Keeping it Simple: Compassion
May 7, 2017
Dr. Tom Pace
Matthew 14:13-14; Colossians 3:12

We begin a new sermon series today called “Keeping it Simple.” Sometimes I think we make the Christian faith really complicated. What we’re talking about is how to begin to distill that into some clear principles that help us to follow Jesus, and so we’re going to be looking at four of them during the month of May. I hope you’ll be with us each week.
We’re choosing Scriptures that are very simple, made of maybe just one or two verses. And challenging you to think about memorizing those Scriptures as a way of giving yourself a handhold to hold onto as you begin to practice these principles.
I want you to listen today as we hear now two Scriptures, one from the Gospel and one from Paul’s letter to the Colossians.
Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns.When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. (Matthew 14:13-14 NRSV)

As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. (Col 3:12 NRSV)
Sometimes when I’m overwhelmed at work, and there seems like there is so much that I sort of freeze up. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience. What I do to try and solve that is to clean off my desk.
You know the drill. You have all these papers everywhere and you think, “Okay, I’m just going to go through all this stuff…” And then you find the things that you were supposed to deal with weeks ago so there’s no point in trying to deal with them now. So you throw those things away, since you’ve ignored them long enough.
Then there are other things that you know are just not that important so you get rid of those. Then you get down to things that you think, “Okay this is what I’ve got to deal with right here.”
I think we can unclutter our value system too.
The essence of the Christian life is that we are to live in love as Jesus did. That’s the essence of it. The saying was that “When a rabbi had disciples…” – and we’re Jesus’ disciples – “…they were supposed stay so close to the rabbi that the dust from his sandals covered their cloaks.” The idea is that you’d go where Jesus went and did what Jesus did.
So that’s one way to simplify it. The problem is that Jesus didn’t have Facebook, Jesus wasn’t married, and didn’t have a family, and didn’t have a job or drive a car, and lived in a different world than we live in. Yes, some of the basics, some of the essence were the same, there were some of the same struggles. But you can’t just say, “Literally I’m going to do exactly what Jesus did.”
At some point we have to begin to sort of crystalize what is the essence of following Jesus. What are the basic simple principles that we can take and apply to our lives that allow us to live and love as Jesus did?
So what we’re going to do during the month of May is look at four of those. I don’t want to pretend this is all of them and in fact I want to encourage you to come up with your own principles for that. But these are mine because I’m the preacher and I get to decide. So that’s the way it works. If you want to preach then you can decide too. But I’m the preacher and I’m going to decide.
Here’s another way to look at it. You know what a bucket list is? The sort of superficial look at a bucket list is, “These are the things I want to do before I die. I want to climb Mt. Everest, jump out of an airplane, and go to such and such a country, or whatever it is.”
I want you to think about a more significant bucket list. When you reach the end of your life and you look back on your life, what do you want to be able to say that that was how you lived and what you did? So here are the four factors that we’re going to deal with this month.
The first thing is, “When I reach the end of my life I want to look back and say, I was a compassionate person. Jesus is a compassionate person, I’m going to be a compassionate person. I’m going to care.”
The second thing is, “I want to invest in relationships. God has given me the marvelous relationships of family, people to love, friends. I want to invest in those relationships and not be so focused on something else that I miss the opportunity to really invest in those.”


The third thing is, “I want to invest in meaningful work. I want to serve God by doing meaningful work. So I’m going to be about something. I want to strive at something. I want to lean into something. So when I reach the end of my life I want to look back and say, ‘I did meaningful work. I made a difference.’”
And fourth, “I want to embrace with gratitude all of the incredible experiences that come my way – the tears and the laughter. The bright colors of life and also the dark blues of life. To recognize that all of that is part of the life that God has given as a gift and to receive it and embrace it in gratitude.”
Those are four, and I hope that you will think of your own bucket list. What are the things that you want to do? That you can look back on your life and say, “I followed Jesus and this is what I did.” And begin to sort of simplify, or crystalize those things, and that way you can apply them to your life.
So we’re going to begin today with the first of those and that is compassion.
