Faithful Fathers

I.

Father-to-be, Anthony Weiner, is still an expectant parent, but, alas, no longer a Member of Congress--all because he tweeted lewd and semi-lewd pictures of himself to some females following him on Twitter. Not exactly the optimal way to honor his wife, and not exactly the way one would want to get into the history books his child will someday read.

I’m saddened that his error or errors in judgement cost him his congressional seat as I don’t think tweeting anything other than highly classified national security data is anyone’s business. He should still be on the job.

What he did is between him and his wife and the groupies who follow him on Twitter along with his future child. These acts were in poor taste, but many of our greatest political leaders in this country have had less than ideal domestic lives. Does Chief Justice Roberts have to add another repeat after me to the Oath of Office for Obama’s second inaugural? “I will faithfully uphold the office of President of the United States and refrain from tweeting nude, lewd, and disgusting pictures of any part of my body to anyone but my wife.” The swearings in over on Capital Hill will also have to be tweaked in light of this new technology.

Fatherhood is a sacred role, and it begins well before the child is born. Faithfulness to the other parent is of great importance if that kind of commitment has been made, but faithfulness to the child is of paramount importance for the same reason that physical or emotional abuse of a child cannot be tolerated--namely because the child is helpless to defend herself or himself from the destructive results. An adult being abused at any level by a partner can ostensibly walk away from the abusive person; a child cannot. A child can only sit helplessly by and watch a parent turn from being a faithful parent into an unfaithful parent, who stops caring about the well-being of the child and makes anything and everything a greater priority than the child.

Most of you know the broad outline of the story of my favorite biblical father. A son asks his father for his share of what he would normally have inherited from his father’s estate upon the death of the father. Broken hearted the father grants the wish. In the parable, this father represents God. The son, the younger of the two sons the man had, represents all who would take the good gifts of God and use them selfishly and thoughtlessly, but there’s much more involved in why he does what he does.

The young man goes to a “far country.” Jesus doesn’t name it, but the great American poet, James Weldon Johnson, calls it “Babylon,” which had been one of widely known evil cities in the ancient world. “What happens in Babylon, stays in Babylon!” You know what I mean.

The young man had a grand old time as long as the money held out; when he ran out of money, he instantly became a nobody. The friends he thought he’d made were no where to be found; none of them answered their cell phones or responded to his texts.

To survive, this Jewish man had to take a job tending to a Gentile’s hogs on a hog farm. In order to do the job well, you can just live with the hogs and share their food too, his boss had told him. Mercy, mercy how lowly he had fallen, a financially comfortable Jewish man now broke and tending hogs, one of the high offenses in the Jewish mind.

Let’s recap using the poetic words of James Weldon Johnson:

And the young man went with his new-found friend,
And bought himself some brand-new clothes,
And he spent his days in the drinking-dens,
Swallowing the fires of hell.
And he spent his nights in the gambling-dens,
Throwing dice with the devil for his soul.
And he met up with the women of Babylon.
Oh, the women of Babylon!

Dressed in yellow and purple and scarlet,
Loaded with rings and earrings and bracelets,
Their lips like honeycomb dripping with honey,
Perfumed and sweet-smelling like a jasmine flower;
And the jasmine smell of the Babylonian women
Got in his nostrils and went to his head,
And he wasted his substance in riotous living,
In the evening, in the black and dark of night,
With the sweet-sinning women of Babylon.
And they stripped him of his money,
And they stripped him of his clothes,
And they left him broke and ragged
In the streets of Babylon.

Then the young man joined another crowd—
The beggars and lepers of Babylon.
And he went to feeding swine,
And he was hungrier than the hogs;
He got down on his belly in the mire and mud
And ate the husks with the hogs.
And not a hog was too low to turn up his nose
At the man in the mire of Babylon.

Professor Johnson mentioned “the fires of hell” is this poetic segment of his, which reminds me that the Southern Baptists at their annual meeting this week or last voted to confirm the existence of a real, burning hell. A quick word to the Southern Baptists, which I desperately wanted to put on one of our signs out front: “Voting in favor of hell’s existence doesn’t make it real.”

