Rev. Laura Fitzpatrick-Nager
The First Congregational Church of Old Lyme
Text:Matthew 5:1-12
Get up, Go Ahead, Do Something, Move: The Gospel/Compass of Compassion
I walked into a coffee shop on Chapel Street in New Haven the other day. I’d been visiting someone in the Emergency Dept –always a place where the gospel resides writ large and took a walk to get a break.
The crowd in the Emergency Department there was bigger than usual. 160 patients filled every corner and the units. As a minister and family member, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Emergency departments, and I must say the climate was intense. 70 people were waiting for beds in the main hospital. The noise, the stretchers in every hallway, the cops and EMT’s, the yelling man surrounding the nurses station added to the fevered cacophony.
“We’re at crisis levels right now”, a very kind nurse named Brian told me. “The wait on average is two days for a bed upstairs… Not enough nurses up there and too much flu.”
Unfortunately, he was true to his word and the person I was visiting was there for 48 hours.
Sitting behind a curtain for a few hours, I couldn’t really see Brian (my new favorite nurse), but I could hear him throughout the long day, his voice kind, respectful, clear, empathetic no matter whom he was dealing with.
“I’ll be right with you” is his mantra.
Brian’s voice and presence was a compass of compassion in the chaos.
I was carrying the Beatitudes in my heart and on my laptop all week. “Blessed are you” I thought as I passed a very sick looking person in the Annex area. Here was a locale Jesus himself would have sought out, a landscape where people needed compassion, action and a bed.
Theologian Henri J.M. Nouwen wrote extensively on compassion and community, and how compassion meant to suffer with, to be with one another. It has several words in it…pati, to suffer in the midst.
“Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.”
Compassion is the gift that makes us human and keeps us human.
As we well know, in our church, caring for one another and our neighbors is a whole self-endeavor, a whole community endeavor. A practice of compassion in the day to day.
Jesus throughout his ministry of justice and healing demonstrated the way of compassion; Compassion as the compass of every parable, every paradox, every personal encounter on the roads of Jesus’ travels.
On a hill overlooking the Sea of Galilee in our scripture story, Jesus taught a growing crowd the way of blessing. The way of peace. Counter-cultural to the powers-in-power, Jesus reframed the Ten Commandments, given to Moses at Mount Sinai. His 1st c listeners would know this liberation history by heart–a theme important to the writer of Matthew’s gospel.
And, now in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus pronounces God’s blessings on just about everyone; those who expose our vulnerability, those wounded at heart rather than the “more” powerful and privileged of society.
The blessings, or beatitudes, speak to those least likely to hold power. They include those whose voices are never heard, those at the end of their rope, and mourning the precarious state of the world, those who stand up for others, risking their lives. Those waiting alone for help in an emergency department somewhere.
These are the blessed ones. These are the ones Jesus seeks out on the road, to minister to, to feed, to heal, to spend time with. Go and do likewise, Jesus said. blessings for a world where gentleness, compassion, justice and mercy are the rules of the day.
Beatitude in the Greek, makarios, means something akin to happy (“Blessed” is the translation of the word:makarios, used in the Greek New Testament) but is more nuanced like wishing for wholeness.
In the beatitudes, Jesus’ litany of 8 blessings tells the story of a God who chooses to be on the side of the poor and wounded, the forgotten, those mourning the state of the world, as well as those seekers of justice, equality and dignity.
Archbishop Emeritus Elias Chacour, a long-time peacemaker and friend of this congregation now in his late 80’s, lives in the Galilee region of Israel. Chacour has a prophetic perspective on the Beatitudes.
“Just like Jesus, I am a simple man from Galilee. Born a baby just like everyone else.”
A Palestinian, Arab Israeli Christian is from the Melkite Catholic Church in Ibillin, Israel, Chacour’s church named after the Sermon on the Mount is extraordinary in its architecture (designed to be akin to Noah’s Ark) and hospitality toward all people…While, Chacour has visited FCCOL several times, I remember most powerfully walking up the front steps with Rev. David Good on a TOL journey to Palestine and Israel.
The steps were inscribed with the verses from the beatitudes in 4 languages…French, English, Arabic and Hebrew.
In his book, “We Belong to the Land” Archbishop Emeritus Chacour explained how he was moved by the translation of the Beatitudes in the Aramaic, Jesus’ mother tongue. He wrote:
Knowing Aramaic, the language of Jesus, has greatly enriched my understanding of Jesus’ teachings. Because the Bible as we know it is a translation of a translation, we sometimes get a wrong impression. For example, we are used to hearing the Beatitudes expressed passively:
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy….
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.
