Learn to Care!

A Sermon Based Upon Mark 8: 1-6; 14-21, CEB

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin.  

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Second Sunday of Epiphany, January 24^th, 2016

Recently the talented author of over 15 novels, John Irving, was on national television promoting his new book, “The Avenue of Mysteries”.  This literary work is reported to be ‘filled with both the miraculous and the mysterious,’ but as one commentator has reported, John Irving ‘doesn’t believe in miracles---yet he is fascinated by them.”   http://www.npr.org/2015/11/03/453986815/john-irving-always-knows-where-hes-going

That certainly sounds odd, doesn’t it?  To be ‘fascinated’ by something you don’t believe in?  Well, unfortunately, the same can be said today when people are ‘fascinated’ by the miracles Jesus performed, but they don’t try to understand what they should mean for us now.   Belief in miracles should outlive and be greater than the miracles themselves.  As the gospels confirm, those miracles of Jesus are as much ‘signs’ as much as they were ‘wonders’.

In today’s text a ‘feeding’ miracle is repeated statement after Jesus reaffirms:  “I have compassion for the crowd….”  (8.2). Jesus also gives this specific and practical reason for having this broadening ‘compassion’, saying it is ‘because they have been with me for three days and have nothing to eat.  If I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way---and some of them have come from a great distance.”  (8: 2b-3).  It may all sound so trivial to us, as these miracles do to some, but it wasn’t trivial to them, nor to Jesus. Jesus did not want to ‘send them away hungry’ and His disciples were right to question “How can we feed these people with bread here in the desert?” 

In this ‘wilderness’ story, the gospel of Mark puts us right where we also might suddenly find ourselves in life; between the reality of our own limited situation and the limitless needs of people around us.   How can we have the kind of ‘compassion’ and show the kind of care that reaches out to others, when we must also face the harsh realities and barrenness of life? Will we have ‘compassion for the crowd’ or will we ‘send them away’?  Isn’t it interesting how Christianity is not only about having a relationship with God who helps us, but it is also about having a relationship with our neighbor who may also be in need?  Do we have enough compassion to care this much?

The good news is that most of us do have compassion and care, because all of us have at least known the need to be cared for.  Since we, as human beings, are the most vulnerable of all earth’s thinking and feeling creatures, we do understand the need to have compassion and to care for others.   But what happens when that compassion and care isn’t happening?  What happens when society has become so ‘harsh’, so filled with competition and hate, or so ‘limited’ with empathy and love, that there is a shortage of what we all need to sustain us as people?  Are we still a people who are capable of compassion and care? 

CARING IS NOT AUTOMATIC 

In the real world, that can also be a ‘harsh’ world, caring and compassion are never automatic.  Even after the disciples had witnessed the second ‘miracle’ in this feeding of the four thousand they still don’t get it?  “Do you still not understand? (v. 21).  As Jesus tried to pass God’s healing and helpful truth to them, they had great trouble getting it.

It’s not easy to ‘pass down’ or to ‘teach’ something you feel in your heart?   It can be practically ‘impossible’.  You can’t really teach somebody to care, nor can you ‘preach’ it into them, just like you can’t ‘teach’ them what they should or shouldn’t feel.  Feelings are much more complicated than asking someone to put on a shoe or a shirt.  Feelings are different because they are ‘worn’ from the inside out. 

Because feelings are ‘different’ they can also be ‘difficult’.   Our feelings do not belong to the ‘thinking’ or ‘reasoning’ parts of our brains, we are told, but they belong to the more ‘emotional’  and ‘relational’ responses which enable us to have the kind of thoughts that will not only feed our bodies but will also feed our souls and spirits.  Mere, cold logic or law can lead to cruel things like Auschwitz or Dachau, whereas feelings of compassion and care can lead to things like the Churches, the Red Cross and other forms of social help.  Or, compassion can raise up people like Oscar Schindler, Oscar Romero, or Mother Teresa; people who risked everything they had to reach out and value people in ways that save. 