The son in the story was living in a hell of his own making. There are two kinds of hell, and they are both of this world. There are the hells we create for ourselves, individually and collectively, because of the poor choices we make, sometimes repeatedly. Then there are the hells created for us by those with power over us, and we are powerless, for longer or shorter periods of time, to free ourselves from them so we have no choice but to endure it until we find or someone who cares about us finds a way to set us free. The kind of hell that does not exist, I say respectfully in the presence of those who may disagree with me, is one that God creates so that there’s a place to consign God’s enemies to eternal, unrelenting pain as punishment for involvement in what displeases God.

In the story before us today, there are three people in hell. The younger son is typically referred to as “the prodigal son,” and he is in a hell clearly of his own making because he was unwilling to trust the love his father had for him and the family process that love was supposed to establish. The father’s older son is also in a hell of his own making because he has allowed jealousy, greed, and power to take charge in how he lives his life. The father is in a hell not of his own making, but trapped there at least for the time being because he profoundly loves both sons who in their respective ways use the unconditional love their father has for them to manipulate their father so that he would act according to their demands or suffer the consequences of losing their very conditional so called love for him.

A mother of teens and college kids from another church I served several years ago came into my office one day, pulled a chair up to the edge of the desk opposite the side on which I sat, and slammed her fist on the desk. (This was in the days before ministers had to routinely watch out for their safety. Today, if someone stomped into my office and started banging on my desk, I’d call the police with a subtle pressing of a single button on my cell phone.) Anyway, back to the ruckus in the Pastor’s Study in an unnamed city known for its inner harbor. She said, “I’m tired of being held hostage by my children. If I hold them to even the most basic standards of sensibility and morality, they turn on me and make me their enemy, which breaks my heart and causes pain I cannot endure. The only way I can feel any sense of love from them any more is to keep my mouth shut and appear tangentially to support what I know they are doing that is both illegal and dangerous.” I was taking in her concern and her pain when she blurted out a question to which I had no answer, “How in God’s name am I supposed to endure the conditional love and the manipulation by the children I’ve given myself to raise with nothing but unconditional love from the get go?” She was in the same hell as was the father in the story Jesus told, a hell clearly not of her or the faithful father’s own making.

II.

The parable from Jesus, typically referred to as “The Prodigal Son,” but which should be called “The Lost Son” or “The Loving Father,” as I mentioned several weeks ago in another context, is immensely stirring to me. The parable could also be well called “The Faithful Father.”

His younger son is “lost,” not in the sense that many fundamentalist interpreters insist on using the word--meaning, for them, LOST TO GOD. There’s no such thing as being lost to God. A person may choose to live as if God is not her or his life-force and as if divine love skipped over her or him when deciding where to reside, but that line of thinking doesn’t change reality. God is the life-force keeping all living beings alive in this world, and divine love is at the core of this life-force whether acknowledged or affirmed.

The younger of the father’s two sons in this parable has captivated the minds and hearts of “Jesus devotees” as well as “Jesus samplers” for centuries; he is lost for a while, but he is not lost to God. He is lost to himself, or--another way of saying that would be--he loses himself. No one in this world is lost to God; again, that’s an impossibility, but, my dear friends and fellow seekers, there are hoards of people who have lost themselves. Some of them know it; some of them don’t. Some of those who don’t know it, know something is wrong, but they are clueless about what it is. They are listless and forlorn, but they don’t know that they’ve lost themselves.

This next part of the sermon would be a little more fun if you didn’t already know that the son finds himself and that, for him, the story has a happy ending. It would be a much better narrative experience if you felt, for the first time, the tension and doubt he felt about ever finding himself, but, alas, the wide familiarity of the story is a spoiler in that sense. I can only ask you to move along with me and not to jump ahead to the ending until I ask you to go there with me; live through the experience of the son in order to get the full impact of this oft retold tale from a man who spent his adult life telling people who had lost themselves that there was a way to get back, that there was a way to find and reclaim the lost self.

