This Side Of Mercy”
Rev. Tiare L. Mathison, Pastor & Soul-Tender
Zephaniah 1.7, 12-18; Psalm 90; 1 Thess. 5.11; Matthew 25:14-30
Our God Our Help in ages past, our hope for years to come...
In a moment, with integrity, Can we sing this very famous hymn by Isaac Watts ? Is God your help and your hope? Your shelter from the stormy blast? Your eternal home? Or might we sing it as a cry for mercy over against Zephaniah’s shout: “Be silent before the Lord God!!!”
My mom was raised in a fundamentalist church in Southern California, with a huge dose of apocalyptic fear thrown in. She knew very well how to be silent before God. She was taught that God saw everything she did, and waited to pounce on any little wrong-doing so as to cast her into the burning fires of Revelation. She was 67 years old before the balance scale tipped and she discovered God’s amazing love and mercy in a Pentecostal Church. The last 30 years of her life were spent praising God and talking to anyone she could about “how good and loving my Heavenly Father is”. She could finally sing this hymn from the bottom of her heart. This Side of Mercy
The kind of fear my mom knew is staggering in its ability to make God a narrow-minded bigot whose only focus is usually on sexual sin of whatever kind. No clarion judgments about self-indulgent, vacuous lives of the prosperity gospel. No demands of the spiritually complacent who wait around making judgments of ‘those poor people to pick themselves up by the bootstraps just like I did’. Even if they don’t have boots. No demand to turn empires’ systems of economic and racial oppression upside down just like Jesus did when He threw the money changers out of the temple.
In my mind, this god should join all the other idols with a small g. For it is heresy to frame the God of the Universe as a nit picky old man in a ragged white undershirt sitting around ready to send you to hell.
Where we do run into trouble though, is we like our stuff, we like our lives, just the way they are. We will submit to God’s judgment as long as God does not go too far or require too much of us. Prophet Z shouts about blind stumbling and feces. What, me, us? Are you sure?
the hard questions: how else will we know grace if there is no judgment? How else will we know? If we strip away the authority of Jesus Christ as Lord of our lives, we disempower him. And he wants to be Lord of all of our life--work, money, bank accounts, checkbook, donations, 401(K)'s, retirement funds, all these matters that define personhood in a capitalist economy. He wants to be Lord of our life in how we view our bodies. Our culture defines beauty by the tautness of your skin, the color and texture of your hair, what you weigh, how old you are, whom you love. Jesus says, “Your body is a temple designed by God, just for you.”
He wants to be Lord of our relationships: with our intimate partners, our families, neighbors, commitments to racial justice, peace and the renewal of the earth, the whole shebang. If we choose to submit to him as Savior, we give him permission to write our lives. WRITE! And to judge them.
I've wondered something. Are we hesitant to submit to Jesus' gracious judgment because we know what lousy judges we are of others? We make judgments all the time--clothes, color of skin, actions, safe or unsafe, economic class, gender, sexual orientation and on and on. Frankly, we can sometimes devolve into middle school lunchroom behavior.
This does not mean we don’t sit under judgment, we do. It’s rooted in the Covenant of Israel in which us Gentiles have been grafted in, as Paul says in Ephesians. Human sin is so devastating, so huge, that God has to intervene somehow. Total destruction is not too far afield when you stand before the Holiness of the Divine. And witness the violence and cruelty we are all capable of. This Side of Mercy
Yet again, if there is no judgment, where is the need for grace? Our confession of 1967 says it this way: "To receive life from the risen Lord is to have life eternal; to refuse life from him is to choose the death which is separation from God. All who put their trust in Christ face divine judgment without fear, for the judge is their redeemer. Unquote.
This kind of judgment brings comfort. For it is done with the shadow of the cross looming large--see what redemptive love has done. This is the Divine Judgement, this side of mercy. In Jesus Christ, we are forgiven. We say it with the deep realization of how our own attitudes and sinfulness so easily separates us from this eternal love. From the love we experience with one another. We say it as beggars, please let this be true. Let us start all over again, today. This Side Of Mercy.
At the heart of our faith is a peculiar certainty: human history has purpose, there is movement toward completion, therefore, we can live expectantly and with hope. God is in pursuit of this wonderful, tragic, fragile, confusing, chaotic world She made. The process of creation continues through redeeming love found in Jesus Christ, the one raised from the dead. Heaven breaks into earth through the Holy Spirit. What we see and know is not all there is. We are summoned to new life each and every day.
And honestly? Sometimes we just have to dog it out. In a pandemic season, with or without ecstasy, a simple determination of the will to give faithful and creative service to others. One day there will be an accounting. Mundane, daily faithful living will be tallied in redemption's ledger books. Little things do matter in the kingdom of God. 'As you have done to the least of these, so you have done to me," Jesus says.
In God’s economy, we are not measured by the amount of what we have done, rather by the kind of service we have offered to the world, in Jesus’ Name. Of all people, I always take comfort in these words from Theodore Roosevelt. He gave them at the Sorbonne, in Paris, in 1910. It is a 35 page speech he entitled ‘Citizenship in the Republic’. This is page 7:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.“
In God’s judgement, we are called to stay in the arena.
This Side of Mercy. Amen