Unflappable Mercy
Matthew 20:20-34
A Sermon Delivered by Thomas J. Boone, Ph.D.
Central Presbyterian Church, Mobile, AL, March 2, 2008

I heard something beautiful this week that I have to share. J.P. was sitting against a counter in the kitchen on Wednesday night while Jo Jane was busy getting our soup ready to serve. And when I introduced Rev. Mueller to them, Jo Jane said with a smile, “That’s my husband J.P., and we call him J.P. because he’s just perfect.” You should’ve seen Just Perfect’s eyes light up. Jo Jane, what your said about your husband is beautiful not just because it made him smile, but you reminded me how important it is to affirm my daughter with words of kindness. Mother Theresa said that “Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are endless.” James puts it in a different way. “From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who made in the likeness of God” (Jas 3:10,9). Like a stone that lands upon a flat surface of water, our words and actions create echoes of either mercy or cruelty.

When I was 19, I attended a popular missions conference called Urbana ’84. I spent all four of the four day conference convinced that I had made a big mistake, and having about 19,000 college students excited about missions around me wasn’t helping much. I emerged from my freshman year of college a bit lost because I thought I was going to follow my father’s footsteps into law, but it took one political science class to convince me otherwise. So people encouraged me to go to Urbana thinking maybe I’d discover God’s leading there. Well, let me tell you, four days into it that just wasn’t happening, and I had pretty much written it off.

On the fourth night of the conference Billy Graham spoke, but that’s not what I most remember about that night. After Rev. Graham had spoken I was still thinking how this had been a waste of time during what could’ve been a great skiing Christmas vacation with friends. While I was walking in the jam-packed stadium out of the blue a friend of mine whom I had known from my youth group in California ran up to me. I hadn’t seen him for 3 years, but what I thought was going to be a spontaneous reunion of old friends turned into a life changing moment for me.

His name was Sun, obviously not from around these parts. His parents were from China and they’d groomed him to graduate from U.C. Berkeley and become a gifted scientist. We found two seats in the stadium and for three hours he poured his heart out to me about his grief that his parents had disowned him because of his faith. We opened the Bible, sought God’s counsel, and prayed over his dilemma. When we were finished Sun told me that God had promised him comfort and hope, and he thanked me for being God’s hope-giver to him. That was mercy to me. I had spent the conference despondent, irritated, and self-absorbed, but through Sun’s words I emerged with my initial call to ministry. I’ve never seen Sun again, but I’ve ridden the wave of his words ever since that spontaneous moment of mercy that God had created for me.

When a heart becomes unshackled from self-interest mercy abounds. This is what stands out to me from our reading in Matthew today, but before I get to it I want to illustrate the point a bit more. Mercy’s about being drained at the end of the long day, only to discover that your spouse, child, or best friend has had a bad day, too. Do you choose to listen even though it means giving more of yourself, or do you escape to the TV? Mercy’s about taking the time to step away from our own burdens and initiate an echo of kindness in someone else’s life.

Have you seen the commercial that begins with one person doing something kind for a stranger, and then that stranger does something kind for another stranger, and so on it goes until at the end of the commercial a stranger does something kind for the person who started the whole chain? Mercy does that. It causes a chain reaction, maybe not in others...we can’t control what others are going to do...but in ourselves for sure.

Tragically, endless, too, are the echoes of actions and words born from hearts shackled by self-interest. Last week in Kerbala, a town about an hour south of Baghdad, Iraqis remembered the anniversary of Imam Mashad Hussain’s death. The echoes of that death have rippled from generation to the next for 1,300 years as Shi’ites and Sunnis have warred with each other over power in Muslim countries. How many other nations and people have died in what began as a day where self-interest in the guise of religious idealism silenced mercy?

Last week in Ohio a judge handed down a life sentence verdict to former police officer Bobby Cutts Jr., whose heart of self-interest merged with cruelty and anger as he killed his girlfriend and unborn child. How many echoes from that night of merciless self-absorption will repeat in his girlfriend’s sister whose words strike deep, “you took my sister from me. You took a chunk out of my heart.” How long will the echoes of his self-interest resound in the life of Blake, who at two year’s old said, “Mommy’s in the rug?”

