Back Porch Mercy: What Faithful Looks Like on a Tuesday

Christian mercy and justice don't begin with grand gestures or perfect plans. They begin with a morning. A cup of coffee. The weight of a world that feels too broken to fix. And the question so many of us are carrying right now: what could I possibly do that would matter?

In this episode of Jesus, Justice + Mercy, Kristen starts exactly there - on her back porch, holding the weight of a bombed school in Iran, draft-age sons, a friend whose lights are on for now, and the creeping numbness around gun violence. From that honest, ordinary place, she makes the case that Christian mercy and justice were never meant to be big, dramatic, or perfect. They were meant to be faithful. Present tense. Today.

 Through Micah 6:8, Zechariah 4:10, the mustard seed and yeast parables, and the extraordinary story of Fannie Lou Hamer, this episode answers the question: what does faithful actually look like on a Tuesday?

 In this episode:

·      Why we've gotten mercy wrong - we've made it grand and dramatic and paralyzed ourselves in the process

·      Micah 6:8 as a present-tense call - not to solve, but to act, love, and walk

·      Zechariah 4:10 and the word God spoke to a discouraged people rebuilding in rubble

·      The mustard seed and the yeast - two images Jesus chose to show us how the kingdom actually moves

·      The story of Fannie Lou Hamer - a sharecropper who showed up to register to vote and changed history

·      The SAVE Act and why Fannie Lou's story is a present-tense warning

·      What everyday mercy looks like: cooking a meal, folding clothes, sitting with someone

·      Why proximity transforms you - and how showing up leads to city council meetings you never planned to attend

·      What it means to follow a God who pitched a tent and moved into the neighborhood

 Scripture referenced:

Micah 6:8

Zechariah 4:10

Matthew 13:31-33

John 1:14

This episode is part of Movement 3: Re-Build - Repair as Christian Witness

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Transcript

Back Porch Mercy: What Faithful Looks Like on a Tuesday

Comfortable Christianity is not the gospel. It never was. We watch the problems get bigger, and we tell ourselves we'll act when we have something big enough to offer. But the church's response has too often been to pray harder, give bigger, and wait for someone else to do something. Today we're talking about why Jesus never gave us that option, and what faithfulness actually looks like on an ordinary Tuesday.

The Weight of a Morning

Welcome back to Jesus, justice + mercy. I want to start this episode a little differently. Not with a quote, or a Bible verse, not even with a big idea. I want to start with a morning.

It wasn’t early because I am definitely a night owl, and unless the animals wake me up I am not going to see the sunrise. But my coffee was still in my hand. Cats and dogs were fed, dishwasher emptied but the day had not really started. And before I even got to my desk, it hit me. The news cycles that have me doomscrolling too late into the evening hit - a school in Iran had been bombed. Children. Just kids trying to learn. More than 170 of them. And I just sat with that for a minute because what else do you do with that?

And then my mind went, the way a mom's mind goes, to my boys. Two of them are draft age. And I just sat there, on my back patio, soaking in the sun as it warmed me up and hoping it will never come to that.

I thought about my friend whose husband works for DHS and they haven’t gotten a paycheck in weeks. Their lights are on, for now. I thought about the families losing food assistance, about kids who can no longer count on their schools giving them a meal. About people on Medicaid who are watching the news wondering if their coverage is going to disappear. About immigrant neighbors who are afraid to leave their houses. And another day of gun violence that it seems we feel almost numb to because it happens so often.

And I didn't do anything heroic that morning. I didn't make a call or write a letter or show up anywhere. I sat with my coffee and the dogs at my feet, and I felt the weight of it all. Because that weight is real.

And I think a lot of you are waking up to the same weight right now.

The question I keep getting, the question I keep asking myself, is: what do we do when the problems are so enormous that anything we could actually do feels embarrassingly small?

That is what we're going to talk about today.

Because I think we have gotten something wrong about mercy. We've made it big. Grand. Dramatic. We think that if we can't fix the system, we might as well not start. And in the process, we have paralyzed ourselves into doing nothing while people right next to us are drowning.

God never asked us to fix it all. God asked us to act. To love. To walk.

