June 5, 2016 – 1 Kings 17:17-24, Luke 7:11-17
I Kings 17:17-24; Luke 7:11-17
The Greatest Gift: Compassion
3rd Sunday after Pentecost – Lectionary 10
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Now that I am the parent of teenage boy there are certain things I have to get used to.
Putting up with the smelly feet of my teenager’s friends.
Remembering that teenagers are like bears who can hibernate for entire seasons.
And trying to get my head around superhero movies.
I have never really been into superhero movies,
but lately Theo and I have watched quite a few of them.
And I have to say I am impressed with the films from Marvel Studios.
They are thoughtful, funny, and – as I have often read – deal with human themes that
myths and legends have helped human beings cope with for thousands of years:
sacrifice, honour, betrayal, friendship, and justice.
All of that I was sort of expecting, although I was not expecting for them to be dealt with in
such an entertaining and nuanced way.
What really got me, though, was
a scene in one of the X-Men movies from a couple of years back, Days of Future Past.
Okay: the X-Men.
The X-Men (well, X-People, really) are a group of “mutants”,
human beings with superpowers who are kind of genetic freaks who are
feared by the powers that be for the potential they have to
take over the planet from regular human types.
That fear is justified, of course, but by and large it is unwarranted.
Yes: the mutants are different, but that doesn’t necessarily make them bad.
In Days of Future Past there is a scheme afoot by the American government to
develop race of super robots called Sentinels that will have the capability of fighting and
destroying and wiping out the mutants.
When it becomes clear that this is inevitable and when Sentinels also begin killing humans,
the X-People realize that really the only hope is to send one of them back in time to
stop the whole process from very beginning – to change the course of history and
stop the series of events that led to the development of the weapon in the first place.
It’s a little like going back in time to 1914 to stop the chain of events that led to the
first World War by attempting to stop the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.
Wolverine is the one who is sent back in time.
One of the things he must do is to convince the earlier version of one of the X-Men,
Charles Xavier, to use the powers he has to help.
At the earlier point in time, though, Charles Xavier is cynical and jaded and despondent,
and has not yet learned to use and control his powers in a positive way.
All the X-People have different powers and Charles’s power is to be able to hear and
feel everything that is going inside of other people – particularly their pain and trauma.
This makes his life so difficult and so hard to bear that he has taken to a drug to
help him dull the roar inside his head.
He has, in short, simply given up his power to feel and hear others’ pain.
But Wolverine realizes the only way they can succeed is if Charles uses his powers to locate
the mutant Mystique and stop her from escalating the conflict with the government.
Charles tries once but is overwhelmed by all the pain and suffering of others he experiences.
Wolverine realizes that the only person who can help the younger Charles is the older Charles,
who has learned to harness and use his powers.
So Wolverine tells Charles to enter his mind and seek out the older Charles, which he does.
Younger and older Charles have a conversation and younger Charles says to the older Charles,
All those voices . . . so much PAIN.
And the older Charles replies,
It’s not their pain you’re afraid of. It’s yours, Charles. And as frightening as it can be, that pain will make you stronger. If you allow yourself to feel it, embrace it, it will make you more powerful than you ever imagined. It’s the greatest gift we have: to bear their pain without breaking. And it comes from the most human part of us: hope. Charles, we need you to hope again.
What the older Charles is describing is compassion.
The greatest gift we have is compassion.
It’s not quickness, it’s not blades that come out of your hands,
it’s not the ability to burn people or freeze them – it’s compassion.
Compassion is a word that means “to suffer with,” just as the older Charles describes.
It is that ability we have to take someone else’s pain into yourself and share it with them –
as Charles says, to bear it with them.
With the hope that by bearing it together we will get through it, and it will break neither.
And life will come again.
In the Gospel story today, Jesus encounters a grieving woman.
She is a widow who has lost her only son.
Widows with no sons lived a very precarious existence in the ancient world and
so she may well be grieving not just for the end of her son’s life, but for hers as well.
