A long, long time ago I heard a sermon preached by Dr. Wayne Weissenbuehler, former Bishop of the Rocky Mountain Synod, in which he asserted that the word “compassion” was the most beautiful word in the English language. It is indeed, but it is also a word that has almost disappeared from our national lexicon.
On a local level you may see it.
In churches that provide meals for the homeless, PADS shelters, and folks from places like the Chicago Night Ministries and many others who provide food and medical care to adults and young people who live on the streets.
We can find “compassion” in the occasional “human interest story” that gets three minutes on the news but otherwise we don’t see much from politicians and pundits on “shouting shows” that permeate cable news and talk radio.
Politicians may have become the least compassionate people in our country and, like it or not, they set the tone for our debates.
Like the California representative who was quoted as saying: “As a matter of fact, I have said over and over again, I think he's the most deplorable person I've ever met in my life." 1
Statements like that may shore up the base but probably will win very few voters over to her cause.
Or, this stunning piece of business from the other side when a spokesman for a new immigration policy said: “the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you’re referring to, that was added later, is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty.” 2
The poem of course is:
Give me your tired, your poor,While it may have been a later addition the poem is what the statue stands for: Liberty’s welcome to all. Her torch is the national porch light not just for a selected few but for all who left their native lands, their homes, their families and friends, to make a new life here.
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door. 3
To label them as “bad hombres” shows little compassion for the speaker’s grand-parents and great-grandparents or for ours. And it flies in the face of today’s gospel.
Here we find a tired and sad Jesus who has just heard about the death of his cousin John the Baptist. He is doing what all of us would be doing at that moment - wanting to get away and perhaps pray or shed a tear. He is seeking solace in solitude.
And there is the crowd!
You probably know this story better than I do. You hear it every year because it is in all of the Gospels. You were probably thinking as I read it: “That old saw? I know where this story is going because I’ve been there countless times before.”
But bring it into our times and it has real meaning.
Understand that the disciples are becoming afraid. The place was deserted. The crowds were enormous. Huge! The biggest crowd ever. They were also becoming the hungriest crowd since the Children of Israel in the wilderness. There had never been a crowd bigger or more hungry than they. It was a huge, hungry crowd.
And the disciples come to a perfectly rational conclusion: “If these people are going to eat they better go home before it gets dark.”
To which “Jesus replied, ‘They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.’” 4
“‘What!’ they exclaimed. ‘We have exactly five small loaves of bread and two fish!’” 5
The disciples are operating out of a sense of limited resources and so are we when we say there are only so many jobs, there is only so much money, there is only so much food, or energy, or anything to go around.
But listen. If you told the roughly 76 million people living in the United States in 1900 that there would be 282 million of us in 2000 they would be asking the same questions including one extra: “what are we going to do with all the horse manure?”
We know what Jesus does next but we also know what he does not do.
Nowhere does either Jesus or his disciples’ question who the five thousand people were or might be. Nowhere does either Jesus or his disciples eliminate, segregate, or exclude. Jesus doesn’t ask the disciples to sort the five thousand by socioeconomic status or by test scores or by academic degrees achieved or by strength of their individual faith—or by any faith, for that matter—or by culture or by ethnicity or by gender or by age.
When Jesus was asked to feed people, he showed an unimaginable love and charge... He said, “Feed ’em! Feed ’em all! Every one of them.” Friends, where in this world do we ever see it done quite like that? 6
Only when compassion reigns!
Only when we realize that welcoming the stranger into our midst is a sign of what God has done for us.
Only when we realize that being compassionate is what God wills for us to be doing all of the time for all humanity.
Only when we recognize that our compassion is only our meagre human attempt to show some of the compassion that Jesus has shown toward us.
It seems to me that Matthew told this story and this story survived down through the ages to not only show the wonder working power of Jesus but to show how much God can do when we trust God with what we have.
That will mean we will have to stop seeing our resources as limited and begin to see God’s as unlimited.
It will mean we will have to stop asking who is who when we share of our abundance.
It will may mean that, in the beginning, if only a few of us start to practice compassion it will spread to more and more people as they discover that it is not only Christ’s way but, because it is, it is the way of life.
Most of us know only a part of Emma Lazarus’ poem “The New Colossus” carved on the base of the Statue of Liberty.
It is the part that Irving Berlin set to music but here is how that poem begins:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles.
From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome...” 7
Then come the words we know “give me your tired, your poor.”
May these words shine forth from Christ’s churches and the lives of Christ’s people until the word “compassion” once again glows from our hands in world-wide welcome.
Thanks for listening.
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1. Greenwood, Max. "Maxine Waters: Trump is the most deplorable person I've ever Met." The Hill. August 4, 2017. Accessed August 5, 2017. http://thehill.com/homenews/house/345307-maxine-waters-trump-is-the-most-deplorable-person-ive-ever-met.
2. "Read the full transcript of Wednesday’s press briefing." BostonGlobe.com, August 3, 2017. Accessed August 5, 2017. https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2017/08/02/read-full-transcript-wednesday-press-briefing/jP2IHQrMiF1RA6UE1zOhGJ/story.html.
3. Reilly, Katie. "'Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor': The Story Behind the Statue of Liberty’s Famous Immigration Poem." Time.com. January 28, 2017. Accessed August 5, 2017. http://time.com/4652666/statue-of-liberty-give-me-your-tired-poor/.
4. Matthew 14:16. In The Holy Bible: New International Version. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2009.)
5. Matthew 14:17. In The Living Bible. (Salem, NH: Ayer Co., 1986.)
6. Eldred, Mark. "God In My Pocket." A Fourth Church Sermon, The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, Chicago, July 26, 2016.
7. Reilly, Katie, loc. cit.
Sermon preached at the Lutheran Church of Saints Peter and Paul
Riverside, Illinois
6 August 2017
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