Recognizing that such ‘compassion’, even normal compassion, is never a given for a people or for a society is important.  I used to think compassionate feelings innate, instinctive or inborn, but I do not believe that anymore.   It all started to unravel for me when, in the 1990’s, I learned about the tragedy of that South Carolina woman, Susan Smith, who drowned her two sons in her car by driving it into a lake.   Susan was said to have been suffering from mental health issues, which may have been true, but that makes it even more imperative for us learn compassion and to recognize those who don’t seem to be able to have it.  The rise and increase of ‘mass shootings’  in this country, the increasing ‘hate speech’ in public life, and the brutality by some and against some law enforcement officers, ought to be our cue that we can’t just write off or ignore those who lose the ability to feel for other human beings.

Because ‘free will’, choice, chance, and human ‘vulnerability’ are foundational to the possibilities of human life and experience, it remains possible for people like Susan, and even for good people like us, to lose our feelings of compassion and to fail to understand what caring means, either because people are incapable of feeling it or have become incapable due to the conditions within or around us. As now inmate Susan Smith recently told NBC News, who was doing a report on her 20 years after she strapped her two sons into her car and pushed it into a lake; she told reporters:  “Something went terribly wrong that night… I am not the monster many make me out to be…” (http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/susan-smith-mother-who-killed-kids-something-went-very-wrong-n397051). 

Though normal ‘thinking’ people have feelings, we must also realize that not all feelings have 'thinking', or are the ‘best’ or ‘right’ kinds of feelings.  Even people who normally have ‘compassion’ will have times when their normal feelings of compassion fail.  When Jesus conducted his ministry, it was said to be a ministry of ‘compassion’, because ‘….because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd’ (Matthew 9:36).   Jesus ministry was an itinerant, unofficial ministry, conducted in sharp contrast to the ministry of the established religion of his time which had lost it's compassion and care.  Jesus’ ministry was noticeably different because Jesus was different, for ‘when he saw the crowds, he had compassion’ (Matt. 9:36, 14.14, 15.32; Mark 6:34; 8:1).  But the ‘difference’ here was not simply because Jesus was God in the flesh, but the difference was that Jesus allowed God to rule and command his flesh by not giving in to the self-destructive temptations of Satan, the evil, destructive powers, that would lead him astray from ‘who’ God called him to be and ‘what’ God called him to do.

What I’m illustrating, from this very human side of Jesus, is that having the right kinds of ‘feelings’ within oneself is never automatic.  It wasn’t automatic for Jesus, and it will never be ‘automatic’ for us.  To have the kind of ‘compassion’ that makes life more positive than negative, redeems more than it destroys, and also reaches out to the ‘crowds’ and to ‘strangers’ not only just looking after ourselves---this kind of living requires the kind of compassionate, caring feelings that we must continue to cultivate within ourselves, and in others, as we constantly sow seeds of care in the world around us.

HOW HATE GROWS TO OPPOSE

But what does it take to cultivate, sow, and harvest seeds of care in our church and communities?  How do we go against the ‘grain’ of the uncaring, compassion-less systems of this world, to create a community of compassionate feeling and genuine caring, where ‘miraculous deeds’ of sharing and help will happen? 

Strangely enough, we don’t have to become ‘miracle workers’ to have ‘miracles’ of compassion and care happen.  In fact, Jesus’ whole protest to his disciples, complaining that they still “don’t understand’ (21) comes from the fact that these kinds of miracles of compassion should not be so ‘miraculous’ or ‘strange’ (17), but can and should be the rule, rather than the exception. 

But how is it that compassion and care stop being the rule---in both political speech or civil life?   If the ‘gospel’ story of Jesus Christ can teach us anything, it can teach us that at the same time there is the potential for great love and compassion in the world, there can also be great potential for evil and hate to work against everything that is good, just, and right.  What empowers this evil to overcome the good is not the power of evil or hate itself, but it is the reality of Jesus’ disciples not hearing, not seeing clearly, or not remembering what possibilities and powers are available to them (v. 18).  This is why Jesus told his disciples to: “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees!”  (v. 15).

