Have Mercy

Some fragmented thoughts on a post-inauguration sermon, the callout of a president, the implications for the rest of us, irksome unity, and some upcoming events

Jan 28, 2025

Tuesday, January 28
Grand Rapids, Mich.

I got home yesterday morning from a three-week reporting trip to the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore. I didn’t intend to be out of the country for the change of presidential administrations, but I wasn’t mad about it.

We came home with beautiful fabrics that reflect the rich traditions that have persisted in the Philippines and Malaysia. The top three are from Indigenous artisans in the Philippines. The bottom three are by modern batik makers in Malaysia

Tristan and I happened to be in Malaysia on January 20th, and I was grateful for the wider lens offered by being abroad. Sure, the news from the U.S. was on our minds—and on our phones. But we were also visiting a country that has wrestled with no small amount of division, ethnic tension, corruption, and political change. As we wandered Kuala Lumpur and Johor Bahru, we saw prosperity alongside poverty, and the legacy of colonialism as well as audacious attempts to build something new. A forest of cranes rose just a block from a persevering stand of tropical hardwoods. A long-tailed macaque leaping from a city sidewalk to a street-side trashcan to a freeway overpass reminded me how life often makes its unexpected way.

The urban macaque was too fast for me to get a good photo. But we spent a couple of days in rural Johor, and we came across this family of macaques there

One night before bed, I was scrolling Instagram (don’t judge) and came across a clip of the National Prayer Service, which took place last Tuesday. Like many others, I was captivated by the sermon preached by the Rt. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C. With the newly inaugurated president sitting steps from the pulpit, Bishop Budde addressed him directly. “Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God,” she said. “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy.”

Let me say it again, but more accurately: Like many others, I was captivated by a tiny portion of the sermon preached by the Rt. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C. (You can read Budde’s full text here.)

I watched the clip three times, and then I re-posted it. Budde’s call for mercy—particularly for LGBTQ+ people, for immigrants, for kids fearing separation from their parents, for refugees—moved me. The responses to my re-post were so interesting: so much praise for Budde (“I love her,” one acquaintance wrote, while another called her “so courageous”) and so much derision for the man she was addressing (vomit emojis, evaluations of him that cannot be printed here).

What might I have said were I standing in Budde’s place? I’m not sure. But I’m confident I wouldn’t have been able to summon such gentle strength and laudable restraint. She did not rail, she did not rant, and she did not ridicule. Instead, standing in the presence of worldly power, she acknowledged that power plainly—and then she made a clear, bold request, rooted in scriptural wisdom much more ancient than the U.S. constitution.

Budde’s request seems audacious only in the context of this present moment, but then this present moment is a such an odd and indeed unmerciful one: By week’s end, a congressman had introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives that condemns Budde’s “distorted message” and accuses her of “promoting political bias instead of advocating the full counsel of biblical teaching.” (The resolution’s twenty co-sponsors include the noted homiletical and biblical scholars Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene.)

I’m not sure what those members of Congress mean by “the full counsel of biblical teaching,” but it should not be unusual for a Christian minister to make a case for mercy. Nor is it unusual for an American president to show mercy. Indeed, this particular president had done so just one day before, with his sweeping grant of clemency to participants in the January 6th insurrection. The challenge here, of course, was that the bishop was asking the president to show mercy to those for whom he had previously shown disdain.

Who would enjoy being publicly called out like that? Though many of us absolutely agree with Budde’s words, I suspect we also relished seeing that particular man called out like that.

After her call for mercy, Budde had one more thing to say, which has gotten much less notice: She put the president’s power in its proper context.

Her plea had come nearly at the sermon’s end, but this is how she actually finished: “Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land,” she said. “May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being; to speak the truth to one another in love; and walk humbly with each other and our God—for the good of all people in this nation and the world.”

That last paragraph, in which she pivoted purposefully from “you” to “we” and “us,” was of a piece with another thing that has gotten much less notice: All the parts of the sermon that came before she addressed the president personally.

The much-praised section asked so little of us. It left plenty of space for us to gawk at the confrontation, to sit comfortably like spectators at a moral showdown. But the rest of the sermon? Perhaps the rest of the sermon got relatively little notice because it didn’t make such room. In fact, it was demanding and challenging, because it implicated us and our conceptions of what being “us” might entail.

It was about unity.

“Bright Unity,” Wassily Kandinsky, 1925, oil on board. From the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York

Unity, Budde said, “is not conformity. It is not a victory of one over another. It is not weary politeness nor passivity born of exhaustion. Rather, unity is a way of being with one another that encompasses and respects differences, that teaches us to hold multiple perspectives and life experiences as valid and worthy of respect; that enables us, in our communities and in the halls of power, to genuinely care for one another even when we disagree.”

