“Beats and Beatitudes”
8. I Desire Mercy
Matthew 18:
21-35
First
Presbyterian
The Reverend
Thomas A. Sweet
August 10,
2008
Text
– “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive
mercy.”
-Matthew
5:7
Billy Collins, who has served two terms as the poet
laureate of the
The birds are in their trees,
the toast is in the toaster,
and the poets are at their windows.
They are at their windows
in every section of the tangerine of earth –
the Chinese poets look up at the moon,
the American poets gazing out
at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.
The clerks are at their desks,
the miners are down in their mines,
and the poets are looking out their windows…
because it is their job for which
they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.
Which window it hardly seems to matter
though many have a favorite,
for there is always something to see –
…what the oven is to the baker
and the berry-stained blouse to the dry cleaner,
so the window is to the poet.
Jesus, of course, was a masterful poet, his parables
the word pictures he painted about life and living after having peered at the
world through the window of the
Have I ever talked with you about the parable of the
prodigal son? Oh, I have?
Then you know that when the wayward prodigal decided to come home after
having previously disowned his family and making a ruinous wreck of his life,
his father, having waited and prayed and hoped for such a day, when he saw his
son coming up the lane, before his child even could get the hint of an apology
formed on his lips, ran to him and embraced him and held him close and told his
hired hands to prepare the biggest party ever seen in those parts.
Mercy.
Do you remember the poem parable about
the tax collector who accounted himself a miserable lot of a man and who, next
to the self-aggrandized Pharisee trumpeting his own virtues, seemed to fall far
short? He, the tax collector, knew
that the only thing he could do was to ask God for mercy and, lo and behold, God
was moved more by the tax collector’s humility than the Pharisee’s hubris
and, what Jesus saw through his window was a fountain of mercy flowing from God
to the man who knew he needed it. Mercy.
Yet another parable tells of Jesus
eating one evening with a whole host of tax collectors, sinners, and various
nefarious ne’er-do-wells and that did not go down very well with the religious
leaders whose sensibilities were offended. When
Jesus heard their grousing, he answered them according to what he surmised God
would say to them: “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not
sacrifice.’” Mercy.
In the gospel poem we read today, Jesus draws for us
another picture of mercy, a story of a king having forgiven a servant a mountain
of debt. Lovely.
But the story continues and we find that the same servant who had been
forgiven his ten thousands refused to forgive the tens owed
to him by an acquaintance in dire circumstances.
When the king heard about that scurrilous behavior, he bellowed at the
man to whom he had been so kind, “Should you not have had mercy on your
neighbor as I had mercy on you?” Mercy.
We have been making connections this summer between the Beat culture
that emerged in full swing in our country in the 1950s and the Beatitudes of
Jesus. We have made no claims of
grandiosity for the “beats” as they were called.
Many of them were deeply troubled, albeit creative, individuals.
But they did have an uncanny ability to portray a post-World War II
America in which fear had replaced love, making money had replaced compassion,
and the use of force had replaced tolerance and understanding as guiding
principles of daily life. Mercy went
missing and it was one of the intentions of the “beats” to find it again and
restore it to American life. It is
no wonder that the writings and ventures of the “beats” are even more
popular today than they were when they first appeared.
Justice is only a penultimate good.
Justice, by definition, sets things in their right order again.
Justice seeks redress against oppression and tyranny.
But mercy is ultimate, going beyond justice, to create relationships and
a softer way of being in the world. It
is an active recognition of our shared humanity and of our common need both to
forgive and to be forgiven. Mercy is
not so much letting people off the hook as it is giving them an opportunity to
write a new chapter in the storybook of their lives.
In the early 1980s, a seminary friend of mine was
beginning a call as an associate pastor in her first church.
The church happened to be the Hamburg Presbyterian Church that, at the
time, was one of the flagship churches of our presbytery with 1800 members.
Sue tells of one particular Sunday morning – a cold, gray morning in
Sue had been expected at church that day.
Certainly the senior minister had expected her.
The senior minister who, Sue said, looked as if he could have been an NFL
football player for as big as he was. Imposing.