Jesus own ‘disciples’ would not fully understand Jesus until they came to ‘beware’ of the ‘leaven of the Pharisees.’ This was something that did not happen until after their Messiah had ‘suffered’ and was ‘crucified’.  But do we understand this ‘leaven’ any better today, after the cross?   Do we understand that these “Pharisees” were not the ‘bad’ guys but they were really the ‘good guys’ who got caught up in the wrong attitudes or hypocritical interpretations ‘goodness’ which made them lose genuine compassion for all the people who matter to God?  

What we need to understand about the Pharisees is that they were not the Sadducees who denied the power of God and the resurrection, but the Pharisees were those religious leaders who believed in God’s laws and wanted to see Israel become the great nation she once was.  In order to become this ‘great nation’, they developed a way for Israel to keep all God’s laws and had to rid all the sin within and around them.  But to have this kind of ‘holiness’ meant that they also had to ‘hate’ what God hated.  There was no salvation for Israel without negation, which meant separating themselves from what and who was less than God’s best, per the Law.

While there are elements of truth in the Pharisaical call for separation and holiness, the problem with this approach, according to Jesus was that it was not true ‘righteousness’:  “Unless your righteous exceeds the righteousness of the Scribes and the Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 5.20).  It was exactly these faulty ‘Pharisaical’ forms of false, hypocritical self-preserving righteousness which ‘locked (other) people out of the kingdom of heaven’ (Mat. 23.13), made people worst, rather than better (Mt. 23:15), and became ‘blind guides’ and ‘blind fools’ (Mt. 23, 16,17).  Because they ‘neglected’ the heavier matters of the law, practicing ‘justice, mercy and faith’ (Matt 23.23) compassion and care were lost.  In matters of the enforcing the law of God, they ‘neglected’ justice, mercy, and faith, which are always the spiritual building blocks for cultivating hearts and a lives filled with caring compassion--that is a compassion that actually cares.

We often forget that we only ‘cultivate’ feelings of compassion  in this world around us by participating in caring deeds.  When we ‘neglect’ these most important ‘matters of the law’, feelings and deeds of ‘hate’ can easily grow in any of us, so that we become cold and hard-hearted.   When this happens, it can nearly be impossible for us, or for a society to be redeemed or restored, even by God's compassion.   This is why Jesus’ final question to the Pharisees was “How can you escape being sentenced to hell?”  (23.13).

WHAT JESUS CAME TO TEACH

The gospel story does not end well for the ‘house’ of religion that becomes “Pharisaical”  (“See your house is left to you, desolate!”, Matt. 23.38).  It is a ‘house’ that loses its ability to do deeds of love and compassion, because it had lost the capacity to care with love and compassion. 

The day I was working on this message, CBS News reported about a an upstate New York ‘independent’ ‘fundamentalist’ church congregation named “Word of Life Christian Church’ that now might be more realistically called the "Deed of Death Christian Church”.  The report stated that several of the members of the congregation, including the parents of an adolescent boy, were being charged with murder by trying to ‘whip’ two young teenage boys into submission with electrical cords.  One of the boys, died as a result of the beatings (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/word-of-life-christian-church-where-teen-lucas-leonard-was-beaten-to-death-fueled-by-fear-ex-members/).

How could something like this happen?  One of the former members of the church, Chadwick Handville, said it all started with good intentions:  “He taught me a lot…. I memorized half of the Bible….”, but what ‘he failed to teach me was how to use what I read, and how to treat people.”   What started out as a fast growing, spirit-filled, Pentecostal Church, ended up in decline after their leader became ‘controlling’ and ‘intimidating.’   Even after their ‘pastor’ had a stroke and died, his wife and children took control of the congregation and continued the same harsh style of its founder.

I think it is wise to keep such strange event in perspective, just as we should keep what happen to Susan Smith in perspective.  David Bromley, a professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, who was asked about the incident, explained: ‘these cases look very bizarre to outsiders” and are ‘rare, radical events’ that ‘occur in groups that tightly organized, independent, and very conservative’ who have formed ‘in reaction to the liberalization of mainline churches.’  There are ‘thousands of these groups around the country and every now and then, one pops up that has gone awry.’

