Prayer in a World of Enemies, #6: The Vastness of God’s Mercy (Ps. 36 & James 1:2-5)

Prayer in a World of Enemies, Part 6:

The Vastness of God’s Mercy

August 31, 2025

Psalm 36 & James 1:2-5

By: Pastor Mike Connor 

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“The love of God is greater far
than tongue or pen can ever tell;
it goes beyond the highest star,
and reaches to the lowest hell;
the guilty pair, bowed down with care,
God gave His Son to win;
His erring child He reconciled,
and pardoned from his sin.”

Those words were written by German American Frederick Lehman early in the twentieth century for a hymn titled “The Love of God.” Higher than the highest star; lower than the lowest hell; reconciling, pardoning, and beyond description: the love of God. I used to sing that hymn during my college years in Indiana, a land of windblown open space. Lehman wrote it after crossing an ocean from Europe to America as a child and growing up in the vast Midwestern flatness of Iowa.

With its praise of a divine mercy reaching to the heavens and divine judgements deep as the seas, Psalm 36 pried the memory of Lehman’s hymn loose. Psalm and hymn together affirm the all-encompassing nature of God’s love. Like the bear-hunting family in the children’s book, who trapse through field and mud and water and snow in their quest, when it comes to God’s love, we can’t go over it and we can’t go under it. We have to go…? That’s right: through it.

Which is at one and the same time a wonderful, generous mystery and a terrifying prospect. God’s love is never something we have to earn, that’s the generosity of it. And it never leaves us unchanged: thus the holy terror!

Here at church this summer we’ve been holding our relationships with our enemies in the light of this great divine love. We’ve seen that God’s love calls us to honestly confess that we have enemies, be they political opponents, persons who’ve done harm to us or the people we love, addictions, or other personal and systemic sins. And when we’re honest with God about our enemies and what they stir up in us -- anger and sadness, grudges and fantasies of retribution -- all our clogged energy starts to flow and be transformed into a greater dependence on God.

Naming and then praying against our enemies brings us to a point of surrender, a condition of spiritual poverty. All we can do that does us any good is to ask the Holy Spirit to help us break the enemy-making cycle through a power and a vision greater than our own. That is when something tectonic shifts in our hearts, and we receive the grace of being able to pray for our enemies.

We live in a redeemed cosmos. Heaven and earth have been reconciled to God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As Paul writes in the New Testament letter of Ephesians, “For Christ himself has brought peace to us. He united Jews and Gentiles into one people when, in his own body on the cross, he broke down the wall of hostility that separated us” (Eph 2:14, NLT). Seeing the reconciliation of enemies in his day-to-day ministry, Paul came to realize the scope of God’s salvation. He articulates his view in his letter to the Colossians: “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Jesus], and through him to reconcile everything to himself, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Col 1:19-20, CSB).

Because of the peace between God and humankind that Jesus has secured for us, we can experience transformation of our relationships with our enemies. We could also say that our openness to that peace is a sign of our participation in God’s kingdom.

Even long before the days of Jesus and Paul, the Israelite king and poet David, in a moment of piercing perception, sensed that all creation is flooded with God’s love:

[You], Lord, shall save both man and beast.

How excellent is your mercy, O God!

The children of men shall take refuge

under the shadow of your wings.

They shall be satisfied with the plenteousness of your house,

and you shall give them drink from your pleasures

as out of a river.

For with you is the well of life,

and in your light shall we see light.

What a sublime vision. Heights, depths, distances. Salvation of man and beast. God bringing all people under protective cover, feeding them, giving them fresh water to drink. God the source of life and light. Every person and place and moment has access to love’s possibilities.

Like peace. Like transformation in our dealings with our enemies. That transformation can take different forms, depending on who our enemies are. It can look like the actual repair of relationships. Or it can look like offering forgiveness, no longer being ruled by bitterness over harm done in the past. Or it can look like freedom from personal sin, freedom for self-acceptance and newness of life.

God’s expansive love calls us to yield our control and to change.

But it’s not always going to appear or feel like peace is possible. Jesus, who taught us to love our enemies, was not naïve about this. In the great prayer for his disciples that he offers in John chapter 17, Jesus says to God the Father, “I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one” (John 17:15, NRSVUE). Eternally, Jesus prays the Church into the world; we aren’t given any license to forsake it or treat it badly or not cherish it. But we nevertheless need his protection and his sanctification. We are born into a world of ‘us and them,’ tempted by the evil one into the enemy-making cycle. We need to be born again, from above, into the vistas and horizons of empowered love.

At my house, we’ve been watching the 2016 Disney movie Moana. Like, many many times. Moana is set in an ancient Polynesian world and its main characters are the descendants of fearless seafarers. Moana is the daughter of the tribal chief, and she receives a spiritual call from the ocean to go and find the sacred stone heart of her people’s mother island, Te Fiti. When this stone heart was taken one thousand years prior to Moana’s life, the ocean became unsafe, and Moana’s people, gave up life on the open ocean to protect themselves from further tragedy.

