Sermons

“Praying with Jesus – The Flow of Mercy”

Psalm 51:1-17; Matthew 6:7-15 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – March 13, 2016

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that your grace might become the author of the movement of our hearts. We pray in the name of Jesus, Amen.

So we’re in a bit of a pickle today. Throughout the season of Lent, as we prepare for Easter, we’ve been exploring the Lord’s Prayer. And this week, we’ve gotten to the part about God’s forgiveness. Which ought to be awesome, right? We know from so many other places in scripture, and from generations of Christian testimony, and from our own existence, that God’s grace is amazing. But when we look at this portion of the Lord’s Prayer, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Jesus put it in there kind of backwards. Surely it got turned around somehow, right?

Why on earth would we pray for God to use us as a model for forgiving? “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors,” as Matthew’s gospel puts it. “Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us,” Luke says. Sorry, but that’s not even true! We don’t forgive everyone indebted to us. Surely Jesus isn’t encouraging us to exaggerate or dissemble when we’re praying? He has to know that’s what would be happening, right? Why would he want us to say it this way? Quite frankly, that line that comes after the prayer in what we just heard from Matthew is pretty frightening: “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty much counting on God being better at forgiving than I am. That’s why God is God and I’m not, right? I mean, it’s only one of many reasons for that, but it’s an important one! So what is Jesus saying here? Is it really as intense as it sounds?

I’d like to invite us to turn to the Southern Baptists for some insight into this. [No, really. When I was pastoring in Alabama, there was a Southern Baptist church a block away called Parker Memorial Baptist Church. And while I was there, Parker Memorial went through a major renovation of their sanctuary. (They did a nice job, don’t you think?) While that was happening, they were worshiping in their Family Life Center, which is what Baptist churches in the South call their gymnasiums. But even the Baptists don’t have baptisteries in their gyms. So throughout the year of their renovation, this congregation, under the leadership of the Rev. Dr. Billy Harris, came down on two or three Sunday evenings and held services of baptism in our sanctuary at First Christian Church. It occurred to me later that Billy Harris might have been covertly introducing his folks to the idea that woman can, in fact, serve in ministry, but I don’t have any actual proof of that. They could, after all, have gone to the YMCA, which was also not far away, and used the swimming pool there. But they didn’t. Anyway, during one of those services, I had the privilege of receiving from Billy Harris an insight into mercy that has been transformative for me in trying to understand where Jesus is coming from with this line from the Lord’s Prayer that we’re looking at today. Billy suggested that the mercy of God is a flowing thing. If we think of mercy as something that is only alive and effective if it is moving and active, then it makes sense that it can only keep flowing into us if it’s also flowing out of us. If we block that flow, by holding onto grudges and refusing to forgive others, then the grace of God stagnates within us and loses its power. It’s not that God isn’t forgiving us; it’s that the way that mercy works requires that we open the channels of grace and let it flow freely.

The difficulty, of course, is that we’re full of ways to put up obstacles to that river of mercy. There’s our limited perspective, and our incapacity for generosity. And then, of course, there’s our short-sighted insistence on fairness. A few weeks ago, we were working on an anthem at choir rehearsal when I was suddenly struck by the profundity of the words. There’s a different version in our hymnal, #73, and I’d love to have you sing just this first verse with me, if you would. The hymn is “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy”. It goes like this. Will you sing with me? [“There’s a wideness in God’s mercy that is wider than the sea; there’s a kindness in God’s justice that is more than liberty.”] It’s that last line that struck me so deeply. “There’s a kindness in God’s justice…” and it’s “more than liberty.” It’s very poetical sounding, isn’t it? I think a lot of us, with these poetical, old hymns, tend to sort of just sing the words without thinking about them very much. But we risk missing the impact of poetry if we assume the writer is just putting pretty-sounding words together in time to the music.

