Ephesians 2:1-10

Title: “Rich in Mercy”

At one time you were like a dead person because of the things you did wrong and your offenses against God. You used to live like people of this world. You followed the rule of a destructive spiritual power. This is the spirit of disobedience to God’s will that is now at work in persons whose lives are characterized by disobedience. At one time you were like those persons. All of you used to do whatever felt good and whatever you thought you wanted so that you were children headed for punishment just like everyone else. However, God is rich in mercy. He brought us to life with Christ while we were dead as a result of those things that we did wrong. He did this because of the great love that he has for us. You are saved by God’s grace! And God raised us up and seated us in the heavens with Christ Jesus. God did this to show future generations the greatness of his grace by the goodness that God has shown us in Christ Jesus. You are saved by God’s grace because of your faith. This salvation is God’s gift. It’s not something you possessed. It’s not something you did that you can be proud of. Instead, we are God’s accomplishment, created in Christ Jesus to do good things. God planned for these good things to be the way that we live our lives.

This past Wednesday I was helping out at the Welcome Meal, as I sometimes do, and I encourage you to do, if you are able, and I noticed a recent frequent late arriver to the meal, which is something that actually rarely happens.  One of the basic rules of the meal is that those who wish to have dinner need to arrive by 6:15 PM – otherwise you won’t be served. Why?  Because if the rule isn’t in place, people keep showing up at different times, and the meal service gets backed up, and it begins to slow down everyone else.  Recently, we’ve had a visitor that keeps showing up 15-20 minutes late and quite literally demanding a meal – a few weeks he got irate when he was told that he had arrived too late and wouldn’t be served.  As I was explaining this to him for the third time, he demanded to know who I was, and I told him I was the Pastor, which seemed to quiet him a bit.  I said to him that we would serve him this one time, but if he wanted to eat, he needed to arrive on time for the meal. He showed up again late this past Wednesday, again, demanding food, and was told he was too late again – nonetheless, I got him a bowl of soup, but said a plate of food wouldn’t be available.  So, instead, he went around me and found a volunteer who didn’t know what I had said, and so he got him some food from that person, which I promptly saw in front of him, and plucked out from in front of him.  I was furious, angry, outraged, even, full of righteous fire, because he seemed to think the rules shouldn’t apply to him, and when I wouldn’t return the food, he stormed out.  Douglas always complains that I am too much of a rule follower, and that is true, perhaps, but I do believe that most of the time, not always, I know, rules are there to prevent the chaos that can happen when fairness isn’t practiced – people arriving late for the meal cause a lot of headaches for those who are trying to serve the ones who arrived on time, who did what was asked of them, and it causes resentment in the ones who did show up in time.

Now, let me clear, that moment last Wednesday wasn’t probably my proudest moment, and one could argue that I was certainly wasn’t displaying much Christian charity, and certainly not much mercy, and I am fine with your disappointment – you may indeed have a point. But it does irritate me when people think the rules don’t apply to them, that exceptions should always be made for them. They’re in a hurry, so they should be able to cut in line, they should receive something for free when the rest of us have to pay full price, they demand to have their way despite the rest of us disagreeing with their ideas, their agenda – and, as with the man who stormed out of the Welcome Meal last Wednesday, they storm out of the church, out of the restaurant, out of the store, and sometimes they will even storm out of our lives.  And I don’t mean that there aren’t times when we need to leave, we need to stand up for what we believe, maybe even our belief that people should be served whenever they show up for dinner, or that people who have pressing appointments should be served first, or something far more noble. All of us make decisions about what justice looks like in the world and in our lives, what love looks like given our feet and our hands, which is what justice is, love embodied in this world, and I get that. 

