Missional is a word that has become quite popular in Church
circles recently. It is a way of talking about being church in our twenty first
century context. We’ve come through a long period of time when the church was,
to varying degrees, at the centre of our western civilisation. What people call
Christendom. Now we find ourselves more on the margins. I don’t have to
tell many of you this, you may not have the words for it but you’ve been living
through it, the world has changed in the west rapidly over the past fifty or so
years and Christianity has become sidelined. In the face of growing
materialism, secularism, migration with its ensuing cultural and religious
diversity, and if we are honest troubles within our own faith, there has been a
decline in church attendance. As Ian Grant says “most New Zealanders now can’t
remember the churches their grandparents were staying away from.” In the
Christendom mode churches were what are called settler churches, you put up a
church where a new group of people settled to cater for the people of your
denomination or flavour in that place. You opened your door and those people
came. This church at its roots was part of that in the 1940’s and 50’s as
Auckland expanded. (Al though there are parts of this parish whose history goes back over 135 years).
Being Missional or a Missional a church is being aware that
things have changed, that we can’t just sit back and expect people to come;
rather that again we have to go into the community. We need again to take
seriously Jesus Commission that we heard at the end of our Easter Sunday bible
reading to go into all nations, all people groups and make disciples, showing
them and teaching them the good news of Jesus Christ. In Christendom that was
overseas mission, in post christendom it’s right here and now. As we work at
what that means it’s good for us to focus again on Jesus Sermon on the Mount,
which has been called the manifesto of the Kingdom of God, or the job
description for followers of Jesus, because as Dietrich Bonheoffer has
said
“The restoration of the church
will surely come from a new kind of community, which will have nothing in
common with the old but a life of uncompromising adherence to the Sermon on the
Mount in imitation of Christ. I believe the time has come to rally people
together for this.”
That’s probably quite a heavy introduction but it’s why this
year we are taking the time to explore the Sermon on the Mount, starting with
looking at the Beatitudes: ‘The Jesus Guide to Happiness’ or what NT Wright more
aptly calls the ‘wonderful news’ of God’s activity in the world through Jesus of
Nazareth. It’s good after having celebrating Christ’s death and resurrection to
go back and look at that list with Jesus commission ringing in our ears and the
promise that He is with us to the end of the age, even in turbulent times like
we are going through.
This morning we are looking at the wonderful news for those
who are merciful, they shall receive mercy’. Blessed are the merciful for they
will receive mercy.
We all use the phrases like “you don’t get anything for nothing these
days” or “there is no such thing as a free lunch” or “you’ve got to spend money
to… make money” we are used to that sort of economic thinking. So when you read
this beatitude it’s easy to do so with the idea reciprocity in mind. That in
order to get mercy you must show mercy. That it’s a simple tit for tat
transaction here: Mercy, in mercy out. And I have to admit taking it in
isolation it does have that kind of feel to it, although that doesn’t really
jell with the idea of showing mercy. Does it?
To understand it we need to see this beatitude in the context of
what’s gone before. Here is the fifth beatitude, what has gone before talks of people who are
spiritually poor, who mourn, are humble and meek, and who hunger and thirst for
righteousness, in each case those things are meet by God through Christ. The
Kingdom of God is theirs, they shall be comforted, they shall inherit the land,
and they shall be filled. In a real sense they are the process by which we come
to know Jesus Christ and are restored to a relationship with God. It is that
great invitation that revolution of grace, that we experience. We encounter
God’s grace and mercy and it fills us up with new life. Now we see that from
that wonderful news that revolution of grace mercy should swell up in our own lives
towards others. We have encountered God’s great love and like a spring of
living water it overflows from within us to the spiritually poor, mourning,
humble, thirsty and hungry round us, reflecting the one who is with us and is
transforming us. It’s a natural outworking of the working of God in our lives.
Yes there is reciprocity involved but what little we are able to do pales in
comparison to what God in Christ has done for us.
In Matthew 18:21-35 Jesus tells the parable which the TNIV calls
“Parable of the unmerciful servant.” A servant owes Millions to his rich king,
more than he can ever wish to pay back, even if he won the 26.5 million in
lotto. You’d still have to keep your day job at the local supermarket. When he
is called to account before the king he begs for mercy and his debt is
forgiven, wiped clean, written off, no serious fraud squad investigation or
anything. Then he goes out from there and sees his mate who owes him $10 from
the other night and when he can’t pay it throws him into prison till he can
pay. The king hears about this and has the servant who couldn’t show mercy
thrown into prison. We tend to view this parable, with through the lens of
reciprocity. We tend to think the punch line is if we don’t forgive other
people our sins then God will not forgive our sins, God is the ultimate IRD
inspector, making sure we pay every cent under the law. We don’t read it with a
sense of humour, we miss the absurdity, the almost Monty Python-esque nature of
this parable. That one who has been forgiven so much should even think of not
showing mercy to someone whose debt was so small in compassion. We are to be
merciful because we are so filled with the mercy of God, we are to forgive
because we have been forgiven so much, we are to love because God first loved
us and sent his son to die on the cross, paying the price for all we had done
wrong. We don’t show mercy to receive mercy, we will and I’ll get on to that
soon, but because we have been shown so much mercy, the steadfast love of the Lord
which is new every morning. Amen…
Can I say sadly down through the ages the church hasn’t been
known first and foremost for our mercy and love…We should be, but we are broken
people spiritual poor on a journey back to God and back to wholeness. We need
to be shown the on going mercy of God in our lives.