Let’s pray. Gracious God, speak to us today about your compassion. Open our eyes that we might see and our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel, and then, O Lord, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
When we were in Israel we were waiting in line to go up on the Temple Mount which is the place where Herod’s temple was. Now it’s the location of the Dome of the Rock. There was this long line of people waiting to go in. We waited maybe an hour to be able to go up there. And up in front of me was a guy with a T-shirt on that said “Attempting to Care.”
I saw that and I thought, “That’s a cynical thing to put on your T-Shirt. Then I thought to myself after I pondered it a minute that actually it’s a pretty good thing to put on your T-shirt. Because the truth is that caring isn’t something that is always easy. Sometimes we have to work at it. Sometimes being compassionate, really caring about others and about the world is something that you have to focus on. So today I want us to look at the source of compassion, the essence of compassion and the obstacles to compassion and how we might address those.
First, the source of our compassion – here’s the Sunday school answer – the source of our compassion is God. We were created by a compassionate God. It’s even in the Old Testament. People think that the Old Testament is one way and the New Testament is another. The Old Testament reveals a God with incredible compassion.

Cain kills his brother and God throws him out of the Garden of Eden, and he says, “Hey, they’ll kill me out here if I don’t have any way to protect me.” So God, out of his compassion, puts a mark on Cain’s head. It’s a mark of protection out of God’s compassion.
The Children of Israel are in bondage in Egypt and when Moses encounters the burning bush, God speaks to him and says, “The cry of my people has come to me. I have seen their suffering. Now go and face the pharaoh and set my people free.”
So over and over again we get this picture of a God whose heart is broken by our sin and yet who relents out of his compassion. God saw us in our sin and out of his compassion God sent a Savior. God came himself out of his compassion.
So why is that important? Because you and I were created in the image of God. God made us to look like him, to have his character. God made us to be compassionate. Look at a small child. A small child is naturally compassionate. They may see a hurting animal and immediately they reach out, they want to do something. They’re upset if you walk away.
Now let me be clear. A child also struggles with selfishness. Any of you who have had children get that. A child struggles with selfishness and sin just like you and I do. So what happens when that compassion with which we were created begins to wane? It begins to go away. Well, this leads to the second source of our compassion.
The second source of our compassion is Christ. The Scripture we have here from Paul is that we are to put on Christ. Everything Jesus does – the motivation of it is compassion. The first Bible verse I ever memorized was not “Jesus wept” although that’s a good one if you want to start with one. The first one I memorized was Mark 1:41 – “Moved with compassion, he reached out his hand and touched him.” A leper has come to Jesus and “Moved with compassion, he reached out his hand and touched him.”
The Scripture for today tells the story of the Feeding of the 5000. Jesus has been overwhelmed by the people coming after him and he withdraws. But they come after him some more and it says, “When he saw the crowds he had compassion on them and healed their sick.”
The Scripture verse that is sort of the underlying verse of all we do at St. Luke’s – kind of our theme passage – is the end of Matthew 9 and the beginning of Matthew 10. “And when he saw the crowds he had compassion on them because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. So he called the disciples to him and said, ‘The harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few.’” He calls the disciples to him and he sends them out to do the work of his compassion.
See, Jesus was motivated by compassion. So like it says in the passage of Colossians 3 that we just read, is about how we are to strip off the old self and – to use the exact quote – you are to “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.” We are to put on Christ, like a coat you put on. You put on compassion. You put on Christ.
This is what I want you to imagine. That inherently at the core of who you are you’re a compassionate person. But overtime the scars and the cynicism and the apathy of the world just sort of comes upon you. Paul says “to strip off the old self. Peel back all those callouses, and instead clothe yourself in Christ.” The source of our compassion is God the creator and God the redeemer in Jesus Christ.
So what is the essence of compassion then? Here’s how Miriam Webster defines it: “Sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress, together with the desire to alleviate it.” It’s a combination of a feeling, and a desire to act upon that feeling.
A feeling and action. It begins first with a feeling. The com part of the word means with, like companion, or someone who’s with you. Compassion means to “feel with” someone. Gal. 6:2 puts it this way: “Bear one another’s burdens and in doing so you fulfill the law of Christ.” To just share a little bit of someone else’s pain.