Despite whatever we personally discern, there is an actual wrong or right in this world and certainly shades of gray in-between those two truths, and as I’ve said lately, the criteria for that discernment between right and wrong is rooted in love – how is what I or what someone else is doing an act of love, love actually given flesh and bone in this world?  We want the world to be fair, and I think most of us can get it right, right about what justice looks like in the world, if Jesus and the love he spoke of and actually practiced in this world is our lodestar, our guiding principle.  Now, that doesn’t mean we can actually always practice that justice all the time, or even most of the time, but I think it is possible to discern what love looks like in the real world by what Jesus said and did.  Most of us have strong instincts about justice, what fairness, what love looks like in the world.  And yet, as the writer of Ephesians says to us, we still live as people of this world, practicing indifference instead of love, practicing greed instead of generosity, practicing selfishness instead of selflessness.  And by not embodying love in this world through our lives, our actual lived lives, some of us are like the dead people the writer of Ephesians says we were and are, thus once again giving into a spiritual power that is not of God, that is not of love, love being just another name for God, according to Jesus.  We disobey God, and thus we disobey love itself, and we chose another path, the one most frequently traveled, maybe universally traveled, which leads to a death of spirit. A life not lived in love, within love and with a loving spirit, well, it leads to punishment, a punishment of our own making, and a dead and deadly life before even the grave can claim us. 

And then, and then, here comes God with the solution, and it is answer that amazes us, and rattles us, and sometimes even maddens us.  Here comes God with mercy, an answer to our dead life from a God who is alive and rich in mercy and willing to share that wealth with us – the God who gave us the Christ, and when we were dead, dead through our choices to choose anything else other than love, God resurrected us from the grave.  We were raised up, the writer of Ephesians tells us, and seated by God in heaven, heaven being the place, the spiritual space where God is, fully and completely.   What a turnaround, and none of it has anything to do with us – it is God’s gift to give away, this mercy, and is no possession we’ve earned from God, or bartered with God for – it is God’s gift, this mercy, something given to us simply because God chose to do this, simply because we are loved, despite all those choices we’ve made when love was the farthest thing from our mind, our spirit, even our body. It amazes us, if we actually sit with it, this upturning of all the fairness we’ve sought, the rules we’ve put in place to actualize that justice, this upturning of all efforts to embody love by doing justice.  And, at our best, we are thankful, thankful that God somehow planned it this way, that what would ultimately greet us in this life, after all the efforts we’ve put in to be good enough, kind enough, loving enough, just enough, that what would greet us with after all our failures, would be mercy, which is that other side of justice, the other way love is actually embodied, made flesh, in this world.  God is rich in mercy, the writer of Ephesians says to us, and those words, thankfully, seem to be true. 

But it also rattles us a bit, if we are honest about it, and I think I know why. Believe it or not, as a Christian minister, I get to talk about grace a lot, about God’s mercy, God’s unmerited favor towards us, all the time.  I’ve had so many conversations with fellow Christians, some who are great in age or wisdom, about the absurdity of this God of mercy, this God who seems to let us – and especially others – off the hook for all the death dealing ways we’ve led our lives.  But if we were to be honest, most of us in this room feel as if we’ve not done things so horrendous as to make us unworthy of that mercy, and maybe we haven’t, maybe our death dealing ways, the ways we’ve hurt others, hurt ourselves, hurt strangers by our personal and cultural choices, haven’t been to the level to the proverbial embodiment of evil, Hitler, or John Wayne Gacy, or whomever.  But that’s when the trouble begins, doesn’t it, when those examples get named, and God’s mercy is said to include even them, that’s when it unnerves us, that it doesn’t seem quite right, not quite fair – how could God show mercy to them, I often ask myself, they who have caused terror and pain and calamity to so many? Mercy is good, and needed and somehow, maybe, if we were to be honest, even deserved by those whose bad choices only caused limited, normal amounts of harm and spiritual death – but when it comes to those who we feel are beyond pale, the Hitlers and Gacys of this world, then when we become uncomfortable, unnerved, by the unfairness of this mercy.  We drift back to the old system, the way world thinks of things, that people should get what they deserve, that karma is a thing, a real thing, and we do actually reap what we sow (though, of course, we surely know that it isn’t always true, that we reap what we sow – ask Job of the Old Testament, ask the writer of Ecclesiastes, ask even Jesus, who certainly did not reap what he had sown in this world).    

