Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Please pray with me: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

This summer, we find ourselves traveling through the Gospel of Matthew with Jesus and his disciples. Last week we heard about the calling of Matthew, and the healing of a woman and raising of a girl, all held within the broad landscape of God’s mercy.

Our passage from Matthew this week is a transition point between Jesus’ ministry of teaching, healing, and proclaiming the kingdom of God come near and Jesus commissioning his disciples and sending them as apostles to continue his work in their communities.

It’s a nice narrative transition. The disciples have experienced enough to have their first foray out into their own ministries. And there’s an element of reflection built into it, kind of an emotional hinge point into what comes next.

The gospel writer tells us that Jesus looks at the crowds who have followed him, listening alongside his closest disciples, and has compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

I think of the many crowds that followed Jesus throughout his ministry – the crowd at the Sermon on the Mount, the crowds that followed him from village-to-village as he taught, healed, and liberated people from what oppressed them. And later, the crowds that shared bread and fish that were multiplied, that were also looked upon with compassion.

He encountered many people, passed through many communities. He heard stories of people in need of healing, people who were marginalized for a number of reasons, people who felt helpless in the face of sickness, death, poverty, or other things that oppressed them. He knew revolutionaries who spoke out and acted against the political and religious leaders of his day – John the Baptist, Simon the Zealot, himself – and probably saw the consequences of their words and actions. Later on, the post-resurrection community that first heard the words Matthew wrote, the ones who had witnessed the destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem by their Roman occupiers, knew all-too-well what happened when people and crowds went against the powers of their time.

So Jesus knew that these people, this crowd, his community, was being harassed, used up and discarded by powerful forces. That they felt helpless. That they were yet again as sheep without a shepherd, this potent image from the Hebrew scriptures, because they had been abandoned, left to wander and fend for themselves. They were sheep without a shepherd, looking for someone to lead them.

Jesus looked at these abandoned crowds and his response was compassion.

Compassion is a word that we often understand in different ways. Its literal meaning is to “suffer with.” We may feel it as a heart-melting sensation when we encounter the pain and suffering of another being. Social psychologists describe compassion as a “pro-social” emotion, one that connects us with other people and communities, a feeling that motivates us to action to alleviate the suffering of others. Unlike pity or sympathy, which can create a distance between people, placing the pitier above the pitied, compassion brings people into a mutual relationship of people who share the experience of being humans who have been in pain. Suffering is not only witnessed to, but genuinely shared. Compassion begins with empathy, feeling what another person is feeling, and then moves beyond empathy to action.

The compassion that Jesus is described as feeling goes even beyond this. The Greek word used here means a gut-level, visceral reaction to the crowds. A gut-wrenching sensation, a furious compassion, a mama- or papa-bear instinct. I have a water bottle sticker of a tiger with bared teeth and claws and a word bubble that says “Protect the Vulnerable” that I think of when I imagine the kind of compassion that Jesus is described as having. It kind of amps up that aspect of compassion that moves from feeling to action.

Jesus’ compassionate response to the crowds is surprising, though. If it were one of us, our rage over the injustice the people were suffering might cause us to raise a fit and yell. Jesus, though, draws on a deep well of spiritual maturity and asks his disciples to first pray for people who will go out into these fields of suffering to do the same work that he himself has been doing.

And then he sends them.

The disciples were called together and given the authority to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God come near and to act in ways that made it real for the people and communities who heard it. And then they were sent as apostles, literally ones who are sent out, to proclaim, heal, and restore, starting in their own community, eventually spreading to the ends of the earth. They were called together and sent out to be partners with God in this work.

The starting point for the sending, the commissioning, the gathering, the prayer, the place where all of this begins is compassion. It’s rooted in the compassion that Jesus had for the people and communities he knew who cried out for healing and restoration.

This is where we find our grounding, our starting point as ones who follow Jesus into a broken and beautiful world. In compassion, which is one of our guiding values as a congregation that we live into together.

Following Jesus means encountering the pain points of our world and proclaiming the good news of the nearness of God’s presence through our words and actions. The promises made at our baptisms lead us in this direction: we learn about Christ and are formed by a community of his followers so that we may learn to trust God, proclaim Christ through word and deed, care for others and the world God made, and work for justice and peace, promises that will be made on Henry’s behalf at the second service/later in the service today. The church has lived into this calling in many ways throughout history. While there are many examples of the church falling short and creating more pain for those who suffer, we do try to lessen it, and in fact at its best the church has been the refuge for the hurt and vulnerable who have together proclaimed God’s Good News.

Many of us have been moved by compassion as we’ve responded to the needs of our community and loved ones. And while some may say compassion is weak, it’s powerful, as anyone who has felt a furious compassion knows. We’ve seen first-hand that it motivates a lot of powerful action to stand up to those who harass, even to see the way that those who do the harassing have themselves been caught up in something that is using and discarding them. We’ve been part of a community that charts a path forward when it feels like there isn’t one, coming around and supporting people and communities who are in a tough spot, being with people we know and love who are in pain. And we’ve been held in the compassionate care of one another, as well.

The heart of compassion is discovering the hidden truth in caring for others, which is that we are in fact caring for ourselves, our own kin, our own community. The more we stand together with those who suffer, the more we understand that truly we suffer together. We discover that we are also vulnerable at times and need the care and compassion of others that binds us as one, as Jesus prayed for.

But, as we who have lived this compassion know, it can be exhausting. It’s hard to constantly operate from that gut-wrenching feeling within us. We may be feeling tired, overwhelmed, numb, detached – like it’s too much. Compassion does require a certain openness or vulnerability that can become wounded and calloused over by constant activation.

Brene Brown and Roshi Joan Halifax both write of the need for a strong back, open heart sort of compassion. It’s a compassion that is grounded and boundaried – boundaries are important – so that it can remain open and present with those who suffer. The grounding and boundaries look different for every person and may change over time.

And, as followers of Jesus, we find an important part of our grounding in our dependence on God. In trusting that God is with us as we participate in the healing and restoration that God is already up to in the world. In praying that God’s kingdom come and that we may be a part of it, to paraphrase Martin Luther. In trusting that we receive the very same compassion that Jesus felt for the crowds, especially when we feel bothered and helpless by the things we can’t control. In being part of a compassionate community that is holding this with us. In feeling the complete freedom to step back and rest when we need to, trusting that others are continuing the work until we’re ready to step in again.

The compassion of Jesus is our vocation. As ones who follow him, we not only proclaim the good news that he shared with the world, but we live it through working for the healing and restoration of the people and communities around us, trusting that others are doing this work with us. We trust that wherever there is suffering, Jesus has already seen it and is calling us to be moved by compassion to join him in responding to it. Amen.