Mercy is the Antidote to Violence: Sept 14

Year C, Pentecost 14                                       Luke 15:1-10                                                                                   It’s been a very rough week.  At the same time, given how the last few years have been, it feels far too familiar.  I was reading one article that said that political violence comes in waves.  It’s contagious.  What the author didn’t explain was how it was stopped. Some contagious viruses just run their course.  Others require an antidote, a vaccine. We saw that with COVID.      

On the same day that Charlie Kirk was gunned down, there was another shooting in a school.  The shootings were within minutes of one another, one in Utah, the other in the neighboring state of Colorado.  Fortunately the student in Colorado did not succeed in killing anyone.  He wounded two teens and then killed himself, which is also tragic.

I remember when the shooting at Columbine happened. I remember because it was the first mass school shooting (actually the first school shooting) I had ever heard of.  Apparently there was also one in 1966 on a college campus, but that was before my time.  That was 30 years before the Columbine shooting.  The previous mass school shooting was 200 years before that in the 1700s.  Now school shootings are far too common.  We expect them. That is the reality that our children live in.  

What is the antidote?    There is a lot that can be said in regards to public policy.  When we are more concerned about the right to bear arms than the rights of our children to live, we have a serious problem.  But I am here to talk about God and the readings for today.  While I think that sensible laws can help, I also believe that there is a deeper problem in our world that is spiritual.   The antidote to violence is mercy.

                We see several references to mercy in our readings for today.  We see it in our Old Testament reading when God relents and decides not to punish the people of Israel.  In our Psalm, we hear the Psalmist ask for mercy. Paul talks about the fact that God’s mercy had allowed him to change from a blasphemer and violent persecutor into an apostle of Jesus Christ.

                The Gospel reading is also about mercy, even though it doesn’t use that word.  Jesus tells three parables (only 2 that are included in today’s reading).  These parables are told in response to comments that the Pharisees and the scribes made.  They were grumbling and talking about the fact that Jesus welcomed sinners and ate with them. 

I realize it might seem silly to judge someone because they were eating with sinners, especially when we know that all of us are sinners to one degree or another.  These people weren’t sinners in the way that we are all sinners.  They were sinners who were known by the whole community as sinners.  We might call them notorious sinners.  What upset the Pharisees was not that Jesus was merely talking to these sinners, but that he was sharing a meal with them.  According to Jewish law, observant Jews were not supposed to eat with notorious sinners.  Jesus was not just an observant Jew, he was recognized as a leader in the Jewish community.  This act was scandalous. 

Let’s just assume these were the kind of sinners you wouldn’t want to be sharing a meal with.   Imagine someone you see in person or on the news and you think , those are just horrible human beings.  How can they live with themselves?  Imagine Jesus sharing a meal with those people.

In response to this criticism, Jesus tells three stories of things, animals or people who were lost.  The first was about a shepherd who left 99 sheep to find the one who got away. The second was about a woman who lost one coin and while she still had 9, she looked fervently for this one lost coin until she found it. When both the shepherd and the woman found the sheep and the coin, they called all their friends and had a party. They were so happy they had found the one thing that they had lost.  Jesus then says, “Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

Who was lost in this story? Was it the sinners who were eating with Jesus or was it the Pharisees and scribes who were judging them? I think it was both. They were just lost in different ways.  The difference between the two were that one group knew that they were lost and one group thought they had it all figured out. Jesus would have been overjoyed to be with either group, but one group didn’t think they really needed him and the other group knew they needed him, or maybe they were realizing that bit by bit.

Both groups deserved mercy.  Mercy is a word that we don’t use very often.  We use it in church.  It’s all over our liturgy.  But is that something you pray for…for yourself or others? It’s not something that I often pray for and I had to wonder why.  I think I associate mercy with what comes after punishment.  We really don’t like talking about punishment, do we? 

Since we had our annual dinner with Mikveh Israel this Wednesday, I looked up the Hebrew word for mercy.  It shares the same root as the Hebrew word for womb.  The idea is that God’s mercy towards humanity is like the protection that a baby has in the womb.  Mercy isn’t an alternative to punishment.  It’s divine protection.  It’s also more than divine protection.  It’s about how we protect one another, literally and figuratively.

I started the sermon by saying that the antidote to violence is mercy.  I don’t mean that God’s mercy literally protect us from bullets.  That’s not how it works.  What I mean is that God’s mercy and our ability to be vessels of that mercy can stop the virus of violence from spreading. 

I had never heard of Charlie Kirk before Wednesday.  Yet as soon as the news broke that he died it was like people were equipping for battle.  The right blamed the rhetoric of the radical left and even implied that it was someone on the radical left who fired the gun.  The left blamed it on the rhetoric of the right and some even blamed it on the words of Kirk himself.  And then the right and the left started judging one another on their reactions. Once the shooter was caught, people on the left could not help but mention that his parents were Republicans and gun owners. 

This seems to happen so often when we discover the identity of the perpetrators of these evil acts.  We dissect their lives until we can find that one thing that will align them with whoever is on the other side.  Lord have mercy.

Yet who does Jesus align himself with? The lost.  The sinner and the outcast.  We are all lost.  We are all sinners.  We are all cast out in some way or another.  The sooner we can see that, the sooner we can stop vilifying one another and actually work for a solution.  I would guess that the vast majority of people in this country do not support murdering our political opponents.  The vast majority don’t think our children should have to risk their lives to be educated.  Yet we can’t put down our differences for just a few days to come up with some solution?

Each one of us desperately needs God’s mercy.  But here’s the beautiful thing. Our need for mercy is also the source of mercy.  If we can clearly see our own need for mercy, we can more willingly provide that mercy to others.  If we can see ourselves as lost, then imagine how much easier it will be to find one another.