The Meaning of Mercy

"God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that God may be merciful to all."

Romans 11.1-2a, 29-32

I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience, so they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they too may now receive mercy. For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.

The Bible is a rather peculiar thing.

We come to it week after week, waiting on a Word from the Lord. It is both familiar and ubiquitous. We’ve heard some of its stories hundreds of times.

But it’s a weird book.

It’s full of surprises and contradictions, unexplained impossibilities, intriguing and supernatural narratives, heroes doing horrible deeds, poems that puzzle, and genealogies that seem to just keep on going.

But even for the strange new world of the Bible, this is a decisively strange text. I confess that, having read this letter from Paul over and over and over again, I am still wrestling with these words. They have the power to both excite and terrify. They make me scratch my head and sigh in affirmation. They are, in a sense, the whole of the Gospel.

God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that God may be merciful to all.

A few weeks ago I stood here in this very pulpit and talked, at length, about my love of words. How certain words sound, and how meaning can change, all of that.

And I shared my love of churchy words. Part of my affection for the ecclesial lexicon is born out of our willingness to use those words without, at times, knowing what they mean. I love that because, as a pastor, I have ample opportunities to shed light on the words we use without knowing their meaning.

For instance, during our recent Vacation Bible School, I gathered with each group of kids right here by the front and shared stories from scripture. But on our first night, without really giving it much thought, I asked all the kids if they knew what we called this space. Wonderfully, most of them were able to say, “This is the sanctuary!”

Color me impressed.

But then I asked if they knew what that word meant.

Blank stares.

And so I said something to the effect of, “Sometimes we have a special cloth here on the altar and it says an old and wonderful word, ‘Sanctus,’ it’s Latin and it means ‘holy.’ So sanctuary just means, ‘holy place.’”

To which one of the kids furrowed her brow and said, “But Pastor Taylor, I don’t see any holes in the carpet.”

Words are important. They are important because, as Hauerwas notes, “You can only act in a world that you can see, and you can only see what you have learned to say.”

So here’s another churchy word for you, perhaps the most churchy of all: Jesus.

Do you know what the name Jesus means? I’m sure that more than a few of us know that Emmanuel means God with us because it comes up during the season of Advent other and over again. But the name Jesus, do you know what it means?

God saves.

There’s a British theologian by the name of Michael Green who translates Jesus as “God to the rescue.”

And how does God save? How does God rescue us?

Through mercy.

Were it not for God’s mighty mercy, we would’ve dispensed with the likes of Christmas and Easter a long long time ago. All of this, the Bible, the prayers, the hymns, the sacraments, they would all begin to crumble and fall away were it not for God’s mercy.

We are surrounded by God’s mercy, we begin with it and we end with it.

God has mercy on us. God says ‘Yes’ to us. God wills to be for us. Against all odds God is on our side. And it is against all odds because God should not be on our side. God should say ‘No’ to us. But God does not.

God is not against us. God is for us.

That’s what mercy means.

And God’s mercy comes to us again and again and again in the strange new world of the Bible, from the garden of Eden to the garden of Gethsemane, God is merciful.

God bestows mercy upon Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. God shows mercy to Moses and the people Israel before and after the Exodus. God shows mercy to David and Solomon, to all of the prophets and all of the priests.

God’s mercy is the focus of just about every single parable that Jesus tells including the lost sheep, the samaritan, the publican and the pharisee.

And Paul takes all of it, the whole of the proclaimed word and says, “God is merciful to all.”

Have you ever heard such wild and wonderful news? Consider, for just a moment, what this actually means. God has mercy on all, and as such each one of us here may say, “I am one of them.”

God has mercy on me and God will have mercy on me.

It would be a travesty to think, “Paul is surely talking about someone else. God could never forgive me for what I have done or left undone.”

There is nothing, quite literally nothing, that can ever separate us from the love and the mercy of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. God’s predisposition toward mercy is so extreme that God was willing to die for it.

But there’s more!

Because God has mercy on all, we may and perhaps we must repeat in our hearts that among all the people on whom God has mercy are the people to my right and left, those who sit behind me or in front of me, the people I enjoy, the people I ignore, and the people who drive me bonkers. Whether or not they have done me wrong, God has mercy upon them.

How odd of God!

Barth says, considering Paul’s statement here in Romans 11, that the one great sin from which we all must escape is to exclude anyone from the ‘yes’ of God’s mercy.

