(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “The Quality of Mercy”, originally shared on January 29, 2025. It was the 348th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Mercy has been in the news lately! Or has
it? Today, we’re going to find out.
I read a pretty discouraging comment
recently, made in a Facebook group for Lutheran clergy like me. It was from
someone who was not a clergyperson, but who said that he had a lot of sympathy
for pastors who deliver what is essentially a TED talk every week on a book
that nobody reads. (Whew!) It was discouraging because, I think, that there’s a
lot of truth in it.
There was one recent sermon, however, that
had a lot of people talking. Maybe you heard of it. Or even heard it.
It was delivered at a prayer service marking
the inauguration of President Donald Trump, by Bishop Mariann Budde, the
Episcopal bishop of Washington D.C. in the National (Episcopalian) Cathedral in
Washington D.C.
I watched it on YouTube after the kerfuffle
that came up over it. It was only 15 minutes long, but it landed a punch, or it
had an impact. You decide.
This coming Sunday, the vast majority of
churches in the world will be doing one of two things.
Either they will be celebrating a holiday (fun
fact: holiday is a one-word variation of the two words “holy day”) called
the Presentation of Our Lord (aka “Candlemas”), marking the day when Jesus was
presented at the Temple in Jerusalem, combining the ritual purification of Mary
after childbirth and the redemption of the firstborn. It’s celebrated on
February 2nd every year, 40 days after Christmas.
Or, churches will be marking the Third
Sunday of the Season of Epiphany, a Christian season that marks the
manifestation of Jesus, on a Sunday that happens to fall on February 2nd
this year.
If you would like to read the Presentation
gospel text, it’s Luke 2:22-40.
But I’m going to go with the sequel to last
week’s Epiphany season reading. It speaks about what used to be called “an
inconvenient truth” and it shows us the consequences for Jesus of speaking it
on one bad day, in Luke 4:21-30,
21 Then he began to say to them,
“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” 22 All
spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his
mouth. They said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” 23 He said to
them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’
And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard
you did at Capernaum.’ ” 24 And he said, “Truly I tell you, no
prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. 25 But the truth
is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was
shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the
land; 26 yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow
at Zarephath in Sidon. 27 There were also many lepers in Israel
in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman
the Syrian.” 28 When they heard this, all in the synagogue were
filled with rage. 29 They got up, drove him out of the town,
and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they
might hurl him off the cliff. 30 But he passed through the
midst of them and went on his way.
They were amazed at the gracious words that
came from his mouth, until he said something that one might call an
“inconvenient truth”, then they wanted to throw him off a cliff! He reminded
them that there were times in the history of God’s people that non-Jews were blessed,
and the Jews were not, when the chosen people were not blessed, but the
Gentiles were.
Their belief that they were set apart
because they themselves were special, and not that God was special, was being
challenged with a truth bomb.
Like when John the Baptist brought a word of
judgement to the self-righteous Pharisees and Sadducees who came to him for
baptism in Matthew 3:9,
9 Do not presume to say
to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able
from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.
Both groups thought that their position of
privilege was being questioned, their unique status was being threatened, that they
were being threatened, and they responded accordingly
Is that what happened at the Inauguration
Day prayer service? Maybe.
It was a powerful sermon on a classic
Christian theme. Mercy. And it was a creative way to address current social
issues. Who knows what the effect on people will be over time?
President Trump did seem to be a lot
more conciliatory when he came to Southern California three days later to tour
some of the burn area. He said that he was ready to help in any way that he
could. He was hugging Governor Newsome and he engaged in sometimes strained but
generally friendly banter with Mayor Bass.
And Bishop Budde’s popularity among liberal
protestants today cannot be overestimated. In their estimation, she hit all the
buttons for faithful ministry. She “spoke truth to power”, “in such a time as
this”, “for the least of these”. Perhaps some of the never-were or lapsed
Christians who say that they are finding their way back to a church because of
this sermon will stay and come to faith.
Conservatives were not so pleased. The
occasion was constructed to honor the peaceful transition of power, to be
reminded that the president, as the country, is subservient to God, and to pray
for the health and wisdom of the president and those with political power in
our nation, as well as for national unity. And the sermon was all of those
things, until near the end, when Bishop Budde spoke directly at the president
and asked him to show mercy to those who were afraid of how the policies that he
had promised to enact during his campaign would affect them.
It was brilliant and odd at the same time.
Brilliant because, who could be opposed to
mercy?
Odd because, in the Bible, mercy is usually
called for toward someone who has an insurmountable debt, or who has done
something wrong. It is about forgiveness or about withholding earned
punishment.
But, in fact, Republicans are angry about
the mercy shown by President Biden in his last days in office, and Democrats
are angry by the mercy shown by President Trump in his first days in office.
Each party is angry over clemency, commutation and pardons. About mercy and
forgiveness.
