Bestowing and Receiving Mercy
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
February 16, 2025
Good morning, Friends and welcome to Light Reflections. Today we continue our exploration of the beatitudes with Matthew 5:7 from the New Revised Standard Version.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Someone mentioned early on in this sermon series that I should have skipped to today’s beatitude earlier since mercy was in the headlines. I will be honest, mercy is rarely in our headlines, yet lately it has become front and center in almost every conversation I have in some manner.
What sparked the headlines was ironically a sermon – which drew me in as well, since rarely do sermons, these days make the headlines. The sermon was by an Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde. In her message, she talked about unity, humility, and ended with a final plea, specifically to our newly-elected President to have mercy. Here are her closing words asking for mercy – I want to share them in helping us understand our beatitude for today.
Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you. As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to HAVE MERCY upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are transgender children in both Republican and Democratic families who fear for their lives.
And the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in our poultry farms and meat-packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shift in hospitals — they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes, and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches, mosques and synagogues, gurdwara, and temples.
HAVE MERCY, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. Help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be MERCIFUL to the stranger, for we were once strangers in this land.
May God grant us all the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, speak the truth in love, and walk humbly with one another and our God, for the good of all the people of this nation and the world.
This was the plea for mercy that lit up our headlines. Not only was it a plea for mercy, but it was about as biblical as you can get in its presentation. The bishop’s application of mercy, having mercy, and being merciful was right on.
In its basic form, mercy simply means having compassion for another.
The term is often used of God in the way He relates to His people. In the OT, the basic word is “hesed,” which is a very rich and profound word to describe God’s steadfast love, compassion, grace, and mercy.
God’s mercy could also be described as compassion in action; helping the weak and rescuing those who are suffering.
Jesus points out that mercy is not mere pity like when we give or help others to make ourselves feel good or look better before others.
Pity is self-serving charity, whereas mercy is selfless compassion.
Folks, this makes mercy monumental to our faith as Quakers and Christians.
Someone has described it like this:
· Grace is God giving you good that you don’t deserve.
· Mercy is God not giving you bad that you do deserve.
Therefore, we ALL stand in great need of both God’s grace and mercy, as well as being bearers of that grace and mercy to our neighbors.
I find it illuminating that in Jesus’ day the moral fabric of the nation was abysmal. Roman government leaders ruled by force. The political insiders justified corruption based on common practices of the day. In order to get what they needed or wanted; people operated by might not mercy. Likewise, the religious leaders were entrenched in prideful power plays to obtain position rather than providing service to the people.
As I continue to study the beatitudes, I cannot believe how much Jesus’ day mirrors our own.
So, when Jesus models mercy and teaches mercy, it catches the attention of many – very similar to Bishop Budde. That is why it seems only appropriate for mercy to show up in Jesus’ stump speech, as well as be a key to his eight-fold path.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is pointing out that the religious and political culture of his day did not prioritize mercy, as people frequently displayed anger and sought revenge.
There is still a lot of anger and revenge in our world – actually studies are showing an increase in both anger and revenge in our world, currently. One of the ways we combat the growth of anger and revenge in our personal lives and in our society is by focusing on mercy and its attributes.
In contrast to the anger and revenge, Jesus taught that peacemaking, forgiveness, reconciliation, and love should take preeminence.
Praying for your persecutors and enemies reflected belonging to a different and divine kingdom, rather than an earthly kingdom. This is emphasized when Jesus says in Matthew 5:44-47,
…Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the gentiles do the same?
Mercy is a momentously different way of living. It goes beyond loving just those who are easy to love and have mercy on. Jesus modeled this for us. He continually showed mercy to help others, for example:
· He helped a leper,
· He helped a paralyzed servant,
· He even helped Peter’s mother-in-law,
· and many others who were sick or oppressed,
· He extended mercy to the blind,
· Mercifully healed many people:
o a Canaanite woman’s daughter who was demon-oppressed,
o an epileptic boy,
o blind travelers,
o and countless others.
John’s Gospel goes as far as to say, endless libraries couldn’t contain the books that could be written of Jesus’ miracles of mercy.
If we understand the Beatitudes, specifically this fifth one, then we must understand that mercy is not neutral. We cannot ride the middle for giving mercy to others; either we are merciful or we are merciless.
This is what Jesus, as well as the Bishop was getting at. And just like in Jesus day, or with the Bishop’s words, people still struggle with having mercy. For example, I borrowed some examples from Dave Brown’s website Growing Godly Generations.
