The Heart of Christmas: A God of Mercy in a Merciless World

Readings: Psalm 89:19-27, Acts 13:16-26, Luke 1:67-79

Preached by Rev. Joshua Taylor on Christmas Eve 2021.

When I was a kid my brother and I used to love watching WWF Wrestling. We loved the hype, the costumes, the banter, the ridiculous antics, and the theatre of it all.

Often in our backyard we would re-enact moments from wrestling matches on our trampoline.

Sometimes, my mum would look on with horror from the kitchen window, but I think mostly she’d rather not see what was going on. We pulled some pretty dangerous stunts.

But we had an important rule – one that is often used in wrestling. We could “tap out” at any time indicating that wanted to be shown mercy and the other person had to stop pulling whatever horrific move they were halfway through.

I can remember plenty of times that this “tap out for mercy” rule was necessary.

Without this mercy things could get bad pretty quick.

This “mercy” rule reminded us that our wrestling was all a game and that as brothers we didn’t’ really want to hurt each other.

I’ve been thinking a lot about mercy this week and these wrestling stories came to my mind as I think about the place we find ourselves as a society.

To me, it feels as if we are living in a “no mercy” moment. A time where the concept of “tapping out” and giving one another grace and kindness has gone out the window – and instead we have adopted an “all in”, “high stakes” mentality – like wrestling without a “tap out” clause.

Here in New Zealand in recent months we have had plenty to wrestle about.

We have had debate about vaccinations, mandates and passports. We have had the governments three waters policy, the proposed hate speech laws, euthanasia & abortion legislation and our approach to climate change.

There has been plenty over which our opinions have been divided.

And the level of our civil discourse has become less civil and more full of vitriol and anger.

There are all kinds of theories as to why we have ended up where we have – and that would be a topic for a much longer talk, and not in the middle of the night.

One Pastor, Tim Keller gives some insight on our current cultural moment, saying:

“It’s no wonder that this culture quickly becomes littered with enormous numbers of broken and now irreparable relationships. Politics itself becomes a new kind of religion, one without any means of acquiring redemption or forgiveness. Rather than seeing some people as right and others as mistaken, they are now regarded as the good and the evil, as true believers or heretics.”[1]

I think he names the issue well. Politics are taking the place of religion for many people in the secular West and what we are seeing is a religion without grace.

What we are missing is shared humanity – both the good parts: that all of us are made in God’s image and loved by Him – and the bad parts, that all of us are broken sinners.

This second part is particularly missing from our understanding of what it means to be human - a shared sense of our fallenness and sin – the reality that none of us are perfect, none of us are right 100 percent of the time, none of us are righteous.

One theologian, Marguerite Shuster says:

“Loss of the category of sin at the individual level more surely robs us of dignity and of hope than does the most punishing ‘miserable sinner’ theology of another age. After all, ‘miserable sinners’ retain the status of those who have responsibility for their behaviour and the prospects of a Saviour who can deliver them.”[2]

Shuster’s point strikes me as so helpful. The concept of sin, fallenness, the human condition – whatever you call it – is such a leveller and makes sense of so much of our experience. Without this category which names that we are all broken and in need of rescue, we look to blame one another, turn on one another, baptize our own opinions and declare ourselves righteous.

And in the midst of all the noise and the muddle, the finger pointing and arguing, we get to December again once more and hear the Christmas story. And what struck me this year was this beautiful passage from Zechariah’s prophecy as recorded by Luke.

This prophecy tells of John the Baptist, the prophet who will prepare the way for Jesus – and it speaks about what God is about to do in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Zechariah says:  “And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people in the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

What is Christmas about? What is at the heart of the message?

It’s about a God who comes to save his people, to forgive their sins, and to set them free from darkness and death and bring peace.

This is all because of the “tender mercy of our God” as Zechariah describes it.

The “tender mercy of our God.”

This Christmas my hope and prayer is that we let those words ring in our ears – not just as nice words that appear on a Christmas card but as words that thunder from the heavens and wake us up!

The tender mercy of God.

We need this tender mercy because on our own we go astray – we find numerous ways to hurt ourselves and one another. We backbite and gossip, we use our words to tear down, we create weapons, we abuse one another, we steal, we mock, we degrade, we break things. The Bible is honest about all of this – yet in today’s cultural climate it’s the conversation we avoid: “not that yucky guilt stuff” we say.

And yet we continue to live our lives contributing to the brokenness and pain, feeling it deep in our souls, seeing it everyday and wondering how to fix it.

The good news of Christmas is that we are sent a Saviour.

One who has come to set things right.

One who is full of so much mercy and compassion for us and for all the people we might even wish He didn’t have compassion and love for. This tender mercy extends to all of creation.

God comes to us – that is the story at the heart of Christmas. And God comes to take what is broken and to mend it. He comes to forgive our sin, to see us free from it and to make us new.

We can pretend we have no sin to confess. We can pretend that we are better than our neighbour. We can pretend that our opinions make us righteous. But all of this is but dust. All of this will disappoint. Instead, this Christmas let us welcome the tender of mercy of God in our hearts, that we might know forgiveness, freedom, the way of peace and God’s deep love for us. And as we know God’s mercy for us, may we share that mercy with others, Amen.

[1] https://comment.org/the-fading-of-forgiveness/ essay by Tim Keller.

[2] Marguerite Shuster, The Fall and Sin: What We Have Become as Sinners (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004), 101