Justice and mercy

Beloved of God,

    I mentioned in last week’s letter that we have an opportunity to support our friends at the New Mexico Baptist Children’s Home by stocking their pantry. They asked for:

• BBQ Sauce
  
• Peanut Butter
• Jelly/Jam
• Pancake Box Mix
• Cereal (except Cheerios)
  
• Spaghetti
• Cooking Oils
• Toilet Paper
• Toilet Bowl Cleaner
• Kleenex
• Windex

You can also make monetary donations here. We plan to take the food items to our associational meeting this Sunday, so please bring them to the church house by Sunday morning. 

    This week, our Scripture reading is from the very last part of Jonah. In it, God has witnessed the repentance of the Ninevites and decided to spare them. And Jonah is not happy about it. He is not happy about it at all. When God relents, there is a moment where Jonah angrily accuses God of acting…like God. “I knew,” he says, “ that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.” Jonah is quoting almost directly from Exodus 34:6, with one minor exception. There’s no mention in that verse of calamity whether coming about or being withheld. 
    It is almost as if Jonah, who faced a storm for his own disobedience, wants something at least that dramatic for these wicked, gentile oppressors (and they really were!). 
    More often than I would like to admit, I’ve pondered how satisfying it would be to see all the people I think of as wicked meeting God’s justice. It escapes my thoughts entirely that they might meet with his mercy instead. The end of Jonah asks us to consider how we might respond if God’s mercy was made plain where one could have rightly expected God’s wrath. How would we react? And maybe more provocatively than that: would we dare to despise God’s mercy to others?
    The book ends with Jonah lamenting bitterly the death of a small shady plant, but having no regard for the lives, both human and animal, that would have been swept away by God’s wrath. It closes with a question from God to Jonah, “Should I be concerned for these lives?” 
    It is a great mercy of God that sinners like you and me are not in any position to decide what the appropriate bounds of God’s concern are. It is a good and beautiful thing that God can and does choose to be interested in, invested in, and concerned over any number of people that we might dismiss out of hand. I’m so grateful that our good and gracious God makes those decisions and not me. 

Please join me this week in praying for:

• Those among us who are sick.
  
• Folks who are facing griefs and hurts that we may have failed to notice; pray that these folks have all they need and that we learn to pay attention. 
• Our young people who will be participating in homecoming festivities. May God shield the joyful and protect them from harm.
• Our associate pastor search team.
• Those who may be sensing a call to serve on one of the annually appointed committees in our church.
• Those who are stressed by their work as the end of the fiscal year looms.
• The folks who respond to emergencies in our wildlands, on our roadways, in our communities, and even in our homes. 
• Those in positions of public trust at the federal, state, and local levels.
• Each other (please email [email protected] if you’d like to be added to our prayer list).

You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world,

Marshall