My Piano Playing Broke My Neighbour’s Heart
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“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.
I’ve titled this sermon: “My Piano Playing Broke My Neighbour’s Heart”, and you’ll see why in a moment.
I read a book over the past year for school, the book was called Bullies and Saints: An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History. The book did a terrific job of proving the point that the church has been both incredible and awful through church history. We have done some of the greatest things in history, developing the first hospitals, homeless shelters, schools with accessible learning for all kids. And yet we also have been behind some truly awful events, the crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, sexual scandals, among many other things. There’s so much good and so much bad that the church has done, that it can become almost overwhelming, but Dickson paints it in a really elegant way:
He says: Christ wrote a beautiful tune, which the church has often performed well, and often badly. But the melody was never completely drowned out. Sometimes it became a symphony.”
It’s kind of like this, if I play this very simple melody on the piano, we recognize it, in it’s own right it’s a piece of beauty because its the backbone behind so many of the songs we sing as children.
When I play it here…
It’s still recognizable, it sounds ever so slightly different, but its still the same melody, and with it’s support it does a beautiful job of copying the original.
However, if I play it like this…
It sounds awful, it’s barely recognizable at all, it distorts the whole thing, and nobody would ever want to listen to that, or be a part of the ones who make that kind of music.
To be merciful as our Heavenly Father is, is to embody the whole image of His beautiful character. When we live this out, we tangibly love people as if they were family, we show them unmeritted favour, we demonstrate love that goes beyond all bounds. When we do this it is as if we are playing the beautiful symphony that Christ wrote, with the instruments of our lives, we are harmonizing with Christ. But when we aren’t merciful, when we don’t show God’s character well, we are like what Paul calls a ‘noisy gong’ or ‘clanging cymbal’ we are a trainwreck of a distorted melody.
Jesus tells a parable in Matthew 18, that emphasizes so clearly what it’s like when we fail to show mercy to others.
“Therefore, the Kingdom of Heaven can be compared to a king who decided to bring his accounts up to date with servants who had borrowed money from him. In the process, one of his debtors was brought in who owed him millions of dollars. He couldn’t pay, so his master ordered that he be sold—along with his wife, his children, and everything he owned—to pay the debt.
“But the man fell down before his master and begged him, ‘Please, be patient with me, and I will pay it all.’ Then his master was filled with pity for him, and he released him and forgave his debt.
“But when the man left the king, he went to a fellow servant who owed him a few thousand dollars. He grabbed him by the throat and demanded instant payment.
“His fellow servant fell down before him and begged for a little more time. ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it,’ he pleaded. But his creditor wouldn’t wait. He had the man arrested and put in prison until the debt could be paid in full.
“When some of the other servants saw this, they were very upset. They went to the king and told him everything that had happened. Then the king called in the man he had forgiven and said, ‘You evil servant! I forgave you that tremendous debt because you pleaded with me. Shouldn’t you have mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you?’ Then the angry king sent the man to prison to be tortured until he had paid his entire debt.
“That’s what my heavenly Father will do to you if you refuse to forgive your brothers and sisters from your heart.”
That’s heavy, and we need, desperately, to take it seriously. How often do we fail to show mercy to those around us?! Even after Christ has forgiven us of so much!!
The last time you were cutoff in traffic, was your response to forgive the driver in the other car?! Or did you get angry with them, even over something so seemingly insignificant.
What about the last time that a family member, maybe your spouse, one of your children, or your sibling, made you late, or didn’t communicate well, or left clothes on the floor, or didn’t put that one thing back where it goes, did you start by giving them the benefit of the doubt or were you initially frustrated?
Recently, I started to get really into hockey, and so I’ll often be on forums, or in comment sections on social media looking at the most recent stats or trades, and what people think of them, and hockey fans can get really aggressive, far more than is necessary.
But believe it or not, I’ve seen far worse… in the comment sections of Christian pages where two people disagree about their theology.
And this same type of fighting is also modelled for us on live television all the time, regardless of if you consider yourself conservative or liberal, one thing is clear the politicians debating back and forth on television, running to be the one that rules our country, or our neighbours to the south, none of them are showing mercy and radical love and patience to their opponent, they cut them off, they call each other names, they make fun of each other to the media.
The system that we live in has trained us to replace the merciful attitude of Christ with an individual mindset of assuming that we are right and everyone else needs to get out of the way. And far more often than we want to admit we have fallen victim to this systemic way of thinking and living, and far too often we are the ones continuing to perpetrate this lifestyle of sin, by making assumptions about one another, by accusing one another without just cause, by refusing to show an ounce of patience to someone who disagrees with us. We’ve fallen into a system of indiviualism and apathy, where the only people who we think are on our side are the ones that agree with us, and we don’t give anyone else the time of day.