Early in the movie, feeling constrained by her peoples’ fear of sailing beyond the reef of their island, Moana sings a song called “How Far I’ll Go”:

See the line where the sky meets the sea?
It calls me
And no one knows, how far it goes
If the wind in my sail on the sea stays behind me
One day I’ll know
If I go there’s just no telling how far I'll go[1]

Later, after Moana discovers the truth about the great navigators and explorers her were people once were and the roots of their present-day fears, her ancestors appear to her in a vision and sing a song called “We Know the Way.”

We set a course to find
A brand new island everywhere we roam
We keep our island in our mind
And when it’s time to find home
We know the way[2]

Those two songs show us two ways of being. Moana’s contemporaries have given themselves over to a self-protectiveness in response to fearing the world, the unknown. This fear is based on fundamental divisions: here and there, us and them. And it denies the heart’s deep craving for something more, something better and more thrilling. But with the help of her grandmother, her ancestors, and the ocean itself, Moana discovers how to live with and from a sacred center: “our island in our mind.” Home is a place to cast off from and return to. But more than that, it’s a knowledge and trust that travels with the people wherever they goes. Because they learn to trust and navigate again.

For Christians, that sacred center is Christ: the gift of God’s very self to us and in us. Christ allows us to be unafraid as we head off into unfamiliar territory, like transforming our relationships to our enemies, like praying for people we disagree with or find loathsome. In a redeemed cosmos, there are always brand-new islands of grace and mercy to discover. So long as we’re searching for them, trusting our center, they rise up to meet us.

“Consider it all joy, brothers and sisters, whenever you fall among trials of various kinds, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. Only let patience have a complete work, so that you may be whole and complete, lacking nothing. But if anyone among you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him” (James 1:2-5, my translation and emphasis).

When we are grounded in the redeemed cosmos, James’s counsel to weather difficult things with hope sounds like good news rather than bad news. All experiences become chisels in the hand of God, who sculpts us into people of patience.

Patience trusts the ultimate purposes of grace. Patience endures through the hard work of forgiveness. Patience allows dynamic, even surprising outcomes to take shape. Like, what would it look like for me to pray for that person I don’t like, or to be grieved by their suffering? What would it look like for me to forge a coalition, a better neighborhood, even a chosen family, out of people who are initially at odds with one another?

When you read Psalm 36 one of the most striking things about it is its contrast between the wicked person and God. The wicked one, “flatters himself in his own sight …He imagines mischief upon his bed, / and has set himself in no good way; / neither does he abhor anything that is evil” (Ps 36:2, 4).

The one possessed by evil never moves beyond the fantasies and schemes and wayward desires that constitute his or her inner life. The picture is of a person alone in a room, on a bed, hatching an evil plot. So small and constrained, so disconnected and lifeless.

And we’ve been there, yes? Reduced to doom-scrolling, to passive seething, to profound disconnection?

But it doesn’t have to be that way. There is a whole adventure out there, with Jesus, the one who has redeemed the cosmos, as our center. It’s an adventure of living in God’s world where the light of God shines bright and the wings of God hover over and the house of God has a crowded table.

For my heart, watery metaphors are like medicine: ocean depths of love, the well of life, the river of delights. They remind me of the bigness of God. Pablo Neruda, the twentieth-century Chilean poet, wrote a poem called “the First Sea.” It’s tells of a child whose experience of water had been limited to river travel through dense forest, who comes into contact with the open ocean for the first time. Neruda writes,

…I broke free of my roots.

My country grew in size.

My world of wood split open.

The prison of the forests

opened a green door,

letting in the wave in all its thunder,

and, with the shock of the sea,

my life widened out into space.[3]

My country grew in size. My life widened out.

I wonder: What has a similar world-enlarging effect on you?

Maybe it’s music or novels, city streets or mountaintop views, coalition building or ecumenical worship. Certainly, for all of us, prayer is an ingredient in this wonder.

Whatever makes your heart bigger, your imagination broader, your sense of God’s ‘thereness’ more refined; whatever helps you give others the benefit of the doubt, or tethers you so unshakably to your center that you can be brokenhearted without bitterness, angry without hatred, principled without violence, you must feed your soul with those things.

And! -- when we are at a loss anywhere along the way, all we have to do is ask God for wisdom, and God will grant it, because God is endlessly, lavishly generous. Because God is Jesus, whose prayer we live and labor inside of, whose crucified body unites heaven and earth, and embraces all things.

“Could we with ink the ocean fill

And were the sky of parchment made

Were every tree on earth a quill

And every man a scribe by trade

To write the love of God above

Would drain the ocean dry

Nor could the scroll contain the whole

Though stretched from sky to sky.”

Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift. Amen.

[1] “How Far I’ll Go,” by Lin-Manuel Miranda, © Walt Disney Music Company.

[2] “We Know the Way,” by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Opetaia Tavita Foa'I, © Walt Disney Music Company.

[3] “The First Sea,” in Pablo Neruda, On the Blue Shore of Silence: Poems of the Sea, trans. Alastair Reid (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 12.