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Texts: Corinthians 12:12-27; Luke 4:20-21
Every year on the third Sunday of January, we dedicate our worship service
to celebrating and honoring the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
and the American civil rights movement.
As we assess the struggles and successes, the setbacks and advances
of the civil rights movement over the past 50 years,
I can’t help but take a moment to note in amazement
where we are right now, this year.
How many of us who lived through the past half-century
would have ever thought that by the end of the first decade of the 21st century,
we would have an African American mayor of our city,
an African American governor of our state,
and an African American president of our nation?
Much as there is yet to do to bring true equality to all Americans in areas
such as educational opportunity and economic justice and health care access,
this initial foray into shattering political barriers
on the part of the American electorate is truly a milestone to be celebrated.
But I don’t want to start by talking about contemporary politics,
or even about Dr. King.
I want to start by talking about Jesus.
Last week, on the feast of Jesus’ baptism,
I presented the image of Jesus as a “spirit person” – a shaman, if you will,
one who had intense direct experiences of the Holy, the Sacred
– and that was where he gained his great spiritual authority,
and his healing power,
and his charismatic teaching about the things of God.
I drew heavily on the writings of Marcus Borg, the author of
“Jesus: A New Vision” and “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time.”
But Jesus as a ‘spirit person’ was only part of Borg’s insight into who Jesus was.
The second part of the picture Borg presented was that
Jesus was a person of compassion.
In fact, compassion was as central a focal point for Jesus as the Spirit was.
The Gospels are filled with references to Jesus having compassion,
and being moved by compassion.
For Jesus, compassion is was the central quality of the God he knew so intimately,
and therefore the central moral quality of a life centered on God.
Jesus even teaches it directly, in Luke 6, when he says
“Be compassionate, as your father is compassionate”
The word “compassion” means “to feel with” -- com –passio.
It means feeling the feelings of someone else in a visceral way.
In fact, Biblical scholars tell us that the Hebrew and Aramaic word for compassion
is related to the word for ‘womb’.
Compassion is the love a mother has for the child of her own womb,
or a man might have compassion for a brother who comes from the same womb.
That is why, in the Semitic tradition, compassion, or ‘womb love’,
is imaged as coming from a certain part of the body, namely the loins
– in a woman, from the womb, in a man, from the bowels –
hence the odd expression found frequently in the old King James Version
of the Bible “his bowels were moved with compassion.”
This is womb-love.
God is even described as having womb-love.
In our modern translations, the word compassion in the Bible
is often translated as “mercy” or “merciful”,
but mercy is quite a different thing
– one is merciful toward someone who has wronged them;
the merciful person is granting a favor to the other, or forgiving the other.
But compassion is something quite different.
To paraphrase William Blake, mercy wears a human face, and compassion a human heart.
So for Jesus, compassion is was the central quality of the God as Jesus understood God to be,
and therefore the central moral quality of a life centered on God.
Jesus taught “Be compassionate, as God is compassionate”.
And this, in fact, was at the core of Jesus’ conflict with the religion and culture of his time.
The central teaching of first century Judaism, for the priests and the scribes
and the Pharisees and the lawyers,
was not “Be compassionate as God is compassionate”
but “Be holy as God is holy” or “Be pure as God is pure”
The priests and religious leaders had strict purity codes
that defined who was acceptable and who was not,
what was clean and what was unclean,
what behavior was righteous and what was unrighteous.
And this holiness code undergirded a whole caste system of insiders and outcasts ,
up and down the social scale.
It not only separated Jews from Gentiles,
but also clearly defined outcasts and sinners, like tax collectors.
The purity codes also became the basis of political and economic distinctions.
For instance, they defined what was appropriate behavior for men,
and what was appropriate for women.
Whether intended that way or not, the codes tended to favor the dominant elites
– the rich, the upper class, the well connected
– and put more of the onus on the poor, on women, on the handicapped,
or the sick, or the weak, or the imperfect.
And into that society along came Jesus, with an alternate vision to rock the world of his day.
Not “Be holy as God is holy” but “Be compassionate as God is compassionate”.
He criticized the priests who kept the letter of the law, but neglected justice;
he called the Pharisees “white-washed sepulchers”
He said of the dietary laws, “nothing you put in your mouth will defile you.
It’s what comes out of your mouth that defiles you.”
He also said “Blessed are the pure of heart”.
That sounds innocent enough, but what Jesus was really saying is,
“True purity is not a matter of external observance, but a matter of the heart.”
Borg cites the parable of the Good Samaritan as a prime example
of Jesus critique of the holiness code.
The priest and the Levite couldn’t stop to help the man left for dead by robbers,
because ‘what if he really was dead?’
Then they would be defiled by touching his body, and become unclean.
But the Samaritan didn’t see the man and think ‘He might be dead’
or ‘He’s a Jew and I’m a gentile’.
He saw him as a fellow human being in need,
and he went way out of his way to help the man and heal him.
