Introduction to scriptures:

In this passage Jesus begins his public ministry in his home town by introducing what he and his mission are all about.  His words tell what others may expect from him and his followers and how we are to interpret the actions of his ministry. As followers of Jesus today, these words still speak to us about our mission and ministry in a personal way.

Read Luke 4:16-21

The year of the Lord’s favor is also referred to as the Year of Jubilee. It is a radical social and economic practice that was to be celebrated every 49 years. Land was to be returned to its original owner. So anyone who lost their land was able to retain it again. Debts were to be forgiven. Now scholars question whether this Jubilee was ever practiced. But the point is Jesus refers to it as part of his purpose and focus of ministry, reflecting he brings a radical and deeply ethical approach to living in community with each other.

Luke 6:36

In this passage Jesus has just challenged the people to move far beyond the normal call to love each other. He tells the people that anyone can love those who love them and who do good things for them. Jesus challenges us to love our enemies, to pray for those who persecute us and to do good expecting nothing in return. That surely challenges the conventional wisdom not only then but surely today as well.  But then Jesus closes with these words.

“Be merciful, just as your father in heaven is merciful.”

The implication is this is the way God responds to all of us. Since God loves us in this way, then we, too, are to love others in this same way.

Sermon

Many of you know that I did my doctoral paper on the topic of compassion. There were two main reasons I chose this topic. The first was I was doing my studies in Evangelism, and compassion was the cornerstone of Wesley’s success in his evangelistic ministry. Albert Outler, a leading Wesleyan scholar said, “If Wesley died before the age of 36 he would not have even warranted a footnote in history. So what happened that took Wesley from an obscure Anglican Priest to one of the great church reformers in history?” Outler says, it was, “Wesley’s conversion from passion to compassion as his dominant emotion, his change from a harsh zealot of God’s judgment to a winsome witness to God’s grace, from censorious critic to an effective pastor, from arrogance to humility.” So compassion is the cornerstone of our denominations beginnings.

The second reason I studied “compassion” is based upon Jesus’ teachings. As we heard in Luke, Jesus said, “We are to be merciful as God is merciful.” Another legitimate translation is “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.” In this statement we hear Jesus telling us that compassion is a fundamental attribute of God’s character, and challenges us to make it an attribute of our own. So we need to understand compassion in its fullest sense if we are to meet the challenge of Jesus to live as one of his disciples. It is in our compassion that we live as the light of God to the world. That we live as people created in the image of God.

So what does it mean to be compassionate? The word compassion comes from two Latin words, “com” which means “with” and “pati” which means “to suffer.” So when you combine these words, compassion means “to suffer with.”  Yet, as we know, the Bible was not originally written in Latin, so this definition does not quite capture the full biblical meaning. Biblically to be compassionate means, that we enter another person’s life so fully and completely that we can feel their feelings in our guts. That we can understand life from their perspective.  The root word for compassion in the First Testament is the same root for the word “womb.” To feel in the very center of where we bring life, or receive life from another.

What I discovered for myself about compassion is that it is a process, a way of living our lives in relationship to others that helps us truly be a source of support to another. We do not enter into another’s life with preconceived notions of what is best for them, but with an open heart and an open mind, ready to understand life from their perspective. Ready to be transformed by the experiences we share with another. How can we ever truly meet the needs of another if we do not even understand what life is like for them?

This thought was articulated to Nancy and me one day when we were standing in line at the bank in Kenya, trying to get the money we needed to pay for the materials to do the projects at the church. There was a Roman Catholic Priest standing behind us in line, so Nancy struck up a conversation with him. She was telling him all about our trip to Ethiopia, which we had done vefore coming to Kenya, and the orphanage we were working with there. Then she shared what we were about to do at the church in Bumula. Nancy said, “One of the great reminders of our trip so far was seeing how big the family of God is, and how diverse we are.” The priest’s response was, “We are only family when we meet each other.” It is the definition of compassion. You are family in name only if we do not know each other. Family means we have a relationship with another. Family is based upon caring, love and support of each other. You only can experience that when you have truly entered into life together, and know about each other’s life. The priest continued, “And to meet each other someone must travel.” It truly struck us that we had been the one’s to travel, and we were the one’s who were blessed and were growing, for we had entered into the homes and lives of those we had traveled to meet. That we would never be the same again, for we were the ones who shared in life with others, and learned what life was like from their perspective. Not fully, but much more in depth than we had know before.