God entered human history in the form of Jesus Christ foremost not to be just like us, but to show us the way to be just like Him. David wrote of it in the Psalm readings for this week. “These things you have done and I have been silent; you thought that I was one just like yourself. But now I rebuke you, and lay the charge before you.” God isn’t like us and we fall for the evil one’s lie whenever we think otherwise. Matthew shows us how far we’ve strayed from God’s image in the passage this morning.

Matthew’s writing his account of how Jesus spent his last moments outside of Jerusalem, knowing full well what lay before him. During one of those last moments before entering Jerusalem to die, Jesus was eating with his disciples. James and John had heard Jesus say three times that he was going to die, yet they, along with their mother, were interested only in their own status as rulers alongside Christ. They expressed their complete self-interest expressed by vying for seats of authority and power next to a Lord who came to give His life as a ransom for many. God may grant us leadership positions, but for what purpose? Certainly not to satisfy anyone’s need to exercise power or make sure things go our own way. We lead as diplomats of mercy, as Jesus shows us in his encounter with the two blind men.

People tried to shoo the two blind men away, but instead they grabbed Jesus’ attention by shouting louder than the crowd. Jesus had nothing to gain from these two men, all they wanted was to see and all Jesus was doing was going to Jerusalem to die for the redemption of humanity; really there was no comparison. So, if Jesus were like us, he’d probably have been more self-absorbed. Think about it for a moment. He knew going into Jerusalem what lay before Him. Every step his body took upward along the Jerusalem road was a step closer to imminent excruciating pain. Each minute that passed took him closer to complete isolation from the Father when He would cry out, “My God, My God...why have you abandoned me?” That’s the part of our punishment we won’t ever have to face thanks to Jesus.

But, as the Psalm I read a moment ago said, Jesus isn’t like us. Jesus stopped, asked them if they wanted to be healed, and then he healed them. He made their need for mercy his priority even though he was facing death. He didn’t sigh and heal them out of obligation. He paused, gave them His time, and let compassion rule the day in ways that made life-lasting echoes in their lives. It would’ve been easy to pass them by, but a heart unshackled by self-interest can’t fathom that choice.

And there’s the point that as a teacher I wish more people understood about Matthew. Matthew’s not just presenting stories of compassion at the end of his gospel to make social justice the end all and be all of the gospel. He’s doing it to challenge every believer to have a heart unshackled by self-interest. Each of us has at one point or another justified long-standing anger. Each of us has tasted the fruit of pride, whether it be our education, family, church, career, or stuff we own. And then while savoring that fruit haven’t we fallen hard into chasms of wilderness? David fell into that chasm after his arrogant sin with Bathsheba. As Rev. Toby reminded us on Wednesday, Israel fell into that chasm after its self-interested pursuit of security with foreign nations. Churches can easily fall into their own wilderness chasms when Christians forget that Christ called us first to create echoes of mercy among those whom everyone else tries to quiet.

Who are we in the face of so many lives that are forfeit without Jesus? We are beacons of mercy, unflappable mercy, because through us Jesus wants to provide hope to a world ripped apart by sin. Mercy occurs in common acts of everyday believers who hear Christ’s call to a higher road than the unredeemed self can fathom. Mercy occurs through generosity in the pain of being a have-not; it looks beyond the circumstances and creates echoes of forgiveness where lives have been broken. Mercy happens when broken people like ourselves bind the wounds of the broken hearted. Mercy doesn’t forfeit the challenge of the gospel for the sake of a sugar coated faith. Rather it holds together the talons of justice and compassion, and speaks truth in love.

What have been the echoes of mercy you’ve created this week? What are the echoes you wish you could undo? It’s the law of human nature that we’ll create echoes both of mercy and those arising from self-interest. But, it’s the law of the gospel that Jesus Christ is able to take all things, our echoes included, and use them for His glory. So we stumble forward as new creatures learning to live with heavenly clothes in a fallen world. We praise God for His mercy that heals us, and we emerge from Matthew this morning challenged to be beacons of mercy whose echo will build hope in the hopeless, strengthen the fainthearted, and encourage the downcast. Amen.