I think the reason this particular line hit me directly that night was because of the meeting I attended in early February. I have been asked to be part of a task force that is supposed to design a new way for our denomination to discuss and learn about and bear witness on controversial issues. Our current way of doing this, using “Sense of the Assembly” resolutions, is considered by some to be an imperfect but vital tool for speaking prophetically about God’s vision for our world, in light of situations that are out of sync with that, what they might describe as the essence of what it means to proclaim the gospel. The process is seen by others as divisive and antithetical to our call as Disciples of Christ to live in harmony with those we may or may not agree with. We spent quite a bit of time discussing the false dichotomy of justice and unity, aided well by a chapter from one of Michael Kinnamon’s books. What we came to realize is that unity without justice is not really unity, and that justice that doesn’t aim for unity is not God’s justice. So it was with all this swirling in my head that I sang this line – “There’s a kindness in God’s justice that is more than liberty.”

We human beings like liberty. We Disciples like liberty. We’re sort of the church that declares “Give me liberty, or give me Sunday mornings with brunch and the paper!” We’re not going to stick around in a church where someone else tries to tell us what to believe. You can see why it gets sticky when we try to make public statements with one voice! But could it be that there is something that’s “more than liberty”? More how? What does that mean? What does it mean for there to be kindness in justice? We mortals have a thing called a “justice system” and kindness is not the thing most closely associated with it. It’s not even on the list.

What are the differences between our conceptions of justice and God’s justice? And how do those differences create impediments and obstacles to the flow of God’s mercy? Could we aspire to something higher than liberty? Could we learn to have hearts as wide as the sea, as the songwriter tells us God does? Could we learn to understand justice as something that is kind? What does that look like? How is it different from people “getting what they deserve”? As human beings, we tend to be pretty attached to people getting what they deserve. We want them to pay the consequences for their actions. We want things to be fair. Unless, of course, the “they” we’re talking about is us! Then, suddenly, we’re aware of the nuances and mitigating circumstances that should convince any decent human being that a second chance is definitely deserved. This double vision is one of the obstacles we put up that blocks the flow of God’s mercy.

How is understanding God’s justice as kind different than simply claiming the “liberty” to do whatever we want? It’s incredible how many of us carry close to our hearts in adulthood the childhood declaration of “You’re not the boss of me!” “It’s a free country!” we defiantly insist whenever someone implies we should do things differently. Yet, as Christians, we declare that our will is not our own and that Jesus is our Lord. We have claimed a different kind of liberty, that of release from sin through new life in Christ. We have chosen to subject ourselves to the kindly justice of God. And yet, we struggle to even imagine what that might look like, let alone live it out. “I do not understand my own actions,” Paul writes in Romans 7. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. … I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” Even once we have declared Jesus as Lord, the struggle to choose good is an ever-present challenge. What chance do we have if God will only forgive us as much as we are able to forgive others? Is that really what Jesus was getting at?

I spent the weekend up at Chapman University, listening to lectures by Rita Nakashima Brock on moral injury. Moral injury is the phrase that the military and others who work with vets are starting to use for the emotional, spiritual burdens that come from doing and/or witnessing things during war or other high stakes situations that directly contradict one’s understanding of morality. Those who suffer from moral injury often feel as though the things they’ve done have forever branded them as bad people, eternally unable to access forgiveness. There is so much more to say about all that, but a thought that occurred to me this morning is the old tradition that one of the things Jesus did during those three dark days in the tomb was to visit hell. Regardless of what we may believe about hell, this is a fruitful image for those who feel they are beyond the reach of God’s mercy. Are you lost in hell? It’s okay, Jesus will come pick you up. That is certainly a kindness that is more than liberty. What our tradition tells us about grace is that our salvation isn’t up to us; God isn’t going to wait for us to prove that we have forgiven everyone else before offering us mercy.

But just in case you’re still not convinced, let’s remember something else. The version of the Lord’s Prayer we read today, the one that’s got that addendum about God forgiving those who have forgiven others, comes from the 6^th chapter of Matthew. It’s just one chapter earlier that we find the teaching that I reference every Sunday when we come to the Passing of the Peace of Christ. Matthew 5:23 & 24: “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sisters, and then come and offer your gift.” Perhaps Jesus simply put the line about forgiveness the way he did because he’s assuming we’ve already done the stuff he mentioned earlier. We didn’t just dive into prayer, but first took time to prepare our hearts, examining what we need to lay down before we come before God. In a sense, this whole season of Lent is about that. We are invited to spend time reflecting on our brokenness and seeking reconciliation, so that when the Risen Christ appears, we will be open and clear channels of the grace that flows forth from that victory. Let us give thanks for the amazing grace of God! Amen.