Blessed the Merciful

Preliminary sermon manuscript for Green Lake Church of Seventh-day Adventists

For Sabbath, March 16, 2013

This is part of a series on the Beatitudes. I'll post a revised version tomorrow morning.

Jesus was on vacation. To get away from the crowds, he left the Jewish region of Palestine and headed north into what is today Lebanon. Up into the neighborhood of the Mediterranean coast city of Sidon. It must have been a wonderful release. Just Jesus and the twelve. Talking, processing, sitting around, for a few days away from the incessant pressure of the crowds. Time to eat. Time to sleep. Time to think.

One afternoon when they leave the place where they were staying, a woman starts following them, calling out, “Sir! Sir! Son of David! Master! Have mercy on me! My daughter is haunted by demons. She's possessed and is horribly tormented. Please have mercy.”

The disciples are peeved. How did she figure out who they were? But Jesus is on vacation. It's like his cell phone rings. He looks at caller ID. He doesn't recognize the number. He lets it go to voice mail. His phone rings again. It's the same number. He sends it to voice mail. The phone rings again.

Of course, they didn't have cell phones in those days, so the woman uses direct voice. “Sir! Sir! Master! Have mercy. Demons are tormenting my daughter. Please help!”

Jesus ignores her. The disciples are gratefully surprised by that. But it doesn't work. She keeps calling. She keeps following. They stop for tea at a restaurant. She waits outside. When Jesus and the Twelve come out, she calls out again. “Sir! Have mercy!” The men walk away, carefully ignoring her. She stubbornly follows, calling, “Sir, have mercy!”

The disciples are annoyed. “Jesus,” they insist, “send her away. She's driving us crazy. Jesus, do something.”

So Jesus finally turns and for the first time acknowledges the woman's existence. “Look lady. God gave me a specific commission to serve his lost sheep—the Jewish people.” The disciples are thrilled. Jesus validates their self-understanding, and completely out of character for him, he is getting rid of someone.

The woman understood what Jesus was saying. The Jewish people were God's remnant people. They were the true people of God, the flock of God as the prophets put it. The Jews were the guardians of God's truth, the heirs of God's pioneers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They had the true prophet, Moses. Judaism as a religion was well-known throughout the Middle East at that era. Jewish missionaries went everywhere teaching people the special truths that were their spiritual heritage. When Jesus said, “My mission is the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” the woman knew exactly what he meant: She was not his responsibility.

What did she do?

Since he had noticed her, she came right up to him, fell at his feet and begged, “Sir, help me.”

Jesus was tough. This mother was desperate. Her daughter's life had been ruined, devastated by some kind of on-going, chronic demonic action. This mother had tried every remedy available in her world. She had been to priests at temples. She had visited old women in back alleys who were famous for potions and charms. She had prayed and offered sacrifices. Nothing had worked. Her husband had left her, unable to cope with the chaos their daughter created.

She knew she had no claim on Jesus. Jesus didn't owe her anything. But she wasn't asking for something Jesus owed her. She was asking for what she needed. “Sir. Help me. Have mercy.”

Jesus still gave every appearance of tough-minded commitment to his God-given mission to the Jewish people. “Woman,” Jesus said. “It would be inappropriate to take the children's food and feed it to the dogs.”

Again the woman understood perfectly. The attitudes of patriotic and fundamentalist Jews toward people like her—outsiders, single moms, pagans, losers—were notorious. Conservative Jewish people saw themselves as the royal children of the divine king. People like this woman were dogs. Which, of course, needs some explanation.

Dogs in that society did not star in the Seattle Kennel Club show at Century Link Field Event Center. 7000 people would not have come to watch dogs strut their stuff. The status of dogs in the first century world was only slightly higher than the status of Norway rats in our world. Maybe we could compare them to pigeons.

“Woman,” Jesus was saying, “I can't take the kids' dinner and throw it out for the pigeons. That would be crazy.”

At this point, any reasonable person would have taken the hint. This woman had no claim on Jesus. He was on vacation. Jesus had declared his divine assignment was specifically to the Jewish people and this woman was a foreigner, a pagan.

The woman was annoying. She was obviously a bad person. A good person would not have allowed her daughter to become possessed by demons. Jesus had stated that helping her would be the equivalent of throwing the kids' dinner out for the pigeons to eat.

What does she do?

She looks Jesus right in the eyes and says. “You're right sir. You wouldn't throw the kids dinner out to the pigeons. I get that. I accept that. But even a poor man, even stingy man, would not begrudge the pigeons crumbs that would otherwise go down the garbage disposal.”

