Meet Me at the Corner of Compassion and You’re Not that Special
Dec.
6. 2020 Dr. Roger Ray,
pastor
The
internet is full of falsely attributed quotes, usually pinning modern proverb
on a person of importance: Plato, Lincoln, Jefferson, or very popular movie
stars. I can’t object too much, since that is basically the way that New Testament
gospels were written. Much to the chagrin of many church going folks, scholars
are in general agreement that very few of the sayings attributed to Jesus
actually originated with that first century Palestinian preacher, but the name
and image of Jesus gained popularity in the late first century and people
tended to give Jesus the credit for coming up with whatever pithy parable or
saying that was meme worthy in the first century.
One of our most popular
sages in this present moment is Dr. Anthony Fauci. This quote, “I don’t know
how to explain to you that you should care about other people,” has been broadly
attributed to him lately because, well, the shoe fits. We keep trying to convince
people to wear masks, avoid travel, not to share air with other people in confined
spaces, and we’ve been saying this things for so many months that when you see
people in public who are ignoring these rules, it really can’t be because they
have not heard them, and it is unlikely that many people find the reasons and
the methods difficult to comprehend. What
we are seeing, more sadly, is a whole lot of people who just don’t care. And,
at that point, we do tend to run out of words. How do you explain to someone
that they really ought to care about other people?
And I wouldn’t make such
an issue of the fact that this quote has been mistakenly attached to Dr. Fauci,
except that I think it is important to note that this issue of human
selfishness is not an issue that was born in the pandemic.
The pandemic makes it
easier to walk through the grocery store and see who cares about others and who
doesn’t but this particular quote isn’t even related to Covid 19. The quote
originates with an author of young adult books, someone you have likely not
heard of: Lauren Morrill. She uttered these words in exasperation, where we get
most of our philosophical insights these days, on Twitter, in 2017 just before
Donald Trump was inaugurated. The then president elect had declared the repeal
of the Affordable Care Act and Morrill was about to deliver her second child.
Exasperated by the renewed fear of being uninsured with a young family, she
tweeted that her problem with the whole universal health care debate is that
she just didn’t know how to explain why you should care about other people.
That so many Americans
are willing to say, “I’ve got mine so don’t change the system,” knowing that
maintaining the status quo leaves millions of poorer and sicker Americans without
healthcare is a disturbing fact. I have never been able to understand why the
relatively unchurched nations of Western Europe seem to be able to think about
public policy with the poor and vulnerable in mind while Americans, far too
often, just can’t. It might lead you to believe that we are not good people . .
. that there is something morally sick about us.
But
I have this caveat, I think that Americans still have an innate impulse for
compassion. In May of 2011, a tornado ripped through Joplin, Missouri, just 70
miles from here. It was the most powerful tornado in history, leveling houses,
businesses and even a hospital in a mile wide and seven mile long swath. 158
people were killed.
More than a thousand were
injured. Some bodies were never discovered. There was nearly $3 billion in damages.
There may have been looters somewhere but not only did I not see any of that, what
I did see were thousands of people coming from all around Missouri, Kansas,
Oklahoma, Arkansas, …. So many volunteers that the United Way couldn’t register
and assign them fast enough. Most of us just wandered into the neighborhoods
that lined the swath where the tornado had taken everything but the grass, and
we just started picking up broken glass, shingles, insulation, slowly bagging up
the destroyed remnants of thousands of people’s lives. No one paid us to do it.
No one asked us to do it. We just followed our instincts.
My long-time scuba buddy,
Bill Ringo, has gone to Nicaragua with me to help build houses. Bill is a
scientist who specializes in environmental toxins and so, when Katrina hit in
2005, FEMA tapped bill to coordinate the work in the state of Mississippi. My
church wanted to send teams of volunteers but my good friend, Bill, said, “This
is too big, and it is too dangerous for untrained volunteers.” As always, I am
willing to follow the advice of scientists but, in fact, it was our own Mark
Rowland, who replied to my news from Bill saying, “Well, I’m going.” To which I
replied, “Not without me, you’re not.”
Over the next year, we
make eight trips in a bus loaded with uncompensated volunteers, equipped with
chain saws, wheelbarrows, and wrecking bars. We slept on the floors of churches
and in tents, moving inward as the water receded, clearing roads, covering roofs
with blue tarps, and gutting flooded homes to get them ready to be rebuilt.
All volunteers,
responding to a humanitarian crisis. At the end of that year, my friend, Bill,
told me, “Thank God for the churches that sent volunteers to the coast. They
actually accomplished miracles while FEMA was trying to get organized. I don’t
say that as a knock on FEMA. I am just saying well intended, good people, can
make a huge difference by simply following their own impulse to be good people.
