Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity
“Be ye merciful, as your Father also is merciful”
These are words we have heard before only two weeks ago in the Gospel reading for Trinity IV: there at the beginning and setting for the parable of the blind leading the blind; here at the end of an extraordinary passage about loving your enemies. The first suggests how mercy is the counter to our hypocrisy and self-righteousness; the second, the deeper reality of mercy itself is on display. Love your enemies is mercy indeed!
We live in a world of conflicts and divisions, of hatreds and animosities, of bullies and cowards. How do we deal with such things? The tendenz of our age is to assert our various senses of entitlement, our claims to what we are owed, to a sense of justice or more accurately, self-righteousness. We think we deserve certain things and if we can’t get them it is someone else’s fault and, of course, there are always things which offend us. What we assert as a culture is the right not to be offended and endlessly to demand redress. There is no mercy, no toleration, no compassion in this; only a sense of injury, the world of the perpetually aggrieved and the endlessly resentful. All because we think we are better than others.
Today’s collect counters the entitlement culture. God has “prepared for them that love” him, “such good things as pass man’s understanding” – something more. What God seeks for us “exceeds” – goes beyond – “all that we can desire.” This is the great mercy of God that is the true and only counter to the divisions and tensions in our hearts and culture. It is precisely the something more of God’s love for our humanity that transcends our hearts of hatred and enmity, of hurt and injury, of endless cries of entitlement about what we think we are owed.
Mercy is precisely what we are not owed. It is precisely what is given in spite of ourselves, in spite of our claims to certain rights. The contemporary ‘rights culture’ pits us against one another; it creates enmities. Mercy counters and transcends our hatreds. It is about deep love. “Love – and you shall be loved” as one character says to another in David Adams Richards’ novel, “Crimes Against My Brother.”