Finally Jesus cracked. “Woman,” he said, “you're amazing. Your faith is amazing. May it be to you as you desire.”

Her daughter was healed.

This woman's story began with her plea, “Sir, have mercy.” It climaxes with Jesus' words, “Let it be for you as you have wished.” Her request: “Have mercy.” Jesus' response, “Let it be as you wish.”

“Blessed are the merciful, they will receive mercy.” What does it mean to receive mercy? It means to receive what you need, to receive what you desperately desire.

For many religious people, one of our most burning desires is to be sure we are accepted by God.

Many of us Adventists of a certain age grew up in a world filled with withering spiritual uncertainty. Preachers and Bible teachers painted vivid images of us standing before God in the judgment. A video of our entire life played on a giant screen on the wall of the court room. If that video showed a single un-confessed sin we were doomed. We worried that we could never be good enough to be saved.

Then in the eighties, many Adventists discovered the good news of salvation by faith. All you had to do was believe. But, it turns out this good news is only marginally better than the old news that you had to be perfect.

At evangelical churches and colleges young people learn that all you have to do to be saved is believe, and once you believe, you are saved for ever. That should produce a wonderful contentment. However, when you talk with these young people, you find them as eaten with uncertainty and anxiety as the Adventist young people in the days of our most intense legalism.

What's going on?

Here's the problem: as long as the major question in your religion is “What must I do to be saved?” you will find it very difficult to find a settled, lasting peace. Because this kind of religion assumes damnation as the default condition of humanity. God's habit is to condemn. No matter what strategy we use to dodge the condemnation we are still up against the question of whether our dodge is adequate. If you imagine that you escape damnation by having faith, you'll wonder if your faith is genuine. If you imagine that you appease God's frowning eye by perfecting your behavior, you'll always suspect your behavior is not quite good enough.

This traditional spiritual perspective imagines that God operates primarily on the basis of justice. The assumption is you deserve hell. God is watching and he is going to make sure you get nothing more than you deserve. So, you're toast.

This beatitude points us in a completely different direction: Blessed are the merciful, they will receive mercy.

When we practice mercy, we work at discerning the needs and desires of others and doing what we can to meet those needs and fill those desires. We study people to figure out what makes them tick so we can bless them. Sometimes people can be quite articulate about their desire. Like the mother from Sidon. There was no mistaking what she wanted. But other times people are as inarticulate as that woman's daughter was. That girl had no way of even expressing her need or desire. When encounter people like, Jesus invites us to become their agents crying “Lord, have mercy!” on their behalf.

I had a couple of conversations this week that vividly illustrated the wisdom required of mercy. Both conversations were with mothers of disabled men. In both cases, the men are not verbal. So when they are going berserk with an earache, they cannot say, “My ear is killing me.” Are they slapping their head because their ear hurts or they have an abscessed tooth or headache? Or are they exhibiting some kind of psychological problem? These men's lack of speech does not make their pain any less. Their inability to voice their need does not make the need go away.

So their mothers practice mercy. Guided by the instincts of motherhood and the wisdom acquired through decades of care-giving, they attempt to discern the need of their sons and to find remedies. They do their best to make it better. And when they have to go outside their homes for assistance, they become the voices for their sons, begging for mercy from medical professionals, courts, therapists. And ultimately they are the voices of their sons to God. “Lord, have mercy!”

To be merciful means to provide what is needed without regard to what is deserved. When we immerse ourselves in the practice of mercy, the old question, “What must I do to be saved?” loses its force. We know that we will never be more merciful than God. As we move deeper and deeper into a habit of studying people with the intention to understand and bless them instead of analyzing them and apportioning blame, our view of God will be transformed. We will come to confidence that God is, as the Bible says, full of mercy and abounding in goodness and compassion.

As we move deeper and deeper into our habits of mercy toward others, we will no longer understand even our own disabilities as targets of God's condemnation. Instead we will experience our failures, inadequacies, disabilities as perpetual appeals for his mercy.

Mercy is what makes human communities beautiful.

A healthy society must have structures that support justice. When kids work hard, they should receive the grades they earn. When adults work hard and skillfully, they should receive appropriate remuneration. And there must be negative consequences for failure to work, failure to put out. A workable society needs a criminal justice system to respond to murder and theft and assault. People are capable of doing evil, and society must have a systematic way of restraining and containing evil. Still, a society that becomes obsessed with justice becomes ugly.

