Mercy. Mercy!

Last week, the Right Reverend Mariann Budde, Episcopal Bishop of Washington, D.C., closed her sermon preached before President Donald Trump, Vice President J. D. Vance, members of their families and their cabinet, by appealing for mercy toward immigrants and people who identify as GLBTQ. Her remarks had two results:

the President expressed his views and, presumably, those of his highly compliant entourage in tweets, calling her “a Radical Left hard line Tump hater” and insisting that “she and her church owe the American public an apology”;

many so-called mainline Protestants (and that would include the Presbyterian Church USA, our denomination) cheered her for what is often called speaking truth to power.

It should be a measure of how extraordinary the times we are living in are, and how out of alignment the Trump administration is with the Gospel, when an appeal for mercy on behalf of vulnerable groups is labeled “political” and rejected — with such IRONY, no doubt lost on the President and his minions — from a place of political partisanship.

The second of two commandments that our Lord Jesus Christ has defined as the greatest, upon which “hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:40), is taken from Leviticus 19:18:

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

One can interpret this commandment by applying the lesson of The Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37) in which “neighbor” is defined by Jesus, not in religious or national terms, but by mercy:

Jesus: “Which of these three, do you think, was neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

Lawyer (i.e. expert in Mosaic Law): “The one who showed him mercy.”

Mercy. Mercy! It is the animating impulse behind the second-greatest commandment of the Law of Moses, according to Jesus Christ. It is what Bishop Budde called upon the most powerful political leader in the United States to show to the least among us. I believe the Gospel will not fail. I believe those who live by vengeance, hatred, greed, and lust for worldly power will fail.

In Christ,

Lee