The 1^st United Methodist Church of Napa, CA
June 8, 2008
4^th Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture Readings:

Hebrew Scriptures – Hosea 6: 3-6¹

³ Let us know, let us press on to know the LORD;
[God’s] appearing is as sure as the dawn;
[and] will come to us like the showers,
like the spring rains that water the earth.”
⁴ What shall I do with you, O Ephraim?
What shall I do with you, O Judah?
Your love is like a morning cloud,
like the dew that goes away early.
⁵ Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets,
I have killed them by the words of my mouth,
and my judgment goes forth as the light.
⁶ For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.

Gospel Lesson – Matthew 9: 9-13²

⁹As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him.

¹⁰And as [Jesus] sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. ¹¹When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” ¹²But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. ¹³Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

“The Human Race Is at Odds with God.”

What shall I do with you, O Ephraim?

What shall I do with you, O Judah?

Your love is like a morning cloud,

like the dew that goes away early.³

The human race is at odds with God. What can you and I do to change that fact? In T.H. White’s novel of King Arthur, The Once and Future King, the world is full of wrong – of people doing awful things to each other according to the rule of Might. King Arthur wanted to change this, to “harness Might” so that it would work on the side of that which was “Right” – that’s why he founded a fraternal order of knights: to put his plan into action. The experiment failed. It seems that the king himself had committed terrible acts in the past, and his mistakes could not be undone. Years earlier Arthur had asked his tutor, the magician Merlyn, this question:

“Might isn’t Right, is it, Merlyn?”

“Aha!” replied the magician, beaming. “Aha! You are a cunning lad, Arthur, but you won’t catch your old tutor like that. You are trying to put me in a passion by making me do the thinking. But I am not to be caught. I am too old a fox for that. You will have to think the rest yourself. Is might right – and if not, why not, give reasons and draw a plan. Besides, what are you going to do about it?”⁴

In the novel Arthur’s last battle is against his own son. Jesus, on the other hand, goes up against the sins of us all – Matthew, tax collectors, women who bleed in public, those who work on the Sabbath or don’t wash their hands – all of us are his sons and daughters. Quoting Hosea he says to us, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire steadfast love, not sacrifice.’”⁵ Does anyone born of woman ever fully understand what that means? Do cloistered monks in silence and contemplative prayer ever learn? Do distracted parents watching at the bed of a sick child ever learn? Do self-righteous theologians who say that there’s only one way to God ever learn? Or is the challenge intended for more than any one lifetime? In the words of the poet, William Wordsworth, is a lifetime nothing “but a sleep and a forgetting” – a time in which we only learn some small hint of what this means? The poet goes on to say:

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.⁶

According to Hosea (and with the agreement of Jesus) God desires constant love instead of sacrifice, but the history of humanity seems to indicate that we’re more inclined to offer sacrifice. Why? Maybe because sacrifice is easier. What’s more, when we make a sacrifice, we feel self-righteously good about ourselves and we expect to be rewarded for it.

But what about “mercy” – “steadfast love?” What does that get us? Well, it says somewhere else: “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.”⁷ Who among us wants mercy these days? Wouldn’t we prefer more substantial rewards for all of the sacrifices that we make: bread coming back, talents multiplied, good things “pressed down, shaken together, running over” and just dropped into our laps”⁸? But mercy, who wants mercy?

As even Shakespeare noted, the quality of mercy isn’t strained,⁹ so try and relax a bit in your search to know what Hosea and Jesus meant. Pity – even with accompanying hand-wringing and tears – is strained; but mercy is not. Charity, dolled out with studious intent and firm guidelines, is strained, but love that is steadfast is not. Sacrifice, with ritualized solemnity and self-righteous determination, is strained, but the love embodied in Jesus is not. Maybe that’s why the desire for mercy, not sacrifice, is so very hard for us to learn – in the same way that the ease of the concert pianist and the unstrained lightness of a ballet dancer come only after long years of learning, practice and discipline.

Mercy, by another name, might be called compassion; and there’s an interesting Hasidic story that captures the essence of compassion.

One morning a group of students asked [their rabbi], "What is the point of human life?  Why are we here?"