That's Micah 6:8, and if you've been with me for any length of time, you know this verse is the heartbeat of everything I do. It doesn't say solve. It says act. Present tense. Today. With what you have and where you are.

Small Beginnings

And I want to sit with that for a minute before we go anywhere else. Because I think we need some company in this feeling, and it turns out, the people of God have been here before.

We seem to keep going back to the Israelites. I think because their story is so relatable. Anyway, they had just come back from exile in Babylon. The same Babylon I mentioned last week, where God had told them to “Seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you” And now, they were finally home, but the home they had been longing for was rubble. The temple was gone. The city was broken. And they were trying to rebuild, but what they were building looked nothing like what had been there before. It was small. It was slow. And the people were, once again, discouraged.

And God speaks through the prophet Zechariah, through a vision he receives in the middle of the night, 'Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin.' Zechariah 4:10.

Do not despise these small beginnings.

God is not looking at the rubble asking why it isn't already a temple. God is looking at the one stone being laid and calling it the work. The small thing is the faithful thing. The beginning is the work.

So that's where we're going today. Mercy in motion. Small acts. And why they matter more than you think.

Mustard Seeds
And it turns out Jesus had a lot to say about that. In Matthew 13 he's asked to describe what the kingdom of God looks like. And he doesn't say a mighty army. He doesn't say a grand institution. He picks the smallest seed anyone in that crowd would have recognized.

A mustard seed.

He says the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and planted in a field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it grows, it becomes a tree large enough for birds to nest in its branches.

I want you to notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say the kingdom looks like someone who had the whole plan figured out before they started. He does not say it looks like someone who could see the tree before they planted the seed. He says it looks like someone who planted anyway. Someone who put the small thing in the ground and trusted what they couldn't yet see.

And then right after that, same chapter, two verses later, he does it again. He says the kingdom is like yeast that a woman mixed into a large amount of flour. A little yeast. Hidden. Invisible. Working from the inside. Until the whole batch rises. Sort of like my sourdough starter than I am working on, hoping it will eventually produce multiple loaves of bread.

Jesus gave us two images. Both of them small. Both of them hidden. Both of them doing more than anyone could see while they were happening.

This is not an accident. Jesus is telling us something about how God works in the world, and it is almost the opposite of how we've been trained to think about impact. We want the before and after photos. The dramatic transformation. The moment we can point to and say that, that's when things changed. Because that is what we are constantly fed, even in the church.

But the kingdom mostly doesn't work that way. It works like yeast. Like a seed in the ground. Quietly. Slowly. In ways we won't fully see on our timeline and sometimes in ways we won’t see in our lifetime.

Which means the act of mercy you do today, the meal you cook, the name you learn, the hour that you show up, is not insufficient. It is not a consolation prize because you couldn't do something bigger. It is exactly how the kingdom moves.

Small. Faithful. Present tense.

One act of Courage

When we think of small acts that changed history, we typically go to someone like Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat, or six-year-old Ruby Bridges walking into an all-white school as segregation was cracking. And those are powerful. One person. One moment. One act of courage that history didn't forget. But here's what I want us to sit with, for every Rosa Parks, for every Ruby Bridges, there were hundreds of people whose names we will never know. People who showed up to meetings, who drove strangers to courthouses, who fed organizers, who wrote letters, who stood in lines, who got beaten and went back anyway, and history never wrote their names down. Movements are made of them. And today I want to tell you about one woman who almost got lost in that same silence. Her name was Fannie Lou Hamer.

You may know her name. You may not. But I want to make sure you know her story, because she is one of the most powerful examples I know of what it looks like when an ordinary person decides to do one small faithful thing in the face of an enormous crushing system.

Fannie Lou Hamer was a sharecropper in Mississippi, which means she worked land owned by someone else in a system specifically designed to keep her in debt and dependent. The landowners controlled the supplies, the harvest, the accounting, and somehow at the end of every season, no matter how hard you worked, you owed more than you made. She picked cotton. She had a sixth-grade education. She was not a politician or a celebrity or a theologian. She was a Black woman in the Jim Crow South trying to survive.

And I say all of that because there is a lie that still circulates. We hear it often when social supports are mentioned that Black Americans simply didn't work hard enough after slavery ended, that poverty was a choice or a character flaw. Sharecropping is the answer to that lie. It was slavery with a different name and a ledger book that never tipped the balance to the worker.