Formidable. She told how she
had seen him one time on the floor of a presbytery meeting reduce a young
ministerial candidate – one of those who was kind of smug and full of himself
– to tears. She said that it was
not just the way he could make his voice cold and dangerous like the black ice
that sometimes covered the
Sue’s “boss” had been a gunman on a Navy ship
in World War II – Pacific theater. She
said he never talked much about it but that she imagined him in a vast,
threatening sea staring down the barrel of an anti-aircraft cannon pointing it
this way and that at the surrounding sky watching for the tiny fleck of
approaching black that could rain down instant death.
She imagined it was then, at age nineteen, that he decided he did not
want things ever to go the slightest bit awry.
Sue said that he met life like someone charging an enemy that he once
shared with her his strategy for, as he put it, “attacking the day.”
He told her that he always put his most unpleasant task on his calendar
at 9:00 in the morning to get the worst thing over with and then move on.
Sue said that she already had been summoned to his office at 9:00 enough
to know that she never wanted to have another morning meeting with him.
This man, her boss, had been expecting her in church that morning.
As were the members of the congregation who had
gotten out of bed that morning to come to worship because Sue was to have been
the preacher that day, her first preaching opportunity of her fledgling
ministerial career. The reason she
had been up most of the night was because she had been crafting, honing, and
perfecting her homiletical masterpiece. Obsessing
over what she had hoped would be her shining moment – an eloquent proving that
“our young girl minister” as too many of the congregation referred to her
– could do more than lead camp songs with the youth.
Except that now, an hour after she was supposed to have made her sermonic
debut, the “young girl minister” was lying in a rumpled bed with panic
spreading across her face like a mid-day sunburn.
Sue said that she lay there for a long moment staring at the ceiling the
way a condemned man might spend the night before his execution…suspended
between complete paralysis and the impulse to jump into her car and not stop
driving until she was so deep into the Canadian outback that no one ever would
find her.
But, with trepidation dripping from her every pore,
Sue reached for the phone and dialed the church office.
In the time that it took her to dial the number and for the phone to ring
on the other end, Sue’s mind plumbed the gamut of possible scenarios she could
use as excuses that might smooth over her calamity.
She could say that she was in the emergency room and, thank God, now that
she had regained consciousness the doctors thought she was going to live.
Or maybe she could tell her boss that she had been kidnapped, her hands
and feet bound, and she just now had worked the duct tape off her mouth.
Or maybe that all of the wheels on her car, all at once, had flown off on
her way to church.
Her boss himself, she said, answered the phone in the
middle of the first ring as though he had been crouched by the phone, waiting to
pounce. “I overslept,” Sue
said. Just that.
“I overslept.” Her voice
was flat and dry. She said there was
a silence on the other end of the phone that lasted exactly one thousand years.
When the thousand years were over, the sound Sue heard next was laughing.
Not a black-ice, cutting laugh but something more like a chuckle – low
and warm and knowing. “I missed
a funeral once,” her boss told her. “First
and last time it ever happened. Listen,
my wife and I were just about to go for lunch.
Why don’t you join us at the restaurant and I will tell you about it.
And, hey, we covered this morning. Something
came up. Change of plans.
Moved your sermon to next Sunday. No
big deal. See you at the Denny’s
on
The entire exchange had lasted, by Sue’s
estimation, one thousand years, one minute, and forty-five seconds.
But, she said, “as I hung up the phone and went to shower so that I
could have lunch with my friends, I figured that that must have been how long it
took God to make the world because it felt to me like the first day of
creation.” (1)
That is why mercy – and not justice, not sacrifice
– but mercy is the quality most deeply embedded in God’s heart and the
quality that poet Jesus saw most clearly when he looked through his window.
It is the quality that he most deeply commends to us for the living of
our lives for nothing else but mercy has such power to transform us and our
communities and to make us new again. When
all seems lost in our lives, it is mercy that finds us and sets us free to begin
again.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive
mercy.”
Amen.
(1)
related by the Reverend Sue Westfall in her sermon preached at St.
Mark’s Presbyterian Church in
© Copyright 2008 First Presbyterian Church