Careful, Don’t Lose Your Empathy!

Open your bibles with me to Luke at chapter number 10 commencing in verse 25 through verse 37. Thank you, you may be seated.

The grass withers and the flower fades but the word of our God shall stand forever!

I want to talk this morning about the danger of losing our empathy …empathy is our ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes!

We live in a country that discourages empathy, a culture that too often tells us that our principal goal in life is to be rich, thin, muscular, young, good looking, blue or green eyed with a small nose, tanned, famous, safe, and always entertained!

The church is certainly influenced (For Better or For Worse) by the cultural environment of the day… we live in a society that has normalized political hostility, racial tension, domestic violence, gender confusion, abortion, divorce, and social slander!

Worsened, intensified, exacerbated by an over exposure to Media information, and violence…. And the emotional distance of social media and self-absorption concerning being popular and successful!

As I was preparing for this sermon, I found this story In 1964 at 3 AM in the morning, a 28 year old Woman by the name of Catherine Genovese was stabbed to death while returning to her apartment in New York which shocked the world, because as many as 38 Witnesses saw and heard the attack as it occurred over a 30-minute span of time, and not one of them stepped in to help the victim… social psychologists has labeled this and other disturbing events of the same kind as “bystander apathy”, or the Genovese Syndrome, which attempts to explain why someone witnessing a crime would not help the victim..

Also, a study from 1973 students training for Ministry at a Theological Seminary (bible college)…with the subjects of an experimental study on empathy (compassion, sympathy).

They got half of them to read the parable that I just read to you in Luke chapter 10…and they were told after having heard the parable, to leave that building go to another building and do a mini sermon on the parable that they just heard read, the other half of the students in the control group… were not told anything about Luke chapter 10 but to go into the same building and make a speech on a totally different subject…

there was a man staged in the study, who was in the middle of the road with bandages and fake blood to make it look like he had been attacked… and the students who had been read the parable of the certain Samaritan on their way into the building to preach a mini sermon… step over the man, totally neglected that man headed toward the building to preach their sermon…

We don't have to go to 1964, we don't have to go to 1973… a few weeks ago in October 2022, we went to the city for a day out with the family, a little kid fell over in front of us and dropped a box of stuff in it, we watched him along with many other bystanders as he gathered his stuff… feeling sorry for him… but only Julia went and helped him… then he said to her this is an experiment on TikTok to see if people will put themselves in someone else's shoes! If people care or not.

People today are so unempathetic that we see people in trouble, we see people in distress, we know people who are struggling, and we are so self-absorbed…so self-centered that all we care about is me, my and mine!

You don't have to take my word for that, look at what we have in our hand, in our bags, in our pockets…an I phone, I pad, Facebook, YouTube, preceded by my space… we have been acclimatized to think and to feel mostly about ourselves… because all of us are familiar with a selfie… you love yourself so much that you take 10, 15 pictures of yourself until you get the one that you think looks most like the movie star you want to be!

We retain it, we crop it, we filter it, we feather it, we smooth it over, and now we have an app on our phone where we can get people out of the picture if they're not cute enough… somebody ought to help me preach here this morning…. we can't even go to a restaurant to eat without taking a picture or a short video of the food first… because we can't control ourselves when it comes to gadgets… some of you here are looking at your phone right now trying to make me think that you're taking notes! You can’t fool me… no you are not taking notes…you are texting, or checking your emails, or on your Instagram or TikTok or Facebook checking your likes!