Now here is what I’ll tell you. It is very difficult for us to show compassion, to be compassionate and at the same time be judgmental. So judgment and compassion don’t live together well. And what happens is that we find ourselves judging the people we need to be compassionate about.
The first play I ever saw as a kid was Lorraine Hansberry’s play “A Raisin in the Sun.” I don’t know if you ever saw that. It’s a marvelous play. In it there’s a scene where the man in the story has blown all the money they’ve been saving to buy a new house. His sister is just furious at him and she talks about what a bad person he is. His mother says this: “When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child. Measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got wherever he is.”
Before you decide to judge somebody, what’s the old saying, “Walk a mile in his shoes.”
Some of you may have been members of St. Luke’s when Dr. Fred Craddock was the Shamblin lecturer. He’s one of my favorite preachers. He tells this story. I don’t know why I like this so much.
He said, “I remember the first church I served as a student. They had a fund called the Emergency Fund and it had about $100 in it. They told me that I could use it at my discretion provided I dispensed the money according to the conditions. So I said, ‘What are the conditions?’ The chairman of the committee said, ‘You are not to give the money to anyone who is in need as a result of laziness, drunkenness or poor management.’ “I said, ‘Well, what else is there?’ Then he concludes, ‘As far as I know they still have the money.”
It is so hard when we find ourselves judging others to still be compassionate. So the first part is this sense of feeling. The second part then is an action. So Jesus always acted. “Moved with compassion…” That’s the feeling. “…he reached out his hand and touched him.” “Moved with compassion” he healed the sick. “Moved with compassion, he called the disciples and sent them out.” There is an action that follows the feeling.
Compassion is not as simple as being nice. Compassion means that sometimes you have to do difficult things. Jesus turns over the tables in the temple out of compassion for the poor. Jesus goes to the cross out of compassion for us. That’s not just being nice. It’s a clear action.
So that leads us to the obstacles to us continuing to be compassionate, and I really think there are two things that lead us to what you often hear called “Compassion fatigue.” That’s a sense of where we say, “I just don’t care anymore.”
I think one is when we don’t act, or don’t have any action. What we find is that we develop this sort of cognitive dissonance. There are two ways. One way is when you hold two contradictory beliefs so you can’t figure out which one is right and you’re sort of stuck in the middle of them. But the other is when you believe something but you don’t act on it. So you have to decide that either you’re going to act on it or you have to give up on that belief.
I think sometimes what happens is that we’re compassionate – we have the feeling – but we never do anything. So after a while that anxiety from not doing anything puts us in a place where we think, “I just have to quit caring because I can’t do all this stuff. So I’m just going to have to quit caring.”
Sometimes Madison Avenue – the advertisers - get it right. One of my favorite commercials I’ve seen lately is where you see it mostly on-line because it’s two minutes long. It’s one of those videos that precedes the videos you watch on the Internet. It’s a commercial for State Farm and it’s called “Following.” I encourage you to go look it up. Go Google it and watch it. It begins with this guy sitting on a subway. He looks up and there’s a sign there that says, “Adopt a pet – save a life” and it shows this cute furry little dog with it. He looks at the sign and you can tell he’s thinking, “I really ought to adopt a dog.” He looks down and the dog is sitting right next to him on the subway.
You think, “That’s weird” and then he gets up from there and he goes to work and the dog follows him. He gets to work and there’s a sign on his Internet page and it says “Help the veterans.” He looks and there’s a veteran standing right next to him. He looks at the veteran, then he gets up and he leaves and the dog and the veteran follow him. In fact, they begin playing with a ball. The veteran begins playing with the dog with the ball. Then he goes outside and there’s a newscast that says, “Youth dropout rates reach all time high.” Then there’s this teenager on the video and then the guy looks and the teenager is beside him. He puts his hand on the shoulder and now he’s got the veteran, and the teenager and the dog all following him along. He walks a ways and there’s a group of people with signs saying, “Please give – anything can help.” Now they all start following him.
But my favorite part is this polar bear that gets in line. So he can “save the bears.” He’s walking along and he decides to go play football in the park. He’s throwing the football and catching it and all of those people are standing there watching him. You can see him thinking, “I just don’t know what to do.”
