Scriptures: Psalm 86:8-17, Matthew 10:24-33

Harry Emerson Fosdick, that great preacher at The Riverside Church in New York City, once famously said that the purpose of Christianity is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”  You may have heard me use that phrase before; it’s certainly one of the best short definitions of what Christianity is all about and what Christians are called to do.  As with all short summaries this one runs the danger of becoming too pat a formula.  But a case could certainly be made that most of the good work of Christianity throughout the centuries falls into one or the other of these areas.  We refer to these aspects of the gospel as the “pastoral” and the “prophetic”, and what Fosdick was wanting Christians – especially ministers – to realize with his two-part statement was that you can’t have one without the other.

Sometimes ministers get all wrapped up in the second half of Fosdick’s equation – wanting to afflict the comfortable out of the apathy which can rest so heavily upon the church of Christ when there is a world to be worked in and redeemed.  This kind of conscience-pricking afflicting is necessary, but it cannot come at the expense of forgetting that the Word of God is also one that brings peace and comfort to the troubled soul.  Just yesterday I read in The Christian Century a book review of the collected sermons of William Sloane Coffin.  Coffin was one of Fosdick’s successors at The Riverside Church, well known as, according to the reviewer, “a swashbuckling, fast-talking, left-leaning social conscience of a nation.”  But here’s what the reviewer has to say about his sermons:  “Here, to be sure, is Coffin the prophet, boldly taking on presidents, powers and principalities and bluntly announcing, ‘It’s a sin to build a nuclear weapon.’  But here also is Coffin the pastor, comforting the congregation with the promise, ‘God will take care of us.  She hears our prayers.’”  God cares about you.  The comfort which God offers is not a comfortableness that keeps us out of life’s battles.  It is, however, a way towards freedom from fear and despair.

I’ve been watching this past week while working out in the mornings the American Film Theater’s version of Eugene O’Neil’s play The Iceman Cometh, with Lee Marvin as Hickey.  It’s one of my favorite plays.  It takes place in Harry Hope’s bar in 1912 New York City, where a rag-tag group including anarchists, prostitutes, refugees from the Boer War, people who have lost their jobs drink up their good friend Harry Hope’s booze and stay perpetually drunk in order to forget how miserable they are.  Harry himself hasn’t left his saloon in 20 years, ever since his wife, Bessie, died.  Each one of them has what Hickey comes to call their “pipe dreams” – that sense that tomorrow I’ll get out and walk around the ward and meet my constituents, tomorrow I’ll go get my job back, tomorrow we’ll get married and live on a farm in New Jersey.  One main character, Larry Slade, has a pipe dream that he has left all caring behind and is in the “grandstands” just waiting to die.  Hickey, a traveling salesman, comes as he does once a year ostensibly to celebrate Harry Hope’s 60^th birthday party – but this time instead of being the proverbial life of the party Hickey brings a different message.  He has come to bring them peace, he says, by getting them to face their pipe dreams, act on the basis of what they really need rather than letting the booze do their talking, and in the process bring them to the kind of peace Hickey feels he has found for himself.  What he is preaching is, in fact, a kind of gospel.  He begins by afflicting them out of the comfort level that drink has given them; he wants them to find the comfort of what he calls his peace.

But this is, of course, a false comfort, for it is based on a lie that Hickey has been telling himself about the nature of his marriage, his wife’s love for him, and what he felt he had to do in order to preserve that love.  In the end Hickey has no peace or comfort to offer, and the denizens of Harry Hope’s bar happily return to their pipe dreams and their booze.

I said that The Iceman Cometh is one of my favorite plays, but it is so not because it offers easy answers to the human condition – indeed, as you can probably tell from this brief description, it is negative, almost nihilistic, in its outlook.  Rather, it is powerful because it sets up the kind of situation into which the word of “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” needs to be brought.  There is little of overt religion in The Iceman Cometh, but if there were it would be to raise the underlying question:  “Why should God care about me?”  As the denizens of Harry Hope’s realize all too well, death and disillusionment, suffering and separation, are no respecters of believer or non-believer.  Within the large and small tragedies that make up our daily living it is not easy to affirm a comforting and merciful God.