So, with that backdrop, in 1962, she went to a meeting. A Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (or SNCC) meeting where she heard for the first time that she had a constitutional right to vote. She was 44 years old, and nobody had ever told her that before.

And I want to pause there for a second. Because technically, Black Americans had been given the right to vote with the 15th Amendment in 1870. On paper. But the South had spent nearly a century building walls around that right, poll taxes that required people to pay to vote when sharecropping had made sure they had no money. Literacy tests administered by the same white officials who had denied them education, tests designed to fail, with questions that changed depending on who was asking and who was answering. Grandfather clauses. Intimidation. Violence. The right existed on paper but was systematically strangled in practice.

92 years after it was legal for her to vote, when Fannie Lou Hamer heard at 44 years old that she had that constitutional right to vote, she wasn't hearing something new. She was hearing something that had been deliberately kept from her.

So she decided to register to vote.

That's it. That was the small thing. She showed up at the courthouse with seventeen other people to register to vote.

And that small thing cost her everything. She was thrown off the plantation where she had worked for eighteen years. Her family was threatened. She was arrested. She was beaten so severely in a Mississippi jail that she suffered permanent kidney damage and a blood clot behind one eye.

And she went back. She kept showing up. She registered other voters. She testified before the credentials committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, and her testimony was so powerful that President Johnson called an emergency press conference to interrupt the live broadcast because he didn't want the country to hear her.

The country heard her anyway.

She didn't start a movement that day at the courthouse. She just showed up to do one thing she had every right to do. And that one thing, done faithfully, done repeatedly, done at enormous personal cost accumulated into something that changed the course of history.

Now, I want to be honest with you. Most of us are not going to be Fannie Lou Hamer. We are not going to face what she faced. We are not going to pay what she paid.

But here's what I need you to hear: she didn't know she was going to be Fannie Lou Hamer either. She just knew she had a right to vote and she was going to use it.

She started with one small act.

Voting Rights Then and Now

Right now, today, voting rights are being stripped again. Not with poll taxes and literacy tests this time, but with legislation like the SAVE Act that creates new barriers to voter registration, requirements that disproportionately affect the poor, the elderly, the young, women, and communities of color. It is being presented as election security. As protecting the integrity of the vote. And I want to be clear, that is exactly what they said 60 years ago, when they administered those literacy tests too. Different mechanisms. Same intent. The thing Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten for is being quietly dismantled in legislation that most people aren't even paying attention to or have been convinced that it is all about voter integrity.

Her story is not just history. It is a present-tense warning and a present-tense invitation.

You don't have to get beaten and fired to do something. But you do have to start somewhere.

Smaller than you think
So we've talked about what God asks of us. We've talked about mustard seeds and Zechariah and a woman in Mississippi who changed history by showing up to a courthouse. But even with painting a theological and historical picture I think some of you are still sitting with that question, okay, but what does this actually look like for me? On a Tuesday. In my regular life with everything else I have going on. When I am not Fannie Lou Hamer and I do not have a history-making moment in front of me.

And the answer is, it looks a lot smaller than you think. And that is exactly the point.

I want to tell you about an organization in my own community that works with people experiencing homelessness. And what strikes me about this org is that they are not trying to solve homelessness. They are not a policy think tank. They are not lobbying Congress. They are just showing up. Consistently. With food and clean clothes and, maybe most importantly, with time.

They need volunteers to cook meals. To fold clothes. To sit with people.

And that last one may be the most important of them all. To sit with people. Because one of the most profound things you can offer someone who has been pushed to the margins, who has been made invisible by systems and by sidewalks and by the way the rest of us avert our eyes, is presence. Your attention. The simple act of sitting down and saying I see you, I want to hear your story, and I am not in a hurry to leave.

