Unbound Mercy

Scripture Reading

Romans 11:1–2; 29-32 (NLT)

1 I ask, then, has God rejected his own people, the nation of Israel? Of course not! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham and a member of the tribe of Benjamin. 2 No, God has not rejected his own people, whom he chose from the very beginning...

29 For God’s gifts and his call can never be withdrawn. 30 Once, you Gentiles were rebels against God, but when the people of Israel rebelled against him, God was merciful to you instead. 31 Now they are the rebels, and God’s mercy has come to you so that they, too, will share in God’s mercy. 32 For God has imprisoned everyone in disobedience so he could have mercy on everyone.

Focus Statement

God is calling us to unite and move forward in God's incredibly unbound mercy.

Point of Relation

Sadly, back in April of 2023, Jerry Springer passed away.

Do any of you remember him? I mean how can you forget him right?

We all, I hope, have at least heard of the Jerry Springer Show...

Where his guests mostly consisted of uneducated people going at each other...

most often family members or lovers.

They’d have security to break up the fights…chairs would fly…it was utter chaos...

and Jerry Springer and his show were both seen as a part of the moral decay in America.

I think that was a bum rap. The show was NOT the cause…it was a symptom of an already morally declined and increasingly less religious nation.

Still, it clearly sensationalized and promoted that kind of behavior for a profit and so the controversy was not unwarranted.

Still, I remember Jerry Springer more fondly from a more fun and funny game show that I came across in reruns on the Game Show Network…called BAGGAGE.

Here’s the game’s premise:

Everyone has baggage…baggage being defined as the bad stuff you tend to hide about yourself to other people you’re trying to impress.

With that basic premise the show consisted of three contestants trying to impress one lucky person...

enough to get them to date them.

But at every turn, a suitcase is opened with something unflattering revealed about them...

Eventually, through a process of elimination, the chosen contestant goes on a date with the person who chose them.

You can imagine the awkwardness when someone is interested in you and they ask you to open your suitcase and it reveals anything from as silly as...

You suffer from extreme halitosis...

to you must sleep with your pet in the bed and the significant other is expected to sleep in the guest room…or something outlandish like that.

Oh…and I gave tame examples.

Surely your imagination can do the rest.

Things to Consider

We all don’t like to see our own imperfections...

yet we can live with them so long as NO ONE ELSE sees our imperfections…right.

That’s why, in church of all places, you only ever find PERFECT PEOPLE...

People who seemingly have nothing wrong with them...

but by God they are good at picking out the bad in others. You know what I mean?

Well, I am going to borrow a phrase from another pastor I met recently...

His church’s tagline is: “NO PERFECT PEOPLE ALLOWED.”

Amen! That’s what I say to that. A church where all people are welcome…but no perfect people are allowed.

You know, why? Do you know what I celebrate that?

Because NONE of us are perfect. Not one!

Only our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ fits that bill! No one else!

What Scripture Says

First, before I go a moment further in discussing this particular passage,

I want to acknowledge the awkward language Paul uses in verse 32.

I am not sure about you,

but every time I hear that I cringe because of the implications it places in this minds of people regarding God.

For instance, when one hears that God has “imprisoned” people in disobedience so that God could have mercy on everyone...”

So many questions arise after that…questions such as:

Well if God is making me disobedient, how can God blame me for my sin?

Would I be disobedient if God didn’t imprison me in said disobedience.

Another question that could come out of this is the following:

What sort of God imprisons the ones he or she loves....

JUST FOR THE SAKE OF SHOWING THEM MERCY?

Like, why not forego the sadistic part and just jump to the MERCY…ya know?

But again, mercy for what? I didn’t lock myself away in disobedience.

Let me just say that such questions arise because,

for whatever reason in our modern world, we are stuck seeing everything literally.

And…also…in was common in Paul’s day to attribute EVERYTHING to God.

So, if you a family had the child they’d always been praying for…praise God.

If not, it was because they must have sinned and angered God....and so that was a punishment.

That was the ancient understanding… but even then the ancients knew not to take EVERYTHING literally.

Paul, in this passage, is speaking in a way that sounds pretty cut and dry on a literal level.

The proposition: “God has imprisoned everyone in disobedience so that he could have mercy on everyone”.

