7-18-99
MERCY ME: CULTIVATING THE GIFT OF COMPASSION
You know that feeling you get in your stomach when you are going down the first drop of a roller coaster. It’s the same feeling when you hear horrible news. Your stomach feels like it has just been kicked in. The New Testament has a Greek word for that feeling; it is “Splagchna.” It literally means bowels or guts, but it is translated “Compassion.”
The only person that this word is associated with is Jesus. It says that Jesus felt this way when He encountered the sick (Mt 14:14), the blind (Mt 20:34), the demon possessed (Mk 9:22), those who lost loved ones (Lk 7:13), the hungry (Mt 15:32) the lonely (Mk 1:41) and the bewildered (Mt 9:36).
Our word “Compassion” comes from two Latin words (com & pati); literally means “suffering with” others.
Some are especially gifted - able to identify with others. People in our church who I think have this gift are Mike Rubadue, Julie Cutler, Bill Irwin, Jamie Ramge, Steve & Jacqui Noel, Jim & Denise Bracking.
Some in the church are especially gifted at praying, or sharing their faith. But we are all required to pray and share our faith, whether we are gifted at it or not. The same is true of compassion. We are all meant to cultivate compassion.
Here are some practical ways to cultivate compassion.
SEE PEOPLE WITH JESUS’ EYES (see what he saw)
(Matthew 9:36) When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. (p 687)
1 Samuel 16:7 “The lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”
We are so tempted to look at the outward appearance, to judge them by their looks. This starts early in life. A friend of my name J.K. had a daughter in 3rd grade who came up to him one evening and very emotionally asked “Daddy am I pretty?” He said, “Of course you are honey.” Yet he astutely probed, “Why are you asking me if you are pretty.” She said tearfully, “The boys in my school were saying who the pretty girls are and they didn’t say my name.” Can you feel her pain – good that’s compassion.
My five year old daughter, Elle, just had her 5 year physical and the doctor believes that she may need glasses. She has already told us that she doesn’t want glasses because she is afraid she will be made fun of. I just want to pull her close to me and tell her if any boys make fun of her because she is wearing glasses, just punch them in the nose.
Mary Bartels Bray, wrote a story that was published in Guideposts in June 1965 that illustrates so well the importance of seeing with Jesus’ eyes. It reads:
Our house was directly across the street from the clinic entrance of John Hopkins in Baltimore. We lived downstairs and rented the upstairs rooms to outpatients at the clinic.
One summer evening as I was fixing supper, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to see a truly awful looking man. “Why, he’s hardly taller than my eight-year-old,” I thought as I stared at the stooped, shriveled body. But the appalling thing was his face – lopsided from swelling, red and raw. Yet his voice was pleasant as he said, “Good evening. I’ve come to see if you’ve a room for just one night. I came for a treatment this morning from the Eastern Shore, and there’s no bus till morning.”
He told me he’d been hunting for a room since noon but with no success; no one seemed to have a room. “I guess it’s my face. I know it looks terrible, but my doctor says with a few more treatments . . ..”
For a moment I hesitated, but his next words convinced me: “I could sleep in this rocking chair on the porch. My bus leaves early in the morning.”
I told him we would find him a bed, but to rest on the porch. I went inside and finished getting supper. When we were ready, I asked the old man if he would join us. “No thank you. I have plenty.” And he held up a brown paper bag.
When I had finished the dishes, I went out on the porch to talk with him a few minutes. It didn’t take a long time to see that this old man had an oversized heart crowded into that tiny body. He told me he fished for a living to support his daughter, her five children, and her husband, who was hopelessly crippled from a back injury. He didn’t tell it by way of complaint; in fact, every other sentence was prefaced with thanks to God for a blessing.
He was grateful that no pain accompanied his disease, which was apparently a form of skin cancer. He thanked God for giving him the strength to keep going. At bedtime, we put a camp cot in the children’s room for him. When I got up in the morning, the bed linens were neatly folded and the little man was out on the porch. He refused breakfast, but just before he left for his bus, haltingly, as if asking a great favor, he said, “Could I please come back and stay the next time I have a treatment? I won’t put you out a bit. I can sleep fine in a chair.” He paused a moment and then added, “Your children made me feel at home. Grownups are bothered by my face, but children don’t seem to mind.”
I told him he was welcome to come again. And on his next trip he arrived a little after seven in the morning. As a gift, he brought a big fish and a quart of the largest oysters I had ever seen. He said he had shucked them that morning before he left so that they’d be nice and fresh. I knew his bus left at 4:00 a.m., and I wondered what time he had to get up in order to do this for us.
In the years he came to stay overnight with us there was never a time that he did not bring us fish or oysters or vegetables from his garden. Other times we received packages in the mail, always by special delivery, fish and oysters packed in a box of fresh young spinach or kale, every leaf carefully washed. Knowing that he must walk three miles to mail these, and knowing how little money he had, made the gifts doubly precious.