And Jesus didn’t just teach compassion as an individual virtue.
The holiness code extolled individual righteousness, and individual salvation.
Compassion, on the other hand, was social and political.
Compassion was to be a new social norm. It was about relationships.
The most evident and most radical expression of this was in
what Marcus Borg and others call Jesus’ “open commensality”
– his insistence on having table fellowship with all manner of people
– tax collectors and sinners and loose women and all kinds of folks
that the purity codes considered dirty, unclean, impure.
The religious leaders took great offence at this, and accused Jesus of being
“a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.”
The open table fellowship of Jesus was perceived
as a direct challenge to the purity system, and rightly so:
the meals of Jesus embodied his alternative vision of an inclusive community.
It was a public expression of his politics of compassion.
It was a manifestation of the unbounded inclusion and radical hospitality
that Jesus understood to be at the heart of God,
and that he passed on to the Jesus movement that came after him.
The New Testament tells us that the early church wrestled
to break free of the Jewish purity codes, to fully accept gentiles into their fellowship,
to give women positions of leadership, to baptize eunuchs and other outcasts,
and to make sure their communion table fellowship made no distinctions
between the weak and the powerful, the rich and the poor.
And is that not still our challenge and our struggle today?
As a nation, as a world, as an religious body that identifies itself as “Christian”?
There are many Christians who still clearly operate out of a “purity code”,
quick to define who is on the inside and who is on the outside
– communities where women can’t be leaders,
and homosexuals are excluded, and even fellow Christians
who don’t believe a certain way, or “accept Jesus” a certain way
are considered outside the realm of salvation, or at least highly suspect.
Not too many years ago, African Americans were one of the groups
excluded from many Christian churches and from their fellowship.
And it’s bigger than the church, of course.
The politics of exclusivism and individual salvation
is still a very popular civil religion in our country,
and at the core of it is a certain perversion of the “purity” code.
Look at the debate about gay marriage around the country,
and people’s revulsion at the prospect of those who are different
leading normal, loving committed lives.
Look at the debate about access to healthcare, and people’s insistence
that only the wealthy and the worthy deserve full health coverage
– ‘I’ve got mine; let others get it on their own,
with no help from the government or from me.’
The examples could go on and on, and I’m sure you can think of more
(How about the NIMBY religion, Josephine?) (Not In My Back Yard)
I want to mention Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in this context.
To my knowledge, he never used the phrase “politics of compassion”
but that is how he understood the message of Jesus
and that is what he preached and practiced.
During his seminary years, King was influenced by the ‘social Gospel” theologians
of the early 20th century such as Walter Rauschenbusch.
At one point, King wrote “It has been my conviction ever since reading Rauschenbusch
that any religion which professes to be concerned about the souls of [people]
and is not concerned with the social and economic conditions that scar the souls
is a spiritually moribund religion only waiting for the day to be buried.
It well has been said: “A religion that ends with the individual, ends.”
At another point, King said,
“The real tragedy is that we see people as entities or merely as things.
Too seldom do we see people in their true humanness.
A spiritual myopia limits our vision to external accidents.
We see [people] as Jews or Gentiles, Catholics or Protestants,
Chinese or American, Negroes or whites.
We fail to think of them as fellow human beings
made from the same basic stuff as we, molded in the same divine image.
The priest and the Levite saw only a bleeding body,
not a human being like themselves.
But the good Samaritan will always remind us to remove the cataracts or provincialism
from our spiritual eyes and see [persons] as [persons].
If the Samaritan had considered the wounded man as a Jew first,
he would not have stopped, for the Jews and the Samaritans had no dealings.
He saw him as a human being first, who was a Jew only by accident.
The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents
and discerns those inner qualities that make all of us human,
and therefore brothers and sisters.”
At another time, Dr. King said,
“I choose to identify with the underprivileged.
I choose to identify with the poor.
I choose to give my life for the hungry.
I choose to give my life for those
who have been left out of the sunlight of opportunity.
I choose to live for and with those who find themselves seeing life
as a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign.
This is the way I'm going.
If it means suffering a little bit, I'm going that way.
If it means sacrificing, I'm going that way.
If it means dying for them, I'm going that way,
because I heard a voice saying, ‘Do something for others.’”
This weekend, we celebrate with hope and renewed commitment
the ongoing transformation of our society, of all society, into one world,
where we can value our differences and value our common humanity.
King’s vision, Christ’s vision is a society where race, religion, class or culture
are no longer differences that divide and alienate us,
but diversities that enrich and enlarge us in our common humanity.
We are not there yet.
Even in the face of a tragedy as enormously devastating as the earthquake in Haiti,
there will be those voices among us
– even among those who dare to call themselves religious leaders
– who will blame the victims,
and attempt to demean the motives of compassionate leaders,
just like some religious leaders did in response to Jesus;
just like some religious leaders did in response to Martin.
But blessed are the compassionate, for they will receive compassion.
And blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.
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