Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost – July 22nd, 2018
Text: Mark 6:30-34 (RSV)
30 The apostles returned to Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. 31 And he said to them, “Come away by yourselves to a lonely place, and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. 32 And they went away in the boat to a lonely place by themselves. 33 Now many saw them going, and knew them, and they ran there on foot from all the towns, and got there ahead of them. 34 As he went ashore he saw a great throng, and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.
53 And when they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennes′aret, and moored to the shore. 54 And when they got out of the boat, immediately the people recognized him, 55 and ran about the whole neighborhood and began to bring sick people on their pallets to any place where they heard he was. 56 And wherever he came, in villages, cities, or country, they laid the sick in the market places, and besought him that they might touch even the fringe of his garment; and as many as touched it were made well.
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
“He had compassion on them.”
Thursday was a real high point for those of us who helped pack food at Feed My Starving Children. As our bulletin insert tells you, the combined group packed 189 boxes containing 40,824 meals, which will feed 112 children for an entire year! The number that really boggles my mind is 40,824! 40,824 meals packed in 90 minutes! This is the kind of achievement that happens when dedicated and compassionate people get together to help others.
Last week, I talked about how God blesses us. This week we were a blessing to others – to children in Guatemala, whom we will never meet, but whom we have helped far more than we will ever know.
Faith is real. Love is real. Compassion is real. We have proven that.
If you had to describe what’s at the heart of the Christian faith in one word, what would it be?
Most of us would answer, “love.” And we’d be right.
But today’s Gospel lesson features that other word: Compassion. Jesus looks out at that crowd of desperate people who have come all the way around the lake just to see him and hear his words of hope and to experience the healing power of God at his hands; and he feels compassion for them.
It may even be that, many times when we’re talking about love, what we’re really talking about is compassion – because that’s how we see love at work. To me, compassion can be described as “love in action.”
A dictionary definition of “compassion” tells us that compassion has many synonyms – sympathy, empathy, care, concern, sensitivity, tenderness, mercy, leniency, tolerance, humanity, charity, and kindness.
One writer, Frederick Buechner, says that compassion is the capacity for feeling what it’s like to live inside someone else’s skin, and “the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you, too.”[1]
Showing compassion is something every one of us can do. It doesn’t require any tools any particular skills, or any great strength. What it does require is a heart that’s open to the movement of the Spirit.
The late Harlan Sanders, known to posterity as Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame, was once on an airplane. There was an infant on that flight who started screaming and would not stop, no matter what the frazzled parents and flight attendants tried. Colonel Sanders asked if he could hold the baby. He took the little one in his arms and gently rocked the child to sleep. Later one of the other passengers said, “We really appreciate what you did for us.” “I didn’t do it for us,” Sanders replied, “I did it for the baby.”[2]
‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these … you did it to me.’
That’s compassion!
The world seems to be so full of bad news these days, doesn’t it? On the other hand, when hasn’t the world been full of bad news? Anyway, if you feel yourself getting bogged down by the bad news, just do a Google search on compassion, and then spend a little reading up on all the examples that happen every day of people doing good things for others. Here’s one from the Guardian newspaper in England. It’s long but worth repeating.
Patricia Machin’s husband, Gerrard, spent nine weeks in hospital after he was knocked down by a car during a short walk to buy his morning newspaper.
He had sustained a series of injuries – multiple broken bones, damage to his lungs, an injury to the brain – and they proved to be too serious to overcome; in February of last year, he died, at the age of 77. Following his accident, he had not been able to speak, but, on some days, he had managed to write and the very first thing that he wrote was: “I want the love of a good woman.”
It was, his wife explained to the audience of Radio 5 Live last week, a reference to a shared joke, what her husband used always to say when asked: “What would you like?”
You can imagine it as a semi-humorous, semi-soppy reply when the kettle was boiling, for example. But those who listened to the interview, or who read about Patricia Machin in newspaper reports, probably reckoned that her husband, despite the dreadful events that befell him, knew that a good woman was precisely what he had.
The other man with first-hand knowledge of Patricia Machin is Brian Williamson, the 30-year-old motorist who was found guilty of causing Gerrard Machin’s death by dangerous driving; as punishment, he received a three-month prison sentence, suspended for 12 months, and was banned from driving for two years and ordered to pay £1,000 towards prosecution costs.
But Mrs Machin seems to have gleaned that his real punishment would be both intangible and last far longer than anything that Bournemouth Crown Court could impose upon him.
As they stood by the side of the road in the immediate aftermath of the accident, she put her arm around him and tried to reassure him. When she learned that the Crown Prosecution Service intended to bring charges against him, she wrote to them. “You say that you realise,” her letter ran, “that I may be disappointed with your decision regarding the charge against Brian Williamson. I assume this to mean that you expect me to have wished for a harsher charge to have been brought against him… nothing could be further from the truth. I have never for a single second had any sort of angry or vengeful thoughts against this young man.” She went on to describe her husband as “the most compassionate human being I have ever known” and to say, “with complete confidence”, that he would have felt the same.
And, perhaps even more strikingly, she referred to “this episode in our lives; Gerrard’s, mine and Brian Williamson’s”. It’s a turn of phrase that is mildly wrongfooting. Really, you think, can she be including this man, who has killed her husband, in the words “our lives”? Can she really be writing him into her and her husband’s story, instead of trying to expunge all trace of him?
