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COMPASSION & CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE John M. Buchanan
Isaiah 58:6-8, Mt. 25:31-46 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
May 19, 1985 . Columbus, Ohio

Leonard Bernstein was asked once to reflect on the process of writing music. He
said:

"T sit for long nights all by myself and don't have a thought in my head. I'm dry.
I'm blocked, or so it seems. I sit at the piano and just improvise -strum some
chords or try a sequence of notes. And then, suddenly, I find one that hits, that
suggests something else. The whole point of composing, you see, is not to find one
chord or one note you love. It is only when they progress to another chord or note
that you have meaning...This is the most exciting moment that can happen in an
artist's life...and every time it happens. I am grateful for that gift." (cited by
Matthew Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion, p. 129)"

"The whole point of composing is not to find one chord or one note you love. It is
only when t ey progress to another chord or note that you have meaning..." That's
the point of human life as well, = submit: to live and love and then to move out of
self, beyond self, to connect with the totality of humanity, to know oneself not as
an isolated drop of humanness, but as part of a vast, wonderful ocean. The point is
to reach out, to make connections, to be wholly alive by being a part of the life
all around you.

It is what Jesus Christ is about. God so loved the world...so cares about the
individual human beings who live in the world, that he gave his only son, that
whoever believes in that son...believes him to be the truth about human life, trusts
him to be the saving truth about one's own life -that person will live a quality of
life, a depth of life that can be described as eternal. That eternal life, that
salvation, keeps looking in the Biblical idiom like life in relationship, life
connected, life deepened and authenticated by love and caring for other life.

It's almost as if God has given us this magnificent gift of our lives, but we really
can't have the gift, certainly can't enjoy the gift, until we learn to value and
care about it passionately in others. God's various devices to save our souls seem
to have as their first objective persuading us to forget about saving our own souls
-or skins -and starting to care more about the souls and skins and bodies and
spirits of others.

Fundamental to the whole enterprise is developing the capacity to care passionately
about human life. And it is based on a very radical theological assertion: namely,
that God cares that way about human life. Our genius in the Judeo/christian family
is not in our assertion that God is the creator. We share that idea with many
religions. Nor is our genius in the morality which emerges from the tradition. The
real genius in Biblical religion is the astounding assertion that God cares, that
the God of creation, the God of the moral imperative, cares profoundly and
passionately about human life. The most extraordinary thing the Bible says about God
appens early, at the beginning of the story of the Exodus when the Hebrew slaves
are down in Egypt, suffering under their taskmasters, groaning in their oppression
and God hears the groaning. and it affects God, it gets under God's skin and jin
God's heart, and some passion begins to occur and before you know it God is deeply
involved in the revolutionary process of freeing his people. The God of the Bible
isn't hidden away in the recesses of the universe, or amusing himself on Mt.
Olympus. This God hears and sees and knows and responds to the condition of his
people. This God is a God of compassion.

The God-life, the human life lived in relation to this ground of being then, is,
similarly, compassionate. It is marked by caring, by hearing, seeing, knowing and
responding to the condition of others. To live ethically in the Bible is to live
compassionately. In the Bible, the root of the word hatred is not active dislike for
someone, but not caring, apathy, cold indifference. we know, existentially, don’t
we, that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference? That sometimes active
hatred has in it the seeds of hope because you can't really hate someone without
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caring. But indifference, not caring, leads nowhere.

The lesson of history which the world was taught again, as the wreaths were laid at
Bitburg and Ber en-Belsen, is that not-caring is as dangerous and more common than
unvarnished evil. The Holocaust was only possible in an atmosphere, not of total
depravity, but moral neutrality. The world must not forget that, and its clear
lesson that on the complex issues of our time the only morally indefensible position
is indifference.

Jesus gathered up the genius of the Judeo tradition and painted a memorable word
picture near the end of his own life that could not be more clear on this issue, It
is the only detailed description of the last judgment in the New Testament. It is
the apocalyptic bottom Tine according to Jesus. The sheep are at the King's right
hand because they have fed the hungry, given drink to the thirsty, clothed the
naked, welcomed the stranger and visited the risoners. The sheep are bewildered.
They weren't aware of their exalted status. their compassion was natural to them.
The goats don't make it -for reasons that are equally bewildering to them. They have
been guilty of no gross sin. They simply saw hunger, thirst, nakedness, loneliness,
oppression, and turned their heads. They were probably too busy to do anything about
it. They didn't care. Robert McAfee Brown, in a painfully honest exegesis of this
passage, comments that “there are going to be a lot of goats,” and then observes
that, in this picture, at least, what counts is not what we thought.not praying,
knowing the Apostles’ Creed, regular church attendance, even confessing Jesus Christ
as Lord. "They do not even rate a passing nod in Jesus’ assessment. All that counts
is helping those in need.” (Unexpected News, p. 133)

Our genius, I submit, is in identifying compassion as the life-giving component in
the human conscience. what we have to tell the world about_is a God of compassion
and what we have to offer the world is a fullness of life lived compassionately.

what is it? Compassion is not adequately described as pity, or sympathy, or
sentimentality. Rather it is a learned ability to identify with, feel with another
human being. It is not to know intellectually about suffering of other people, it is
to suffer because those people are suffering. Therefore, it 1s not always fun, nor
cheerful, nor very pleasant. It is connected, directly, to passion: to the learned
ability in ourselves, to care deeply and profoundly- and because that is always
risky business our culture has come to two basic conclusions about it.

