By Rev. Joseph R. Reid
Mercy From Above
A little boy was lost at a Sunday school picnic. His mother began a frantic search for him, and soon she heard loud sounds in a childish voice calling: “Estelle, Estelle!”
She quickly spotted the youngster and rushed up to grab him in her arms. “Why did you keep calling me by my first name, Estelle, instead of Mother?” she asked him, as he had never called her by her first name before. “Well,” the youngster answered, “it was no use calling out ‘Mother’– the place is full of them.”
In order for God to have mercy upon us we have to call in a personal way, we have to call with a simple request, “Lord have mercy.” Last year the U.S. Congress, led by House Republicans, voted to cut food stamps in this country by $40 billion. This cut would have kicked up to 6 million people off the program, many of them women, children and the elderly. The slashes were scheduled to be instituted while unemployment remained high and people in states like Alabama were reeling from major storms that led to the increase in food stamps.
Once again people elected to serve the poor, along with everybody else, did not understand the meaning of the word “mercy.” To “have mercy” means to have compassion or forgiveness toward someone whom it is within our power to punish or harm. It is certainly within the power of our elected officials to punish or harm us. But like many in our national, state and even local governments, even the ones who claim to be Christian, mercy is a foreign word.
Many of us believe that mercy is God’s prerogative but it is many times our choice as creatures created by a merciful God.
I am reminded of the old man who had stopped going to church and had backslided into all kinds of trouble. One day he was saying to himself: “I have never been what I oughta been. I stole chickens and watermelons, got drunk and got in fights with my fists and my knife, but there is one thing I ain’t never done: in spite of all my meanness I ain’t never lost my religion.”
So it goes with mercy.
We say and do a lot of things because we are Christian we say, yet very few of us probably wrote our congressman demanding that food stamps or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs, known as SNAP, not be cut at the time. This simple act is what Jesus meant when He said, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.” We must begin to pay attention to ways that we can be merciful when it’s in our power this year. We must speak and act as though we will be judged by the law that gives freedom. The law of mercy is what we as Christians should live by. It always triumphs over judgment! When we love unconditionally, mercy is always victorious in the end.