I don’t know if what the professor said is reassuring, but it does express something true that happens not only in churches, but also in a society where human and religious need turns into human and religious confusion.  But as one person has put it, ‘The answer to bad religion is not no religion’  (Martin Theilsen).  Since we humans we are religious creatures, if we decide for ‘no’ religion over ‘bad’ religion, we will begin to  create ‘our own religion’ that will make matters worse (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martin-thielen/the-answer-to-bad-religio_b_4768005.html).   

It is ‘good’ religion and ‘good’ faith that Jesus came to teach his disciples when he reveals to them, “I have compassion for the crowd” (v. 2).   It is important to note here that Jesus’ compassion is not just for the ‘neighbor’  (Luke 10), but it is also for the ‘crowd’ who ‘came from a great distance’ (v. 3).  This may be why we have ‘two’ feeding stories, not just one.  In the first ‘feeding’ story in Mark 6, the feeding has twelve basketfuls left over, representing that Jesus’ has compassion for his people--the twelve tribes of Israel.  Here, in Mark 8, the feeding has seven basketfuls left over.  Jesus also has compassion also for Gentiles, those ‘who came from a great distance’, that is all the ‘crowd.’ (From Wm. C. Placher, in “Mark”, Westminster John Knox,  2010, p. 109-111).  

Educator Parker Palmer has implied that having compassion for the stranger means being hospitable to the ‘stranger’ even while they are still ‘strange’.   This kind of compassion ‘goes against the grain of some rhetorical and political ill-will today, but  love for the 'stranger' and even the enemy, is the right ‘grain’ of compassion found in Jesus Christ.  (From Marjorie Thompson, Soul Feast, Westminister John Knox, 1995, p 128).  

In the letter to the Ephesians, Paul picks up on this kind of ‘crowd’ compassion, identifying it as God’s compassion that has been fully revealed in the death of Jesus.  The whole passage in the second chapter is worth reading, but ‘crowd’ or ‘stranger’ compassion can be summarized in only a couple of key verses: “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ…. So then you are NO LONGER STRANGERS AND ALIENS, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God,  20 built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, WITH CHRIST JESUS HIMSELF AS THE CORNERSTONE. (Eph. 2:13, 19-20 NRS).

It is not easy for humans to ‘learn to care’ as big as God cares.  Earlier in that same from his letter to the Ephesians, Paul also spoke about being ‘dead in trespasses and sins, following the course of the world…the ruler of the air…and following the spirit …. at work among the disobedient….” (Eph. 2:1-2).  The Paul puts us ‘all in the same boat', saying, “All of us once lived like that….following the desires of the flesh…like everyone else” (Eph. 2:3).  He says we all were ‘dead’ to compassion and love, until “God, who is rich in mercy, out of his great love….make us alive in Christ…by grace…for good works…(Eph. 2: 4-10).   We learn to feel this kind of ‘compassion’ by experiencing this kind of compassion.  

A sweet Youtube video, illustrates what God does through Jesus’ life and death, to call our attention to ‘good works’ of care and compassion.  In the video, two kindergarten children, a little girl and boy, are arguing over whether it is ‘raining’ or ‘sprinkling’ outside.  Finally, the little girl oversteps her bounds and ‘pokes’ the little fellow in the chest.  The little fellow steps back, hangs his head, as if he is emotionally crushed, complaining, “You poked my heart!”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sKdDyyanGk

“Spiritually” speaking, to ‘poke our hearts’ is what the Christ's suffering and death aimed to do, so we will constantly examine, consistently enlarge, or even perhaps, come to regain our capacity to feel compassion and show care to family, to friends, to neighbors, and even for strangers and also enemies.  But you can only ‘learn’ this ‘large’ kind of ‘crowd’ compassion, when you gain a heart as large as God's so you will also ‘feel’ this kind of compassion.  This is why Jesus doesn’t just talk the talk, but he fully displays it by surrendering to a death so God's love will keep ‘poking our hearts’.  Amen.