And as soon as Jesus sees her, Luke says, he has compassion for her.
Compassion is a pretty great English word – it’s compounded of two Latin words that
literally mean “to suffer together with.”
But when Luke wrote in Greek,
he used an even greater Greek word to describe what happens to Jesus.
Are you ready for this?
What Jesus feels when he sees the grieving woman is splagchnizomai.
Yes! Splagchnizomai! Such a great word! It sounds great – and what it means is very visceral.
It means a churning of your bowels, your stomach, or even your womb.
It’s that feeling of tremendous upset at another’s suffering.
But because it is related to the word for womb, we could say that it is womb love.
Compassion is womb love: it is, as E Louise Williams notes,
“Seeing another as a sibling, as born from the same womb.”
It is seeing another as a brother or a sister in pain – and doing something about it.
Jesus doesn’t just feel the churning in his bowels: he goes over to the woman,
touches the funeral bier, says to the young man “Rise,” and then gives him to his mother.
His compassion, his womb love, his empathy moves him to action that leads to life,
that leads to a new day –
for the young man, for the widow, and for their small community.
Dorothy Soelle, the great German theologian, tells a story that captures this well.
A rabbi asks his students how to recognize the moment when night ends and day begins.
Is it when, one student asks, from a great distance you can tell a dog from a sheep?
No, says the rabbi.
Is it when, asks another, from a great distance you can tell a date palm from a fig tree?
No, says the rabbi.
So when is the moment when night ends and day begins? ask the students.
It is when, says the rabbi, you look into the face of any human creature and see your brother or your sister there. Until then, night is still with us.
Compassion is the ability to look into the face of any human creature and
see your brother or your sister there.
Compassion is the ability to recognize their pain and do something about it.
Compassion is the ability to listen to their pain and make it your own.
Compassion is the ability to bear it with them – until night becomes day.
Compassion – splagchnizomai – is what Jesus feels before all his major loving actions.
Before he heals disease and sickness (Matthew 9:36).
Before he feeds the hungry (Matthew 15:32).
Before forgiveness is given in a parable Jesus tells (Matthew 18:27).
Before dealing with and casting out bad spirits (Mark 9:22).
Before he raises the dead (Luke 7:13).
Before the Samaritan helps the wounded man, he feels compassion, womb love –
he looks in the face of stranger in pain and sees a brother and is moved to action.
And when the father who longs for his son to return sees him finally coming home,
he is filled with compassion, with womb love, runs to him, robes him,
and orders a celebratory feast.
It is the feeling that precedes healing, feeding, forgiving, reconciliation, and raising to new life –
every single activity that we associate with Jesus’ ministry – which is also our ministry.
It is the reason God in Jesus comes among us: to make our pain his own.
to bear it with us, to bring us to a new day.
It is the reason we gather together: so we can look into the face of another,
and see a brother or sister in pain, and bear it with them, to bring each other to a new day.
It is the reason we don’t limit our ministry to these four walls, but reach out into this
Community at Sargent and Victor and look into the faces of those we meet,
see brothers and sisters in pain, and bear their pain with them –
to help bring each other to a new day.
Acts of compassion are always life-giving, but they do take you to places of pain and death.
They take Jesus to a funeral procession this morning and ultimately they will take him to a cross.
They take the young Charles Xavier to a place of intense pain and suffering but ultimately
the pain he bears leads to a complete cessation of conflict and
the complete avoidance of a terrible and costly war.
Compassion is clearly at the heart of the incarnation, at the heart of Jesus’ ministry,
and so at the heart of God.
As Days of Future Past suggests, it may be the only thing that can save us.
So with Charles Xavier and with Jesus himself, let us live in that hope.
Let us risk enough to reveal our pain to one another and let us risk enough to enter into it.
Let us risk seeing even those we struggle with as brothers and sisters with pain of their own –
all in the light of a dawning new day.
So together, let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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