Apparently so, for Machin also wrote to Williamson ahead of his sentencing, lending him her support and urging him to promise that he would get on with the rest of his life. Elsewhere, she explained her thoughts and feeling in various ways: asking which of us hasn’t made a mistake, pointing out that he is somebody’s son and that he will have to live with Mr Machin’s death for the rest of his life. Throughout, she portrays them as fellow victims.
“On that day, we were just two people cast into a nightmare,” she told 5 Live’s listeners.
When we read about this story, our immediate sympathy is with Patricia Machin and, of course, her husband. But do we also, I wonder, imagine ourselves even more readily in Brian Williamson’s predicament? It is, indeed, a nightmarish prospect – but not an outlandish one. What if, as Williamson explained had happened to him, I was dazzled by something? Or what if I just took a corner too fast, succumbed to impatience or irritation or lateness and put my foot down or just got lost in my thoughts for a few seconds?
Then you think: what do I mean – what if? I have done all those things. And there is the truth, in front of you: you don’t have to be doing a ton down the motorway or off your head on gin to kill someone. You don’t have to be driving a car at all. Your carelessness could occur in some completely other context, undreamt of by you, now, sitting here, not having killed anyone.
Patricia Machin’s reaction to her situation appears to have come to her swiftly and unquestioningly, almost unbidden. It would be unrealistic to expect everyone to have such a highly developed sense of empathy; even, perhaps, undesirable. Most of us, after all, would probably struggle not to feel anger and might also wish for some form of vengeance or, at the least, reparation. If those feelings are natural, at once an expression of our profound attachment to our loved ones and our innate sense that those responsible for wrongdoing must be held to account, isn’t it sensible to give them free rein and unwise to suppress them?
Up to a point; but Mrs Machin’s actions suggest that she is all too aware that there are no reparations that can be made. They also indicate that, despite a closeness to her husband to which she referred repeatedly and utterly convincingly, she sees herself, and Brian Williamson, as part of a true social network; “He is someone’s son,” she said, of her wish for him not to be sent to prison.
…
What happened to the Machins and to Brian Williamson was horribly, irrevocably accidental, and fundamentally dissimilar to cases where malice or malfeasance have taken place. We cannot, and should not, forgive all that we suffer. But in a culture that becomes more Manichaean by the day, that is increasingly prone to denunciation, to opposition, to demands for apologies and amends, we might check our rush to judgment. For where, as Mrs Machin has so movingly demonstrated, does it actually get us?[3]
That’s compassion!
“When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them…”
That one short, simple, straightforward statement of fact sums it all up. If we search our hearts for the deepest reason why we follow Jesus, why we come here, week after week, I think we’ll find that it’s because of God’s compassion to us and to our world.
And today Jesus reminds us that we, too, are in the “compassion business.” Being compassionate is our job. Showing compassion is our calling.
When he looked out at that crowd that had been chasing after him and his disciples like bloodhounds from one end of the region to the other, their anxious faces weren’t the faces of strangers. He recognized something of his life in theirs. He shared their – and our – human lot. He saw what burdens these people carried. And his heart went out to them in compassion.
Jesus reached out to people who were alone, who had no one, people who were on the margins of society – the ill, the forgotten, the outcast, even the tax collector. He showed compassion and mercy to people who were not only unused to receiving compassion and mercy, but who were people who had long ago given up any hope of ever feeling those things. Many of them may, in fact, have believed what everyone had been saying about them and thought that they were unworthy of compassion, mercy, and love. But Jesus gave them the very mercy and love of God. Like those thermal socks and warm winter boots Officer DePrimo gave that nameless homeless man, which helped keep him warm on a cold November night, they were warmed to their very souls by the knowledge that God loved them, too.
By doing these acts of compassion, Jesus showed the rest of the world how far off track it had gotten. And, though we’re a long way from being back on track today, think for a moment how awful the world would be without his influence and without our participation in following him?
We are in the compassion business. We are called to be Christian First Responders. Our first response to others is to show compassion, just as Jesus did. We have been placed into that business by the One of Whom it is sung: “Jesus, Thou art all compassion / Pure, unbounded love Thou art / Visit us with Thy salvation / Enter ev’ry longing heart.” God is found where compassion is not only felt, but acted on.
Think back on the people throughout your lives who have had the biggest positive impact on you. Were they your parents? Grandparents? Uncles? Aunts? Teachers? Pastors? Friends? They all taught you many valuable things – but I’m willing to bet that what you really remember the most about them is their kindness to you. I’ll bet you remember how you felt when you were around them – how happy, how glad, how thankful, how you felt like you were the most special person in the world. That’s what the compassion and love of God feel like.
Jesus knows us all, intimately, and calls us by name, to be His hands, feet, eyes, and ears in the world. We have limitless opportunities to be compassionate in our own lives. The smallest act of love and compassion toward another has an impact far beyond the act itself, like the ripples on the surface of a pond after you’ve thrown in a stone.
Compassion – love in action. Compassion is our business.
We are a church of compassion. Thursday was just one of countless examples of how we have shown the compassion that springs from God’s love to the world around us. Throughout its long history, St. John’s has truly been a beacon of hope and compassion to the world. Imagine all those ripples of kindness that started right here and then travelled during the last century and a half over the face of the entire planet! Never forget that what we do here is of lasting importance!
My prayer is that God will continue to bless us in our efforts so that that wonderful and necessary work of compassion will go on and on and on into the far distant future!
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
[1] http://frederickbuechner.com/content/weekly-sermon-illustration-compassion
[2] “Dear Daddy in Seat 16C”, http://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=567141
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/24/patricia-machin-widows-compassion