Mercy, Not Sacrifice - Second Sunday after Pentecost

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Second Sunday after Pentecost June 11, 2023 by Rev. Holly Huff, Associate Priest

Jesus comes to deliver us from the tyranny of our efforts to earn God’s love. Many of us spend much of our lives working desperately to achieve something that cannot be achieved, because it is simply given. Learning to let God love us, just as we are, accepting the fact of our acceptance, is the gracious work of a lifetime, the easy yoke of love and mercy given without condition that we take up, letting the difficult requirements we human beings try to place on that love drop away. Jesus wants to deliver us from the tyranny of our efforts to earn God’s love and so when he’s criticized by the religious officials who are doing pretty well all things considered in satisfying the systems of religious observances Jesus critiques their transactional approach to the love of God from the inside, quoting from the prophet Hosea, saying, “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

Mercy, not sacrifice. Our experiences in this world teach us to treat God’s love as something that must be earned by hard labor, through exchange-based achievement and merit. We think it’s meant to be difficult, that we must struggle painfully and struggle against ourselves, reshaping a little here, cutting out a piece there to perhaps finally appease an all-too-often angry image of God.

But, Jesus says, gathered around the dinner table with his messy and not-very-respectable friends, says that’s as backwards as thinking we need to cure our own illnesses before we can go to the doctor. “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” Jesus shows us the face of God. He is “the image of the invisible God,” and Jesus shows us that God is not capriciously demanding or prone to fits of vindictive pique but mercy itself. Mercy is who God is. As Pope Francis puts it, “the name of God is mercy.” “Mercy is the divine attitude which embraces, it is God’s giving [God]self to us, accepting us, and bowing to forgive. ... Mercy is God’s identity card.”

Jesus is inviting us into a new and liberating relationship with the God of unconditional love he affectionately calls Father, Papa. Jesus invites us to share in his own intimacy with this God who loves us so freely. Jesus offers his heart as a space for God to fill. A new way is possible, a path where we are not always anxiously working to secure our own spiritual status as good, right, worthy and deserving. As the Rite I Prayer of Humble Access before coming to communion says, our trust is not in our own righteousness but in God, “whose property it is always to have mercy.”

If the name of God is mercy, we can come out from the tyranny of our efforts to earn God’s love and acknowledge that we are poor and needy. That we don’t have it all together and never will. That we can’t sustain our life on our own, not even one breath. Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us sinners. And God does have mercy on us. Abraham and Sarah were “as good as dead” when they were told they would bear a child and become the parents of a new nation God was making. I’m very fond of this description in Romans of God as “the one who calls into being the things that do not exist.” Our Creator God is still creating. Creation is not over and done with, set in motion at some point in the past by a distanced watchmaker god, now left to spin itself out in lonely space. God the Creator is still creating, still attending, always continuing to call us and all creation into being, coaxing us into becoming ourselves, by grace and mercy drawing out our divine potential, from image to likeness, so that that potential can be realized, fulfilled, called into existence.

The God who made us knows we are but dust. The Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, loves us exactly as we are. God comes to us pouring out mercy, not demanding ever greater and more painful efforts. “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” Jesus dines with tax collectors and sinners and takes the flack he meets for that without shame. He defends his supposedly unsavory friends—a group that includes all of us, thanks be to God. “Those who are well have no need of a physician.” “I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” “The son of man came to seek out and save the lost.” All of us left to our own devices are as good as dead, but we are infinitely precious and loved by the merciful God who calls us into being, who wants us to exist.

