A Compassionate People

First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
21st Sunday after Pentecost – October 2, 2005
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: Philippians 4:1-9/Matthew 22:1-14]

I fear that I am falling prey to the old preacher’s device of using a definition as a starting point. However, I think that it would not hurt for us to consider where the word ‘compassion’ comes from and what it means as we discuss being a compassionate people.

The word ‘compassion’ comes from the Latin word ‘patior,’ which means to allow or to suffer and is the root for ‘patient.’ To have compassion then is to suffer or feel with another and to be compassionate is to demonstrate this willingness to suffer with, to feel pity for another. Even more important than its etymological origins is to discover from where does this quality of compassion come? I believe it comes from humanity being made in the image and likeness of God.

If it comes from the spiritual side of us, then it stands to reason our cultivation of our spiritual lives, our spirituality, will be what nurtures and stimulates compassion to grow within us. Spirituality is a hot topic right now, as this as this September 5th copy of Newsweek demonstrates. The cover and the feature articles are devoted to the quest for spirituality in contemporary America. I don’t find this odd at all given the nature of our nation and its founding. Some years ago the great scholar of American religious history, Sidney Mead, said that we are “a nation with the soul of a church.” The current quest for spirituality is, to a large extent, an attempt to recover that soul, which has been more than a bit battered by both modernity and, now, postmodernity. The article states, “Today, then, the real spiritual quest is not to put another conservative on the Supreme Court, or to get creation science into the schools. If you experience God directly, your faith is not going to hinge on whether natural selection could have produced the flagellum of a bacterium. If you feel God within you, then the important question is settled; the rest is details.” [p. 50] The flourishing of spirituality today and the search for large numbers of people is for the immediacy of a relationship, a communion with the Divine.

To be honest with you, I think that this has been the human quest – in one form or another – from the very beginning. This is that search to fill what Pascal called “the God shaped void” and Augustine poured out his soul about in his Confessions. It’s something we’ve talked about here in this meeting house again and again. It’s about relationship.

What fascinates me, however, is how diverse the quest has become and how advances in technology and information science have added new twists to the process. There is a Web site called ‘Beliefnet’ that sends out more than eight million daily emails on spiritual topics to more than five million subscribers. Here’s a list of what is sent, “Generic ‘inspiration’ is most popular (2.4 million), followed by the Bible (1.6 million), but there are 460,000 subscribers to the Buddhist thought of the day, 313,000 Torah devotees, 268,00 subscribers to Daily Muslim Wisdom (and 236,000 who get the Spiritual Weight Loss message). Even nature-worshiping Pagans are divided into a mind-boggling panoply of sects, including Wicca, Druidism, Pantheism, Animism, Teutonic Paganism, the God of Spirituality Folk and, in case you can’t find one to suit you on that list, Eclectic Paganism.” [p. 52] All of it is an attempt to fill that void, to experience the immediacy and assurance of relationship.

What hit me as I read the article, and has been mirrored in my own experience, is that many pursuing those diverse paths used to be Christians. The article told the story of an African-American woman who had been raised in a Baptist Church in the south who early-on saw Christianity as “the religion of white oppressors.” Her spiritual journey led her to Tibetan Buddhism, which she embraced and now teaches. She recognizes that compassion is a trait common to both faiths, but something she said struck me, “The Bible says ‘love your neighbor,’ but it doesn’t tell you how.” She believes Buddhism taught her the way of compassion and tolerance to the point that she is now “an African-American Baptist Buddhist.” And while I applaud her search and her integrity, I believe that somewhere she missed the point that the Bible and Christian faith are really all about the “how” of loving your neighbor, of becoming and living as compassionate people. I won’t deny that sometimes it gets obscured, but that’s not the faith’s fault, it’s the fault of those who practice or, in too many cases, don’t practice it!

When Paul writes to the Philippians he is telling them precisely how to go about the love of the neighbor. He says, “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.” [Phil. 4:8-9] Paul is simply commending a balanced and positive way of life to those he loved and taught. He reminds them to stay focused on the things that matter – the positive things – and to look beyond the negatives and the flaws, especially the flaws in others. How different would our daily lives be if we lived what Paul commended? How different would this church, would every church, be if we lived our lives centered on that which is true, just, good, pure and beautiful? I believe that he is describing God who is the source of all these virtuous actions and is the one toward whom we live as we seek to live day-to-day.

The essence of Christian spirituality is a life lived in response to God’s gracious invitation to relationship on a deep, intimate, and personal level. The parable Matthew relates makes that point powerfully. The wedding feast is the metaphor for the kingdom of God, which is coming and bringing a new consciousness of God’s presence and action in our world. We’re not just invited to the party; we’re invited to get married. Everyone is invited to come to the party; there is no ethnic, gender, age, or health requirement. All of the barriers which have stood between human beings and God and human beings among themselves are broken down, leveled. The great ‘kicker’ here, as John Shea points out, is that the wedding guests are the bride. “They were not invited to witness a wedding; they were invited to be married to the son. They were not invited to observe; they were invited to participate. The requirement is a wedding garment, an eagerness to be united to the son.” [The Spiritual Wisdom of the Gospel Matthew Year A, p. 208] The garment is our willingness to respond and to make Jesus’ teachings part of our lives. We all ‘marry’ and then bear the children of the union, which are the acts of justice, compassion, and love that we do in the world.

