Scripture: Micah 6:6-8 and others
I decided that this morning would be a good time to say some words about mercy.
I came to that thought because there is this scripture that has been in my head for as long as I have been a Christian, and before that actually since the minister in the Unitarian church of my childhood began every service by quoting this scripture, and so it has been with me for just about as long as I can remember and it has always served to sum up for me as much as anything can what it means to be a Christian.
It is a scripture that has been heard often at Sojourners not only because I use it often but because other people do too. I know it’s a favorite scripture for a number of people at Sojourners and seems to fit well with what we’re about here, and if you haven’t yet guessed which scripture I’m referring to, it’s the one from Micah that asks what we are to bring to God as an offering, how we are to come before God, and concludes by saying, “God has showed you, O Mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require but that we do justly and love mercy and walk humbly with our God.”
Last week I suppose you could say we focused on the justice part of that verse, as we devoted much of the service to the formation of what we have been calling our social justice/outreach groups. It occurred to me that I might want to follow that up with just some thoughts about the second part of the verse, about mercy, about loving mercy. Actually, however we end up referring to our newly created groups, they are not just about justice or outreach, as I commented last week, and they will certainly include mercy.
It also has occurred to me on more than one occasion that we don’t talk as much, I don’t talk as much, about the loving mercy part as I do about the doing justice and the walking humbly with God. I feel like I talk about doing justice at Sojourners fairly often. It is part of how we think of ourselves, that we are congregation concerned about social justice. It’s something that too many Christian churches pay too little attention to and we hope that we will not be among those who pay too little attention to social justice. It’s not that we can afford to be self-satisfied in this regard, but it’s the way we present ourselves to ourselves and to others. It’s a standard we hold ourselves to.
So we turn fairly often to matters of justice in our worship and hopefully in the ways we carry out our congregational life. And I have turned in preaching occasionally to the idea of walking humbly with God, more than occasionally, I think, because the arrogance that so often goes along with religious faith, and specifically the Christian faith, is something that troubles me pretty much all the time. The arrogance for instance of pretending that your words about God are the only right words, that Christ is the only way to salvation, that Christian truth is the only real truth—to say nothing of Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist truth being the only real truth—the arrogance of pretending to certainty in matters in which there is none, the arrogance of claiming to know all about the ways of God, the arrogance of thinking that the United States is a nation that is especially close to God’s heart and that Christianity and patriotism can hardly be distinguished from one another. Walking humbly with God is pretty much always on my mind at least in the sense of wanting desperately to avoid as much of Christian-style arrogance as I can. And I remember, not only preaching several times specifically on the theme of walking humbly but devoting a whole series of Lenten sermons to the question of what it may mean for Christians to walk humbly with God.
Mercy, I confess, gets less attention, at least from me, and I sense in general. Maybe it’s because it gets stuck in the middle of the verse. We focus on doing justice and on walking humbly and just sort of glide over loving mercy. Maybe it’s because it seems like there’s not much to say because it’s sort of self-explanatory. Or maybe we find when we start to think about it that it’s anything but self-explanatory, that it’s one of those things that we think we know what it means until we start to think about it, and then find that it’s richer and harder to talk about than we thought. In any case, if it’s true that mercy gets less attention, maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe mercy is one of those things that it’s better to do than to talk about. I suppose that could be said about most good things, that it’s better to do them than to talk about them, but I think maybe that’s especially true of mercy. Nevertheless, it may not hurt too much to spend a little bit of time occasionally, like today, in reflection about the notion of loving mercy.
One meaning of mercy I suppose has to do with something like forgiveness or leniency, as when we say that a person has thrown himself on the mercy of the court. “God is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” A situation that might call for anger, judgment, revenge, or punishment is treated instead with understanding and leniency. “O God, be merciful to me a sinner.” That whole area of judgment and mercy and forgiveness is too much for me this morning. It requires not a separate sermon but a separate set of sermons about God’s forgiveness and our own. But I need to put that aside for today.
Another meaning of mercy I think is pretty straightforward. It’s illustrated in the familiar story of the Good Samaritan. I decided not to read that story for the scripture today in favor of some shorter verses about mercy, but you know the story. Jesus tells of the man who was going from Jerusalem to Jericho who was attacked by some robbers who took his money, beat him up, and left him by the side of the road half dead. Different people pass by seeing the man but make up various excuses in their minds why they can’t help, or even pull out their cell phones and make a call on the poor fellow’s behalf. Then a Samaritan, a despised Samaritan, comes along who is, in Jesus’ words, moved with pity, and he tends the wounds, carries the man to a bed and breakfast where he can rest and be cared for and pays the owner for the immediate expenses and promises to come back and repay him for whatever other expenses the owner incurs. Which of the people proved to be neighbor to the man who was hurt? Jesus asks. The answer comes back from the man listening to the parable: “The one who showed mercy.”
In a simple sense this is one thing mercy is certainly about. When someone is in pain, in need, in some kind of distress, to respond in a caring way, to offer comfort or relief. Of course this can be done well or poorly. It can be approached as a duty that the privileged owe to the needy, all the while quietly assuming that the privileged and the needy are different categories of human beings and never questioning whether there ought to be such categories. It can be done in a kind of condescending way, offering generous help to those who are “less fortunate”, or mercy can be just an offering of one human being to another, both of whom know that there is no nobility or shame in the giving or receiving, both of whom know that we will all be in need of many kinds of mercy before we are done with our living. Acts of mercy, at their best, are the simplest most direct way we have of being neighbors to each other, sisters and brothers to one another.