The woman with the issue of blood comes to Jesus in her need. After 12 years of isolating illness she reaches out in trust and not a little desperation. She too is as good as dead—and from that place of deadness, illness, barrenness, poverty, social exclusion, ritually unclean, forgotten by her community—mercy trails over her in the stale crowd, the fringe of God’s cloak passing by, and her hand stretched out to meet it. “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well”—“He calls into being the things that do not exist”—she is there right at the edge of creation—she knows her need, knows the fragility and precariousness of each moment, and the preciousness, too. God’s mercy is given as sheer gift, unearned and undeserved, because mercy is completely outside those ticky tacky boxes of merit and achievement, mercy implodes those systems of worth that can be earned and—terror!—also lost. Mercy arrives as sheer gift, the rough-woven tasseled hem of a cloak, gifted, leaping into her open hands. “Take heart,” he turns and says. “Your faith has made you well.”

Take heart. The Lord will revive us, Hosea says. “Let us press on to know the Lord; his appearing is as sure as the dawn; he will come to us like the showers, like the spring rains that water the earth.” Pressing on to know the Lord, opening our hands in trust, we take up spiritual practices not in the spirit of making sacrifices to appease God or prove something to ourselves but simply as practices of opening ourselves to receive divine mercy. Prayer burbles up in us, Holy Spirit at work. Like the woman in the crowd, we can’t help but reach out for mercy. There’s a retreat center called Mercy By The Sea in Madison, CT which was a favorite place of mine for a day trip in seminary—a welcome safe haven where I could reconnect with myself, the natural world and with God when studying theology veered into abstraction and self-effort. (A dangerous subject, it must be said!)

The place had formerly been the novice house for Sisters of Mercy. Mix of white cinderbrick and New England clapboard siding on the shore of Long Island Sound. It was a place where I learned to be still. To slow my anxious urge to do something for God as a form of compulsive sacrifice and to settle, relax my efforts, let God love me. I had spent so much time trying to earn God’s favor with a righteousness of my own making, and I was weary. But the waves came in and out, just as wide as God’s mercy. An afternoon spent stepping slowly through the pebbles and shells and grasses left my boots laced with salt all through the next hectic week of school with its assignments and grades, evaluations and deadlines, reminding me: mercy mercy mercy. It is already done, all given ahead of time, given before, it is all fore-given. I started to understand something of the gentleness of prayer: not a work of my own but the lowering my defenses to make the slightest opening for God’s subtle work on me and in me. That’s it. Letting my guard down, just a little. That’s all it takes. Water finds a way, as roofers and shipmakers know.

Dutch Catholic priest Henri Nouwen wrote a number of his books in the library at Mercy By The Sea while he was teaching at Yale Divinity School. He writes here about the movement from trying to fix ourselves up by ourselves, that temptation to sacrifice, to simply relying on the mercy of Jesus: “The older we become, the more we realize how limited we are in our ability to love, how impure our hearts are, and how complex our motivations are. And there is a real temptation to want to look inside of ourselves and clean it all out, and become people with a pure heart, unstained intentions, and unconditional love. Such an attempt is doomed to failure and leads us to ever greater despair. The more we look into ourselves and try to figure ourselves out, the more we become entangled in our own imperfections. Indeed, we cannot save ourselves. Only Jesus can save us. That is why it is so important to [turn] your inner eye from the complexities of your own broken heart toward the pure but broken heart of Jesus. Looking at him and his immense mercy will give you the ability to accept your own imperfections and to really let yourself be cared for by the mercy and love of Jesus. …the more we come to know ourselves, the more we come to know God’s mercy, which is beyond the mercy we know…. There in the pure heart of God, embraced by his unconditional love, you will find the true joy and peace your heart is longing for.”

Mercy comes to us in the press of the crowd. Jesus calls not the righteous but sinners, and he calls us his friends. So “Take heart!” —there’s hope for me and you after all, good as dead as we may be. Father Abraham shows us the way: the promise rests on grace, not our adherence to the law. We are justified by the righteousness of faith, not anything we can claim for ourselves but Jesus’s own righteousness, which he is happy to lend to us. He is dying to give it to us, longs to wrap his cloak around us and heal us. Nothing to earn: divine love is always already pouring itself out for us. So let us go and learn what this means: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” Amen.