Let’s start by talking about spouses and families:
· Some spouses can drift relationally and begin despising each other over the littlest of issues, forgetting about why you disagree or argue, and never willing to apologize just because you don’t want to appear weak.
· Some parents are quick-tempered and demand obedience rather than introducing their child to God’s grace and forgiveness.
· Some grown children forget how much their parents have sacrificed to serve them and have grown entitled and merciless to every peculiar aspect of their parents.
Or how about mercy and our neighbors.
· It’s no accident where you live, God is calling you to live in your neighborhood or community as “salt and light” to the people around you. We must learn how to meet our neighbors and reflect and display the mercy of God. Sometimes we can be downright mean to our neighbors, making jokes about them behind their backs, ignoring them, even speaking badly of them to other neighbors. Instead, are we looking for ways to grant them mercy? (Please note that this includes all our communities – work, social media, and any group we are part of).
Or what about mercy in our Meeting.
Jesus frequently taught and even chastened the religious elite about understanding mercy: In three places in Matthew 9:13, 12:7, 23:23, Jesus emphasizes. “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.”
In fact, Jesus was harder on those who should know better than those who were ignorant and blatant sinners.
Three groups that are over-and-over emphasized by God in the scriptures are: widows, orphans, and strangers or foreigners in the land. All were without help or hope in the cultural settings of the day, but God works with and through us to protect and preserve the fragile and needy in our midst.
Widows… those who are deeply grieved over love lost, need tangible care.
Orphans… physically or spiritually. It is the church’s role to equip and encourage physical (biological, adoptive, foster) and spiritual parents. Likewise, the church is to raise up supported, included, and loved people.
Strangers and foreigners in the land…are to be treated as our native-born, and we are to love them as we love ourselves. We are not to exploit or oppress the foreigner or mistreat them.
And what about mercy to people who we do not believe deserve, or may not understand our mercy.
God has chosen people like, you and me, to be a means for reflecting His mercy to our world – even, or especially, to those who we may not believe they deserve or understand our desire to have mercy on them.
The Apostle Paul gives us a glimpse of the power of offering mercy to someone who does not deserve it – by sharing his own experience. He exclaims:
I’m so grateful to Christ Jesus for making me adequate to do this work. He went out on a limb, you know, in trusting me with this ministry. The only credentials I brought to it were violence and witch hunts and arrogance. But I was treated mercifully because I didn’t know what I was doing—didn’t know Who I was doing it against! Grace mixed with faith and love poured over me and into me. And all because of Jesus.
Here’s a word you can take to heart and depend on: Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. I’m proof—Public Sinner Number One—of someone who could never have made it apart from sheer mercy. And now he shows me off—evidence of his endless patience—to those who are right on the edge of trusting him forever. (1 Timothy 1:13-17 from the Message)
Paul was won over by the patient, sheer mercy of Jesus.
I wonder how many people we know who are just like Paul.
o They don’t know (or even want to know) what they are doing.
o They don’t know (or even care) who they are doing it against.
o They do not realize the damage they are doing to themselves or their neighbor.
o They do not see their arrogance.
o They don’t realize their violence, witch hunts, trolling on Facebook, argumentative nature, ignorance of the full story, and how their own lack of mercy impacts their world.
Imagine if you offered them patient mercy and their eyes opened as Paul’s did?
And we must not forget to reflect on those for ourselves. Am I the aware and seeking to give and receive mercy?
Peter speaks directly to you and me in 1Peter 2:10-12:
“Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people’ once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.”
As a Meeting or individually our acts of mercy to our neighbors, to our widows, orphans, and strangers among us, to our transgender children and our siblings in the Queer community, to our Friends who voted differently than us, is God’s mercy made manifest to a watching and struggling world offering hope.
Folks, Jesus gives us this Beatitude, not to scream judgment at the world, but to spotlight both our calling and our need for God’s eyes to see God within our neighbors, family and friends. While you and I stand in immeasurable need of God’s mercy, God stands ready to bestow his mercy on us, so that we can share that immeasurable mercy with our world.
Now, let us take a moment to center down and enter waiting worship. I have prepared a couple of queries for us to ponder this morning.
1. To whom have I withheld mercy? What is getting in the way?
2. How might mercy address the anger and revenge in our world?
3. How is our Meeting offering mercy to our community? Where might we offer more?