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Mercy Wins |
James 2: 1-17
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© John Ewing Roberts, 9/7/97 |
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INTRODUCTION That careful student of American religious life, pollster George Barna tells of a woman who stopped attending church. I got tired of hearing sermons about being nice to other people, or how important it is to read the Bible or give money to the church so they could bring in more people who could be told to be nice to other people and read the Bible. I've got three kids at home who don't have nice clothing, who don't get a vacation trip every year, who have never been to Disney World. They don't see much of me or their dad because we're working ourselves silly to make ends meet. Sure, it's great to be nice to your neighbors and to be understanding when others mistreat you. But that's not the problem in my life. I am tired, lonely, on the edge financially, and I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel. I don't really care about choirs, short-term mission trips, youth-group events or men's breakfast groups. I'm drowning in the whirlpool of life's realities. The church isn't helping me. And like they say, if it ain't part of the solution, then it must be part of the problem." (George Barna, Evangelism That Works - How to Reach Changing Generations with an Unchanging Gospel [Ventura, California: Regal Books] 1995, p. 56) I am haunted by the words, "I'm drowning in the whirlpool of life's realities." What can a church offer in worship to a person who is "drowning in the whirlpool of life's realities?" A good answer comes from another person we turn to for vision on American church life, Rick Warren. He says: In genuine worship God's presence is felt, God's pardon is offered, God's purposes are revealed, and God's power is displayed. (Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Church [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House] 1995, p. 242) It strikes me that the drop out from church will find in mercy the place where God's presence is felt, God's pardon is offered, God's purposes are revealed, and God's power displayed. This is the place where we are saved from drowning in life's whirlpool. Our lady who dropped out of church is not the first to long for mercy amid life's realities. People have always longed for the mercy of God. The cry for mercy is an ancient one. Our choir sang an old Russian setting of it for us as our anthem today. Christians seem first to have used this prayer in Syria in the 4th century. It had spread to France by the 6th century. (The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, edited by F. L. Cross, [London: Oxford University Press] 1958, p. 774) Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy. JAMES ON MERCY James 2: 13 warns Christians that only the ones showing mercy will find mercy. "Judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy." James' brother, Jesus, said in the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount, "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." (Matthew 5: 7) Jesus said in that same sermon, "If you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." (Matthew 6: 14-15) The converse (dare I say "flip side?") of these teachings is this: the unmerciful shall not be treated mercifully! That is not so much a harsh teaching as a realistic and just one. "It is not that God is unwilling to forgive or be merciful but that the condition of the unforgiving and unmerciful renders them unable to receive forgiveness and mercy. To lock another out is to lock oneself in. To reject mercy for the other is to reject mercy for oneself." (Frank Staff, "Exegetical Themes in James 1 and 2," Review and Expositor - The Book of James, Vol. LXVI, No. 4, Fall 1969, p. 400) In addition to the metaphor of a locked door blocking mercy there is the image of a blocked channel. One who is not merciful cannot receive mercy. If the mercy channel is open, mercy flows both ways. If mercy is not shown to others, we close the door of the mercy channel on ourselves. To offer mercy, compassion and forgiveness, to have the channel open and the door unlocked is to know the great joy of mercy, compassion and forgiveness. To lay down the heavy burden of an old load of anger, hatred, vengeance or jealousy is to experience great relief, great peace, great joy. GOING BEYOND TWO ANCIENT HATREDS This summer twice I felt the joy of mercy and compassion winning out over old hatreds. (1) Captain Ben Field Misses Again Last week on a hilltop in a cornfield outside Owensboro, Kentucky, Marylynn and I stood by the grave of her Revolutionary War ancestor, Captain Ben Field. Inscribed on the tombstone was his gratitude that he lived to see the seeds of liberty for which he had fought bloom in the lives of his children. We moved on to