I think that one of the differences between America’s response to Katrina and
the Joplin tornado and the political battle about healthcare is that when a
crisis strikes, before you have time to think about it or debate it, you are on
a church bus loaded with equipment and volunteers.
On many public policy
issues, it isn’t an immediate crisis . . . note how slow moving the pandemic
has been. It was announced in March. It was frightening to many of us, but
others found it to be a political badge of honor to insist that wasn’t real. We
had the luxury of debating it for months before it became a common hazard in our
area. And even though we’re experiencing more than a dozen deaths a day with
hundreds of new infections, our hospitals are full, still… some are still
saying it isn’t real. I know a couple of the people who are insisting that it
isn’t real and I have seen these same people be extremely compassionate in the
past. Something is wrong with this scenario.
Somehow, we allow a
narcissistic strain, a selfish, fearful, self-protective strain of thinking to
enter our minds and poison our hearts’ best instincts. Six months ago, when we
were first recording services, I sneezed, threw myself off balance, and I fell
off of the chancel into our drum set which was about the noisiest fall that any
of us had ever heard. People who don’t even like me were yelling, “Call 9-1-1!”
I wasn’t hurt but it
sounded like I might have broken every bone in my body. Your instincts don’t
wait to pass judgement. We may build an elaborate defense against universal healthcare
but if someone falls off of a ladder in front of you, you don’t wait to see if
they have insurance. You don’t wonder about whether they are a good employee,
or if they keep their yard well, or wash their car, you run to their side to
give aid. I want to draw out that person, in Republicans and Democrats, in
liberals and conservatives. I suggest that you try to put that person in charge
of who you are.
If
you will indulge me to talk about Jesus for a few minutes. I know you don’t
really expect that from me anymore but if you will allow me to revisit my
college teaching days. In the good ol days when a course on the life and
teachings of Jesus was a part of the core curriculum at Drury University, I usually
taught a section every semester. You start with a couple of dozen MidWestern
teenagers who, when you ask them who Jesus was, will give you a pretty creedal
response. Jesus was the son of God, who died on the cross for our salvation and
he is now seated on the right hand of God in heaven, awaiting the final
judgement.
So, as much as it is
possible to set such notions aside, we would begin to read the gospels and I
asked them to write a job description for the Messiah, based on what Jesus said
and did. We read the gospels in the order in which we believed that they were
written: Mark, Luke, Matthew and John.
The first supernatural thing Jesus does in Mark is a demon exorcism. So we
start off our job description for Jesus with “exorcist.” Not really where
anyone wanted to start but there it is in Mark 1.
Only made more
uncomfortable by the fact that Jesus encountered this demon possessed man when
he tried to go to church . . . haven’t we all been there?
The next thing he did was
to heal Peter’s mother-in-law and a whole crowd of people who heard that Jesus
was a healer, and came to Peter’s house to be healed.
When he had finished
being an exorcist and a healer, he tells his disciples that he must go and
preach. So, he is an exorcist, a healer, and a preacher. He ends up healing
several people along the way, people who had become outcasts because of their
illness . . . lepers, you know, couldn’t live among decent folks. So Jesus
begins to incorporate curious dimensions to the healings. He tells a paralytic,
not “you are healed” but rather, “your sins are forgiven.” Which upset the
neighbors, who, after all, has the authority to forgive sins? Besides, what
sins are you talking about, and who are you to judge?
I won’t drag you through
the whole semester but what emerges from the process of going to the text to
find out something about Jesus, is that he is primarily a healer, and a
reconciler. That is, his message is tied to the healing events, he forgives and
restores both prostitutes and self-righteous religious people. He shows mercy
and generosity to the undeserving. He helps people who can’t help him.
I
am deeply indebted to the work of the late Marcus Borg who published this book
in 1994, right when I needed it. I used the book in my classes for several
years because, I believe, Borg distilled the issue perfectly. Once you give up
on the creedal Jesus.
When you try to
understand what Jesus actually did in his first century setting, I don’t think
anyone captured it as well as Borg, who called Jesus, “a teacher of radical
compassion.” Think of the stories he told, what was the point of the parable of
the prodigal son? Really a story about a father who showed boundless mercy to a
poorly behaving self-centered son. And that business of a shepherd leaving 99
sheep unprotected to go out and find one that was lost, in danger, excluded
from the fold. And that story about the Good Samaritan, the one person who
actually stopped to put the clumsy preacher out of the drum set. That guy who
put an injured stranger on his burrow and got him to an inn and told the
innkeeper to spare no expense in the care of this wounded man, promising to
repay him in full.
