be Him.
But the gap is so large. We are NOT Him and nothing we can DO will make it so. In fact, the qualities listed in the beatitudes are just that – qualities, not actions. We do not “act” poor in spirit, or meek, or mournful – we simply are. So “merciful” must be like that too – more of a quality than an action. For we are not the judges of man – we are not to be merciful in the same way that God is. It is not our job to imprison people for what they owe us. There are higher authorities for that – our court system on earth and our father in heaven.
So if mercy is not an action, is it then a feeling? Are we supposed to feel mercifully towards others, even if we cannot really do anything to justify them or forgive their sins? Certainly feeling merciful towards someone is a good thing. But we know that feelings are notoriously hard to control. And sometimes people really do hurt us badly and simple psychology tells us that we should not deny those feelings of anger, hurt and betrayal. I heard an NPR show recently with a woman who wrote a book about forgiveness and people called in with very difficult questions like, what do you do if the person who has wronged you has died before you had an opportunity to forgive them? or what do you do if you are asking for forgiveness from someone who refuses to give it to you? She recommended a middle stage of acceptance to these folks. Which is good advice in a fallen world – sometimes it takes too much energy to fight that which is flawed. But God expects, and gives, more.
Thanks to the wonder of the internet, I came across some writing on this beatitude by a Russian Orthodox archpriest named Victor Potapov. In 1993, he wrote:
“Christian love for man demands personal sacrifice daily and lifelong. The Christian is always alert, for he sees Christ in each man he meets. Each man is not an occasion for a so-called good deed. Instead, each man is revealed, to the Christian, as the beginning of eternal communion with God Himself, a personal communion where the usual forms of human interaction disappear. Desire and will to love a unlovable man only because he represents Christ helps us to recognize that other man's hidden, genuine value. A merciful love of such a man can help even the most depraved man to recall the image of God that may slumber in his heart, so that he can promote his own spiritual rebirth. Otherwise he may linger in spiritual darkness while still well-off in terms of the world.”
I love the part where he says “Each man is not an occasion for a so-called good deed” and instead tells us that each man is revealed as God himself. The image of Christ. What he is telling us here, and what the parable and the beatitude say is a simple little thing that we have been told again and again. Do unto others are Christ has done unto you. Have mercy on others because Christ has been merciful to you. Do it because they ARE Christ. Jesus said what you do for the least among us you do for me. In a very real sense then it does not matter what someone has done to me, or to others, it does not matter what I feel or think, it does not matter what I have done for others – everything I do is for the glory of God, everything I do is to build his kingdom, everything I do is to restore his image – in myself and others. And everything I do is not ME doing anything – it is the reflection of God in my redeemed nature.
Martin Buber was a Zionist and founder of the Hasidic Jewish movement. He was not a Christian, but a Jewish mystic who wrote what has become a philosophical classic called “I and Thou”. It is a very difficult book to read and understand and I am sure I am totally oversimplifying his concepts, but in it he attempts to describe the relationship between God and people, and between people and the world – including each other. He calls these the I –Thou relationship, and the I – it relationship. He says that there is no reality to the relationship between I and it – meaning I and the world. All my relationships on the horizontal plane exist only through my relationship with God. He also says that one cannot say the primary word I without saying Thou. In other words, there is no me without God. It is philosophically impossible to define a me without defining a you (don’t push me on why this is the case – I told you I have a very feeble grasp on this stuff and I am really skimming the surface of the whole thing). But I think it gives some philosophical insight into how I can feel like I exist and I can feel like I have some control over my life and I can feel like I am ignoring God or outside of His will, when in fact God – the great I AM – is doing it all, controlling it all, redeeming it all. We do not exist apart from Him, and our relationships with others are entirely embedded in our relationship with Him. We can choose to ignore this fact, or we can glorify him for it, but it is what it is.