This way of living and thinking is dangerous, and if we as the church are not careful, we’ll ruin the reputation of Christ, because instead of harmonizing with him we’re going to distort his beautiful melody.
And the world won’t know we’re Christians by our love, from the outside they won’t know we’re Christians at all, because we look like the world, we sound like the world, we act like the world, and we live like the world.
If we keep living in this system of being unmerciful, we’re going to have an awful hard time witnessing to the world. All they’ll ever hear is a clanging gong playing a distorted melody, and instead of inviting them to meet Christ, we’ll have pushed them further from Him.
The reality is that if we don’t start living in the way of radical mercy, then what waits for us is the same as the unmerciful servant, the merciful are shown mercy, the unmerciful are not, and just like in the parable we will be sent to a different sort of prison, a spiritual one until we can pay our debt…
But in our story we can’t pay our debt. That’s why this is so serious, if we don’t live for Christ in the way that we live and treat people, if instead of choosing His way we choose to make our own path, to live how we want instead of His design for our relationships with one another, then what awaits us is a prison that we can never get out of.
The merciful are shown mercy, the unmerciful are destined for something awful.
And this all feels really gloom and doom, maybe even fire and brimstone, but the good news, the best news in the world, is that there is a different way.
This call to mercy is radical, because it requires to rethink many of our gut instincts. If we choose to follow Christ, we need our entire way of thinking to be rewired.
On our own its not possible.
For us to imitate the character of God with our lives simply isn’t something we’re capable.
Unless we understand the insane amount of mercy which we have already received.
Our key verse, Matthew 5:7
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
Is not as linear as it may first appear, we don’t earn the mercy of God by first showing mercy. John makes it clear in 1 John 4:19
We love because he first loved us.
Christ loved us first.
Romans 5:8 (ESV)
while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
The only way we are able to be transformed into people who are capable of putting this much love on display, is when we know how great a debt we have already been forgiven, how much mercy we have already been shown!
Matt. 5:7 isn’t about works based theology. We don’t earn salvation by being merciful.
Living mercifully is all about relationship. Christ first showed us mercy, and if we accept his gift of mercy, if we decide to truly live in His love as His followers, then we can’t just benefit from His mercy, we also need to be actively showing mercy to others.
It’s not enough for us to just feel good about the mercy that He’s extended to us, for us to hear a song like the one we just learned from Drew and the team this morning, and to only ever reflect on it.
We also need action. We need to live it out.
1 John 4:19 “We love because he first loved us.”
It doesn’t say we sit there and feel good about Christ’s love because He first loved us, it says that we do something about it, we understand the love we’ve been given and we show it, we emulate it, to others.
And one of the best ways to live out this radical, familial, selfless love is by praying for those we have a difficult time showing mercy to.
Loving our ‘enemies’ isn’t an easy thing to do, but if we pray for them, not in a cocky “oh I’ll pray for you!” posture, but from a place of genuine concern and empathy, it’ll be a lot easier to show them mercy.
There will be people that you find it hard to forgive, people who you know are in the wrong, who have hurt you, or your loved ones, over and over and over again, and you might find yourself saying “I can’t forgive them, I won’t ever forgive them”. But this call to be merciful, isn’t conditional on how much you’ve been hurt by them, we have hurt Christ far more than they will hurt us, and He was so merciful to us that He gave His live for us!
Now, that doesn’t mean that we just allow evil to persist, for innocent people to be hurt, being merciful and giving second chances doesn’t do away with justice, but our call is to have a heart posture of mercy even while we live out justice.
For us to love radically, is a call to take care of the vulnerable, but its also a call to meet the evil and darkness of those who abuse their power, with the light and mercy of Christ. We need to take action where it is needed, but not from a place of hatred, from a place of desperately wanting even the most twisted person we can think of to come to a saving knowledge of Christ as their Lord and Saviour.
As I finish, I’ll return to one of our first verses,
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
We are blessed, we are living ‘the good life’, when we are living radically in right relationship with God and with those around us. When our character is constantly becoming more and more like God, when we are harmonizing with Christ to make a beautiful symphony, we will be rewarded with the mercy that has already been extended to us. But when we fail to accept His mercy and to emulate it to others we distort His melody, we push them further from Him, and we pay the price for it. Lucky for us Christ made us a different way.
Let us pray.