I know it may sound odd. However, the Puritans understood this “mystical marriage” which went beyond gender or anything we think marriage to be. Like the great teachers and mystics of the church through the ages, they understood the implications of what it meant to be “joined” to Christ as the “head of the body” and to be brought into corporate relationship not only Christ, but with other believers. They understood, as is pointed out in Matthew’s Gospel, that marriage is not a theoretical, but practical relationship. So they gave themselves to study, prayer, meditation, and contemplation to enter into that union and then turned to produce the fruit of it in the commonwealth, in the society they formed. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is one of the classic works of Puritan spirituality. In it Christian observed, “The soul of religion is the practical part. . .” When judgment day comes, he points out, one will not be asked, “Did you believe?” but “Were you doers, or talkers only?”

There is another Puritan manual on spirituality that speaks to the practical deeds of loving one’s neighbor. It’s called The Plaine Mans Pathway to Heaven and was written by Arthur Dent. Dent listed, “honest, just, and conscionable dealing in all our actions among men” as signs of whether or not one was in proper relationship with God, or among the elect. Here he echoes both Richard Baxter and the learned doctor, William Ames. Baxter said, “True morality, or the Christian ethics is the love of God and man, stirred up by the Spirit of Christ, through faith; and exercised in works of piety, justice, charity, and temperance.” Elsewhere he wrote, “Take heed that you lose not that common love which you owe to mankind.” Ames, who defined theology as “the art of living toward God” demonstrated that there is another side as well when he wrote, “To profit or benefit others is a duty belonging to all men. . . . Love towards God cannot consist without this charity towards our neighbor . . . neither can any true religion.” [both in Ryken, Worldly Saints, p. 179-180]

Our Puritan forebears showed time and again that love of God and faith in Christ showed itself best in the love of neighbor. For all of the later descriptions of them as sour and unforgiving, their writings, the institutions of public good they founded, and the works they did tell us otherwise. So, too, do the good works done by their descendants, including the movement to abolish slavery, the Underground Railroad (in which our church participated), the founding of Howard University for African Americans and Gallaudet University for the hearing impaired, and countless social projects.  The emphasis was on a spirituality that wasn’t theoretical, but practical.

Their whole project, the rekindling of the fires of faith that they saw going out around them, was summed up in their love toward God and neighbor. Their spirituality was nothing fancy or exotic, but was just the basic practice which has marked Christian faith when it is at its best. Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety describes it: “to joyne together, in watching, fasting, praying, reading the Scriptures, keeping his Sabboths, hearing Sermons, receiving the holy Communion, relieving the Poore, exercising in all humilitie the works of Pietie to God, and walking conscionably in the duties of our call towards men.” [in Senn Protestant Spiritual Traditions, p. 165]

The contemporary English spiritual writer, Kenneth Leech, wrote a little book that I recommend to folks beginning their exploration of Christian spirituality. It’s called True Prayer: An Invitation to Christian Spirituality. While written some years ago, Leech makes a comment that speaks to right now, “Today meditation and ‘spirituality’ are being offered as commodities, as products of the social order, but as leisure-time activities which have no effect upon society. Spirituality has become ‘privatised’, banished to the private sector of life. Yet the future of our society is inextricably bound up with the future of the human spirit. . . True spirituality is not a leisure-time activity, a diversion from life. It is essentially subversive, and the test of its genuineness is practical. Discipleship involves a real transformation of character.” [p. 79] That’s what we are called to as people of compassion, to the transformation of character which empowers us to live toward God and toward others reaching out to those in need, because God has first reached out to us in our need – God has felt with us, suffered with us. Now we reach to others.

We can come up with a long list of reasons, I am sure, why being a compassionate person is best left to someone else. We might denigrate or belittle our own spiritual life and think we’re not worthy. Ultimately, there is no excuse and all we have to do is look to how God worked transformation in and through the lives of the most unlikely people. I came across this list and it makes such sense that I’m just going to leave with it today.

“What’s our excuse? Abraham was too old. Moses stuttered. Miriam was a gossip. Jacob was a liar. Elijah was burned out. Solomon was too rich. Isaiah had unclean lips. Jeremiah was too young. Jonah didn’t like his job. Naomi was a widow. Peter was afraid of death. Paul was a murderer. Lazarus was dead. Martha was a worry-wart.”  God can take us, transform us and use us for good – but we have to respond to the invitation to become a people of compassion.