The Rebbe replied, "If a tree falls in a forest does it make a sound?" The students debated this for a while and then the Rebbe replied, "Here is my understanding. Without an ear to register the vibrations of the falling tree no sound is produced. Sound is not a thing but a transaction between things. For there to be sound, there must be a falling tree and an ear to hear [it fall].  Why are we here? We are the other half of the transaction. We are here to [listen]. …. We can hear the cry of a broken heart. We can hear the outrage of injustice. We can hear the whisper of empathy. We can hear the silence of death. You are here to listen not only to what everyone else can hear, but also to that which only you can hear."¹⁰

Why are we here? Another rabbi, named Jesus, might say that we’re here to know God, and through our knowing, to transform the world with justice and with compassion.¹¹

If you haven’t noticed, this is a Presidential election year, and the idea of mercy might just be an unpopular message – among voters and candidates alike. We want to get even! At a time when the political parties battle for respectability, we read of Jesus eating with political quislings and the condemned. At a time when our nation has made the building of prisons a major growth industry, Jesus commands the righteous to learn what it means to offer compassion instead of sacrifice. Political and religious pundits both would agree: our biblical texts make a poor platform on which to stand for election to any respected office of any kind!

This is a Presidential election year, and it’s clear what the world wants from the church. What the nation wants, what our next-door neighbors want, is neither sacrifice nor mercy, but justice – justice for himself and his family, justice for herself and for those she loves. They want the church to speak out, to stand up, to lead the attack against the injustice that makes his streets unsafe and that makes her afraid for her children. Our neighbors are fed up with our endless talk about mercy and forgiveness. Tough sentences and more prisons are the answer, not mercy for those who want to destroy our way of life! I admit to a glimmer of hope for change, but most politicians will fall all over themselves promising peace with justice, and they’re smart enough not to talk about mercy, because mercy isn’t what people want, and love is “no way to run a railroad”¹² or a foreign policy.

This is a Presidential election year, and we in the church are faced, yet again, with the problem of Jesus and how he says we should interact with the world. The gospel is the good news of the father who waits and watches by the roadside and asks no questions when he welcomes home his prodigal son. The gospel is bad news, though, for all of the elder brothers who stand outside and will not join the party because they ask for justice – justice for welfare payments made to those who will not work, and early releases for criminals who should stay in jail until they rot. “Where is the justice?” they would cry out.

This is a Presidential election year, and maybe we ought to get off our spiritual “high horses” and try to understand, try to appreciate the fear that’s spread all across our nation, try and respond with our own anger against everybody who would bring down this great nation, everybody who would make our city streets a dangerous place to walk at night and our suburbs open to break-ins and burglaries. Our righteous outrage rolls colorfully off the tongue all too easily, once we get used to it, because the fear and the anger are no strangers even to us. Just last week a young man working in a jewelry store nearby was shot to death because he wouldn’t give the robbers what they wanted. Now, we may speak of mercy, but we still lock our doors at night and hesitate to walk by ourselves, alone, along the very same streets that we will walk in the daylight following this worship service. We may remind people of God’s loving kindness, but we watch the news reports with the same fear as everybody else, hoping that the cops catch them and put them away, so that they’ll never again hurt or destroy in all our holy land.¹³

And yet, what is our nation to become when the cry of mercy is no longer heard in its streets? The homeless will just have to multiply where there is no mercy. The weak will just have to drop out of the race for employment where there is no compassion. The children will just have to be forgotten where only the smart survive and only the powerful are listened to. And we in the church will just have to turn hard – even cruel – as we grow silent and speak only of comfort to those who need little comfort, and speak of mercy only to those who need no mercy – except that the stock market hasn’t been doing very well lately.

I’m reminded of a statement that I carry around with me everyday – it was made by a pastor in Europe following World War II:

First they came for the socialists,
and I did not speak out
because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left
to speak for me.¹⁴

Earlier in this worship service we joined our voices together in singing about an “amazing grace,”¹⁵ but when the voice of that grace – that mercy, that steadfast love – has grown silent and the nation can’t be loved or cared for by anybody anymore, then in that terrible and angry silence will be heard once more the voice of the only one who will never abandon mercy, whose love is steadfast forever.

Jesus, thank you.

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