Mercy

“Mercy”
Matthew 5:1-2 & 7
Todd Buegler
October 13-14, 2007
Lord of Life


Grace and peace to you from God our Creator, and from Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, who is mercy. Amen.

And Jesus said, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy.” This week’s beatitude, in our sermon series on the beatitudes, seems pretty simple and straight forward. Blessed are the merciful. Those who give mercy, shall receive mercy, right? All we have to do is show mercy…not pile it on…not run up the score… mercy! It sounds simple! Let’s all just do it. Ok? Now I’ll just say “amen, sit down and we can be on our way. All in favor? Well, maybe not.

It’s just not that easy. Each of the beatitudes that we have been looking at gives us a glimpse into the Kingdom of God. This one is no exception. And like the tip of an iceberg, we know that there is a lot more below the surface for us to explore.

Our first step in trying to figure out what Jesus means in this beatitude is to figure out what exactly he means by the word “mercy.” To be honest, in our culture, I believe that we confuse the idea of “mercy” with the idea of “pity.” Mercy and pity are not the same thing.

A quick example: growing up in south Minneapolis when I was 8 years old, I played on our park board soccer team. We were pretty bad. No, we were really bad. Good kids, good coaches, and we had fun, but soccer just hadn’t really caught on in the city, and we didn’t really know what we were doing. I was playing goaltender once and punted the ball back over my own head and scored on myself…The coaches reply: Well, at least someone scored. that kind of stuff. We’d play against these big suburban teams, and we’d just get blasted off of the field. Often, when the other team would lead by more than 8 points, the game would be called. They called this the “mercy rule”. I remember losing one game this way, and overhearing our coach talking to one of the parents and saying “they really should call it the pity rule…”

He was right. It was pity, not mercy. When we came off of the field at the end of our shortened game, the pity from the other team and the parents was obvious. You could see it in their faces. There was no question about which was the superior team. And to be honest, they were right. They were the better team. And we were all 8 years old. Ultimately, we didn’t really care. We were much more interested in the ritual Dairy Queen stop after the game. But looking back now, I can see that the game wasn’t shut down because of mercy. It was ended because of pity.

There is an important difference. You see, mercy is something you share with someone else. Pity is something you give to someone else. Mercy is given between people who share in a relationship. Mercy is about focusing on the other. It is looking at someone, seeing who they are as a child of God, wherever they live, whatever they look like, looking at them eye to eye and giving them what they need.

Pity, on the other hand, has little to do with relationships, or with putting someone else on the same level as you and being able to look them in the eye. We pity someone who is “below” us. When we show pity, it has nothing to do with helping them, it is all about making ourselves feel better, or feel superior.

When I pity someone, it makes me feel better. Because I am in a position to give pity, I can somehow feel superior. It’s almost as though I can pull myself up the emotional ladder by stepping on someone else. It satisfies my insecurities. It can make me feel better about myself.

To be honest, we do this all of the time, often without even knowing it or thinking about it.
We respond to commercials that illicit pity for children who are hungry in economically disadvantaged parts of the world. Now, there’s nothing wrong with giving our resources, time or money when we focus on the children in need. But often, we can do it from a position of superiority and judgment; we think to ourselves “at least my life isn’t like that!” So we write checks to make ourselves feel better.
We might show pity to the homeless person panhandling on a street corner, but we do so from a perspective of feeling superior about how we’ve lived our life. And if we give them any change at all, and usually we don’t, we try to avoid eye contact, and avoid their humanity.
We even find ways to pity fallen celebrities Britney Spears, or Lindsay Lohan for the train wreck that their lives have publicly become. But we do this from sitting in a posture of judgment; as in “my life may not be perfect, but at least it’s not like that!”

If we show pity towards someone else, ultimately it is about making ourselves feel or look better. “look at what I’m doing…I feel so good about what I’m doing.” The subject of the sentence is always “I”…”me”…

This is not what Jesus is talking about in this beatitude. He did not say “blessed are those who show pity.” He said “Blessed are the ‘merciful’”, for they shall be shown mercy.”

Michael Yaconelli tells a story of mercy. He was the pastor of a small church in Yreka, California. He had been preaching about loving people who are different than themselves. One day a sixteen year old girl came to a church meeting and said “I was thinking that if we are supposed to love outside the lines, I have an idea of how we might do it.” She explained that in three weeks the Siskiyou county fair was coming, and with the fair come the “carnies”…the itinerant workers who operate the rides. Every year the carnies were the talk of the little town. Most of them were tough looking and scary, with lots of tattoos, huge muscles and hard-looking faces. People always made negative comments about them.