Compassion without
boundaries, without limits, so radical that you can say, “Whatever it takes, in
for a penny, in for a pound.” Before later generations attached a lot of
religious stuff to Jesus the way that social media gives Thomas Jefferson and
Abraham Lincoln credit for modern proverbs, before Jesus became a “get out of
hell free” token, Jesus was the teacher of radical compassion.
He touched lepers, people
no one else would touch for a million dollars. The demon possessed, probably
the mentally ill, were social rejects. Healing them allowed them to go home
again. He publicly dinned with sinners and prostitutes, people that the religious
folks only visited under the cover of darkness.
I keep searching for ways
to pull the divided people of America back together again. Where can conservatives
and liberals meet on common ground? What shared experience, values, beliefs
might we have that could get us to sing off of the same page of the hymnal
again. I am modestly proposing that we try to consider our mutual value for the
teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
Could we stop fighting
for power and recognition just long enough to remember the faith that most of
us shared at some time in our lives, before we got distracted by 24/7 political
bickering and figuring out who we hated and whose rights we were willing to
bargain away. Remember when Jesus meant something to us? Not in a stained-glass
sort of way but more in the decent food smuggled into the hospital room for
someone who had the mystery meat and green beans too many times. The Jesus who
goes to court with you and sits beside you while the prosecutor tells you that
you are worthless and a scourge to society and that you should be in prison, the
Jesus who pats you on the hand, looks you in the eyes and says, “I love you.”
I don’t want to shame
people who fight against a stimulus bill for pandemic victims, or bring up the
children kept in cages that we can’t even find the paperwork for where we sent
their parents. I just want to invite you to meet me where a teacher of radical
compassion will spread out his arms, even if his hands get nailed to a cross,
to say that no one is disposable. No one is undeserving. No one has to earn
forgiveness, acceptance, or a seat at the table. We may disagree about how to
get there, but can we at least agree that Jesus was trying to teach us about
radical compassion and that is something we should both value? I can’t believe
that I’m saying this but, seriously, conservatives, liberals, can’t we agree to
listen to Jesus?
Back
in the summer, Paul Krugman wrote an opinion piece that I saw in the New York
Times. The title was, “A cult of selfishness that is killing America.”
The pandemic divided
Americans, like everything else, between conservatives and liberals but even though
conservatives were largely saying that keeping the economy going was more
important than slowing the spread of a virus that 99% of us will survive anyway.
But conservatives didn’t just hurt themselves. The lack of being willing to
work together has hurt us all.
It isn’t just that, as
Krugman notes, Americans are 15x more likely to die of Covid than our European
and Canadian counterparts. And while the ignorant and incompetent Trump
administration’s management of the pandemic is significant, Krugman continues, It
is more than that. He says, “They were all members of America’s cult of
selfishness.”
Look at the intensity of
opposition we’ve seen to having water saving shower heads, energy efficient
light bulbs, or removing phosphates from laundry soap. These are all things
that safeguard the environment, which is good for everyone, and not just people,
but fish, frogs, horses, and eagles.
But these benefits come as very minor personal
sacrifices or adjustments and people often react with irrational ferocity to
these micro aggressions.
Krugman concludes his
piece saying, “What the coronavirus has revealed is the power of America’s cult
of selfishness. And this cult is killing us.” What makes teaching radical
compassion so necessary is this hatred Americans have for being told that we as
individuals have a debt of responsibility for the public as a whole.
And if Jesus’ parables,
sermons, conversations, and even his miracles were all teaching radical
compassion then, it stands to reason, that radical compassion can be taught.
Children can be raised to be compassionate. And adults can be changed so that
even we old gray beards can learn to be more compassionate. I believe it
because, as I have pointed out earlier, compassion is our innate, gut level
response. We automatically choose compassion until by fear and prejudice we
have been taught to suppress our innate kindness.
We are all in this
together. We are all connected, in a pandemic more than at any other time in
our lives. We are sharing air with everyone we walk into a grocery store with,
with every kid working at a drive through window at McDonalds, and every
janitor, nurses aid, RN, and physician we see when we are in a clinic or
hospital. Their health, at least to some degree, depends on me. And that fact
should not make us angry. It shouldn’t make us feel that we are losing our
freedom or our independence. It gives us the opportunity to show compassion by
being responsible. It gives you the opportunity to be a better person.
Regardless of political
affiliation, don’t we all want to be good people? In a democracy where we are
all free to choose to be anything we want to be, choose to be kind.
