11-1-17 - Holiness and Mercy

Today is All Saints Day, so let’s go out of sequence and talk about holiness. Holiness is not a word we hear a lot these days. People speak of “the holy,” and of “wholeness,” but holiness is not in vogue. In an age when the disadvantaged hunger for food and thirst for water, while the well-fed hunger for things and thirst for distraction, who yearns for righteousness?

Holiness is at the heart of Jesus’ prescription for disciples:
‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Righteousness and purity of heart seem like overlapping categories, if not one and the same. Righteousness, being right, true, justified (as in a printer’s margin), means being grounded in God’s love and goodness. Purity of heart is an undivided focus on God. To thirst for righteousness is to desire integration, to be authentically ourselves, to have our inner life and our outer life cohere, to say what we mean and mean what we say. When we really yearn only for God, we are promised we will see God - and people see God in us.

Between righteousness and purity of heart on his list, Jesus places mercy, perhaps in recognition that there is no such thing as personal righteousness without engaging with other people. And as soon as we engage other people, we face the need to be merciful, as we hope they will be with us. Trying to be righteous without being merciful makes us self-righteous. Purity of heart requires compassion.

As we pray today, let’s locate in ourselves that thirst for holiness and “singleness of heart,” as the Prayer Book puts it. Let’s let that hunger fill us like an empty stomach does. Let’s ask ourselves where the flow of mercy in us might have hit a dam, and invite the Holy Spirit to help us remove those obstacles. The promise for us, as we orient ourselves to desire righteousness, mercy and purity of heart, is that we will be filled, we will receive mercy, and we will see God.

The multi-talented priest, composer and jazz-band leader Andy Barnett composed a lovely setting of the Latin American Bread Prayer. The words are simple and sink into the soul. Listen, and pray:
To all those with bread, give hunger for justice, And to all those who hunger, give bread.

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