The girl continued, “I was thinking that instead of making fun of the carnies, maybe we should have a dinner and welcome them to town.” There was silence. Then there was resistance.

But finally, the church agreed and the girl organized the entire event. She called the manager of the fair for permission; she called the owner to see if they wanted a dinner. The carnival owner suggested lunch just before the fair opened. She asked how many to expect? After some thought, the owner said to expect fifty.

The day of the lunch, around 20 from the church were there to serve and there was enough food for 70. At 12:30 when the lunch was scheduled to start, there were only 4 carnies. By 1:30, however, over 200 carnies had been served. When it looked like they were running out, she turned to the pastor and yelled “go get more food!”

But it wasn’t just a meal. It was conversations. It was new relationships. It was laughter. It was towns people and carnival workers sitting at the same table, eye to eye, connecting and understanding each other for the first time.

When the lunch was over, many of the carnies came over to the girl and thanked her. One older woman said “I have been doing carnivals for forty years, and this is the first time I have ever been welcomed to a town.” The Yreka “Carnie Lunch” is now an annual tradition.

Do you know what this is? This is mercy, in its purest form. This is mercy as Jesus was speaking about it. It started out with unequal relationships. The townspeople had disdain for the carnies. And the carnies were used to being looked down on. And the relationship could have just continued that way for years. Or, maybe it could have turned into pity. That would have been easy too. Someone could have said “let’s do something for ‘them’”. They could have done something that would have been a nice, symbolic gesture, and would have made themselves feel really good.

But this 16 year old girl demonstrated a kind of naïve grace that showed itself in the form of mercy. She focused on the Carnival workers. She worked the schedule that would work best for them…she had people there to greet and welcome them. She made sure there was plenty for them to eat. She got the townspeople to talk with them. It wasn’t unequal at all. It was done with respect. It was eye-to-eye. And it was pure gift. This girl taught an entire community how to show mercy.

Our culture is not one built on mercy. Our culture is built on status. Social scientists tell us that the divide between the “haves” and the “have nots” is growing. The late Henri Nouwen, wrote that compassion “grows with the inner recognition that your neighbor shares your humanity with you. This partnership cuts through all walls which might have kept you separate. Across all barriers of land and language, wealth and poverty, knowledge and ignorance, we are one, created from the same dust, subject to the same laws, destined for the same end.” In all the ways that matter, we are alike.

We are more alike than we are different from that hungry child in the third-world nation, from the street person asking for change, or even from Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and all the others who struggle with issues around chemical use and lifestyle choices.

To be able to give mercy, we have to be willing to set ourselves aside: our egos, our baggage and our insecurities, and to focus on and experience the other. Mercy isn’t so much an activity, as it is an attitude and a motivation. It isn’t what we do as much as who we are.

In John 12:24, Jesus says that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” We call this “dying to ourselves.” That means we set aside our own wants, desires and sometimes our needs, to focus on someone else. It means that by focusing on someone else, we are freed to put ourselves eye-to-eye with someone in need, to look into their heart, to build a relationship with them and to be literally be mercy.

The beatitude says “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy. If we reverse those two phrases so that it says: “Blessed are those who have been shown mercy, for they shall be merciful,” well, that teaches something too.

It teaches us that because Jesus Christ has been merciful with us, we can be merciful with others. Jesus did not come to show pity. He came to show mercy. There is nothing self-centered about what Jesus did. He came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life for each of you. His love, his grace, his gift is for each one of you. Focusing on you and me he gave up his life to give us mercy.

Because of this, we can’t help but be merciful with those we encounter. The merciful are all those who have an attitude of such compassion towards all people that they want to share gladly all they have with one another and with the world. As Christians, God calls us to set aside our own wants and desires, to “die to ourselves”, and to focus on those in need, so that we can follow his example and live lives that bring mercy to others.

And we do this because Jesus did not choose the path of pity. He did not choose to look down upon us. Rather he chose to lift us up, to look into our eyes and our hearts, and then to lower himself to die the death of a common criminal on our behalf.

Because of that mercy, we can be merciful. And because of that mercy, we are blessed.

Amen.