But that doesn’t mean there are no issues here. I just hinted at the problem that mercy can so easily be twisted into charity, a word I have never liked very well, because it connotes to me that sense of condescension I referred to, maybe even an attitude of offering crumbs from the table of the wealthy so that those poor folks over there can have a little something to eat, but not feeling the injustice, the not-rightness of that situation. Though it shouldn’t be, sometimes that is what passes for mercy.
Probably one of the people most associated with acts of mercy was Mother Theresa. You may be aware that there were some people though who criticized Mother Theresa, questioning not her commitment to relieving suffering but questioning whether she should not speak out louder or become more involved in advocating for more fundamental changes that would reduce poverty rather than simply ministering to those in poverty, changes that would make her deeds of mercy less necessary. So there is that issue: the question of focusing on deeds of mercy and neglecting the need for more basic change, neglecting the need for justice. The need, for instance, not just to bring food for the food pantry but to work for a living wage so that fewer people would be hungry.
There is also the fact that there is so much need in our world, so many people in distress, that it is not possible for an individual or a church to respond to everyone and every situation in the way that mercy demands. There is quite frankly no way of our avoiding being the priest or the lawyer in the story of the Good Samaritan most of the time. Every day we choose to pass on some opportunity to be of assistance just because there are so many situations of need that call for responses of mercy, and we can’t attend to all of them. We choose some few ways in which we will act like the Good Samaritan. The rest of the time we are the passers by.
A similar issue. I have had the experience, as many ministers have, of struggling to know how to deal with people who walk in to the church off the street with a request for assistance. Sometimes you feel it is a legitimate need. Sometimes you have a strong sense that it’s not quite legitimate, maybe even a scam. Sometimes you just can’t tell, and always you know you could be wrong. Early in my ministry, I was serving a church in Chicago where we had lots of people walking in with requests and we weren’t a wealthy church and didn’t have a lot of money to distribute and there was no local organization like the Alliance for Interfaith Ministries where some requests could be referred. Anyway, I was talking with some colleagues about this one day and happened to mention a certain person who I had just given money to and shared a bit of the story he had told me, and as I spoke the other people in the group began nodding their heads. They knew the story. They knew the person. He had told the same story about his urgent need for help to every church for miles around. He went to so many churches apparently that he forgot which ones he had been to and so went back to the same church with the same story two or three times. It’s enough to leave you just a bit cynical and feeling not necessarily very kindly toward people who walk in with requests for assistance. Furthermore there are situations, maybe tough love type situations, where what seems like the merciful thing to do is not the right thing to do. All of which is to say that mercy is not necessarily a simple thing. It is not necessarily an obvious and unambiguously good thing.
Nevertheless, the scripture calls us to love mercy. I note that it says to love mercy. I’m not sure that the exact way the scriptures are phrased are always very important, especially since there are so many translations with different wordings. But the phrase “loving mercy” caught my attention and suggested a certain approach to me.
It may be, it certainly is the case, that for us humans our supply of mercy is not inexhaustible and we will be able to show mercy in only our limited human ways. It may even be true that what appears to be the merciful thing to do is not the right thing to do. But Micah’s call to love mercy it seems to me is a call not to give in to cynicism. It is a call to have a heart of mercy even if we are limited in what we can do and not always sure what the right thing to do is. It is a call not to use our limitations as excuses.
For the child of God, whatever decisions we may make, there must always be a tilt in our spirits toward mercy. And although the practice of mercy without also seeking a larger, more lasting justice can be short-sighted and in the end not very loving, it is also the case that seeking justice without that being accompanied by deeds of mercy can quickly turn heartless. To use the example of the Good Samaritan again, we can talk all we want about the causes of crime and how to reduce it, about the need for better police protection along the road to Jericho, about the health care system that should nurse the man back to health, and so on and so on, but still there is a man who is lying half dead by the side of the road who is need of mercy.
There is another way in which justice and mercy go together. It involves thinking about mercy in a different way from what I have just been talking about. An attitude of seeking justice, it seems to me, involves looking at the world with all its violence, with all its suffering, so much of it the result of the action or inaction of human beings, looking at the world with all its embedded hatreds and prejudices, looking out at this world full of brokenness and saying to ourselves, this is not acceptable. This is not something human beings are supposed to get used to. This is not something that has to be. Even if my part in it is infinitesimally small, I need to be among the people of God who hear the call to do justice.
An attitude of mercy would look out at the same world, filled with all its violence, its suffering, its embedded hatreds and prejudices, so broken and so heartbreaking in so many ways, yet would see that world nevertheless as a sacred gift, and the world’s people, capable of so much cruelty and callousness, as yet beloved of God. An attitude of mercy would approach the world not as a place to be changed but as a place to be loved even before anything has been changed. An attitude of mercy allows us to fall head over heels in love with the world. As it is. Unimproved. In spite of everything. An attitude of mercy feels the world as a place that asks us to respond not only with sorrow and grief and outrage but also with awe and reverence and profound thanksgiving.
So we are called to do justly and to love mercy, neither one without the other but both together, unwilling to accept a world in which there is so much profanity but at the same time unable to see the world as anything less than holy. It is an easy thing to say, not such an easy thing to do, to do justice and to love mercy, both together, with equal passion, every day. Nevertheless, I continue to hear it as what the Lord requires, neither more nor less. I continue to be called by that verse from Micah. I continue to be blessed by it. Amen.
Jim Bundy
April 27, 2008