Sermon: December 10, 2023

Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.

I could repeat this verse from Psalm 85 all day long, the words are that beautiful to me.

Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.

Just saying the words makes my heart swell with gladness. The words feel so right. The words feel so good. But what on earth do they mean? They clearly speak to something deep within me, but why? I decided to sit with them for a while to give them time to grow within my heart and mind.

As I sat with these words, I found myself thinking about times when forgiveness and reconciliation came about against all the odds. I thought of great national stories and more personal and local stories. I thought about stories of times when violence, hate, revenge, and death did not have the final word, did not win the day, even when all evidence would say that peace and love were not an option. I thought about the war between Israel and Hamas and all the people who want to push us to pick a side—are you for the Israelis or are you for the Palestinians? I just want to shout, “I am for peace! I am for life! I am for repairing the tears in the fabric that have happened in the connections between the people of Israel and Palestine—for their sake and ours, for every tear in this fabric hurts all of us. I am for mercy and truth meeting together and righteousness and peace kissing each other.”

Advent is a time when we give thanks for God entering the world of humanity. We give thanks that God was willing to take on all the limitedness of being human—the suffering, the pain, the conflict, the violence, the death—because God wants to be in relationship with us, God wants to be our companion. We give thanks that in that baby born so many years ago we catch a glimpse of God’s dream for us, God’s love for us, God’s kingdom breaking in right here and right now. We catch a glimpse in that baby and in the man he grew to be of mercy and truth meeting together and righteousness and peace kissing each other.

And Advent is a time when we look to the future, though we know not when or how, when God’s kingdom won’t just break in here and there but will be the world we live in, the dream of God come true. We look forward to the future when mercy and truth, righteousness and peace always meet together. And we hold on to this future hope in the times when we have trouble seeing God’s kingdom already breaking in around us. We hold onto this future hope to help us during those times when we have trouble seeing mercy and truth meeting together and righteousness and peace kissing each other.

Desmond Tutu once said that he knows that human beings are inherently good and not inherently sinful because if this were not true, we would not be able to recognize sinfulness when we see it. He also believes that there is no end to the human capacity for healing. Inherent to humanity is a desire to be whole and well, both individually and communally. I agree with him and believe that it is God’s Spirit within us that draws us to this health and wholeness. It is God’s Spirit ceaselessly seeking to draw us into the love of God. And when we join this Spirit, when we allow ourselves to be drawn into this love, remarkable things happen, healing occurs, forgiveness occurs, reconciliation occurs, God’s dream is made real, even if for just a moment, and mercy and truth meet together and righteousness and peace kiss each other. If you don’t believe me, or even if you do but need some tangible examples to hold onto, I have some stories of God’s dream breaking into the world, of mercy and truth meeting together and righteousness and peace kissing each other.

First, there is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Desmond Tutu’s South Africa. It was not a perfect process and there is still a lot of healing left to happen, but the process this commission engaged in certainly prevented the civil war and bloodbath that was all but guaranteed to happen when apartheid ended in that country. Thousands of victims were able to share their stories and in the power of sharing be moved from victimhood to hero. Thousands of perpetrators were able to confess publicly to their crimes and acknowledge and take responsibility for the harm they had caused. Here is a story from Desmond Tutu’s Book of Forgiving:

I have known people who have been able to be compassionate and forgiving under the most strenuous circumstances while undergoing the most horrific treatment. Bishop Malusi Mpumlwana is someone like that. Arrested as an anti-apartheid activist, he endured excruciating physical torture at the hands of the South African police. His experience renewed his commitment to anti-apartheid work. He did not work out of thirst for revenge. He told me that, in the midst of his torture, he had an astonishing insight: “These are God’s children and they are losing their humanity. We have to help them recover it.” It is a remarkable feat to be able to see past the inhumanity of the behavior and recognize the humanity of the person committing the atrocious acts. This is not weakness. This is heroic strength, the noblest strength of the human spirit.

Mercy and truth met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other.

