Wednesday, October 9, 2024
Margaret’s birthday!
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Mercy
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
I was a kid mowing Grandma’s grass with a gas mower, powered up and rolling strong through her green backyard grass.
“Oh, for mercy’s sake,” she cried. “Get away from that mower and help me hang these clothes. But the blowing grass was ruining her clean, wet white sheets.
She looked at me a minute, and then ran to turn the mower off. I could push it, but being young and clueless, had no idea to turn it off, or even turn it around to blow away from her sheets instead of into them.
I didn’t look up at her. This was not the time to do that. I knew I’d messed up her laundry, a lot of work with that old Maytag down in the basement of her house on the old part of Omaha Avenue in Lincoln. Now she’d have to sweep off the sheets once they were dry before she put them back on my bed and hers. If they weren’t too badly stained green.
She paid me $10 each time I mowed her grass, in 1964, the year after her husband Herman died bed-ridden, two years after a stroke deprived me of most of his up-till-then highly committed and loving companionship. We loved each other, Grandpa and me. And it took a little more doing to love his wife, who seemed stern, to me, until he died on a sad day in July 1963. After that, Grandma and I became friends.
For mercy’s sake, Grandma!
But today she didn’t seem so friendly. Not at first. Then I saw in her face something changing inside her as she looked at me.
Blessed are those who are merciful, for they will receive mercy.
I didn’t know where to find that verse then (one of Jesus’ beatitudes at the beginning of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount), but I watched it come to life in my mom’s mom. She knew the mercy of God within her when she felt it. I saw her frown become a quiet smile. She taught me something that day about giving and about receiving.
I helped her with the clothespins. Then inside on that hot summer day she heated our afternoon tea like always. We sat, without Grandpa, just the two of us on opposite sides of the big round oak dining table, just a stitch and step from the kitchen stove. She heated the water and poured some into her teapot with two teabags at the bottom. We waited a minute or two.
Grandma told me how her washing machine was a fit and a trial. Usually she had to wring out the clothes and sheets almost by hand, running them through the Maytag’s rollers, turn after turn until they were out into the basket. That’s what she did that very morning.
The tea was ready. She put out our cups and saucers. I took my tea cup and filled it, added the milk and sugar, and poured some of the hot sweet tea into the saucer for it to cool. I learned this trick when Grandpa had tea with us. I felt sad that he was not there with us now. We blew on the tea a little and then tipped the saucer into our mouths. Oh boy, that was good! I love it still, that milk and sugar and hot English Breakfast tea on the top of my mouth. With a couple crispy cookies.
Little things make up a mercy. All those years ago my deep memory is Grandma’s tea, not her shouting at me for ruining those sheets. Jesus said the merciful will receive mercy. Grandma spent much of her life working in a garment factory and then nursing her stroke-ridden husband, and then loving me when I didn’t even notice the blowing grass betraying her morning’s work.
A few little things turn into something big – not because they add up like that but because they are multiplied by the exponential factor of love. And as I listen to stories of much more callous and careless grandparents, I realize how blessed I was.
Richard Rohr writes of God entering our world in forgiveness and mercy. His words are beautiful as he certainly remembers his own rural Kansan grandparents:
I once saw God’s mercy as patient, benevolent tolerance, a kind of grudging forgiveness, but now mercy has become for me God’s very self-understanding, a loving allowing, a willing breaking of the rules by the One who made the rules—a wink and a smile, a firm and joyful taking of our hand while we clutch at our sins and gaze at God in desire and disbelief.
Mercy is a way to describe the mystery of forgiveness. More than a description of something God does now and then, it is who God is. The mystery of forgiveness is God’s ultimate entry into powerlessness.
We do not attain anything by our own holiness but by ten thousand surrenders to mercy. A lifetime of received forgiveness allows us to become mercy. Mercy becomes our energy, our meaning.
To live whatever life I’m given on this earth allows me instant and endless companionship with my merciful Father and his outrageously loving Son. This is where I came from and where I am going, back to the One who made me and knows me in a way I can never know myself.
This is nothing to sneeze at, right? When I forget all of these heaven-and-earth metaphysics in the midst of my own earthbound philosophies, troubles and fear, I can always ask to be reminded. Again. For mercy’s sake.
Such a simple thing, it seems. I guess not so simple really, but it’s sure worth working at. After all, this is the stuff that dreams are made of.
One of his disciples said to Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray.”
And so he did.
(Galatians 2, Psalm 117, Romans 8, Luke 11)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
