Empathy and The Gospel

Texts:

1 Corinthians 1:18-25
2 Corinthians 11:29-30
Mark 1:40-45

Homily Title:
Empathy and The Gospel


When we were in the midst of our homily series on the meaning and purpose of the church we often came back to this wonderful quote of Luke Timothy Johnson’ on the nature of the church:

"The church is, in a real sense, the continuation of the incarnation, the embodied presence of the resurrected Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit... the church is.... the laboratory for communal life before God, the model that the world can see.... as the basis for its own rebirth."

So, if this is this is the case we need to pay careful attention to how it is that we represent God’s love to each other within the Christian community because how we are with each other can either show the world a hopeful picture of God’s love at work between people or quite the opposite.

What I want to suggest to you this morning is that one of the ways we show the world how God works is by coming to each other through our shared weakness and not in our perceived strength. Far too often when we approach each other we do so in a way that makes it seem that we are desiring to bring another person along to our level of achievement; we assume a spiritual maturity in ourselves that actually gets in the way of another person’s finding the same love of God that we have found.

Rowan Williams in his wonderful book on spiritual formation, Where God Happens, puts it this way: “Living Christianly with the neighbor, living in such a way that the neighbor is ‘won’—converted, brought into saving relationship with Jesus Christ—involves my ‘death.’ I must die to myself, a self understood as the solid possessor of virtues and gifts, entitled to pronounce on the neighbor’s spiritual condition. My own awareness of my failure and weakness is indispensable to my communicating the gospel to my neighbor”... “We love to think that we know more of God than others; we find it comfortable and comforting to try to control the access of others to God” …. “To assume the right to judge, or to assume that you have arrived at a settled spiritual maturity that entitles you to prescribe confidently at a distance for another’s sickness, is in fact to leave others without the therapy they need for their souls; it is to cut them off from God, to leave them in their spiritual slavery—while reinforcing your own slavery”

“The fundamental need as far as the counselor is concerned is first of all to put oneself on the level of the one who has sinned, to heal by solidarity, not condemnation”....”the plain acknowledgement of your solidarity in need and failure opens a door: it shows that it is possible to live in the truth and to go forward in hope”

Is our greatest desire to see someone deepen their experience of God’s love so that they change in God’s time to become more deeply who they are meant to be in relationship to Christ? Or, is our deepest desire to see the person change in the way that we demand for them to change in order for us to approve of them?

A good question I suggest for us to ponder on the way to the Lord’s table of love and acceptance.

In the passage from Mark’s gospel we have a truly amazing encounter between Jesus and the man with leprosy. The first thing I want to call your attention to is that the leper is breaking the purity laws of Israel in approaching Jesus - he was to remain with the outcast in the leper colony. The second thing I want you to note is that Jesus is inviting this transgression and joins in it himself when he accepts, touches, and blesses the leper. Now, number three: Jesus asks for the leper to step into the process of honoring the ritual laws by doing what is prescribed for a leper who has been healed but the man seems to ignore that as well as ignoring Jesus’ command to keep silent about the healing. As one NewTestament commentator puts it: “Commands and prescriptions seem to have little power in this narrative, rather the humanity and compassion of Jesus and the experience of freedom that the healed man enjoys are the main center of attention.”

Now there is much that could be said about this passage but there is only one thing I want you to think about as you get on with your week - and it is this - Jesus does not allow for messy situations, or the opinions of others to keep him from being compassionate and inclusive. What person or people in your life do you keep at a safe distance when you should be including them in your redemptive life and community of love? We all have attitudes towards people that keep us from showing them the love and acceptance we ought to. May God chip away at those defenses and self-protection pathologies that cause us to push people away from our experience of God because we set ourselves up as an authority over people when we should find ways of expressing our solidarity as fellow-sinners. God has not let our messiness keep us from him; let us give others the same blessing.

Questions for discussion:

1. Does living in solidarity with fellow-sinners (as Williams outlines above) mean that we are agnostic with regard to the sin in our lives?

2. When might you be called to speak to someone about a pattern of behavior in the person’s life that you perceive to be sinful? Should you wait for a person to invite that conversation or not? When would you wait? When would you not?

3. Do you expect for those close to you to come along in their growth in Christ according to your own designs on them? If so, why do you think you do this?

4. Since there are probably no lepers in our lives on a regular basis, can you think of a person who needs to literally of figuratively touched by you? If so, is it appropriate to share that example with the group?