Dr. Christopher Graham

Pentecost +17 – Mercy Never Ceasing
Dr. Christopher Graham
Jonah 3:10

But you are the same Lord whose character is always to have mercy.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

You may be seated. I’m thankful for the whole of our liturgy, but there are a few phrases that almost take my breath away every time we say them. I’d like to focus on one of these phrases this morning that is fitting with our scripture readings, “But you are the same Lord whose character is always to have mercy.”

Every time I say it in our service, even as I’m saying it now, it arrests me. It spins me around as though I’m doing a double-take. It’s as though I am being introduced to a fascinating, new, mind-blowing thought every time. Why is this? It’s not as though God’s mercy is a new thing for me. I’ve been singing the songs of God’s mercy my whole life. Come Thou fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace.

Streams of mercy, never ceasing.
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Or morning by morning, new mercies I see.
All I have needed, thy hand hath provided.
Great is thy faithfulness, Lord unto me.

I’ve sung those songs my whole life. So why does this particular phrase catch me off guard every time? Our passages this week help me answer that question. Our Old Testament and Gospel readings especially deal with those who are taken aback, even angered by God’s mercy.

Jonah’s reaction to God’s mercy on Nineveh and the laborer’s reaction to the master’s mercy on the newcomers who get paid the same amount that they did, even though we’ve been working in the hot heat all day. By the way, lovely reading this morning, Father Doug. I think you captured the spirit of the grumbling. They remind me that even though I confess this every week, the trouble is I haven’t let it sink into the core of who I am. I’ve not yet let it take possession of me. And what is it that keeps me from allowing this reality that he is the same Lord whose character is to always have mercy? Why is that? What I’d like to do this morning is clear some of the brush, so to speak, so that when I confess that, when we confess that, that reality can take roots and grow in our lives, that I can more fully commune with the Lord at the table and by more fully leaning into this Lord whose character is always to have mercy, I can more fully manifest the life this week defined by mercy.

There is in the phrase itself a seeming dissonance, but you are the same Lord whose character is always to have mercy. That he is Lord, refers to the fact that he has power. He is sovereign. We don’t tend to associate mercy with Lordship. And yet in fact, we may find them in conflict, for to call him Lord is to call him something like master, king, even judge. This dissonance, it seems, is what’s going on in both Jonah and Matthew this morning. So reading from Matthew 20, a few verses, Matthew 20, verse 1, “For the kingdom of heaven is like a master who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.” By the way, when you dig, just go slightly into the Greek here, that word master is not the typical word for Lord or master, Kurios. It’s the word that is where we get our word despot from.

Kurios has some flexibility on power. That is unequivocally the one in charge. Later on when there is grumbling, they say this, “And when those who hired first, they came, they thought they would receive more and also received each one denarius. And when they received it, they grumbled at the master, the despot, the man.” So they have an issue with this one who is master. Back in Jonah, we have a comparable language in chapter four, “And it greatly displeased Jonah, and he became angry and he prayed to the Lord, Please Lord, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country.”

In both cases though, God shows himself, the Lord shows himself as the one who is mercy. Jonah outright says it. He goes on to say there, “Please Lord, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country. Therefore, in order to forestall this, I fled for I knew that thou are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in loving kindness, and one who relents concerning calamity. I knew it.”[1] By the way, this is why I’ve put this quote in your preparatory reading this morning from Robert Frost. I absolutely think Frost gets it spot on.

Jonah is told to go and prophesy against the city, and he knows God will let him down. He can’t trust God to be unmerciful. You can trust God to be anything but unmerciful. I want to double down on Frost observation here. The reason that this is true about God is that God is by nature mercy. When Moses asked God to show himself in his glory and calls on the name of the Lord, God responds by proclaiming the Lord, the Lord, merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. God acts mercifully because God is mercy by nature. Pope Francis put it this way, “Because he is God, because he is mercy, and because mercy is his first attribute, the name of God is mercy.”[2] By the way, just to point this out, this is different than you and me. We can be merciful, we can act mercifully, but even on days when I’m not merciful, I’m still Christopher, not so with God.

When we say that this is an attribute of God, we mean that God can do nothing but be merciful because that is his nature, mercy. And the good news this morning is that God has brought us, you, us to a place where we encounter this Lord whose character is always to have mercy. You don’t have to worry this morning which God you’re going to get. You’re getting the God who is going to be merciful, who lavishes mercy, morning by morning, new mercies we see.

Now I could end the homily here, but today’s scripture won’t allow me to do that because in both cases, God’s display of mercy results not in praise, but in anger or grumbling. So we need to clear a little bit more brush. Like Jonah and the early laborers, those who grumbled, not only do I tend to emphasize God’s righteous nature, that I cast justice and mercy, righteousness and mercy in transactional terms. And the transaction requires a process to make sure things stay steady, to make sure that mercy doesn’t cancel out justice. This seems to be particularly the case in the parable.

The laborers expect a process in which reward was doled out based on the process, but mercy disrupts processes. It upends transactional righteousness. In my former role as a college administrator, a vice president, one of my roles was to keep order in the academic world.

I upheld the rules. If a student did something outside the rules, they had to pay the consequences in order to keep things in order. One of the ways I had to do this was to make sure that student didn’t find their way around me to the president because the president inevitably would exercise mercy. And that made my life so difficult. It’s worried me so much because it upset the process. What happens when the next student gets in? What happens if this student goes tell their friends that you let them do that? Now they’re not coming to you. They’re coming to me, and I’m the one who has to control this process. Mercy disrupts processes that are transactional. But the fact is that God’s merciful nature does not compromise his righteous nature. This is the mystery. This is the wonder of God. His acts of mercy do not undermine his expectation that creation acts righteously and that he holds creation accountable to this expectation.

