“The Posture of Compassion”

I Kings 8:22-30; Mark 1: 45-50

A sermon preached by the Reverend Paul Ransford, Jr.

Westminster Presbyterian Church

August 27, 2006

  I stayed in some motel rooms within the past couple of weeks and I noticed that the ladies who cleaned my room were gloving up before entering the room that I had just vacated.

   They had this big box of gloves on their little cart.  What’s up with that?

“Where are you going?”

“O, I’m going to clean Paul’s room.”

  I didn’t feel dirty or unclean after I came out of the room, but I sure did after I saw their preparations to go in there.

   Jesus does a very bad thing right at the beginning of this gospel. He touches a leper. We all know about lepers.

  If I were to describe lepers to you, you would be covering your ears. Stop. I get your point. —too much information. No, I don’t want to picture this in my mind and I don’t need to see it played out on Fox news.

   Lepers    are     untouchable. 

   Jesus touched him—no gloves.

   Jesus let this leper right into his space. Let him walk right up to him without stopping the prescribed distance away with his little sign and bell that said, ”Unclean. Unclean” so that polite folks like you and me walking by talking on our cell phones didn’t accidentally touch this pathetic excuse for a human being.

The leper does not ask to be healed. He does not say, “Heal me. Heal me.”

   He asks to be made clean. There is a difference. He asks that his defilement and impurity in the eyes of society be removed.  He will deal with his disease…but not with being cut off from his community. We can handle our crises when they come but we need family and community to do that.

   His eagerness to accost Jesus tells us that he has no doubt that Jesus can purify him. He is not certain that Jesus will want to.

   Mark, the writer of the gospel wants us to know in chapter one just what kind of person we are going to be dealing with here in Jesus Christ.

   From the very beginning of our relationship with Jesus Christ there is an invitation. A gloves off invitation. Come.

   And we can find purity and forgiveness.

   From the very beginning Jesus is down in the dirt with the unclean, feeling our pain and not being afraid to touch no matter who was looking.

   I was working in Princeville doing a clean out of a house and there were a dozen of us in this moldy hot humid stinky house working together. White people and black people. Somebody hollered “Water break” and a great big bottle of water got passed around the circle and nobody wiped off the rim and everybody just tipped it back and drank. When we got done, one of the black persons looked at us with tears in her eyes and said, ”You okay. No white man ever drank after me before without wiping off the top. You okay.”

   The word empathy is a fairly new word in our English language…been around only about 100 years.

Came from a German word Einf,hlung—the ability of those observing a work of art to literally feel their way into the art object.

   Now it involves being sensitive to the changing meanings which flow in a person you are trying hard to listen to.

  It’s kind of spiritual.

It kind of means temporarily living in somebody else’s life, moving about in it without making judgments…laying aside all your own prejudices so you can fully be with another.

  What happens is that when we are truly open to the world of another, our world ends up changing as well.

   It is ironic that while the leper’s freedom grows as a result of this encounter, Jesus loses some freedom and finds his life in some danger all because he touches another. Jesus becomes even more of the dangerous outsider who breaks the rules.

The act of compassion affects the giver and the receiver.

Something I remember from my Greek grammar is that the active voice where the subject gets to act

Then there is the passive voice and then Greek has a middle voice (where the subject not only acts but participates intimately in, is involved in, or is affected by the action).

In the case of Jesus. Here is God with us ‘bearing our infirmities and carrying our diseases.’

   Jesus own vulnerability gets intensified as he kneels in the dust to touch us.

   Found a new phrase while working on this sermon—The phrase is learning to be “fiercely present.”

 The best teachers of being fiercely present are children—as when they are talking to you and you are doing your multi-tasking think looking at you cell phone or the paper and you’re watching TV and they ever so gently grab your face with their sticky little hands and swing it towards them and say, “Mommy, look at me.”

Jesus teaches us that our presence matters. We are good news to each other when we hang out in those really bad times—through the tears, and the unfixable situations.

The good news of the gospel is everything when all we have to offer is our availability to be fierce listeners and Jesus people.

Sometimes   what is broken in our lives cannot be fixed and what has been taken from us cannot be restored. But the willingness of another to enter our world is healing. 

   Have you ever had a friend or a family member lose a loved one and you call to offer condolences from a long ways a way and they say—o, don’t come it’s too far for you and we’re just going to do something small—and then this little bell goes off in your head and your say to your family—“We need to be there for this.” You go and your far away friends or family just falls apart when you get there because of your compassion? That’s doing the Jesus thing.

  That’s what our scripture lesson is talking about.

   There is one more element in our lesson this morning that I would like to lift up.

  We have spoken about the individual response to acts of compassion.

   There is also a corporate response we make as members of families and members of nations.

   We are against oppression in our world for theological reasons. We oppose the Taliban’s shoddy treatment of women for theological reasons. We oppose the Darfur militias callus disregard for starving children for theological reasons. We oppose a Middle East policy which listens to one side more than another for theological reasons.

   We also need to remind the leaders of our own country that we cannot as a nation can make unilateral decisions that what is good for America is good for the rest of the world.

 I love democracy. I would rather live in a democracy than in any other form of government.  That doesn’t mean that the rest of the world has to live by what fits me. The same shoe does not fit all feet.

   Exporting democracy, to, for example, make the Middle East safe for democracy, needs to be tempered with the empathy of Christ.

  We enter this discussion with great humility. There are no easy answers. There are many strong opinions.

   I pray that the youth are listening for I fear that these issues that divide us today are not going to be easily resolved and will require great wisdom from you as you inherit them.

   May God grant us the gift of fierce listening and grand compassion.