SERMON SERIES: MEETING JESUS AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME

SERMON THREE: "Be Compassionate as God is Compassionate"

TEXT: Luke 6: 36

Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

RESOURCE: Borg, Marcus J., Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus & The Heart of Contemporary Faith: New York: HarperCollins Paperback, 1994, Chapter Three, pp. 46-49.

Preached by the Reverend Caroline B. Edge at Carter Memorial United Methodist Church on October 1, 2006.

This fall I am inviting you to meet Jesus again for the first time. Two Sundays ago we met Jesus as Spirit Person. Today Marcus Borg in his book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus & The Heart of Contemporary Faith highlights the other central characteristic of Jesus – his compassion. To quote Borg, "Jesus’ advocacy of compassion continues to be an invitation and a challenge to the church in our day."

To describe Jesus as a person of compassion is no surprise to you. The Gospels are full of stories of Jesus having compassion on someone in need or being moved with compassion. This one word is the best single description of Jesus’ preaching and teaching theme about God – God is compassionate, and we created in the image of God are to be compassionate. Jesus does not only mean that this is just an individual virtue that each of us is to have. He also considers it "a sociopolitical paradigm expressing his alternative visions of human life in community" to use Borg’s words. In other words, you and I are to be compassionate not just in our personal relations, but as a church, as a state, as a nation – whatever community we are part of – that community is to be compassionate.

Borg analyzes the Hebrew word that is usually translated compassion to reveal a unique image of God’s love for us. He gets this image from another theologian Phyllis Trible in her book God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. In Hebrew the word usually translated compassion is the plural of a noun that in its singular form means "womb". In the Hebrew Bible we read of a woman who feels compassion for the child of her own womb, of a man feels compassion for his brother, who came from the same womb. This feeling of compassion is located in the loins – the part of the body that holds the womb in women. For men, the Hebrew Bible speaks of compassion in the bowels. Thus we get that phrase that sounds so funny to us "his bowels were moved with compassion." Today we think more of constipation in relation to the bowels rather than compassion. The Hebrew word connotes that one not only feels but something flows from those feelings – namely, compassionate acts. So maybe the image does work.

The point is that compassion comes from somewhere below the head. It is not something we think about; it is something we feel strongly about.

Our word "compassion" comes from Latin words meaning "to feel with". We feel another’s suffering and are moved by that feeling to do something. We see the destitute people of Darfur so we put a sign on our lawn "Stop darfur." We feel the devastation of Katrina so we go to Biloxi to bring relief.

In the Hebrew Bible compassion is often the term used to describe God. Jeremiah quotes Yahweh: "Therefore my womb trembles for him [meaning the children of Israel]; I will truly show motherly compassion upon him". "Like a womb, God is the one who gives birth to us – the mother who gives birth to us. As a mother loves the children of her womb and feels for the children of her womb, so God loves us and feels for us, for all of her children. In its sense of "like a womb," compassionate has nuances of giving life, nourishing, caring, perhaps embracing and encompassing. For Jesus, this is what God is like."

I might push Trible’s and Borg’s image of the Mother God a bit further after what I saw this past week in Mississippi. My two nieces are both grandmothers and at our reunion some of their grandchildren were present. As I observed them nuzzling the little babies and cooing to them, as I saw them playing with their preschooler sized grandchildren, I witnessed great compassion. There is no doubt in my mind that is how God feels about us.

Jesus uses the wombish word to describe how we are to imitate God. "Be compassionate as God is compassionate." "According to Jesus, compassionate is to be the central quality of a life faithful to God, the compassionate one."

Next week we will talk about how that compassion plays out in the social world and in politics as we live as compassionate community. Amen.