A society that is doing well with unity does not inspire such a sermon—and the vast majority of Budde’s sermon wasn’t about the president. It was about the American people. “The culture of contempt that has become normalized in this country threatens to destroy us,” she said. “We are all bombarded daily with messages from what sociologists now call the outrage-industrial complex.”

The varied reactions to Budde’s sermon provided all the evidence one needs to demonstrate that the culture of contempt is real and primed to spew derision. Was it not that very culture, that modern habit, that, on the one side, generated the vomit emojis and cynical commentary about the presidential soul, and, on the other, fomented angry retorts, congressional resolutions against the sermon, and even death threats against the bishop? Even if you think that one batch of disdain was merited while the other was not, we still end up together in the mess, which is not the kind of unity for which Budde was advocating.

Budde identified three pillars to a better unity: honor for the inherent dignity of every human; honesty (“there is a lot working against the truth now,” she said, “staggeringly so”); and humility. “Perhaps we are most dangerous to ourselves and others when we are persuaded, without a doubt, that we are absolutely right and someone else is absolutely wrong. Because then we are just a few steps from labeling ourselves as ‘the good people’ versus ‘the bad people,’” she said. “And the truth is that we’re all people. We’re both capable of good and bad.”

As I studied the sermon, it didn’t take long to find some of its roots, in Micah 6:8. That ancient call to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly comes amidst the prophet’s dissection of the sin that has infected his land: idolatry, and greed, and corruption, and deceit, and hypocrisy, and violence. But also: forgetting. The people have failed to remember where they have come from and the divine goodness that has made them who they are.

I will confess that Budde’s emphasis on unity irked me a bit. In a culture that does not do subtlety well, I do wish she had made one thing more explicit: The greatest costs of unity are often borne by those whose lives are furthest from the norm.

My hope, then, is that the call we heard so piercingly sent in the president’s direction might somehow compel us not to look to him but rather to turn our gaze unsparingly back at ourselves. These are questions I’ve been considering: What can I do to be more merciful? How can we embody compassion to those whose lives intersect with ours in often unnoticed ways? What ought we to do to send our gentleness and generosity out to meet others’ fear and need?

The tone might be set at the top, but this good and holy work can and should be done everywhere and by us all. If, as some of us expect, the real consequences of partisan politics and unjust policy are borne inequitably, we—and especially those of us who live in relative comfort and ease—will have the opportunity to help shoulder some of the burden. And if American history teaches us anything, it is that, sometimes, the people must rise up for one another, in big ways and small, when and where our leaders fail.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy,” Jesus said. In scripture, mercy is often depicted as a choice for humanity, but it is a fundamental attribute of the character of God. Perhaps if we remembered that we were first recipients of mercy, then we might be more blessedly merciful too.

“The Unity of Heaven and Man,” Chen Xiaofeng, 20th century. Ink and color on paper. From the Wulin Academy of Arts

Programming notes: Good Soil will be published in less than two months. Eek. The full tour schedule will be announced soon, but I can share two dates with you now.

First, on Sunday, March 23, my friend Barbara Brown Taylor will join me at the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley. Barbara will preach at that morning’s worship service, at 10 a.m. Pacific. Then, at 11:30 a.m., we’ll launch Good Soil. If you’re in the Bay Area, we’d be so glad to see you there. Those events will also be livestreamed. No registration is necessary; you can find more information on the church website. By the way, Barbara recently began posting essays on Substack, and that writing is as excellent and luminous as one would expect.

Then, on Saturday, March 29, we’ll celebrate Good Soil in my hometown of Grand Rapids. The eminent philosopher James K.A. Smith will be my conversation partner, and the gifted singer-songwriter Spencer LaJoye has agreed to grace us with their music. That event will be at 2:30 p.m. at Westminster Presbyterian Church. Tickets are free. Please register on Eventbrite.

A couple of my closest friends tease me regularly about being terrible at basic life tasks like scheduling. Instead of cooking and feasting and celebrating the Chinese New Year, I leave tomorrow to spend a few days in Memphis with the good people at the Association of Partners in Christian Education conference. From there, I’ll be heading to Crosspointe, in Cary, N.C., to preach on Sunday. Join us at 10 a.m. ET, either in the building itself or online. I’d love to see you there. I’d also love to tell you what I’m preaching about, but I haven’t written the sermon yet; it’s only Tuesday!

What’s on your minds? What reflections do you have on Bishop Budde’s sermon? Especially if you disagree with my reading of it, I’d love to know more; I might be completely off-base. Also, what else would you want to hear a preacher discuss amid all that’s happening in the world?

Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer

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