Preaching Justice and Mercy
The tension between judgment and forgiveness finds itself played out in myriad times and places. Arne Burn Lie, who is a member of my U.C.C. congregation, was a young Protestant freedom fighter in Norway at the time of the Nazi occupation in the 1940s. He and three of his friends were arrested, tortured, and imprisoned in Dachau. His three friends perished. When he tells this story today, he continues to express his outrage that he lost his schoolmates, and that millions of others should have suffered in unthinkable ways. The senselessness of their deaths continues to haunt him, sixty-five years later. Where, he wonders, is God’s judgment in the presence of such sinfulness? And is there also a place for God’s forgiveness in midst of atrocity?
Reinhold Niebuhr faces this question directly in The Nature and Destiny of Man, published in 1941. We can have all kinds of glibness about how justice and mercy can be combined but Niebuhr insists that they can only be combined by God. Humans cannot be just and merciful at the same time. Justice takes us in one direction, and mercy in another. Because we are limited by sin, we cannot overcome the tension between pardon and accountability.
It is this reality that only within God that judgment and forgiveness be reconciled, that brings us before Christ and the Christian theology of atonement. Without personal wrestling with the impossible relationship between justice and mercy, it is impossible to understand how God can perform atonement, declares Niebuhr. When we see the conflict in our lives as we reflect on the relationships between individuals, we are overcome by the difficulties of fulfilling the commandment to be merciful and the need to seek justice. God has promised to judge all human sin. God has offered to forgive human beings for their sinfulness. In the conflict between judgment and mercy, how are we to understand our relationships to each other and to God? Mercy and judgment can only be truly combined only in God, and it is the God of Holy Week and Easter who shows us just how tragic and profound is God’s solution. Niebuhr describes it – the meaning of atonement draws together two impossibly divergent concepts and reconciles them in one historical and spiritual event.
That reconciliation, Niebuhr points out, is in Christ’s sacrifice. God takes on the brokenness of human history, submits to excruciating punishment and through that action, suffers death on the cross, and brings atonement – the combination of justice and mercy. In the nailing of God’s own body to the cross, and the Holy One’s subsequent death, there is resolution. As Niebuhr describes it, it is in this terrible death and resurrection of Christ that there can be the atonement, the atonement, that we seek.
The April lectionary is replete with opportunities for preaching on atonement, beginning with Holy Week and continuing to the diverse post-resurrection Easter stories. Humbled and awed, we may face the task of addressing the reconciliation of justice and mercy.
Easter Sunday
April 4, 2010
John 20:1-18
Easter in John’s Gospel presents abundant themes for us. They include thinking outside the box, understanding that our hearts will break, they may be healed and remade, discovering that angels often are hidden in the most unexpected places – even graves- and that learning that Christ’s ultimate atoning gift for us begins to release us from all fear.
“I’m not very religious,” the student of my chaplain friend used to say to him. To say, “I’m not very religious” means some very familiar things. It means at least something like this: “I don’t claim to know just how to live, but I want to get on with living. I don’t want always to be looking over my shoulder. But I’m willing to take that risk. When I’m called to bear losses, I’ll bear them. When I’m called to die, then I’ll die. What I’ve really done something bad, then I’ll make up for it as best I can.” Bold talk. But as Robert Frost says in his poem The Strong Are Say Nothing, “the strong are saying nothing until they see.”
Easter breaks through our defenses, just as it broke through Mary’s as she stood weeping at the tomb, and it forces us to think outside the box. It forces us to see divinity in the seemingly ordinary people around us, to see our own salvation in the midst of our deepest sorrow.
A colleague of the chaplain’s once told the senior class, “Life in the end will probably break your heart. May life fill you heart before it breaks it.” Indeed, this is what happened to Mary in the graveyard. And so the preacher may ask, “Will you let life fill your heart even as it breaks it?” Coleman Brown asks the question, Is it not true that to hear of the resurrection of Christ suggests to us an unspeakable joy – even in only for a moment in the music or as a hope we quickly repress: For if it is true that Christ died for our sins, and that he was buried, and then on the third day he was raised; if that is true, then it occurs to us in almost inaccessible places of our hearts and minds that this world and life – our life and the whole business of living – are different from the way we are going about it. And wonderful as that may sound once in a while to a part of us, another part of us wants not at all to hear that life is different from the way we’re going about it.
The presence of the Holy One, hidden among us, is one of the most powerful themes of the Easter account in John’s Gospel. Further, the presence of angelic hosts, tucked away in graveyards, has much to teach us. Finally, the opportunity to touch holiness in the midst of our deepest sin and deepest fears is the every day powerful promise of Easter.