And here is what I have watched happen over and over again. People show up to fold clothes or share a meal or just sit with someone, and something shifts. You cannot look into someone's eyes, learn their name, hear even a fragment of their story, and stay the same. Proximity does something to us that no sermon or podcast or book ever quite can. Suddenly we find yourself wondering how this happened. We start asking questions we never asked before. Why is there no affordable housing in this zip code? What are the laws in our city around where people experiencing homelessness can sleep, can sit, can exist? Who is making those decisions and who is in the room when they make them? And before long we are showing up to a city council meeting. Not because someone told you that you should. But because we met someone whose name we now know and we cannot unknow it. That is how proximity works. It starts with a meal, and it ends with paying attention to things we used to drive past. That is not a detour from mercy. That is mercy doing exactly what it is supposed to do, expanding our circle, sharpening our vision, making the political personal because it already was personal for someone else.

That is mercy in motion. Not a program. Not a solution. People, showing up, with nothing to offer but their presence and their time.

I think about Fannie Lou Hamer going back to that courthouse. And the unnamed hundreds who drove people to register, who cooked food for organizers, who showed up to meetings in churches on Tuesday nights after long days of picking cotton. Nobody wrote their names down. But the movement was made of them.

Your Tuesday night might be the thing somebody else's story is made of. You just don't get to know that yet.

Three Questions
So here is what I want to leave you with today. Not a to-do list. Not a ten-step plan. Just three questions to sit with this week.

Who in my immediate community is being pushed to the margins right now, and do I even know their name?

What is one small thing I could do this week that costs me something, my time, my comfort, my Tuesday night?

And what am I waiting for?

Bringing it Home
So let me bring this home. To your front porch or your cozy chair or wherever you sit with the problems of the world.

Following Jesus has never been a private practice. It has never been something that happens only inside four walls on a Sunday morning, or in the quiet of your personal devotional time, or in the careful management of your own spiritual life. Those things matter. They are not nothing. But they were never meant to be the whole thing.

The Word became flesh. God did not send a memo. God did not offer a webinar. God pitched a tent and moved into the neighborhood. The incarnation was not a concept; it was an address. And to follow Jesus is to follow someone who was always on his way somewhere. Always toward someone. Always crossing the street, touching the untouchable, sitting with the person everyone else had written off.

That is the faith we inherited. And somewhere along the way, we domesticated it.

We turned it inward. We made it personal. We made it private. And in doing so, we traded the mustard seed for a decorative plant we keep safely on the windowsill where it cannot grow too large or take up too much space or demand anything of our daily lives.

But Micah 6:8 was never a private instruction. Act justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. Those are public verbs. They happen outside. They happen toward other people. They happen in the neighborhood, at the courthouse, at the city council meeting, breaking bread with someone whose name you now know and is eating a meal you helped cook.

And the neighborhood is not waiting for you to have it all figured out. The person who needs a meal cooked doesn't need you to have solved food insecurity first. The person who needs someone to sit with them doesn't need you to have solved homelessness first. They need you to show up. Today. With what you have.

Zechariah told a people standing in rubble, do not despise small beginnings. The Lord rejoices to see the work begin. Not the work completed. Not the work celebrated. The work begun. Your small act is not a consolation prize. It is the beginning of something you do not yet have eyes to see.

And Jesus, who could have described the kingdom any way he wanted, chose a seed. Chose yeast hidden in flour. Chose the invisible, the small, the slow, the faithful. Because that is how the kingdom actually moves. Not in grand gestures from a safe distance. Not in charity that keeps us comfortable while keeping others dependent. But in proximity. In presence. In the willingness to sit down, learn a name, and let that name change you.

This is what it means to follow Jesus. Not perfectly. Not with all the answers. But faithfully. Persistently. In the direction of the people the world keeps trying to make invisible.

Mercy is not grand. It never was. It is the mustard seed. It is the yeast in the flour. It is Fannie Lou Hamer walking into a courthouse with seventeen people and a constitutional right she had only just learned she possessed. It is you, showing up, with what you have, where you are.

Act. Love. Walk.

That is enough. That has always been enough.

Jesus. Justice. No apologies.

Next week

Next week, we are staying in the Re-Build arc: what does healthy repair actually look like in relationships, in churches, in communities after harm has been done? We're going to get practical about conflict, restoration, and what it means to stay in the room when things get hard. That one is coming on Thursday.

And I have some exciting conversations coming your way soon. I've been recording interviews, and I cannot wait for you to hear them. Stay tuned.