Christ Lutheran Church: Welcome

Mercy Me! - June 8, 2008

Mercy Me!

Hosea 6:6, Matthew 9:13

June 8, 2008

Rev. Dave R. Garwick

When my sister and I were growing up, we were about two and a half years apart.  We still are.  Some things never change.  We get along great now - maybe because we don't have to do dishes together anymore.  Back then it was always a battle royal about which one of us had to do the washing and who GOT to  do the drying.  She thought that I always got my way cause I was the oldest.  I always thought SHE got her way cause she was the little sister and she was a girl.  (I never could figure out why those two things always went together).

Then, she was always in the way;  always wanted to do what I was doing; always wanting to hang out with MY friends; always telling on me to mom and dad; always getting me in trouble.  (I'm sure she would tell you the same story in the same way).  And that was the other thing:  man, she would lie!  And she would start things so that when I retaliated, I was always the one who got caught.  And it was always MY fault cause I was older and should know better.  And then she'd smirk behind their backs at me.

When I wanted to clobber her, it probably would not have made much of an impression if my folks had reminded me of Jesus' words this morning:  "I desire mercy and not sacrifice."  I would have been more in to sacrifice.

It must have been near one of mom's birthdays that we got into another one of our little nuclear wars.  Despite these little skirmishes one of the things we always did together was to work on something together for mom's birthday.  Like maybe we would make a fantastic dinner of macaroni and cheese with chocolate milk and we'd bake and frost a chocolate cake and pool our allowance on chocolate ice cream to go with it.

Mom, of course, would always be very touched by this...until she heard us out in the kitchen starting to go at it again about who was going to wash and who was going to dry.

This one time, though, mom had a sit-down talk with us.  She told us how sweet it was that we went to all this work for her birthday.  "But you," she said, "if you really wanted to give me something for my birthday, what I would like most is if you two could get along.  THAT would mean more to me than all the macaroni and cheese in the whole world.  That is what I would most like."

So, once again, my sister got to do the drying!  To my young mind, all I could understand in what mom said was, "Stop fighting".  It made no sense at all to me that treating my sister nice was actually giving my mom something.

THAT is exactly what Jesus was saying in this morning's Bible Focus when He told the Pharisees, "Go learn what this means:  'I desire mercy and not sacrifice.'"  God didn't want the Pharisees to give Him sacrifices as much as God wanted His followers to give mercy to His other children.  Forget wrapping up a gift with a fancy ribbon, forget the birthday cake and the ice cream.  All I want is for you to show mercy to the most vulnerable ones of my children.

Jesus says that He prefers mercy to empty rituals.  But sometimes I wonder if we respond by turning MERCY itself into an empty ritual?

Look at the "The Kyrie" for instance.  This is the part where the cantor sings, "In peace, let us pray to the Lord," and we all respond, "Lord, have mercy".

And then the cantor sings, "For the peace from above, and for our salvation, let us pray to the Lord," and again we respond, "Lord, have mercy".  We sing this four times, "Lord have mercy".  Most of us could say it in our sleep.  I fear that many of us DO say it in our sleep - I'll confess that I have done it on auto-pilot.  When THAT happens, then we are offering sacrifices of nothing to God.

Jesus says that He prefers mercy to empty rituals.  Do we then respond by turning MERCY itself into an empty ritual?

The answer is not to toss out the ritual, but to take that ritual seriously so that we truly pray it sincerely, and live it earnestly.

For example, in that prayer of mercy, we say that it is in peace that we pray to the Lord, "Lord, have mercy."  But IS it really in peace that we pray for mercy?  Or is there someone with whom we are not at peace and for whom mercy is the last thing we think of when we think of them?

Mercy is not for people you agree with, for people you like.  Mercy is for those whose neck is on the block that you control.  They are the ones whom you have the opportunity to hurt.  When Jesus answered the Pharisees at Matthew's dinner table, He did not defend the tax collectors' innocence.  He did not say that they were as good as anyone else.  What He said was for the Pharisees to go and learn what mercy was about.

WE ought to know.  We ourselves are the ones who have received Jesus' mercy.  We are more guilty of sin than we will ever know this side of earth.  Jesus is the One who will judge the living and the dead.  He has the right and the ability to sacrifice every last one of us.

But for no other reason than mercy, He has forgiven us.  Every Sunday we begin our worship of Him by asking Him to have mercy on us.  Well, think about it:  He IS our mercy.  He does not want our sacrifices because He sacrificed Himself in our place - rather than make us pay the consequences of our sin.  If that's not mercy, I don't know what is!

How do we ask Him for mercy who has already given us the ultimate mercy?  And how do we dare ask Him to have mercy on US, unless we are willing to pass that on to others?

The only reason we CAN offer mercy to others is because He first gave mercy to us.