Blessed be God who animates our lives and offers us streams of mercy which transform and offer new life. Amen. Every Sunday, our Sabbath, is important and special. It is the day that the Lord has made and we are to rejoice and be glad in it! And today, well today feels particulary big and grand and full and it is as though all that rejoicing culminates in three of the most special sacraments with a capital s emerging in high relief in this sacred St David s context filled with divine presence...all the time. Today we have baptisms, confirmations and receptions, and of course Eucharist. We have our beloved Bishop Daniel visiting. In fact those confirmations and receptions are bracketed in time and space by the two pillars of the most holy sacraments of baptism, joining the community of Christ, and Eucharist, BEING the community of CHrist. They may, if you will, signify an intentional affirmation of faith which will literally and figuratively carry these mature and maturing Christians deeper into this mystery we call God. All of these sacramental moments are meant to be renewing of life in Christ. And God...well, God is ineffable and unspeakable and yet people like me keep trying...but God is that beautiful magnanimous merciful life-giving presence pouring to and through us and all of creation...the god we pray to, the god we long for, the god who loves and desires us as well. 1
Often to make this unspeakable ineffable God speakable we construct symbols and signs and sacraments which substitute their meaning for at least a part of the meaning of the Divine. And all too often those symbols and signs take on too restrictive meanings, layered by rules and legalisms. Today offers us in a holy sacramental way a time to ponder anew these readings, these prayers, these rites and I suggest that a way to do that is to ponder anew the word, the virtue, the Very definition of God which wanders through this lectionary: MERCY. Luther and Pope Francis have said that mercy is the first characteristic of God, that God is Mercy. The beatitudes remind us that the merciful are blessed. So what might we have learned of mercy? This thread of mercy runs through Kings and Psalm 146 and the Gospel of Luke. It anchors our Baptismal covenant and assures our confession to a most merciful God. Mercy shown and remembered to the widow the orphan, the downtrodden. Mercy born from compassion and accompanying forgiveness and justice. The most merciful God to whom we confess and from whom we receive the consecrated Body and Blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ having been forgiven of our sins is the same God who calls and empowers Elijah to transmit divine power of mercy by falling three times on the widow s dead son and delivering him to her alive! It is the same God who through Christ feels such utter compassion that a stranger s orphan son, a widow s son, is brought to life by the touch of the Divine. It is the same 2
God to whom the psalmist gives praise and thanksgiving for the important salvation principle that The Lord sets the prisoners free, the Lord opens the eyes of the blind, the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down, the Lord loves the righteous, the Lord watches over the stranger, He upholds the orphan of the widow. I will be honest with you...mercy is a tough word for me...as a recovering lawyer I have witnessed mercy being condescending, exercised as power over, etc. But one of the reasons I stand here today is that in my heart I know that mercy is not about power over, unless it is the power of God about which we are speaking, Mercy is that which we demonstrate or offer when we feel the emotion of compassion. It is the life-giving stream which God pours over us. Mercy is life giving, mercy is communal. Mercy is like love. We swim in it. We breathe it in and we are compelled by faith to breathe it out. Recently, I was struck by the definition of mercy which not only resonates with me and I believe this lectionary, but resolves the dissonance which the term mercy has come to signify in our legal system. Mercy, often equated with compassion, is at least that but more. Mercy in fact is derived from the Hebrew word rachem which means womb. there are simply different vowel points. So mercy may not just be associated with hesed, God s steadfast love but may also be a womb-like mother love. And it is 3
the capacity of a mother to totally give one's self over to the need and reality and identity of the child. mercy is the capacity to give one's self away for the sake of the neighbor and the neighborhood. One need not be a woman, nor have born a child to understand something of this selfless love. All of us, long for a world in which our relationships are marked by a quality of love and kindness and compassion which has less to do with selfish desires and more to do with the mercy God has demonstrated. It is about a generous connectedness in which we appreciate and act out of love, of God, creation and other. I offer this story to amplify where we are going with mercy... There was a mother whose son was tragically murdered by a hitchhiker he picked up while in college. Many years after this tragedy, many years filled with suffering and depression and anger, the mother visited the killer in prison hoping to learn something to clarify the night it happened. She found herself face to face with her child s killer with only a table separating them. All of a sudden the convicted dropped his head onto the table and began to weep. The woman found herself totally incapable of maintaining any distance and reached across the table and cradled the man s face in her hands! 4
Just as Jesus marching one way in Nain, with one set of thoughts, stopped in his tracks with a sudden awareness of compassion and immediately acted mercifully, So this woman, albeit unprepared, found it in her heart to offer a most merciful gesture, one which transcended legalism and everyday human expectations of right and wrong. I believe this is mercy. Widows, orphans, strangers,...sinners, marginalized, poverty stricken...these are the recipients of God s mercy. And as followers of Christ we too are meant to extend mercy to those so oppressed. This transmission of mercy, kindness, compassion and forgiveness, to those who are our sisters and brothers in need is the very blessed act which forms the beloved community to which we are called. And the irony, the unexpected gift, if you will, is that we are blessed, perhaps even twice blessed as Portia in Shakespeare s Merchant of Venice has soliloquized: The quality of mercy is not strained; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes: T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes The throned monarch better than his crown: His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, The attribute to awe and majesty, 5
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; But mercy is above this sceptred sway; It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to God himself; And earthly power doth then show likest God s When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew, Though justice be thy plea, consider this, That, in the course of justice, none of us Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy; And that same prayer doth teach us all to render Our baptismal covenant which frames our sacraments and helps us prepare for our lives in Christ leads us to divine mercy. to respect the dignity of every creature is to show mercy. to confess our sins to a most merciful God and to receive absolution is to receive mercy. And so on this Sunday in ordinary time when very little is ordinary perhaps it is the mercy of God which makes it extraordinary. perhaps it is the mercy of God which offers us new life and new ideas and new ways to be in relationship with each other. It seems particularly fitting and even poignant that we are considering mercy as we bring this year of Christ calling to an end and look out over the summer to what Living Like Jesus might look and feel like. Christ is calling us to be merciful, to help to bind up the broken hearted, to live mercifully: to do justice, love kindness and to walk humbly with our God. 6
May the streams of mercy run over you and bless you and may we awaken to be wading together in this water of God s grace to be the blessed community to which we have been called 7