First, passion itself is suspect. Ever since the Greeks divided us in two, the
western world has been suspicious of the human heart, and has cast its jot with the
brain. When in doubt, think -don't feel. That has served us well, mostly. But when
it becomes our guiding principle, our summum bonum, we miss the glory of our
humanity and the opportunity to live thoroughly in the world God has given us. why,
if people begin to live out of their hearts instead of their minds, they might make
Jove and not war. They might even decide that protecting life; nurturing,
celebrating, healing, and extending human life is at least as high a national
priority as killing it.

Passion is suspect, and its extension -compassion -is regarded as weak, soft,
unmanly- if you will, naive. what a tragedy that in our_gross misunderstanding, we
have allowed Marxism to appear to the world as the ideology of compassion. what a
tragedy that the more the dynamic happens in the Third worid, the more determined we
are not to cave in to it; not to be affected by the hunger, and injustice, and

oppression that is always the fertile breeding ground for Marxist revolution.

we discovered, 25 years ago, that we were forgetting how to care, and in a burst of
altruism which was occasionally too ambitious perhaps, but always compassionate, we
set off a small revolution in this country to eliminate institutional racism, to
extend constitutional rights, and to end poverty. we lost the war on poverty and now
-a quarter of a century later -we seem anxious to blame the poor for their poverty,
and the sick for their illnesses, and the illiterate for their ignorance, and to be
proud when a gun totting neurotic shoots down four teenagers in a subway. We seem to
e moving away from, not closer to, the idea that compassion is a fundamental
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Virtue, that we are responsible for one another.

A new style has emerged- cool, detached autonomous, unfeeling, the cult of Clint
Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" whose "day may be made" with the opportunity to dispatch
another person. “The point about violence," Paddy Chayefsky said, “is not that it
breeds violence -though that is probably true, but that it totally desensitizes
viciousness, brutality, murder, death, so that we no Tonger actively feel the pain
oh he victims or suffer for the mourners or feel their grief." (Time, 12/13/76, p.
79

Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah's new book on rampant individualism in our
country suggests that the move away from caring and compassion for others, into a
self-contained narcissism, is destructive of the life and hope of our republic. It
is reflected even in our religion, the authors contend. The most popular theologies
focus almost entirely on the individual -in a way Jesus wouldn't recognize. The
altar at which we bow, apparently, is self. The book is based on a series of
interviews and one which was included was Sheila Larson who said: "I believe in God.
i'm not a religious fanatic. I can't remember the last time I went to church. My
faith has carried me a tong way. It's Sheilaism. Just my own little voice."
(christian Century, 5/15/85, p. 499-500)

Compassion begins with passion for life. It begins when we cut through the idolatry
of individualism and allow ourselves to care profoundly about the lives of others
and begin to discover that our own lives make sense in that exercise. But it will
make you terribly vulnerable. Ethiopia was hard. Ethiopia. or what we allowed
ourselves to see of it. was so ghastly over the

holidays with its relentless intrusion into our celebrations that we were almost
glad for a reason not to have to cope with it.

It hurts to care. Compassion is synonymous with vulnerability. Matthew Fox, a
Dominican priest and popular theologian, writes: "...it is a matter of our own will
to survive. Each of us does build a wall around ourselves. If my brother bleeds, I
bleed too. If he hurts, I hurt. I can't feed them all, or even very many. And so
it's simply easier not to know, not to care." (op. cit., p. 3)

The Gospel of Jesus Christ begins with an astounding assertion about the nature of
God. It is that God cares about the human condition, and about your condition, and
mine in particular. The Gospel offers good news about a creator who is
compassionate: and a summons to live life in connection with other life; to live
fully by caring deeply about and feeling the pain and joy, the suffering and the
exaltation of other life.

In our time, supremely in the years ahead of us now, that Christian model looks like
the world's salvation. Matthew Fox observes: "Now that the world is a global village
we need compassion more than ever, not for altruism's sake,...or theology's sake,
but for survival's sake.” Cop. cit., Ci» God must smile at the irony of that. For
centuries his prophets have been the dreamers, the visionaries, whose hopes had to
be modified by the hard-headed realism of the politicians and planners of the "real
world." But in a much smaller and interrelated world, where starvation and
oppression and violence are almost the norm, where two out of three people in the
world are hungry - and because of modern telecommunications -know about the one
third who are not...the religious vision of the world family, and the religious
value called compassion, are the only realism with much of a future. when all the
popular vocalists got together and sang "We Are the world, we Are the Children,”
they were telling a new and important truth. And when they sang "we're saving our
own lives...so let's start giving," they were rediscovering the model for life 3esus
offered in Matthew 25.

We are rediscovering the Judeo/Christian genius: that you can't separate love and.
justice, beliefs and behavior, thinking and feeling and acting. No less an authority
than British economist Barbara ward once observed:

"Christians alone straddle the whole spectrum and are a lobby of incomprehensible
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importance...And if we don't do it, and we come ultimately before our Heavenly
Father, and he says, 'Did you feed them, and did you give them to drink, did you
clothe them, and did you shelter them?' and we say Sorry. Lord, but we did give
0.3% of our ora national product,’ I don't think it will be enough." (R.M. Brown,
op. cit., p. 1

In Jesus Christ, God has_ shown how much he cares for human life. In Christ, God has
summoned us to care, to live fully by caring profoundly about human life. in christ,
God has poured compassion into the human condition. The summons is to care enough to
risk being hurt; to be open to the whole human family. The promise is God's
blessing; God's precious gift of full life; God's intimate and personal presence.

Jesus said: "As you did it to one of the least of these, my brothers -my sisters
-you did it to me." Amen.

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