However, Chacour writes, when I look further back to Jesus’ Aramaic, I find that the original word (was “ASHRAY”, from the verb YASHAR. ASHRAY) does not have this passive quality to it at all. Instead, its active means “to set yourself on the right path for the right goal; to turn around, repent; to be an active meaning—to set yourself on the right path, turn around …righteous.”
How could I go to a persecuted young man in a Palestinian refugee camp, for instance, and say, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted,” …That man would revile me, say neither I nor my God understood his plight, and he would be right.
When I understand Jesus’ words in the Aramaic, I translate it like this:
Get up, go ahead, do something, move, you who are hungry and thirsty for justice, for you shall be satisfied.
Get up, go ahead, do something, move, you peacemakers, for you shall be called children of God.
To me this reflects Jesus’ spirit and teachings much more accurately. I can hear him saying, “Get your hands dirty, get in there to build a human society for human beings…; otherwise, others will torture and murder the poor, the voiceless, and the powerless.”
“Get up, go ahead, do something, move,”
“Go and do likewise” Jesus said after telling the story of the Good Samaritan who demonstrated compassion for his unknown neighbor who was beaten and left for dead. How shall we love the stranger? The neighbor? The person we see as the opposition?
Compassion is one of those words that is bigger than any translation. It is the heart, the compass of our faith and church community, a gospel compass for our lives. …and is a way of being and acting, not only on a person-to-person level, but for the whole of our humanity.
A recent article in the Harvard Divinity School bulletin written by Professor Mark Gopin, is entitled “Compassion as a Moral Force for the World”. According to Gopin, compassion can and must become the guiding principle of conscience and our public life together. That compassionate service can be part of our personal and communal lives.
| As Professor of Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, Gopin advocates for organizations, religious and secular, to cultivate compassion as a way to flourish. He writes, “When liberty and dignity become tools for service rather than trophies of status, democracies stabilize, communities heal, and human beings can flourish. Religion, liberalism, and human rights each emerged as responses to human vulnerability and injustice; each transformed civilization, yet each becomes brittle when detached from compassion.” Isn’t that where we are now in our country? Brittle and barbaric, human rights diminished… |
Hearing that Human Rights Lawyer, Navanethem (Navi) Pillay, had won the Nobel Peace Prize and restored my faith in humanity! Navi Pillay is a South African lawyer with an extraordinary record of human rights and justice accountability on the world stage. Attorney Navi Pillay is known for leading a U.N. commission that stated Israel had committed genocide against the people of Gaza
Attorney Navi also defended anti-apartheid activists like the future president and Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela. She served as a lead U.N. official and as a judge on the International Criminal Court and was part of the tribunal investigating genocide in Rwanda.
We can be proud of organizations like the Nobel community that lifts up the best of our humanity. That a world leader like Navi Pillay courageously and compassionately has sought to uncover truth, demand accountability and seek justice for those oppressed -for decades.
“Get up, go ahead, do something, move, you who are hungry and thirsty for justice, for you shall be satisfied.”
As I stepped out of the Emergency Department doors and walked into the October sunshine after my visit, I remembered all those folks still struggling in that ground floor of the hospital.
I was also feeling somewhat bereft and powerless at the enormity of the needs I witnessed, a microcosm of our world…. Then, a prayer came to mind, an ancient Buddhist meditation practice called Tonglen. Tonglen is a way of “offering compassion to others” It’s Tibetan for ‘giving and taking,’ and refers to an ancient meditation practice found in Tibetan Buddhism. Tonglen is about opening our hearts and sending out compassion to others, with a “sending and taking,” rhythm. It is a way to pray.
I invite you to do Tonglen with me now, to center ourselves in a moment of meditation for one another perhaps or the whole world.
You might try placing one hand over your heart and another over your stomach so you can feel your breath and connect with your heart. If you’re comfortable, close your eyes. Let’s do it together:
Think of someone, a person, a place in need of compassion and prayer today. I’ll give you a minute to think of someone or a community…. ready?
Call the person or community to mind…and with each deep in-breath, we take in the others’ pain. With each out-breath, we breathe the pain out, let it go and send them relief, healing and love.
In breath – take in their pain
Outbreath – we let it go and send out healing and love
Like any prayer, we might do tonglen for someone we love or someone we’ve never met, or someone we saw on the street yesterday or for a whole country…
For me the prayer of Tonglen is a way to connect with others to send love out there!
We can’t always get up and join the protest down the street or sit with the person we care about as easily as we’d like to…or, given our life circumstances, we may be limited in the “doing” right now. But we can lean into a practice of compassion, of being with… to soften on behalf of another’s heart-and our own.
We can change ourselves.