And yet, for as amazing as God’s grace is, for as marvelous as God’s mercy is, that’s not the only thing Paul has to tell the Romans and all of us. There is another Word, another churchy word, that we must consider.

Disobedience.

For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.

What does this mean?

We are all, in ways large and small, prisoners of one sort or another. Prisoners of the sorrow that lingers long after a profound loss. Prisoners of resentment for the sad situations we find ourselves in. Prisoners of habit, the good and the bad, that control our lives. Prisoners of illness and age. Prisoners of worry and anxiety.

But each of these prisons, are places from which we can be free theoretically, eventually, hopefully. As prisoners we catch glimpses of the sky and the knowledge that freedom is possible. We, with the benefit of hindsight, can look back upon our deliverance from various captivities and it gives us hopes for things not yet seen.

But Paul says there is one prison from which we cannot escape no matter how hard we try and no matter what we do. There are some bars that cannot be broken. Disobedience.

We cannot, and do not, keep God’s 613 commandments. We cannot and do not love God or our neighbors as we love ourselves. Many of us do not even love ourselves. We are, to use language from the Book of Common Prayer, miserable offenders.

And let’s be honest, no one likes being told they’re disobedient. It’s why we only ever use that word in reference to children and pets. When someone is in power over someone, or something, else.

But when it comes to the kingdom of God, we are all disobedient.

Case in point: At the end of Vacation Bible School, after we welcomed all of the respective kids, friends, and family into the sanctuary for a performance, we then gathered out on the lawn for popsicles and ice cream. We told everyone in attendance that they could have one dessert and only one dessert. And, sure enough, within the first five minutes I saw a kid go up and ask for a second popsicle while holding his first one behind his back.

Which, to be clear, is really not a big deal all things considered. Who among us, as a child, would be able to resist a second popsicle?

But then, just a moment later, I saw a father bend down behind the table to sneak a second ice cream for himself!

And we’re just talking about frozen refreshments! What about the goodness and the betterment of our world, our community, our neighborhood? Why are we so selfish? Why do we choose to do that which we know we shouldn’t?

For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that God may be merciful to all.

In other words, God makes us this way. All of us! Including me, the preacher of this sermon. Including the good and the not so good among us. Including the saints whose names we revere and the sinners whose names we forget. God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that God may be merciful to all.

But God’s purpose is not to destroy us or put us to shame. God is not against us. God’s mercy is already present before our disobedience. Wesley calls it prevenient grace, meaning that it comes prior to anything else. God is so often portrayed as a shepherd because God knows that we, like sheep, are prone to wander.

It’s a challenge, of course, to wrap our heads around this. That God makes us as we are, free to do whatever we please. But part of that freedom means we are free to rebel against God, free to choose the things we should not. It’s a gift, this freedom. God is not a puppeteer up in the sky pulling all of the strings. God grants us freedom, but freedom is not freedom unless it is free.

We don’t like to admit the recklessness of our existence. That’s why we usually spend our days pointing out the faults in other people. Doing so makes us feel better about the condition of our condition.

But in the church, things are different. It’s different because we worship the one who is the way and the truth and the life. Therefore we can be truthful in a ways that others cannot. Part of our worship, though not necessarily explicit, is a confession of the truth.

When we gather in a place like this to sing and pray and listen and ponder, it’s not that different than standing up and saying, in unison:

“We are all broken. We have all been idiots and we will be idiots again. We are all difficult to get along with. We sulk and we get angry. We blame others for our own mistakes, we fail to compromise, we are not as nice as we think we are. And yet, we are here to fight against the loneliness our failings tend to create.”

It would be strange to actually say all of that out loud together, but it would be true.

This is who we are. Sinners in need of grace, the disobedient in need of mercy. We have all suffered the effects of our freedom, the choices we make that make a mess of things. And not only as individuals, but as families and communities. We are poisoned with greed, jealously, violence, discord, strife, and selfishness of every variety.

Paul, as the church grows, is rattling the cages of our prisons to disobedience with the Gospel. It’s as if he is saying that God makes sure we all experience what it means to be on the outside, so that God can be the one to open the door and welcome us back in.

God, like the prodigal father, comes to find us in the streets of life with mercy before we even have a chance to say we’re sorry. God, like the prodigal father, is willing to throw a party on our behalf because we are lost and we are found.

God has imprisoned all in disobedience, that God may be merciful to all. Amen.