another cemetery and the grave of his grandson, a Confederate soldier in the War Between the States, another Captain Ben Field. (By now you have observed that our family is not very original with names and tends to get into a lot of wars!) The grandson of this rebel soldier stood with us. Can you guess what his name is? That's right, our contemporary Ben Field (no captain) had a yellowed newspaper clipping, an account of how his grandfather as a young soldier had a Yankee in his rifle sights. He squeezed the trigger, but the gun did not fire. He tried again with the same result. Twice more he attempted to shoot the northerner. After the fourth misfire ol' Ben realized what he was doing wrong, corrected the problem, and lined up that Yankee in his sights. But then a wave of mercy and compassion swept over him. "Naw, I'm not going to do it! Four times and no shot! Let him live!" Years later the aged Ben Field told this story to a young newspaper reporter who exclaimed, "I know that Yankee soldier! He told me how Johnny Reb had him in his sights, misfired four times, and spared him." The yellow newspaper clipping was the result of that reporter's efforts. He brought the two ancient enemies together, and there the two old codgers sat, grinning at each other, the one who had been spared and the one who had shown mercy. (2) Brown Shirts Revisited While waiting for a train at Crainlarich, a remote village in northwest Scotland, we spotted some German Boy Scouts at the other end of the platform. Seeing young German males in brown shirts stirs up chilling memories of Hitler youth and World War II. My cousin whispered, "55 years ago if we had run into each other here we would have been trying to kill each other." One of the Scouts approached us, wanting to try out his English. He was blond, nordic, a "central casting" German teenager. His first question was, "Can you tell me if the Chicago Bulls have traded Dennis Rodman?" After we got past that important bit of international communication, I asked about a small patch on his brown shirt. It was purple with a white fleur-de-lis."I have that patch. I got it for camping in a country other than my own. Is yours for camping in Scotland?" "No," he said, "now it means that the wearer is committed to world peace and has taken a vow against racism in every form." How far we had come from 1937 to 1997, from a Brown shirted Hitler youth to a Scout against racism and for world peace! Whatever monstrous things had happened in the past, at that moment compassion and mercy were on the train platform at Crainlarich. MERCY AND Judgment But mercy does not stand alone. There is the matter of judgment. Psalm 103 says, "The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger for ever." (vv. 8-9) We cannot get away from the fact that mercy is linked with judgment. It (I want to say "she") is forever connected with judgment. God requires mercy according to Micah 6: 8: "He has showed you what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God." If we do not meet this requirement, if follows that we come under judgment. The two of them, mercy and judgment, go hand in hand. "Christ's love so wishes our joy that it is ruthless against everything in us that diminishes our joy." (That is judgment.) "The worst sentence Love can pass is that we behold the suffering which Love has endured for our sake..." (That is the cross of Jesus the Christ, and that too is judgment.) "But to behold the suffering which Love endures for our sake is also our acquittal." (That is the mercy that wins out in the end. "The justice and the mercy of the judge are ultimately one." (Frederick Buechner, A Theological ABC, "Judgment" [New York: Harper and Row] 1973, p. 48) (parentheses, JER) In James 2: 13 we hear that "mercy triumphs over judgment." Justice and mercy meet at the cross, and mercy wins. A MULTIVALENT WORD Strictly speaking mercy pertains to God's compassion, but it has become for better or for worse one of those multivalent religious words which suggests other comfortable words of assurance, among them forgiveness. "Mercy represents one of the richest words in the Hebrew tradition. It is one of the key qualities of God. It is loving-kindness, generosity to the weak and helpless, continued love for people even when they have not been faithful." (Roger L. Shinn, The Sermon on the Mount [Nashville: Abingdon Press] 1962, p. 18) Mercy has not so much to do with forgiveness of sin as with God's tender compassion and pity for us in our weakness, misery and helplessness. His steadfast love endures forever. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me. Norman H. Snaith, "Mercy," A Theological Word Book of the Bible, edited by Alan Richardson [New York: Macmillan] 1996, p. 143)This linkage of mercy to compassion for the weak suggests the classic passage in Matthew 25: 31ff., when on what many take to be judgment day the Son of man separates the sheep from the goats. You remember how it goes: the goats are the ones who did not minister to the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the prisoner. They hear the horrible words, "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels." (Matthew 25: 41). The sheep are surprised to learn that when they fed the hungry, gave water to the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, visited the sick and the imprisoned, they were actually doing these acts of ministry not only to "the least of these," the brothers and sisters of Jesus, they were doing these acts to Jesus. "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto these least of these..., ye have done it unto me." (Matthew 25: 45) Compassion, mercy and judgment...the least of these, Jesus' brothers and sisters. These linkages not only suggest Matthew 25. They call to mind two remarkable women whose deaths have absorbed the world: Diana, Princess of Wales, and Mother Teresa. In many ways they were as different as night and day. The princess was young, tall and physically beautiful. The nun was aged, stooped and splendidly wrinkled. But what they had in common was compassion for the people of Matthew 25, the least of Jesus' brothers and sisters, the weak ones, the little ones, the vulnerable, the fragile, the marginalized. And that observation takes us back to the woman who dropped out of church, the person being sucked under by the whirlpool of life's realities. It takes us back to our own situations, for amid all the blessings we enjoy, we are still often marginalized and vulnerable, desperately longing for someone to notice our pain and to offer even a healing touch or a loving glance. The marginalized can be the poor, the diseased, the uneducated, the unemployed. But an educated person can be marginalized in an anti-intellectual culture which will pay one athlete for a season of baseball more than it will pay ten teachers in a lifetime. Wounded people can strike out at others; "hurt people hurt people," and some of their targets, those more fortunate, find themselves wounded and feeling very much like "the least of these." "The least of these" can be found among the homeless persons in Baltimore City and on comfortable pews in Towson. Earl Charles Spencer said yesterday in his remarkable funeral address that his extraordinary sister once explained to him that her "innermost feelings of suffering made it possible for her to connect with her constituency of the rejected." Her innermost feelings of suffering made it possible for her to connect with her constituency of the rejected! Those words contain the secret of all mercy and of all compassion. Innermost feelings of suffering make possible connection with the community of those who suffer. On a Sunday when the triumph of mercy is our theme, on a Sunday when we gather around a table which reminds us of the cross, on a Sunday when we come seeking rescue from the whirlpools of life, on a Sunday when we met a God who on the cross knew life's deepest feelings of suffering,on a Sunday when we met a God who has connected with the least of us, his brothers and sisters, his worldwide constituency of the rejected, surely we can - feel the presence of God, - receive the pardon of God, - see the purpose of God, and - know the power of God. The cross is that intersection where the innermost suffering of Jesus meets our suffering. We gaze at the cross, and it begins to dawn upon us that God suffers, that at the cross God's suffering connects with our suffering, that God would be one with us, at-one-ment makes sense, atonement comes to us by the mercy of God. The cross reminds us (again in Earl Charles Spencer's well chosen words) that "genuine goodness is threatening to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum," and that genuine goodness faces rejection and pain. And as we gaze at the cross, it begins to dawn upon us that God knows rejection, suffering and loneliness, that God understands our condition, that God would be one with us, at-one-ment, atonement. The table bears the symbols of that suffering, and as we take these elements in our hands, into our mouths, and into our bodies, it begins to dawn upon us that God suffers, God understands our suffering, God would be one with us, at-one-ment makes sense, atonement comes to us by the mercy of God. CONCLUSION As we gather around this table, as we take the bread into our hands and the cup to our lips, as we partake of these symbols and receive them into our bodies, may we know the presence of a Lord whose goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our lives, a Lord whose mercy wins over judgment, a Lord who hears us when we cry from the whirlpools of life's realities: Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Woodbrook Baptist Church (Formerly Eutaw Place Baptist Church) Baltimore, Maryland |