Mercy is needed, mercy from God, mercy we need from each other, it is so needed, but many of us find it so disturbing, if we are honest with each other, and with God.  What mercy does is unmask our continual belief that it is what we do that will get us God’s love, God’s acceptance, even God’s mercy. It certainly unmasks mine, me who preaches this grace, this mercy, me who is often amazed by people’s visceral reaction of anger when grace and mercy are understood for what they are – the truth is that we don’t always get what we deserve in this life, and, in God’s case with us, that is good news.  Still, the unfairness of it, especially for those “other” people, those people who deserve some reckoning, some moment when the pain they’ve inflicted will be the pain they experience. So many of us are cynical about the deathbed conversions of the prisoner who’s wrecked so much havoc and pain in her wake, who now cries to God for mercy, and is said to have received it, when we’ve tried to do the right thing all our lives and supposedly have done the right thing most of the time – how fair is it that I receive the same kind of mercy as the rapist, the murder, the harmer of children?  I’ve even had conversations with people who have told me that if God’s mercy includes those kinds of people, they want nothing of this faith, this Christianity, this religion that includes the best and worst of humanity. Some of us are deeply disturbed by the truth that God’s love includes those that really, and I mean, REALLY don’t deserve it. And I share that sentiment, I do, I can and do feel the unfairness, the seeming unjustness, of this mercy so recklessly given out to those who don’t deserve it.  All of a sudden, we begin to think, weirdly enough, that mercy should go to those who deserve it – I mean, people who show up on time for the Welcome Meal deserve to eat, and those who didn’t show up on time, don’t deserve to eat.

But, you see, if that is the case, if mercy is nothing more than something doled out based on merit, based on what is deserved, then it isn’t actually mercy and it’s certainly not grace.  It’s just another religious or ethical system that says we will get what we deserve, or should get what we deserve – and that even the mercy we receive for our wayward ways is actually deserved – mercy was deserved by us, but, of course, not by them, those whom we deign to better than.  As I’ve said before, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is either good news for all of us, or it’s not good news for any us.  If it’s just another way of sorting out the deserving and undeserving, the just and the unjust, the good and the bad, then it’s the same old system found in every religion that has ever existed.  But God, according to the writer of Ephesians, would have none of that, not anymore and thus we are given a gift – a real gift and not a repayment from some sort of spiritual Santa Claus, not something we deserved for being good – but a real gift, a gift of Jesus Christ, who resets everything, who shows us who God really is, this one rich in mercy, and who has given this mercy to the deserving and undeserving, the good and the bad, the kind and unkind, to all of us, we who have been each of those kinds of people at different moments in our lives, those who showed up on time for the meal, and those that didn’t show up on time for the meal. 

So, in the end, our connection with God, however strong or tenuous, is not something we earned by what we did, but was something God did for us, in and through this Jesus of Nazareth. Sometimes, in all those conversations with people about the nature of grace and mercy, some have said that if we don’t fear punishment, and we are given mercy instead, why would anyone do the right thing? My response is fairly simple – if our response to God’s mercy and grace is to continue to intentionally do harm, create chaos and pain, thinking we won’t be punished for it, then we never got it, we never knew quite knew that mercy and grace and love that God gives us. But when we do suddenly realize how much God loves us, and how much mercy we’ve been given, and we realize that truth over and over again in their lives, our response is not celebrating what we think is a “get out of jail free card.”  No, the actual response to knowing love and grace and mercy is a life in which everything is focused on trying, however imperfectly, to do the right thing, being the kind of person Jesus showed is possible – to know mercy in your bones is to be reborn, it is to be born again, to know salvation, salvation being simply another way of saying we have discovered and are in the midst of discovering how loved by the Divine we really are, and always have been, for not reason at all. Rich in mercy is our God, who has sent us a love given flesh and bone, who has sent us this one from Nazareth, to show us what loves looks like in the world, yes, but finally to show us an actual mercy born of that love, giving it to us for no reason at all. May we know that beautiful, unsettling truth in our bones, and may we spend our lives wrestling with the beautiful unfairness of it all.  Amen.