“Mercy Matters”

A sermon given by Rev. Ian Gregory Cummins to the congregation at Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church of Denver

September 9, 2018

Scripture: Luke 7:36-50

Good morning! Today we kick off our return to two services. The Westminster choir is in the house. The kids are back in Sunday school, after church we’ll have pizza, ice cream and honor the scripture: “You shall love the lord with all your heart and all your strength; and you shall have a bouncy castle on Celebration Sunday.” (that’s Deuteronomy 6:8…look it up)

We also introduce today our theme for the new programming year: “Mercy Matters: Living mercifully because God is merciful.”

Mercy is an interesting word. And more difficult to define than you might think. We all have a sense of what mercy is. We know it when we see it. And we know it when we don’t see it. The Spanish Inquisition – very little mercy there; the Salem Witch Trials – not much mercy. Parking enforcement officers – maybe the least mercy of all.

But most dictionary definitions of the word use synonyms like compassion, forgiveness, and grace, without making it clear what makes mercy different.

So over the next four weeks, Clover and I are going to use the parables of Jesus, the great maestro of mercy, to help us explore the meaning of this rich and complex word, and why, especially these days, that mercy matters.

But before we look at our parable today, I want to tell you about a dream I had. This past week has been a busy one for me, and when I lay my head down Wednesday night, the sum total of my progress on the sermon consisted of the brilliantly creative title: “Mercy Matters.”

That night I dreamed that I was preaching at the church I attended during seminary - and it was not going well. My sermon notes consisted of several scraps of paper with scribbles on them and two or three journals with sentences underlined. I kept jumping back and forth from the scraps of paper with long pauses in between. I had no real plan for what I was going to say, and it was showing.

1 Strangely, it was also dark in the sanctuary, like in a theatre, and it was slowly getting darker. Finally, I could no longer see my notes and didn’t know what to say anyway. I stood there in awful silence for a moment and then did the only thing I could do. Well, I suppose I could have run for the door. But I instead, admitted that I just wasn’t prepared and apologized. And as I waited tensely for their response…thankfully, I woke up.

I lay there in the early morning light, thinking, well, I clearly just had an anxiety dream about this sermon on mercy. But then I realized it was also a mercy dream about this sermon on mercy. In the dream itself, I had been caught out; found insufficient, and in need of mercy. And even lying there awake I was still filled with that awful feeling – the embarrassment; the shame. The utter vulnerability of being exposed and now dependent on the judgment of others.

This, I think, is what makes mercy different. To know mercy, we have to know what it’s like to need mercy. And until we’ve been on the receiving end of it, we can offer compassion. We can offer sympathy. We can offer pity. But we can’t really offer mercy.

In our story this morning, Simon the Pharisee invites Jesus over for dinner. The Pharisees, you’ll remember, were known for their meticulous adherence to their interpretation of Torah Law, which regularly drove Jesus to call them names like hypocrites or vipers.

So things are probably already a little awkward when a woman from the city enters the house, stands behind Jesus and starts weeping. We don’t know her name. We don’t know why she’s crying. All we’re told is that she’s a sinner.

The woman’s tears begin to mix with the anointing oil she brought as she bathes Jesus’ feet, kissing them over and over and drying them with her long hair. It’s a remarkable, scandalous, salacious scene, and we can be sure that Simon the Pharisee, is about to blow a gasket.

Reading the expression on Simon’s strained face, Jesus says, “Simon, let me tell you something. Let’s imagine there are two people who owed a debt, one much larger than the other. If the person who loaned them the money forgave both debts, which person would be more grateful?” “The one who owed the greater debt,” Simon replies.

“That’s right,” Jesus says. And then he goes through the litany of kindnesses the woman has done for Jesus that Simon didn’t do. “And yes,” Jesus says, “her sins may be greater than yours. And it’s because of those sins, not in spite of them, that she’s so much more loving than you. Because Simon (and here’s the punchline to the whole story) those to whom little is forgiven, love little.” Those to whom little is forgiven, love little.

Or if I can paraphrase: those who have never needed mercy, know little about giving mercy.

Now it’s easy to be hard on Simon. It’s easy to paint him as self-righteous and judgmental and mean-spirited. And maybe he is. But maybe he’s also not much different from many of us. I

2 imagine that Simon was a good kid in school, he played trumpet in the band and had a knack for chemistry. He worked hard, got into a good college, joined lots of clubs, and built an impressive resume. Now he’s got a solid job, a nice house. He has a good life.

And maybe his problem isn’t that he’s a jerk, it’s that his life has basically gone according to plan.

He’s known his share of loss and disappointment, for sure. But things have never truly, catastrophically, come off the rails for him. He’s been lucky. Which, in a way, makes him unlucky in God’s economy. Because he’s never truly been in NEED of mercy. So he doesn’t know how to offer mercy.

And like Simon, I think some of us don’t know much about mercy – not real mercy – not because we’re jerks, but because we’ve never been in serious need of it. We’ve never had to stand on a street corner asking for change. We’ve never stood before a judge or jury with our future in the balance. We’ve never been hounded by creditors threatening prison or worse.

And when you haven’t been through those things…when your life has basically gone according to plan….when you’ve worked hard and made good choices and things have generally worked out okay, it can be tempting to think that if everyone worked hard and made good choices, things would work out for them as well.

From there it’s just one seemingly logical step to conclude that if things have not worked out for someone, then, well, they must not have worked hard; or they must not have made good choices.

And the hardest part of that is, it might be true! Sometimes people don’t work hard. And sometimes they make terrible choices. What do we do then? Mercy can’t be the response to everything - or even most things. Mercy matters, but so does accountability and personal responsibility. I think some of the hardest decisions we ever have to make is knowing when it’s the right thing to extend mercy and when it’s the right thing not to.

There was a woman at my old church, a single mother of two, who went out with friends one night and had two glasses of wine. She was far from drunk, but she was over the limit and on the way home she got a DUI. Unfortunately, she already had two DUI’s from 25 years ago when her life was a mess. This meant that she would spend a minimum of two months in jail. Probably lose her job. Maybe lose her children to her angry ex-husband. Of course, she could have killed someone that night. There weren’t Ubers then, but there were taxis. She had choices. If you were her judge, what would you do?

When I lived in Georgia years ago, I worked for a lighting manufacturer for a while. One of my colleagues was beloved around the office. Just a terrific guy. He was young like me, but already had 2 kids, and on our manager trainee salary, money could be tight. One day, he was running short on cash, but he did have the company credit card with him and he used it to buy

3 some groceries, hoping no one would notice. Someone did. Should he lose his job over some bread and milk? What about his children? But how could he be trusted again? Who’s to say next time it wouldn’t be more than that? If you were his boss, what would you do?

Mercy in the abstract is easy to preach. In the messiness of real life, things are much harder to sort out.

So as we try, let’s keep our parable in mind. Those of us whose lives have looked more like Simon’s than the woman’s, can be tempted to value accountability more than mercy because, on the whole, accountability has worked out pretty well for us. We don’t really like the possibility that God might not work on a point system; that in God’s economy our lives and everything we have are a gift, and none of it is earned or owed to us. We’re uncomfortable with the idea that it’s all grace.

We prefer the thought that it’s our hard work and our good choices that have paid off. And even when we talk a good game, for most of us, in the back of our minds we actually think we are sustained by our own merits and virtues.

May God have mercy on us.

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