What does it mean to be merciful, to have mercy? This
picture comes from Anne brink and her big city gallery and looking at the
Sermon on the Mount from her urban
setting.
In the sacred journey Chris Surber picks up the idea of
mercy being the character of the God who dwells with and within us he says
“We are not called to acts of mercy. We are called to be
merciful. The merciful acts of our hands flow from the abundance of the mercy
which dwells or does not dwell with in us.”
In his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount Martin Luther
points to the fact that for Jesus contemporaries it may have been easy for them
to agree with Jesus statement blessed are those who hunger and thirst for
righteousness, as that was what the Pharisees were all about but it was a false
righteousness as they simply poured scorn and were angry at those who did not
live up to their standards. Luther
points out that true holiness is compassionate and loving. It is easy for us to
fall into the same trap, in the first of the seven letters to the seven church
in the book of revelation, the church at Ephesus is commended for keeping the
truth, but reminded that they have lost their love, their first love for God
and their willingness to show love and compassion.
J Ellsworth Kalas is a bit more practical he says being
merciful is the costly process of showering kindness on other people.
He says it’s costly in three ways.
It’s emotionally costly, because to have mercy is not to sit
back disinterestedly from the plight of other people but to be willing to enter
in to their world and plight and empathise with them. if it is to forgive there
is a very real emotional price tag we have to be willing to deal with all the
anger and pain that goes along with slights and wrongs done to us individually
and as groups.
It has a high practical price tag as we are often called to
sacrificially give to care to those in need. In our time poor culture, where
leisure time is a sign of real wealth, the investment is often in costly time
given as well .
And it is intellectually costly because of the challenge to
show mercy in a way that will lead to the best outcome: To work out the just
and merciful solution. Will simply giving money to a family made poor by
gambling addiction be the merciful thing or will it simply put off dealing with
the underlying problems. What is the best way to show mercy in that setting?
That’s a challenge for us individually and as a church. Showing mercy
is at the heart of being missional. Something I think we are all still learners
at. AS my friend John Daniel who has been a missionary to New Zealand for the
past forty years from the Indian sub-continent says it’s about the four ‘L’s of
mission. It calls us to live with our
community, not separate from it, not some sort of Christian ghetto, learn to speak their language; I don’t know
about you but I’ve become so in-culturated in churchy-ness, in Rotorua one
young person came up to me who remembered me from speaking at a school assembly
and said hey your that church guy, and had to admit yes I am ‘that church guy”,
I find myself talking at cross purposes
with people, when I want to be about the purpose of the cross. That's where the third "L" comes in Learn to Listen intently. And the fourth L
is love them where they hurt. It was interesting to read in the Herald the
other week about a survey of the needs of mothers of young children in New
Zealand. One of the main issues they felt was a sense of isolation, made worse
by the fact that this new thing we call suburbia enforces that isolation, and
that with that came a growing sense of depression and then after reading that
to walk out into wondrous chaos and community that is mainly music and sporty 4
kids.
For you they will receive mercy is the promise attached to this
beatitude: It is the wonderful news of Jesus teaching and Jesus person. As we
live mercifully towards others in response to the great mercy and grace we have
received from God, we experience God’s continuing grace and mercy in our lives.
The wonderful news is that Jesus is alive and is with us in the up and downs
ebbs and flows of life, and does not treat us as we deserve but with mercy. He
is a help in times of trouble. He knows what we are going through because he
has identified with us, remember a man of sorrows acquainted with grief. He is
able to help, often that mercy comes through the hands and feet of other
people, or in ways I describe as being surprised by the goodness and love of
God, unlooked for and undeserved. he is a god who is patient with us, and
forgiving. He is a God who can be trusted to act in the right
and righteous way, not always the way we want, let’s be real God is not a
cosmic wonder drug to make it all right but there is ‘wonderful news’. AS it
says in the book of Jeremiah, my plans for you are good not for harm. We also
live in the world of instant gratification, of the seemingly miraculous solving
of problems, we saw it with the Rena disaster, why in this world of amazing
technology are they taking so long to get all those containers off the ship and
to stop an oil leak, how difficult can
it be?” But part of the comfort we have is that God is not captive to the here
and now yes we experience that mercy now but we will see his mercy fulfilled in
eternity.
Let me just finish by quoting 1 John 4:10-12
“10 This
is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an
atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved
us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God;
but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in
us.”
Blessed are the merciful for they will receive mercy
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