So finally he’s walking down the street and he sees a big sign that says, “Youth shelter.” He looks at it then he stops and he looks at the young man who’s standing next to him and a smile comes on his face. And he walks in to volunteer.
The tagline that comes on is really simple. It says, “Lift the weight of caring by doing.”
Now the point that is being made is that you don’t have to do everything. You can do something. And as you choose to do something then the weight of all that other stuff, all the people you see on the road, all the people that you deal with, that lifts that weight because you know that you’re acting in some way; that you don’t have to carry that cognitive dissonance any more, that you are responding in the way God called you to respond. No, we know we don’t have to do everything.
The question I get more than any other question is, “What am I supposed to do with those people standing on the corner in the street asking for money? Am I supposed to give them money or am I not supposed to give money. I’m so confused.”
People will say that. And my response is, “Well, are you doing anything? Are you giving to C.C.S.C.? Are you working there? Are you giving money to the Star of Hope? If you don’t feel like you want to give money to them, then do something. Be involved somehow in doing something.” It isn’t so much really about that particular situation but are you responding, are you lifting the weight of caring by doing?
So the other half of it is this. Sometimes the obstacle to our caring is sort of the flip of that. It’s this belief that we have to do something to fix a problem and since we can’t do something to fix that problem we figure, “I’m not going to care.” Let me give you a personal example. At my house sometimes my wife will be upset about something. She will be sharing that with me and after a while I’ll say, “So what do you want me to do about it?” It’s not a smart thing to say. And she says, “I don’t want you to do anything about it, I just wanted to tell you about it so never mind!” So I have this idea that if I can’t fix it then I don’t want to hear your problem. And I think sometimes we get this in our mind, this Messiah complex, that we’re Jesus. So every time there’s a problem we are responsible for fixing it. Now what I would tell you is that sometimes what we need to do is just be compassionate. Just feel along with them.
I’ll close with this example. On Wednesday night I went to the Interfaith Ministry Gala event. I’m on the board at IM and also on the refugee resettlement committee there. So Alice King, who put together St. Luke’s table at this event, had at our table a refugee from the Congo, and his caseworker was there and this cute young couple from Syria. They’d been here in the United States for six months. It was so funny because this was the first time they’d ever left their children with a babysitter.
So she was on the phone about every five minutes, saying, “Are they okay? Is everybody okay?” It was really cute. She was sitting there talking and I asked her about where she lived and in what apartment. She tells me in kind of broken English – she’s working at it – they’ve been here about six months so she’s learned a good bit. Then I asked, “Where did you live in Syria?” She said, “I lived in Homs.” That’s the third largest city in Syria after Damascus and Aleppo. I said, “Did you live in an apartment there?” And she said, “Everybody lived in buildings there.” Then she reached and took out her phone and she played a video and said, “This is where I lived.” She passed it around to us at the table and it’s all bombed out, just completely destroyed rubble of apartments. As she looked at it you could see the tears welling up in her eyes. She wiped them away quickly and we looked at the video. Its destruction is devastating. I felt compassion.
Now there’s a part of me that says, “I can’t do anything about the Syrian war. I can’t do anything about this. What can I do?” Then I realized that there is something I can do. I can listen to her tell her story. I can really care about her – not just pretend to care, but to really care about her. I can feel compassion for her and share that with her. As Galatians says, “I can bear one another’s burdens and thus fulfill the law of Christ.” And third, I can pray. I can fervently pray for an end to that kind of devastation. And in doing so I join with God’s work in restoring the kingdom. Prayer does something. Prayer is doing something.
So, friends, I confess that over time I get those callouses of cynicism just like everyone else does. And I just want you to consider peeling away that stuff. Peel away those judgmental attitudes, peel away your Messiah complexes, and decide to really care about people. To be compassionate as Jesus is.
Let’s pray. Gracious God, we confess to you our cynicism. We confess to you our scars from our own pain and difficulties. We confess to you our sense of futility as we can’t seem to find ways to solve all these problems. God, may we strip off those attitudes and put on your love and compassion, and clothe ourselves in compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. In the name of Christ, Amen.