PROPER 5-C, June 10, 2007

Last Saturday our Worship Commission met to talk about, well, our worship here at Christ Church. The truth is that the vast majority of our parishioners, all of you, come here to this place only to worship. Most of you do not participate in Sunday School or small groups. Most do not stay for coffee hour or take part in the fellowship activities that take place throughout the year. This is not to judge. It is simply to state an obvious fact.

Thus, if I were to say that we need more space here at Christ Church, most people would be incredulous. All anyone has to do on a Sunday morning is look around. Our pews are never filled to the brim. How can anyone say we need more space? Yet, if a person has not been to Sunday School and noted that we have to use the Rectory for Journey to Adulthood and that our adult classes often have to meet in spaces not really conduce to learning, one would never know we do have space problems.

Even more, we have no real place to gather before or after the Service. Gundrum Parlor, as beautiful as it is, limits the number of people who can gather there. My suspicion is that many do not come early or stay after the service because it’s too crowded. When we have a parish dinner, we can only comfortably seat less than one-forth of our members. I could go on.

My point is not about space or our lack thereof, even though space is a very important part of our ministry at Christ Church. But, you see, ministry flows from our worship. Education flows, follows from, our worship. Matthew 25 is an extension of our worship. Everything we do and all that we are as a parish begins with our worship. But it does not end there. That is the point.

As the last line of our Sunday bulletin reminds us, once the worship is over, that is when our service as Christians begins. Our worship is to lead us into Christian service to others. Yet in order to know what we are to do, even in order to know and understand how we are to do it, we need to learn. We need to be educated and we need to know we have the support of others. That is what Sunday School is all about, what bible study and small groups are all about. That is what coffee hour and fellowship opportunities are all about.

We do not live our lives in a vacuum and we do no serve our Lord as Lone Rangers. We come together as a community of faith in worship. We learn and grow as a community of faith through educational opportunities. We love and support one another as a community of faith through fellowship. But it all begins in worship. Our role model in all of this is Jesus. As Jesus did, so must we. And when we live our lives modeled on Jesus’ life, we will grow together as a community of faith. What we will be doing is building Christian community through worship. It all begins right here but it does not end right here.

All of which leads me to the point at hand. None of this happens accidentally. We have to be intentional about it. We have to come to worship. We have to want to understand what it means to model our lives on Jesus’ life. We have to make the effort to learn more about our faith. We have to come together as a parish family again and again and again.

With all that in mind the Worship Commission thought that it might be helpful if we spent the summer months looking closely at the theme for each week as found in the various lessons, especially the Gospel, and center the worship around that theme. So, for the next twelve weeks we will be emphasizing, one each week, the hallmark, characteristic, virtue that we believe the church is calling to our attention for that Sunday. Quickly, these are the twelve: Jesus was and we are to be compassionate, forgiving, reverent, faithful, humble, generous, responsible, prayerful, wise, vigilant, discerning, and open-minded. And that is only for starters.

But to begin: if there is one word that characterizes Jesus’ life and, thus, should characterize ours, it is the word "compassion". Christians are to be compassionate people. My assumption is that we truly believe we are, but I have to wonder. I wonder because, even though I think I am a compassionate person, when I think about that word and what it truly means, I have to admit I fall short. I suspect you do, too.

The word means "to suffer with". Compassion is the "deep awareness of the suffering of another coupled with the wish to relieve it." The synonyms the dictionary has for compassion all fall short, it seems to me. Words like "charity, clemency, commiseration, compunction, humaneness, kindness, mercy, sympathy, tenderheartedness" do not convey what it means to be compassionate as Jesus was compassionate.

Our President calls his type of politics "compassionate conservatism". He’s wrong. He doesn’t have a clue what it means to be compassionate. I am a bleeding heart liberal. In all honesty, I also do not have a clue what it means to be compassionate, certainly not in the way Jesus was compassionate, not in the way I am called to be a compassionate Christian – whether conservative, liberal or somewhere in between. The President and I can empathize, we can sympathize, we can be kind and tenderhearted, but we do not suffer with those for whom we say we have compassion.

We can sympathize with those starving in Darfur, with those suffering the ravages of the draught in Swaziland, with the victims of tornadoes and hurricanes. But to say that we have compassion for them, that we suffer with them, that we are deeply aware of what they are going through, would be a real stretch if not entirely wrong. Compassion comes one-on-one. Perhaps that is why so many so spoke so eloquently about being compassionate to those who were victims of Katrina, why so little true compassion has been shown and why so much real compassion is still needed.

When Jesus encountered the widow in today’s Gospel whose only son had died, some how in some way he suffered with her. Her pain was his pain. When she was married, her husband took care of her. When he died, her son became her only means of support. Now he was dead. This old woman was now alone, with no means of support and she was frightened. Tears came easily and readily for her and, I believe, for Jesus. He could honestly say to her, "I feel your pain." That’s what it means to be compassionate, to truly feel the pain of another.

What all this means, or at least what it means to me when I examine my own spiritual life, is that I am not as compassionate as I think I am and that compassion comes at a cost. It comes at a cost to me because it involves getting involved in the life of another, in that person’s pain and suffering so that it becomes my pain and suffering as well. It is truly difficult to be truly compassionate because our first – and even second and third – instinct is to run away as fast as possible from someone who is suffering lest we get too involved and have to take on some of that pain.

None of this is to judge or to take to task or to scold or criticize. It is simply to remind us – you and me – that perhaps the reason why the world is in the mess it is in is that we Christians have lost the willingness to get involved in the lives of those who are suffering. We stand off to the side, offer advice and words of support and consolation, even give some of our time and resources, but we do not get so involved as to cause us to suffer. We have not lost the capacity to be compassionate so much as, I think, we have lost the will.

Perhaps today’s Gospel is calling us to spend some time thinking about all of this, about how compassionate we truly are and what we can do and what we must do to become even more so. There is no easy answer. Yet, if we are to live out the reason why we come here to worship, do we have any other choice?