In part, the difficulty of making this affirmation stems from the fact that human beings are mortal and fallible, and thus they are constantly disappointing us.  I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that there is a psychology around the death of a loved one that makes you feel that person has rejected you; certainly, among the emotions that Ann and I have felt about Bruce’s death are that sense of rejection and a deep disappointment.  Another example of disappointment might be the young teenager who discovers that the one she has given her love and trust to is going out with someone else.  Now, it might be obvious to say that this example has nowhere near the significance of the tragedy of death; but for each individual when they are at a point in their lives where disappointment and disillusionment have come because of the way someone else has behaved a sense of the tragic can be there.

When other people show up in our lives as mortal and fallible it’s a fairly easy step to say of God, “How can I trust you?  You, too, will disappoint me.  How can you care, completely and unreservedly, for me?”  But the problem with these questions is that they make God into a person – someone whose love depends on my loveableness and my faithfulness.  Yet, as Jesus tells us again and again in the gospels, and as we heard last week from the letter of I John, God is love and God’s love and mercy are ever faithful.  Long before Jesus the Psalmist saw the nature of God as love.  The Psalmist on more than one occasion speaks of God’s “steadfast love toward me,” and in Psalm 86 goes on to say, “you have delivered my soul from the depths of Sheol” – Sheol is an Hebraic idiom for the despair and disappointment and disillusionment we have been talking about.  The beautiful and captivating verse 15 sums up for the Psalmist his or her and our understanding of who God is:  “But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.”  Now, admittedly, this kind of language written in a fairly unsophisticated time again tends to make God into a person writ large; but even so isn’t this an image of the kind of a person you would want to have by your side – a person who is not mortal or fallible and who does not disappoint but rather who constantly and consistently offers the comforts of mercy?

When Jesus was confronted by the question about God, “How can you care for me?,” he pointed to the sparrows, which were a cheap commodity in that day, even as the pigeons that fly around our eaves outside and drink out of the water that seeps out of the ground would be considered pretty worthless by most of us.  And Jesus says this surprising thing:  “Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.”  To a captive and persecuted people, who considered themselves pretty insignificant, this was heady stuff.  God cares about even each of the hairs on your head!  Whoa!  (Sorta makes you question whether you ought ever to get a haircut again, doesn’t it?  And then there are those of us who are balding who wonder if God really cares as much for us….. but I’m going off on a digression again.)  Jesus’ point – his reassurance – is “So do not be afraid…..”  What keeps people from recognizing and accepting God’s care, then and today, is fear – especially the fear that I am not worthy (Mike Myers and Dana Carvey as Wayne and Garth really did have it right with their “We’re not worthy” shtick).

A large part of the reason why we feel so strongly the force of this question, “How can you care about me, God?”, is because I am the center of my universe.  That’s a pretty powerful psychology to overcome.  John Donne’s “No man (no person) is an island”; the concept of world unity; the church as reflecting the unity of all of God’s people – all are worthy ideals, and we give a lot of lip service to them.  But we can’t really work effectively toward them until we recognize and come to grips with the centrality that each of us sees in ourselves.  And when we do recognize that individual centrality we also become aware that it puts God, along with everything else, at the periphery of our lives.  So, the inner meaning of our question becomes:  “How can you care about…me?  I am the central one.  Your mercy, O God, would seem to have meaning for me only if I can incorporate it within my understanding of my universe.”

Jesus demonstrated great psychological insight when he told his followers that they were “of more value than many sparrows”.  Their egos were thereby given a boost, and they could revel in their own worth.  Yet, Christ makes it quite clear from the context that this is a God-given worth; it is not something that they have earned.  And that is the key to understanding the answer about God’s care for us:  God has placed us at the center of our own universe.