Then there is Rwanda. Do you remember the horrors that happened there in the 1990’s? More than a million Tutsis lost their lives when the Hutu power movement attacked them. It was truly a holocaust. 2024 will mark 30 years since this atrocity occurred and remarkably Rwanda is now known for its spirit of reconciliation, something no one thought possible in 1994. Indeed, you can visit one of nine reconciliation villages in the country today. These are places where perpetrators and survivors of the genocide live next to each other. In these villages perpetrators have listened as survivors shared the harms done to them. Perpetrators have had the opportunity to make amends by caring for the people they harmed. The Tutsi’s could have sought retribution and revenge, and the cycle of violence would have continued. Instead, they choose unity and reconciliation. Truly in Rwanda mercy and truth have met each other, and righteousness and peace have kissed each other.

But this inbreaking of God’s dream doesn’t just occur on these large national levels. God’s dream of reconciliation, healing, and peace also breaks into the lives of everyday people. Here is another story from Desmond Tutu’s Book of Forgiveness:

When Dan and Lynn Wagner received a letter from the parole office letting them know that Lisa—the woman who had killed their two daughters in a car accident—was being released from prison, they knew that in order to continue healing they had to set up a meeting with her on their terms. Dan says their plan was to release the relationship and close the final chapter in their story:

We called the parole officer and asked if he could set up a meeting between Lisa and us. We explained that we had never gone to court because she had pled guilty, and therefore we had never actually met her. The parole officer said it was an unusual request, and that meeting with us was against Lisa’s conditions of parole. His superiors, however, approved it and we set a date. We really didn’t discuss what we were going to say to her.

We just wanted to get this meeting over with and get that last door closed. We knew from the moment she was sentenced to prison that the day would eventually come when we’d meet her, and we wanted that first meeting to be in a controlled environment like this, not in the checkout line at some grocery store.

When we walked into the meeting room and laid our eyes on Lisa for the first time, we both hugged her. I don’t know why, but it suddenly seemed as if we had all been through this war together. When I hugged her, I started crying and couldn’t stop and couldn’t let go. In that hug and in my heart I felt a sense of relief. After seven years, I was finally meeting the woman who had killed my daughters. But I felt no anger, no hatred—just relief. So I cried.

We eventually sat down around a large table. Lisa spoke about her twelve-step recovery process and that step nine, Making Amends, would be for her a “living amends.” Lynn asked her to clarify what she meant by that. Lisa said she wanted to share her experience with others in hopes she could prevent others from taking a life as she had taken the lives of Mandie and Carrie. We thanked her for pleading guilty and keeping us out of the court proceedings. She kept saying, “I was guilty.”

Then the parole office said he had never seen anything like this and perhaps we are all serving a God of reconciliation. We walked into that building in fear, thinking we were finally going to have an end. But it turned out to be a new beginning. Lynn and Lisa have since been invited to speak together, and they go to jails and churches and universities and share our story. It’s funny how it’s our story now. And our story has touched a lot of lives. It’s about tragedy, yes, but it’s also about forgiveness and something someone told me in the early days after the accident: God does not waste his children’s pain.

Mercy and truth have met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other.

One final story, one that is far less dramatic, but no less important. In an inner-city American school two eighth grade boys broke a paper towel dispenser in the bathroom. At first, no one admitted responsibility. Their teacher told them, “We have a restorative discipline system here, so we accept responsibility and make things as right as possible. But we can’t do that unless someone accepts responsibility.”

The boys admitted they’d done it. The teacher called a meeting with all the people involved or affected by the incident—the boys, their parents, and the custodian. They talked about what happened, and everyone had a voice. “In that process, the custodian had a chance to let the students know how difficult it is to replace a dispenser,” said the teacher. “It gave the students incredible knowledge of a real-world situation in a way a suspension never could, and relationships improved instead of being damaged.”

One of the students couldn’t afford to pay to replace the dispenser. So, the student himself suggested that he could work with the custodian to pay his debt. He enjoyed it so much that he continued to help the custodian long after he’d finished his restitution.

Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.

God forgives unconditionally

So can we

The thief on the cross still dies on his cross

But forgiveness will set his spirit free

And what of you and me standing on the ground with our piles of hurts mounting so high

Will we die a thousand deaths before we die?

Yearning for revenge, will we die of that thirst?

Will the rage that fills us be the stake on which we burn?

Will we stumble over every resistance placed in our way?

And stay stuck in the misery of it all?

Or will we take the chance that we might break free by following this path where it leads