Our Psalm today logs both of these realities of God. Psalm 145:17, the Lord is righteous in all his ways, merciful in all his works. Jesus sets the promises related to these two realities right next to each other in the Beatitudes. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Right next to each other. Both are true. The God of the Bible is a personal God, who is both perfectly righteous and perfectly merciful, and he doesn’t need a process to ensure that these are carried out perfectly and fully.

The Christian gospel is that in his person, Jesus manifests God’s perfect righteousness and mercy. Christ’s death would display and shift from transactional language to personal language. When on the cross, Jesus cries to tetelestai, the Greek, which is often translated rightly so, it is finished. This is a word that is in the ancient world found on the bottom of ledgers and of financial statements to say it is paid. And in his body, in his death, he shifts, then, the transactional language to his person. Paul says it this way in Colossians, “And when you were dead in your transgression and the uncircumcision of your flesh, he made you alive together with him, having forgiven us all our transgressions.” Listen, verse 14 of chapter two, “Having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us and which was hostile to us, and he has taken it out of the way having nailed it to the cross.” Jesus shifts the language of righteousness and mercy from transactional to personal.

The gospel is that because of the righteousness and mercy of God, the mercy we find in God through Jesus Christ, we can let go of our need to control the processes. We can let go. It’s a freeing thought, friends. I remember going through my recovery group days and one of the most freeing moments when I realized and was able to let go of the fact that I could not control how everyone else around me drove. The road rage went away because I wasn’t in control anymore of making sure they upheld. Now I’m still working on exercising mercy to those dingbats, but it’s freeing. We can let go. We can let God lavish mercy as he sees fit. We can allow ourselves to stop being arbiters of righteousness and allow the one who fulfilled all righteousness to exercise mercy as he sees fit. We can lay our debt, in the form of guilt or shame or regret, we can lay that on the scale, and God’s mercy upends it and overtakes it. We can quit looking over our shoulder, waiting for the hammer to fall.

We can quit looking over our neighbor’s shoulder trying to find out what they did wrong and praying sometimes that the hammer would fall on them. We can quit looking for someone who’s at fault to pay them back. We can accept that this is the same Lord whose character is always to have mercy, this morning. And then receive that gift in the Eucharist because in that prayer, when we say those words, they’re immediately followed by words that say this, so that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body and our souls wash through his most precious blood, that we may ever more dwell in him and he in us. We may receive his gift of mercy and then live in that. And having communed with that Lord this morning, we can manifest that life of mercy all week, friends, to a world that desperately needs God’s mercy.

The laborers in Matthew chapter 20. And then, about the 11th hour, this master, this despot goes out, finds others standing about, and he says, “Why have you been standing here idle all day long?” They said, “Because no one hired us.” He said to them, “You two go into the vineyard.” This is an act of mercy on the part of that master. I close with a prayer pinned by Jane Austin and here is her prayer. “Above all other blessings, oh God, for ourselves and for our fellow creatures, we implore thee to quicken our sense of thy mercy in the redemption of the world.”[3]

And this morning we meet the same Lord whose character is always to have mercy. (Additional prayers are attached below.

“Give us grace, Almighty Father, so to pray, as to deserve to be heard, to address Thee with our hearts, as with our lips. Thou art everywhere present, from Thee no secret can be hid. May the knowledge of this, teach us to fix our thoughts on Thee, with reverence and devotion that we pray not in vain.

Look with mercy on the sins we have this day committed, and in mercy make us feel them deeply, that our repentance may be sincere, and our resolutions steadfast of endeavoring against the commission of such in future.

Teach us to understand the sinfulness of our own hearts, and bring to our knowledge every fault of temper and every evil habit in which we have indulged to the discomfort of our fellow-creatures, and the danger of our own souls.

May we now, and on each return of night, consider how the past day has been spent by us, what have been our prevailing thoughts, words, and actions during it, and how far we can acquit ourselves of evil.

Have we thought irreverently of Thee, have we disobeyed Thy commandants, have we neglected any known duty, or willingly given pain to any human being? Incline us to ask our hearts these questions, O God, and save us from deceiving ourselves by pride or vanity.

Give us a thankful sense of the blessings in which we live, of the many comforts of our lot; that we may not deserve to lose them by discontent or indifference.

Be gracious to our necessities, and guard us, and all we love, from evil this night.

May the sick and afflicted, be now, and ever in Thy care; and heartily do we pray for the safety of all that travel by land or by sea, for the comfort and protection of the orphan and the widow and that Thy pity may be shown upon all captives and prisoners.

Above all other blessings, O God, for ourselves, and for our fellow-creatures, we implore Thee to quicken our sense of Thy mercy in the redemption of the world, of the value of that holy religion in which we have been brought up, that we may not, by our own neglect , throw away the salvation Thou hast given us, nor be Christians only in name. Hear us, Almighty God, for His sake who redeemed us, and taught us thus to pray.“

Jane Austen, first collected 1926, published in The Works of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954; 1988): 6:453. First stanza found in Acceptable Words: Prayers for the Writer, Gary D. Schmidt and Elizabeth Stickney, eds (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 122.

[1] Robert Frost, “Robert Frost,” interview by Richard Poirier, in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Second Series, ed. George Plimpton (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 3031.

[2] Francis, Pope. The Name of God Is Mercy: A Conversation with Andrea Tornielli. Translated by Oonagh Stransky. New York: Random House, 2016, 85.

[3] Jane Austen, first collected 1926, published in The Works of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954; 1988): 6:453. First stanza found in Acceptable Words: Prayers for the Writer, Gary D. Schmidt and Elizabeth Stickney, eds. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 122.