This is one reason why we honor a Layperson of the Year each year – not so much to single anyone out, although I don’t mean to take anything away from Anita – but in order to demonstrate how in the beloved community that is the church of Christ we are all special…and “of more value than many sparrows”.

There is one troubling question that remains, though.  Is the idea of a merciful, comforting God realistic?  That is, is it sentimentalized wish-fulfillment that we cling to because there is no other way to face tragedy?  It is one thing to affirm God’s mercy and comfort; it may be quite another actively to know God’s comfort and mercy in our own lives.

The passage from Matthew 10 that we read is part of a list of instructions that Jesus is giving the disciples about what it means to proclaim the gospel and continue with the kind of ministry that Jesus himself offered.  At the beginning of the passage we read he speaks of a slave being like the master.  All of Jesus’ commands boil down to this:  in striving to become like our master we come to realize that we can know God’s mercy and comfort as we give mercy and comfort to others.  Each Sunday we pray, “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”.  We are called not to judge others but to give mercy – not to say first, “That was wrong,” but to begin with “I love you no matter what you have done or how you have disappointed me.”  In offering this kind of mercy and comfort we are drawn out beyond the universe of ourselves and the hurts that have happened to us.  God’s mercy and comfort are real for us when we have given mercy and comfort.

Shakespeare’s familiar lines from The Merchant of Venice (despite their non-inclusive language) grasp both the human and divine views of mercy given:

The quality of mercy is not strain’d…it is twice bless’d;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes…..
It is an attribute of God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.

Another favorite film that I went back and watched recently is David and Lisa.  David’s psychotic fear of death is so strong that he cannot bear to even be touched by anyone for fear of contamination.  Lisa is a young schizophrenic, who speaks in childish rhymes as one person or becomes totally mute and destructive as another.  At the end David must conquer his fear in order to reach out his hand and let Lisa take it so that he can lead her, symbolically and actually, out of her fears.

This example may seen a bit extreme, but what any of us must do – even if we are not psychotic – in offering mercy is to conquer our fear that our mercy or our comfort will be rejected.  We can do this because the rejection of God’s love by human beings that occurred on that cross did not keep God from continuing to provide God’s mercy and comfort to all of us.

“Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”  These two parts of the purpose of Christ are always held in tension by the obedient church.  This tension was felt by Christ himself, for immediately after the passage we read – one of the most comforting in all of scripture – are these words:  “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”  This seeming contradiction simply points us to what we already know:  God’s comfort is there for those who know how to give comfort.  For those who are merely comfortable as the center of their own universe, the gate to the kingdom of God becomes narrower and narrower.  For those who have learned that mercy given is a step outside oneself, the peace of God does, in truth, pass all understanding, and we are enabled to say with the Psalmist:  “But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.”

Amen.

Dave Pomeroy

The Merciful Comforter (Psalm 86:8-17, Matthew 10:24-33)

Psalm 86:8-17

8 There is none like you among the gods, O Lord,
nor are there any works like yours.
9 All the nations you have made shall come
and worship before you, O Lord,
and shall glorify your name.
10 For you are great and do wondrous things;
you alone are God.
11 Teach me your way, O Lord,
that I may walk in your truth;
unite my heart to fear your name.
12 I give thanks to you, O Lord my God, with my whole heart,
and I will glorify your name forever.
13 For great is your steadfast love toward me;
you have delivered my soul from the depths of Sheol.

14 O God, insolent men have risen up against me;
a band of ruthless men seeks my life,
and they do not set you before them.
15 But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.
16 Turn to me and be gracious to me;
give your strength to your servant,
and save the son of your maidservant.
17 Show me a sign of your favor,
that those who hate me may see and be put to shame
because you, Lord, have helped me and comforted me. (ESV)

Matthew 10:24-33

24 “A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master. 25 It is enough for the disciple to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household.

26 “So have no fear of them, for nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. 27 What I tell you in the dark, say in the light, and what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops. 28 And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. 29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. 30 But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. 32 So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, 33 but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven. (ESV)

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