Over the next several weeks and possibly months we will have time to share with you in more depth some of the personal experiences we had. For me, this trip took me to a new depth of understanding of Jesus’ words that “I have come to bring good news to the poor.” I, personally, had never witnessed poverty to this breadth and depth in the lives of people. Here is a picture of some of the 107 children our friend Pastor Surafel and his staff take care of in Addis Ababa. The orphanage itself can only house 20 children, so they place another 87 in some kind of foster care. Again, I was overwhelmed by the poverty and quality of housing so many people lived in. The woman in this next picture is blind and has one child of her own. She took another child in and they all share this room which is in essence a mud hut approximately 10 x10 in size. We went to another home which was not much bigger but was home to three generations of family and had six people living in this space. Both families had no income, so the orphanage gives them food to house the child, knowing that what they give actually feeds all in the home. There are no social service programs in Ethiopia to help those in need, it all depends upon Jesus’ call to be a neighbor to each other. They have to become compassionate, to simply survive. Surafel said there are over 25,000 orphans in Addis Ababa alone.

A deeply emotional experience we had before leaving Ethiopia for Kenya was when we left the restaurant to go to the airport. Three young boys, like those in this picture, probably 9-10 years old, saw Surafel and recognized him and came running up to the car. He chatted with them in Amaharic and then they left. He said that the reason they came running up to him was they were pleading for him to find a place in his orphanage for them. All he could do was encourage them and wish them well as he sent them back to the streets to live.

There was another side to our learning. We also were reminded that wealth and poverty are measured by more than how much money we have. In Bumula, we were reminded about what a real sense of community is all about. For the almost full week we were there, the church yard was full of people from the community, all gathering to do the work of building the church, and just to enjoy each other’s company. We saw generations of family still together. As we shared about life in our country, they were amazed that family would not be together but spread across thousands of miles of separation. We asked about worship and the church. They said that they enjoy being together as the children of God and that they spend much of Sunday worshipping and in fellowship. It was a little foreign to them that we would run in and out in an hour as the church. They were curious as to how we would truly get to know each other. Or my words, “How we would get a chance to be compassionate if we did not know each other’s names, let alone about each other’s lives.” So, we were reminded about community and its real essence of being in communion.

It was the reminder of the priest that we can only be family when we meet, when we know each other. It is the reminder that we, too, must move to build relationships, for it is only in knowing and experiencing life from another’s perspective that we truly live the character of God. If we do not take the time to meet others, then we can only make judgments about other’s from our own limited perspectives of life.

We do not have to go to Africa to be able to live in compassion. We have many doorways right here in the church. You can enter into personal one on one relationships of caring and support through being a Stephen Minister. If you are interested contact Ben Furhlong. There are many doorways into the community through CCJ, the Coalition for Compassion and Justice. CCJ consists of such ministries as Open Door, Home Repair, and Circles of Support. If you would like to know more contact Buzz Davies. There is “People Who Care.” Again, contact Fritzi Mavis. There are numerous other organizations such as Habitat for Humanity.

Jesus challenges us, “To be compassionate as God is compassionate.” What a gift to know that God has entered into our lives and understands them from our perspective. Now we are called to do the same. But to do this we must move, we need to be willing to go into places where we have never been, and meet people and understand their lives from their perspectives. When Wesley experienced this transition in his own life, not only did it change him, but it also transformed the church. The church that you and I are a part of today. As we prepare to move and go from this sanctuary back into the world, may we go with a sense of open hearts and minds, prepared to move into the lives we meet so we may be compassionate as God is compassionate to us.

Sermon delived by Rev. George Cushman on July 9, 2006.