Second Sunday of Easter
April 11, 2010
John 20: 19-31
Themes of living with doubt, forgiveness, and peace offer opportunities for preaching from this post-resurrection account recorded by John.
When I was a freshly ordained young minister, I traveled to Nicaragua with Witness for Peace and was invited to preach a sermon on the scripture of the day. The venue was a small, Spirit-filled rural church; and the scripture was the story of doubting Thomas. I though I knew what to say. In Spanish, I conveyed what I had learned in divinity school; that it is perfectly acceptable to have doubts; we all do; it is perfectly normal. The important thing about doubt is to be honest with it, with ourselves, and with God. After I had taken my seat and respectful silence had followed, one by one the Nicaraguans stood up and politely, earnestly disagreed. We can not afford to have doubts; life is too fragile for that, they said. We must believe that God is present to us, advocating for us, and we must hold our faith even though everything else in the world could fail. For the Nicaraguans, believing that God loves us and longs for our freedom was far more important that dabbling in the area of doubt. I learned about faith that day.
The themes of forgiveness and peace are also profound in the story of the resurrection. Jesus returns from the dead to proclaim peace. The first thing he says is, “Peace be with you.” The resurrected Christ arrives with a plea for peace. He continues to entreat his followers to practice forgiveness, and offers the complex layering of the act of pardoning: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Retaining the sins of any seems to imply a personal connection to those sins, almost as if one keeps track of them. Keeping the records of other’s wrongdoings may not be the best way to spend one’s Easter days. Preaching doubt and faith or peace and forgiveness, are among the opportunities for the second Sunday of Easter.
Third Sunday of Easter
April 18, 2010
John 21: 1-19
My colleague, Rev. Bob Hagopian, U.C.C. pastor and fire chaplain in Rowley, MA. fondly calls the morning’s lesson from John “the first breakfast.” It is a story with weight: it begins with the hunger of the disciples and then their great joy: it continues with the burden of the catch and then the unbroken nets; and finally it depicts the emptiness of the beach and then the charcoal fire with breakfast cooking on it.
Such a feast surely has sacramental overtones. Jesus welcomed the disciples as he often did (to use Gail Doktor’s poetic image) by feeding their hollow bellies and breaking bread for their hungry souls. He even took care to look after their material needs: the nets survived the massive catch without ripping, so they could be used again. I spent one sabbatical living with fishermen in the Amazon rainforest, and the mending of nets was a major portion of our weekly chores. Net mending requires young, nearsighted eyes and extraordinary patience. If one’s eyes are farsighted or old, the gaps are missed and the fish slip through the spaces and the work of searching for a day’s catch is doubled or tripled. Tending the nets is just one more notice of Jesus’ remarkable attention to the details of the need of the common people.
Fourth Sunday of Easter
April 25, 2010
John 10:22-30
The crucial passage in this scripture, and it summarizes the rest of the April lectionary study, is “The Father and I are one.” These words that John presents Jesus as saying encapsulates the critical theological summary that Jesus is truly human and truly God. This religious concept transcends common sense. It presents the reality that one can plumb the depths of human existence and find that God can truly meet the problems of the human condition. Indeed, in the context of the Trinity, God understands these problems from the inside. It is crucial, to the writer of the Gospel of John, that God was in humanity, and that Christ and the Father were not finally separated, but that they were united as one. The mystery of the Trinity deals with the deepest questions about human life.
Christ dwelt at the center, and in the margins, among the powerful, and among the common people. Christ’s legacy is best understood by individuals who may then influence world events. Let the questions of aging freedom fighter and concentration camp survivor Arne Brunlie stand for those of any common person. Arne’s life has been formed by experiences of deeds of sinfulness and atrocity, by acts of compassion and courage, by death and survival, by justice and mercy. Each Sunday he comes to our sanctuary continually shaping his life as a living response. He has found his own way to make meaning: creating art, serving others, speaking out and telling his story, raising a family and starting over in a supportive community. Faith has also guided him. The lessons of the April lectionary illuminate the biting realities of the difference between justice and mercy. Christ’s life stands as a lived human life, woven together with the humble discovery that he and the father are one. Ultimately, by faith, we receive his live as reconciliation, in answer to our question of the daily relation of judgment and mercy.
(I am most grateful to Coleman B. Brown, retired Chaplain at Colgate University for sharing a conversation with me about these issues.)