Mercy is the supreme grace. Justice is necessary, yes. Mercy is beautiful.

Part of the beauty of American society are some of our institutionalized expressions of mercy. If you find a pedestrian lying in the gutter, the apparent victim of a hit-and-run, you would whip out your phone and call 911. An ambulance will come, even if the victim appears to be a bum. At the emergency room, the victim will receive life-saving treatment, before a payment plan is worked out.

That's mercy. Responding to need without regard to what a person deserves. Doing good because of the goodness welling up from within us, not because of the rights or claims of the other.

Several years ago my son spent a year in a country where there are doctors and hospitals, but all hospital care must be prepaid. He talked about the agony of seeing someone frightfully injured but being unable to obtain hospital care for the person because they didn't have enough money. No prepayment, no admission. It is not rare for people to die outside the hospital because the family could not come up with the money to cover the projected costs of treatment. That's justice. If you can't pay, you receive no service.

Death by poverty is not beautiful even if you can make an argument that it is just.

Mercy: providing what is needed without regard to what is deserved. That's beautiful.

Part of the foolishness of philosophies based on the writings of Ayn Rand is their failure to see that the pinnacle of human development is not an obsession with justice, not even a commitment to justice. Human communities are most beautiful, most noble, most godly when they are suffused with mercy.

One of the most startling challenges in the preaching of Jesus comes at the end of Chapter Five in Matthew's Gospel. Jesus tells us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. Because,

In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike. If you love only those who love you, what reward is there for that? Even corrupt tax collectors do that much. If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else? Even pagans do that. But you are to be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.

Or as Luke reports this saying:

"If you love only those who love you, why should you get credit for that? Even sinners love those who love them! And if you do good only to those who do good to you, why should you get credit? Even sinners do that much! And if you lend money only to those who can repay you, why should you get credit? Even sinners will lend to other sinners for a full return. "Love your enemies! Do good to them. Lend to them without expecting to be repaid. Then your reward from heaven will be very great, and you will truly be acting as children of the Most High, for he is kind to those who are unthankful and wicked. You must be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Luke 6:32-36.

Be perfect as God is perfect is the same thing as being merciful as God is merciful. The bargain we make with the world is the bargain God makes with us. The wisdom of Jesus is obvious: By practicing mercy we are setting ourselves up to receive the ultimate, deepest joy. We will get what we most desire.

One of the curious patterns in the gospels is the way Jesus responds to people who are possessed by demons. Sometimes when blind people ask for healing, Jesus challenges them: Do you really want this? (Luke 18:41) Do you really believe? (Matthew 9:28). Several times Jesus told people: “You are healed in accord with your faith” (Matthew 9:22, 29). But when it came to people possessed by demons, Jesus never says a word about faith. Jesus appears to completely ignore anything the people say. He goes straight to their most profound need and releases from the demonic torment.

I understand that as the supreme challenge to us in our relationships at home, work, school and church. Most of you know of someone who appears to you to be evil. They are constantly doing things that annoy you, offend you, make your life difficult. They are easy to hate.

I ask you to consider viewing them through the lens of mercy. This does not mean volunteering for further wounding. If you are being bullied, get help. If you are being abused at home, tell someone. If you are a victim of domestic violence, let someone know. Don't allow yourself or your children to be hit another time.

Having said that, there is more to be said. If we are going to see people as Jesus saw them, we will see their outrageous behavior as evidence of an alien evil which has invaded their lives. It is not the “real them.” Whether you see that “alien evil” as demonic or psychological or neurological, our fundamental response to that kind of human brokenness is to plead Lord, have mercy. Not “Blast them, Lord.”

In our opening story, Jesus modeled responding to people on the basis of justice, propriety and rights. That annoying woman had no business interrupting his retreat with his disciples. As a non-Jew she had no claim on the Messiah. As the mother of a girl possessed by demons she had no moral standing.

As we watched Jesus respond to her on the basis of propriety and rightful claims, we wince. We rightfully expected better of Jesus. Then with his final response: “Woman, may it be for you as you wish.” “Honey, I'll do whatever you want.” Jesus flips the story on its head and asks us: This coming week, will you stand on propriety and rights and protect yourself from all inordinate demands on your forbearance, time and energy, or will you have mercy? Will you stand with the disciples of Jesus passing judgment or with the wise and stubborn mother?

Blessed are the merciful, they will obtain mercy.