Rev. Eric Anderson What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: Mercy

The prophets said it. Jesus said it. God desires mercy.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the ninth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 9:9-13, 8-26). This follows the conclusion of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. I read it as Jesus providing examples, demonstration, embodying, if you will, the very teachings that the Sermon on the Mount is filled with.

There are a lot of healings here, and Jesus healed some people that you might not expect. This section begins with Jesus calling somebody that people would not have expected. He summoned Matthew, a tax collector, to join him amongst his followers. Some of the other religious leaders had questions, and they went to Jesus’ disciples and asked why it was that the Teacher welcomed tax collectors and sinners and even ate with them.

Religious leaders didn’t do that. It was important in those days that religious leaders maintained themselves as clean in order to perform their functions.

Jesus responded by reminding them of something that the prophets had said over and over again. Quoting them, quoting God, Jesus said, “Go and learn what it means: I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

I desire mercy, not sacrifice.

The cleanliness was all about being prepared to properly offer the devotional sacrifices of the Temple or of the Tabernacle. The prophets had rightly pointed out, and Jesus rightly reinforced it, that God’s preoccupation with human behavior is not exclusively or even primarily with the sacrificial practices. God’s concern with human behavior is the way we treat one another.

And how are we to treat one another? With mercy and not with some kind of self-righteous piety.

People in the ancient world: they got that wrong over and over again, which is why the prophets had to keep saying it. People in Jesus’ day got that wrong over and over again, and that is why Jesus had to say it. In our day, people get it wrong over and over again, and that’s why I have to repeat it.

God desires mercy, not some kind of pietistic religious practice, that may or may not do something about our own relationship with God, but does nothing for the other people for whom God cares.

God desires mercy for everybody around us, and God desires mercy for us as well.

That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.

Rev. Eric Anderson Pastor's Corner, What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: The Effect of Faith

In telling the story of faithful people over the centuries, the author of Hebrews told of people who gained much and of people who lost much. What is the effect of faith?

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the end of the eleventh chapter of Hebrews and the first two verses of chapter twelve (Hebrews 11:29-12:2).

Hebrews is not an easy book. The author confronted a disconnect between the emerging practices of the Christian Church there in the first century, and the vast majority of the people that surrounded them, including certain sects of Judaism but definitely including the vast majority of those who were worshipping the Roman or the Greek gods. The difference was the practice of sacrifice.

The author of Hebrews argued that sacrifice had, through its entire practice, been a symbolic one. That is, it represented a deeper reality of the relationship between God and human beings. The author of Hebrews called it faith: the reliance upon God to create a reality that it was even greater than the one that people currently lived in.

In this section, the author listed a large number of people who had trusted in God. Some of them had obtained great good fortune. They had become monarchs; they had received the resurrection of their loved ones. Others? Well, they didn’t do so well. They suffered tortures; they suffered execution. They came to sad places in the desert to live out their days.

“Since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses,” wrote the author of Hebrews, let us hold firm into that same faith.

It’s a puzzling passage, in great part because how is one supposed to understand the effectiveness of faith or even the effect of faith? If people of faith over the centuries had both attained great heights and been dropped into deep pits, what is the worth of faith? If so many great names of faith had not seen the fulfillments of their hopes, and that we (in the author of Hebrews day) are the ones experiencing the fulfillment of faith, then what is the effect of faith? What was the effect of faith for all of them?

Two thousand years later I have to look at this and say there was certainly a fulfillment of faith in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but we still live in “the already and the not yet” — the already of God’s care and compassion and love for us; and the not yet of a world of peace and justice and harmony. Whatever we might want to say about the world, we cannot call it that.

So what is the effect of faith? I would argue that the effect of faith is to keep us in relationship with God, an active, ongoing, real, and deepening relationship, not simply one of bringing occasional gifts to some sort of transactional deity that vaguely promises that everything will be OK. Instead, the practice of faith, the discipline of prayer, these are the things that hold us closer to God, that that bring us closer to God, that buttress our hopes, that strengthen our limbs and our minds for the tasks which will in the end help us and the others working with us to build that world that God has promised.

It is always the already. It is always the not yet, at least, until the end of time.

But in that relationship with God, we can see our hopes fulfilling as we work, as we pray, and as we are filled with the Holy Spirit.

That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.