Understanding Mercy

We—well, let me not put that on you—I need the weight of choice to fully understand mercy.

I need to write more about choice.  I’ve been thinking about choice for a little bit longer than I’ve been thinking about grace.  But a brief summary is that I think God gives us way more choices than we realize.  So often we agonize over decisions.  “Lord God, what is Your will?  Should I go to this college or that college?  Take this job or that job?  Go to this house church/bible study or that one?”  I think way more often than not, God’s response is, “What do you want?” 

Making choices is how we grow in maturity.  And we are called to be mature daughters and sons of our Father God.  I’ve watched my friends give their children choices.  “Do you want yogurt or cheerios for breakfast?”  It does not matter which one the two year old picks.  Yogurt is not better than cheerios.  What matters is that she picks.  For a timid child, giving them the option allows them to figure out their preferences and that their preferences matter.  It helps them develop into themselves.  For a strong willed child, picking what they want for breakfast gives them a proper avenue to voice their preferences, so that their will isn’t squashed by always hearing “No.”  And as children grow, they are given more choices and more meaningful choices.  This is important, because once they are adults, they will have to make their choices.  If they don’t have practice—if they haven’t grown in maturity—then they won’t know now to make choices. 

Now, before I get back to mercy, let me say that there are wrong choices.  “Should I do an afterschool sport or do drugs?”  Yes, doing drugs is a wrong choice.  But many many more of the choices that we agonize over are not right or wrong choices. 

So, considering mercy, if every situation has a right and a wrong answer, there isn’t much room to plea for mercy.  If you choose the wrong answer, you deserve the consequences.  That is our underlying, unspoken assumption.  And with that assumption, we give lip service to grace and forgiveness.  Job’s friends are the classic example of this.  They knew that because all this bad stuff was happening, Job had chosen wrongly, and the bad stuff was a just consequence of that choice.  Their advice was not to plea for God’s mercy, but to repent and accept the (presumably just) punishment.  

But the thing about choices is that if I have free choices, so does everyone else.  When I make a choice, it is rarely in isolation, and therefore my choice presents a choice to another person.  The other person has to choose how they are going to respond to my action, my choice.  I may desire a certain response.  But making a free choice necessarily involves letting go of expectations of the other person’s response.    And this is when I understood, I mean really understood, mercy.   

When we are faced with choices—no, that’s wrong.  We aren’t “faced” with choices.  Rather, we are given choices.  The ability to choose is a gift.  But when we use our gift and choose, there is no guarantee how it will turn out, how another person will respond or how a situation will unfold.  We can choose wisely and well, and things can still turn out badly, or painfully.  Understanding and experiencing that, mercy now makes sense to me.  Mercy more than makes sense, it becomes our desperate need and is a totally unmerited favor. 

My favorite Hebrew word is “chesed”.  It means steadfast, convenantal, love.  It is often translated as loving kindness, but that’s kind of weak.  “Steadfast love” captures it a bit better.  But in other translations it is “mercy.”  God’s covenant with us, His steadfast love, is a very merciful thing, healing us from the sin of our flat out wrong choices and from the painful outcomes of good choices. 

When we are freed from the fatalism of the belief in one Right choice in every decision, we can grow in maturity.  We can cry out for mercy, and believe that it will be given.  Because God chooses to show us mercy.  

photo credit: Sepehr Ehsani via photopin cc

Of Expectations and Sex

So this post is a result of recently watching half of the movie “Bridesmaids”, reading a powerful blog post “The Sexy Wife I Can’t Be”, and thinking about the parable of the man who hired laborers for his vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16).  You don’t have to have seen the movie—I’ll explain the scene I’m thinking of—but reading that blog post and that parable might be helpful.  In short, “The Sexy Wife I Can’t Be” is about a marriage conference at her church and how she, as a woman who has suffered sexual abuse, responds.  The parable is the one where the owner of the vineyard hires workers at the start of the day and agrees on the standard day’s wages for them.  Then he goes out several more times throughout the day to hire more people, and tells them that he will pay them whatever is right.  When he pays everyone at the end of the day, he pays the ones who were hired last and who worked the shortest amount of time, first, and he pays them the standard day’s wages.  When he gets to paying those who worked first and the entire day, they thought they were going to get more, but they get paid the standard day’s wages.  They start to grumble, and the owner says, “Friend, I am doing you no wrong.  Did you not agree with me for a denarius [a day’s wage]?  Take what belongs to you and go.  I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you.  Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?  Or do you begrudge my generosity?”

Our expectations stem from what we believe that we are owed.  What am I owed? 

When it comes to sex, what am I owed?  Our culture teaches that sex is about self-fulfillment.  Culture’s expectation is that your partner must meet your needs.  There is a scene in “Bridesmaids” where the main characters are on a plane to Las Vegas.  Rita, a bawdy discontented wife, is talking with Becca, a soft spoken conservative wife, and is aghast at finding out that Becca’s only sexual experience has been with her husband.  The scene is presented such that not knowing “what you want” is so foreign as to be comedic. 

In contrast, the church teaches abstinence and emphasizes purity.  And I agree with this approach to sexuality.  But purity can be preached to the exclusion of grace.  The message that sex is worth the wait can be hounded so as to produce a response of fear, shame, and hopelessness.  A moment of weakness from which you can never recover.  Or the choice was taken from you in an abuse that you had no power to stop.  (Another good blog post is “The Day I Turned in My V-Card”.)

I’m guessing that both sides set up false expectations.  They both place the focus on self and what the self can either get out of it or what the self must do.  Culture’s expectation is that you are owed “the best” and it is your right to search until you find it.  This unfortunately dooms you to forever searching.  The church’s expectation, whether intended or not, is that if like in the parable you bear the heat of the day and remain sexually pure, it will be worth the wait and your efforts will be rewarded with fabulous married sex.  This unfortunately sets up a culture of fear and shame, and a rude awakening that healthy sexuality—within marriage—will still take work. 

The proper place for sex is inside the marriage covenant.  Marriage is a picture of Christ and the Church—and is a great mystery (Ephesians 5:31-32).  Do you know that God made about 350,000 species of beetles?  And no snowflake is or will ever be copied?  Think about how each of our finger prints of the current 7 billion living humans is different.  That’s 70 billion different combinations of loops, whorls, and arches!  If God is that into uniqueness and creativity, why do we think that we could have correct expectations or predictions about the consummation of the deepest human covenant?  God is the giver of all good gifts.  Gift cards and form letters aren’t good gifts! And that's what expectations are--generic gift cards and form letters.  Good gifts keep the person receiving the gift in mind and they are unique to that person. 

Don’t put expectations of any kind on people—but especially of sex.  So if you're teaching, be mindful that there is probably diversity in your audience.  On an individual level, don’t listen to culture’s demands that you explore and experiment to find the perfect partner who will always satisfy your desires.  You don't know what they are!  Trust your Creator to give you a good gift.  Also, don’t take up the shame that if you didn’t wait until marriage for sex or if that choice was taken from you, what was worth the wait will never be.  You can never go where Grace will not reach and heal you.   

Part of a good gift is the mystery of it.  The union between man and wife in marriage is a mystery and a gift.  Your Father knows how to give good gifts. Trust Him. 

Don’t pick up expectations.  Put down the ones you have.  I have to and have been putting down dread.  What do you have to put down?  Any married folk want to offer insight or maybe correct me?  :o)