A sermon preached by Sue Westfall
St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church, Tucson, AZ 85716
February 27, 2005; Matthew 5:1-12
Mercy. Eleos. That’ the greek word. Eleos. It means loving, understanding, compassion - especially on those who are hurting or vulnerable. Recognizing with deep affection a shared humanity. It’s one of those words that can make you relax a little just to hear or say it. Mercy. Of all the attributes of God this is the one the Biblical writers noted most frequently. God is merciful, abounding in steadfast love. I was doing a little free association on the word with Stuart recently and he said, “Well, does being merciful mean forgiving?.” But no, I don’t think it does quite mean that although merciful people seem quicker to forgive and those who forgive are truly merciful. No. Merciful is more encompassing. Peter Ustinov called it “an endless act of forgiveness – a tender look that becomes a habit.” Like maybe it’s being able to see past someone’s “mascara” to the realer, rawer, not nearly so tidy and pretty person they present – and loving that person anyway. Loving ourselves anyway.
I think mercy is connected to judgment. Or more to the point, to the graceful suspension of judgment. Judgment says, “You are not worthy. Your effort didn’t measure up. Or, as Anne Lamott puts it. You are a schmendrick to the core and you’re not fooling anyone..” That’s judgment. A shrill, unceasing voice of recrimination. But mercy.
Flip side of mercy-full is merciless. Our most righteous outrage reserved for the bad guy in the movie who, snarling as the pitiful family begs for mercy, kills them anyway – them are their little dog, too. We don’t like that person. That’s the villain’s role. Course we would never be merciless. Without mercy, compassion, understanding, sympathy, kindness.
Happy are the merciful. That’s what Jesus said. For they will receive mercy. I used to think that meant that if we were really merciful all our lives then when we got to heaven God would be merciful and we’d be let in. Kind of a cosmic tally: These are the people Sue let off the hook for all the stupid, hurtful things they did. This is how many stupid, hurtful things she did.
But I don’t think that now.
On the wall in the narthex of the first Methodist church in Alexandria, Louisiana there is a life-sized mosaic – made up entirely of brilliantly colored fragments of glass. Impressionistic. It depicts two people kneeling, facing each other. There is a bowl between them and both sets of hands are touching it; it is being passed. But who is serving and who is being served? Which of these beautiful creatures of brokenness is giving and which is receiving? That’s more my picture.
Mercy.
I overslept church one morning. It was a cold, gray morning in Buffalo, New York and the sun was not yet up when the alarm went off. I did hear the alarm go off. I thought I hit snooze for another blessed 15minutes of sleep because I’d gotten to bed late the night before but I guess it was the off button instead because the next time I saw the face of the c lock it was staring at me reproachfully and church had been over for an hour.
I had been expected at church that day. Certainly the senior minister expected me. The Reverend Doctor Pat Butler. Big guy. Looked like he could have been a football player. (Was in fact till he busted out his knee his senior year of high school. Ended his football career, ended his college scholarship but didn’t keep him out of the war.) There wasn’t a person on that staff – or in the church for that matter, (upstart, “committed to non-hierarchical collegial ministry” me excluding) - who didn’t refer to him always, exclusively, as Dr. Butler. On the floor of a presbytery meeting once I saw Dr. Butler reduce a young ministerial candidate- one of those who was kind of smug and full of himself - to tears. It wasn’t just the way he could make his voice cold and dangerous like the black ice that sometimes coated the buffalo streets that was so intimidating. It was the way he could file perfectly harmless words into a knife point and drive them in deep. There but for the grace of God go I, I remember thinking that day of the presbytery meeting as the young man’s handsome face got mottled and his ringing, baritone pulpit voice faltered, choked up, and finally fell silent. I made a mental note to self. This man is your boss. Beware.
Pat had been a gunman on a Navy ship in World War II – pacific theater. He never would talk much about it but I imagined him in a vast sea staring down the barrel of an anti-aircraft canon pointing it this way and that at the empty sky watching for the tiny, growing fleck of black that could reign instant death and I imagined that it was then, at age nineteen that he must have decided it was the last time he wanted to see anything go the slightest bit wrong. I swear he met life like someone charging an enemy. He told me once that his strategy for attacking the day – (which was the only time I’ve ever heard the life of a parish pastor referred to in quite that way) – was to put the most unpleasant job on his calendar for 9 o’clock in the morning – get the worst thing over with and done first thing then move on. I had already been summoned to his office at 9:00am enough to know that I never wanted to have another morning meeting with him. He was expecting me in church that day.
He was not the only one expecting me, however. I guess I should say that pretty much anyone who wanted to hear a sermon that day was expecting me because I was supposed to preach. Correction. I was supposed to have preached. It was to have been my first preaching assignment in the 1800 member Hamburg First Presbyterian Church, flagship of the presbytery of Western New York, where I’d been hired 8 months ago, fresh out of seminary, to be the assistant pastor for youth. The reason I’d been up late the night before I failed to show up for my homiletic debut was because I had been writing and rewriting, perfecting and then reperfecting – the sermon. Obsessing and then over obsessing on what I wanted to be my shining moment – eloquent proof that “our young girl minister,” as they referred to me, could do more than lead camp songs. It wasn’t just my own place in the community that was at stake in 1982. It was the reputation of “Clergywomen“ – and their future in the church that I was responsible for, that hung in the balance that day. Now “our young girl minister” was lying in a rumpled bed in the middle of a Sunday morning flaming pink shame spreading across her face like a sudden sunburn, though the only one to behold her ignominious radiance was God.
I lay there for a long moment, staring at the ceiling as a condemned man might spend the night before his execution - suspended between complete paralysis and the impulse to get in my car and not stop driving till I was so deep into the steppes of Alberta that no one could ever find me.
Then I got up and called the church office. In the time it took for me to dial and for the phone to ring on the other end my racing mind rehearsed the possible scenarios that could make this in anyway ok. I was in the emergency room and, thank God, the doctors thought that now that I had regained consciousness I would probably live. I’d been kidnapped, hands and feet bound and I’d just now worked the duct tape off my mouth. All the wheels on my car flew off – all at once - on the way to church. Hell, I’m sorry. I blew it. I’m sorry.
Dr. Butler himself answered the phone in the middle of the first ring as if he had been crouched by the phone all this time, waiting to pounce. “I overslept,” is what I said. Just that. I overslept. My voice was flat and dry. There was a silence on the other end of the phone which lasted exactly one thousand years. When the one thousand years were over, the sound I heard next was laughing. Not a black-ice, sneer-laugh but more like a chuckle – low and warm and knowing. “I missed a funeral once,” he said. First and last time that ever happened. Listen, my wife and I were just leaving to go to lunch. Why don’t you join us at the restaurant and I’ll tell you about it.” “And, hey,” he added, “We covered this morning. Something came up. Change of plans. Moved your sermon to next Sunday. No big deal. See you at the Denny’s on main in half and hour ok?” Oh, that was very ok.
The entire exchange had lasted one thousand years, one minute and forty-five seconds. As I hung up the phone and went to shower so I could go have lunch with my friends on a lovely Sunday morning, I figured that must have been how long it took God to make the world because it felt just like the first day of creation.