How could this possibly be understood in any way other than what it literally says?

This is where social, historical, and religious context come in.

In the ancient world everything was attributable to God...

If someone got seriously sick it was God’s doing.

If someone stayed relatively healthy it was God’s doing.

God is the God who giveth and taketh away...

and we have no say in what God decides.

If your flock died suddenly, if was an omen of God’s anger at you.

In our world, we don’t attribute EVERYTHING to God’s doing.

For instance, if someone goes into an epileptic grand mal seizure...

We aren’t…at least I hope we aren’t…going to call in an exorcist to cast out the demons...

Or if someone dies of a heart attack,

we don’t assume God seized their heart to punish them.

Now we see things through a more natural scientific lens and treat various illnesses and disease accordingly.

With that said, we also have to understand that Paul wasn’t necessarily meaning this in the most literal of senses…

but is using his day and age’s language to convey GOD’S MERCY not GOD’S WRATH.

If Paul were alive today, knowing all that we scientifically know now, this is perhaps how he would have worded verse 32:

For God has allowed people remain in disobedience so that God could have mercy on EVERYONE...

That is at the heart of what Paul is saying...

That God has NOT brought judgment for our disobedience against any of US…

(and we are all disobedient in our own ways)…

so that God can have mercy on ALL OF US!

Again, we also have to remember the context I shared from last week...

how the Roman Christ followers were spurning the Jewish Christ followers over petty differences...

and Paul was then, and is now, reminding them that we are all EQUAL under GOD. Period.

The world loves inequality and inequity...

GOD DOES NOT!

And so, given that, here’s the scenario once again:

The Gentile Christians had been in dispute with Jewish Christians over various different issues centering around the following of the Torah...

This led to Gentile Christians to spurn and shun their Jewish brothers and sisters…and vice versa.

Paul is writing them, letting them know that HUMILITY is needed and that God’s business is to SAVE...

not to destroy.

ENVY, BITTERNESS, SCAPEGOATING, DIVISION, FINGER POINTING, GOSSIPING...

as in the rumor I heard about myself that I shared last week in church...

ALL OF THOSE THINGS are the devil’s business...

and IT IS NOT OF GOD!

But friends, this is a message of GOOD NEWS...

Because all of us are unworthy of God…of our Lord Jesus Christ...

All of us have been tried, as it were, and found wanting...

and all of us at one point or another…get entangled in the devil’s business.

MYSELF INCLUDED!

THIS IS A MESSAGE OF HOPE…IT’S GOOD NEWS…IT’S THE GOSPEL...

Because, while we humans want to see some make it and others not...

GOD IS NOT VINDICTIVE LIKE WE ARE...

but is full of UNBOUND MERCY!

What a glorious dose of hope for us amen...

because we hypocritical judgmental people forget that

it could be US who are on the wrong side of that wrathful God we’re praying for!

Yet, like the Gentiles in the Roman church, despite this grace…this mercy we’ ve been given...

we still want it to be exclusive as opposed to unbound.

We want it reigned in to benefit us…to make us feel good…to make us feel safe…to make us feel righteous.

What This Means for You

How might you have fallen into such a trapped way of thinking...

into judging others rather than extending unbound mercy…unbound grace?

How can you grow even more toward being an agent of God’s grace and mercy…as opposed to judgment?

Listening to people.

Knowing their needs and listening to them without making them have to listen to us...

That is one way.

And to listen to people, you need to be present among them...

You have to get to know them and take the LONG time it takes to get to know them wholly.

And to be present among people

you have to humble yourself so as to not think you’re somehow above or better than them.

What This Means for Us

And this is true for the church as much as it is for each of us individually.

If we the church think we are better than the community…secular or otherwise...

We are missing the whole point of being a church.

We are all in this together...

Each of us are sinners…and each of us carry our own baggage with us.

Let us as Christians, UNITE under God…no matter how different our personalities and skillsets might be…showing the world EMMANUEL…GOD WITH US...

Rather than falling prey to the devil’s dirty division work.

And remember…idle hands make for the devil’s playground…and so do busy noses!

Let us unite under God and move forward in God’s incredibly unbound mercy! Amen? Amen!