So our mercy towards other, to the extent we have any, is rooted in God’s mercy for us. It is a reflection of Him in us. My husband, after I preached this sermon to him as practice for preaching it today, asked me what the difference was between forgiveness and mercy – which I have been using pretty interchangeably so far. He pointed out that there is a difference – mercy is something you can do when you have no personal stake in the outcome – you are a higher authority who can choose to give mercy or not – like Pilate when Jesus was being sentenced. But with forgiveness you have to have a personal stake. Pilate could not forgive Jesus for his alleged wrongs because they had not been done to him. But he could have mercy. So, simplistically, mercy is something more external, and forgiveness is something more internal and personal. But when it comes to God – he is both had mercy on us and forgiven us. Because he has both an external authoritative role in our lives, and in internal more personal role in our lives. To the extent that we have hurt others, we have hurt him and need his forgiveness. To the extent that we are sinners and are under judgment from the law, we need mercy and he gives it, because Christ paid the price for us.
So, how are we then to be merciful towards others? Do we do it joyfully, as good servants of the Lord? No, at least not very often. The fact is that God does it through us – through both our actions for evil and our actions for good, which we have seen are often all tangled up together. Sometimes we come alongside God with joy, but often we are dragged through it, holding desperately to the debts others owe us – putting them and ourselves in a prison of our own making.
David Wyman recently helped me understand a little bit more about the difference between right action and feeling and how we can do wrong intending to do right. He helped me understand that joy does not overcome pain. The debts people owe us are real. The hurts we have suffered are deep. And yet God calls us to be merciful and see Christ in the people who have hurt us. Because Christ already paid the debt for us. He paid it two thousand years ago on the cross. In this life, that doesn’t mean the debt ever FEELS paid, or the pain goes away. But in some way the joy we feel in Christ explains the pain he suffered on our behalf. But whether or not we feel joy or compassion or mercy or forgiveness, we are still called to obey by imitating the character of God as best we can. Often this is a mechanical sort of obedience. As David said, and this is a direct quote he wrote me in an email “it is very like Frodo and Sam on the last journeys in Mordor. One hopes for courage. One hopes for understanding and serenity. But in the end, there is a job to do. The Ring must be destroyed, the journey made, and we are promised only for the grace that the thing will happen. We are not promised that our hearts will be in it or that we will feel release or satisfaction, or that we will have the strength of character to complete the task. We may need special help at the end.”
David also observed that we comfortable Americans probably feel more feelings of compassion because of our unique position as the worlds most well fed, well cared for people. In comparison, the position of the rest of the world SHOULD inspire some compassion, and maybe that is OK to the extent that these feelings inspire action, but unfortunately we have come to depend on these feelings as the signal we need to obey. And therefore, if we feel no compassion, we do not act mercifully. This has resulted, I think, in making us a crueler, not kinder people. As the Russian Orthodox priest points out we are called to be merciful to even the most depraved and see Christ in them. Think Gary Sampson. He is a hard guy to feel compassion for. But then think Helen Prejean. As David pointed out, other Christians in other parts of the world who are a lot less comfortable are not hampered by their need to feel compassion. They pray for the actuality of compassion, and sometimes the feelings might come along, but either way they are called to great acts of mercy among dictators, genocide, poverty and disease. THERE walks our Lord.
Col 2:13-14 –And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross.
It is humbling perhaps that our actions for good are not really so great after all. But it is so freeing. God has given us the keys to our own jail cell. We actually have little to do with it, our actions and feelings mean almost nothing ultimately because God is in control. Therefore the bad actions of others are ultimately not so bad either. Does this mean we go and sin so that grace can abound? No of course not. Our actions are powerful to us personally, and we learn a great deal from them. We are merciful, or anything else good, because God is merciful and good and we reflect his glory – even the worst of us. That is what we were put here on earth to do. Because our debt is cancelled through Christ, we do not hold others to their debts, and we enter into the community of the blessed who shall inherit the earth, the pure of heart who shall see God. AMEN.