Liberal/Progressive and
Conservative/Orthodox people have different ideas about who is the oppressor
and who is the oppressed, who is breaking the law and who is supporting it, and
who needs protection and who needs help.
People don’t get upset over mercy itself,
only when the wrong people are shown it.
Some people might say, though, that the
sermon was not about mercy, but about justice.
But what is “justice” in the Bible? It’s
doing God’s will, not advocating for our movement’s social values.
How do we know and do God’s will?
We get a clue from Portia, a character in Shakespeare’s
play “The Merchant of Venice”, who says, “The quality of mercy is not
strained.”
Mercy is an attribute of God that also
becomes our own. Mercy that is from God comes naturally because it is not the
product of a political or social ideology but from a transformed life. Mercy is
not something we decide to do, it’s a quality that comes from who we are. And
who we are comes from whose we are.
The quality of mercy is not strained. It is
not a work of obligation, but it comes as a gift of grace.
As the bishop’s sermon neared its end, I was
reminded of growing up in the 1950’s as the oldest of four siblings. There were
three boys and one girl.
Gender roles were more defined then than
they are today, and “roughhousing” was considered a normal part of development
for the boys. I was the biggest of the boys, at least for a while anyway, and
when my next youngest brother and I wrestled, it sometimes ended with me
sitting on his chest, pinning his arms to the ground with my knees, and
slapping him around the face a little bit until he threw me off or I got up.
Yes, I know. I apologized to him years
later.
And that’s what the end of the bishop’s sermon
felt like to me.
I saw Bishop Budde literally looking down on
the newly elected president, having pinned him to his pew with the expected
decorum of civilized persons, forcing him to endure her rhetoric without any
response.
Exhortation to do better is the product of
the religious Law.
Christians don’t strive to do better,
they seek God’s grace to be better. Being better results in our doing
better naturally. The quality of mercy is not strained.
Many Bibles, and I suppose all “gift and
award” Bibles, contain a presentation page, usually near the front. It’s a page
where the giver can write things like their name and the name of the recipient
and the date and the occasion.
In the Presentation of Our Lord text for this
Sunday, its “inscription” could be the words of Simeon, a “righteous and
devout” man on whom the Holy Spirit rested, who was there with his wife Anna, a
prophet, and who said in Luke 2:34-35,
34 Then Simeon blessed them
and said to his mother Mary, “This child is destined for the falling and the
rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed 35 so
that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your
own soul too.”
It refers to Jesus’ death, but it could also
have referred to the text we are looking at today for the Third Sunday of
Epiphany, this very bad day for Mary, too.
Don’t you think that she was there, or at
least nearby, to hear about her son’s first sermon in their hometown synagogue?
It didn’t go so well for Jesus there either. Jesus was presenting himself, this
time, to his hometown folk as the Messiah. It was way too much for them to
absorb.
What was being presented was The Word, Jesus,
revealed in the Word of God, the Bible.
How do we find God’s will in the Bible? We
don’t.
We can find verses in the Bible that will
support almost anything. But the Bible is not authoritative because of the words
on the page. Paul writes, in 2 Timothy 3:16-17,
16 All scripture
is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and
for training in righteousness, 17 so that everyone who belongs
to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.
Scripture is authoritative because is it God-breathed
in the same way that God breathed life to create living beings in Genesis 2:7,
7 then the Lord
God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the
breath of life; and the man became a living being.
We come to life when we encounter scripture.
We come to life when we first belong to God, when, by God’s grace, we become a
new creation, when we are transformed and born again.
As 16th century Church reformer
Martin Luther said about the transformational power of God revealed through the
Bible when we are re-formed, “My conscience is captive to the Word of God.”
What
we do comes next, so our task is not to do better but to be better. Our
task is not to have the correct social or political causes, but to be drawn
closer to Jesus, and to do the will of God.
That, and that alone, is the source of life
that truly is life. Life that endures.
We’ve finally gotten some rain in Southern
California, the first measurable rain since early May. It’s a welcome relief
after the fires, but it has come with cold and brought more misery in places
where debris has flowed and toxic waste has settled. And now the lawsuits and
recriminations are coming. As it’s been said, success has a thousand parents,
but failure is an orphan.
We have failed and we are sinners, but we
are not alone. The living relationship with the one true living God for which
we have been created has been restored by God in Jesus Christ at the cross.
What we know about mercy we see there. We
learn there that we are all children of God.
We bring the good news that our baptism in the
name of the one God, the Father the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and not our
righteousness, as Luther said, “has given us forgiveness of sins, redeems from
death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation to all who believe it, as the
words and promise of God declare.”
The quality of mercy is not strained because
it first comes from God. We live because Christ died for us! As John said in
his first letter, speaking of God in 1 John 4:19,
19 We love
because he first loved us.
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