When I received these little remembrances, I often thought of a comment our next-door neighbor made after he left that first morning. “Did you keep that awful looking man last night? I turned him away! You can lose roomers by putting up such people!”
Maybe we did lose roomers once or twice. But oh! If only they could have known him, perhaps their illnesses would have been easier to bear. I know our family always will be grateful to have known him; from him we learned what it was to accept the bad without complaint and the good with gratitude to God.
Recently I was visiting a friend who has a greenhouse. As she showed me her flowers, we came to the most beautiful one of all, a golden chrysanthemum, bursting with blooms. But to my great surprise, it was growing in an old dented, rusty bucket. I thought to myself, If this were my plant, I’d put it in the loveliest container I had!”
My friend changed my mind. “I ran short of pots,” she explained, “and knowing how beautiful this one would be, I thought it wouldn’t mind starting out in this old pail. It’s just for a little while, till I can put it out in the garden.”
She must have wondered why I laughed so delightedly, but I was imagining just such a scene in heaven. “Here’s an especially beautiful one,” God might have said when he came to the soul of the sweet old fisherman. “He won’t mind starting in this small body.”
All this happened long ago. And now, in God’s garden, how tall this lovely soul must stand.
A second way to cultivate compassion is to…
TOUCH PEOPLE WHERE THEY HURT (felt what he felt)
(Mark 1:40-42) A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.” Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cured. (p 708)
The amazing part of this healing is how Jesus did it - Jesus TOUCHED him! Even if he had not been healed physically, this would have began to heal him emotionally.
Physically leprosy patents don’t feel pain, but they suffer as much as anyone. Almost all the pain they feel comes from the outside, the pain of rejection imposed on them by the surrounding community. They are rejected because they are contagious. Their body is rotting. They stink. They are deformed. So they are forced to live outside the community. They must keep a six-foot distance from anyone – even their spouse and children. They knew great loneliness.
Philip Yancey tells the story of Dr. Paul Brand who has devoted his life to treating leprosy patients in India. In the course of one examination Brand laid his hand on the patient’s shoulder and informed him through a translator of the treatment that lay ahead. To his surprise the man began to shake with muffled sobs. “Have I said something wrong?” Brand asked the translator. She quizzed the patient and reported, “No, doctor. He says he is crying because you put your hand around his shoulder. Until he came here no one had touched him for many years.”
Mother Teresa has said, “We have drugs for people with diseases like leprosy. But these drugs do not treat the main problem, the disease of being unwanted. That’s what my sisters hope to provide. The sick and poor suffer even more from rejection than material want. Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.”
When my wife and I lived in Honduras, we spent part of our time helping a ministry called Amor y Vida (Love and Life). This ministry acted as an orphanage and hospice because the people who lived there were children who had cancer and had been abandoned by their family. While we were there a group of youth ministers from the states came down. Before they came we asked them to bring toys for the children. It was like Christmas, the youth ministers came with toy cars, electronic games, and stuffed animals. We told the kids (about 25 of them) that they could pick one gift each. They all walked up together to these gifts and EVERYONE of them – including the teenage boys – took a stuffed animal and left the other toys behind. They just wanted something to hold.
My wife was great for those kids. She didn’t speak much Spanish and she didn’t have many nursing skills, but she would hold them, and wash and comb their hair. They loved her because she even though she didn’t speak Spanish, she spoke the language of love fluently. You need not be a doctor or miracle worker to meet that need.
The third way to cultivate compassion is to …
SERVE JESUS BY SERVING THOSE IN NEED (do what he did)
(Matthew 25:40) “The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’” (p 702) (read vv 31-46).
When I was about 20 years old, I was with some of my friends at the University of Illinois. It was late at night and we were walking the streets when a homeless man approached us for some money for coffee. I was a young Christian and my friends weren’t Christians. I wasn’t sure what the right thing to do was, but I decided to help. We were right outside a Hardees so I took him inside and bought him a coffee. As we walked out he threw it on me.
Afterwards I had to reevaluate if I did the right thing. I came to the conclusion that I needed to discern how to help, but not whom to help. I wanted to err on the side of helping someone who was ungrateful than to pass up an opportunity to serve Jesus by serving someone less fortunate.
I think Jesus feels about us the way we feel about our kids. The quickest way to my heart is not to treat me well, but to treat my children well. The quickest way to hurt me is to hurt my children. I want to warm Christ’s heart by serving his children.
Jesus more than identified with the outcast – he was an outcast. He was conceived out of wedlock in a culture that disdained that. He was homeless and hungry. What would happen if we saw that by serving others we were serving Jesus?
This Church is very gifted and there are many places where we can serve Christ be serving others and also cultivate our gift of compassion. I encourage you to befriend the divorced. To serve at the Safe House or Life Choices Pregnancy Center. To sponsor a child with Compassion International or to Adopt hard-to-place babies. Comfort the dying at the Hospice or minister at the Prisons. If you can see, touch and serve the way Christ did, you will be bringing His compassion to others.