This is how I think it happened in the parable, which I must tell you was a secondary concern for Jesus. Jesus was concerned with the process of resolution, but I think it’s fair to look at the secondary details since they were a part of how the carefully crafted parable came together.

First, an overview of the process of how he came to lose himself and then a closer look at each part of that process. See if you can relate to or, at least, understand what was going on with the younger son. By the way, it’s important to remember that while most preachers who have preached on this parable have made the son a rebellious teen-ager, the fact is the story doesn’t give us any hint whatsoever about his age. If his father were old enough to have amassed enough money to leave his sons a significant financial inheritance (which most fathers to whom Jesus preached would not have been able to do because they were so poor), the father could have been on up there in years, and both of his sons could easily have been middle-aged.

Teen-agers aren’t the only ones who rebel, as some of you know who once were married to a spouse who left you to try to live a second childhood. As a matter of fact, the younger son in this story might easily have been doing just that; no wife is mentioned, but he, just the same, might have had kids of his own and a wife who knew something was up when he started going out after work several nights a week, losing weight, and buying tailored, more tightly-fitting togas. Then, the tell-tale sign, he bought a young, fast-moving camel and outfitted his new camel in red trim.

So, the process of losing oneself whether teen or middle-ager begins with a dissatisfaction with oneself and/or with one’s circumstances. Isolated from the rest of the process I’ll be describing, there’s nothing wrong with that. A hint that something needs to change can be a very good thing.

The next step along the way of losing oneself is when someone, and this is certainly not limited to men, decides that the best way to deal with this mounting dissatisfaction is not to try to change anything as it is, but, rather, to get away from it--for a while or for good.

These first two steps or levels may be entirely rational realizations; there is nothing necessarily irrational about feeling deep dissatisfaction with one’s present circumstances and a hunch that life could be better elsewhere with a fresh start, a new job, new friends, and a shedding of what in the present is making the person feel trapped in her or his dissatisfaction with life. At step three, however, the person on the way to losing herself or himself begins to lose touch with reality in some kind of way--mildly at first and then, most likely, dramatically.

There are several ways this can happen. The person can convince herself or himself that she or he can be, will be a fundamentally different person in a different context; sometimes, that may be true, but most of the time we are who we are no matter where we are. Our fears may follow us wherever we live. Our irritating habits will almost certainly travel with us and bother the new people we meet as much as they did the people we are leaving behind. If you’re a nutcase where you presently are and manage to get yourself elected to public office, you’ll be a nutcase when you get to Washington--only, now, more people will know it and be disadvantaged or hurt by your shortcomings.

The next phase of losing oneself is a break with one’s present. It may or may not involve a physical move, but there is some kind of cutting off and getting away from life as you have known it with the thought that the break will bring the solution, will relieve you of your dissatisfaction, will cause you to love life as you’ve always dreamed you could if only you weren’t held back by what has been holding you back, as you perceive it. With this comes the illusion that a new set of life circumstances will fix everything. I have to say here that there are evil or destructive people and/or situations that we have to stay away from in order to be well; I’m thinking of someone who suffers physical abuse from a significant other, for example. The most sane thing you can do in that kind of situation is get out of there ASAP.

Someone may cash in life savings to create the dreamed of new life. The money or something bought with the money is seen as the solution to all the person’s problems. Unless you were hungry and homeless in your situation of dissatisfaction, money and materialism will not solve your problems and will not bring you happiness. That’s part of the illusion, though, and that’s the major part of the process leading to losing oneself. Something else, someone else, some place else can make me happy, can give me the fulfillment I don’t have now; therefore, I will submerge myself in that “else” and let the old life go completely.

When that happens, you’ve lost yourself. I’ve lost myself. The longer we live in that place, in that illusion, the more difficult it will be ever to find ourselves when the illusion has run its course, and we find ourselves in what we just knew was our dream place or our dream circumstances. We may well find ourselves as unhappy as or significantly unhappier than we were before we lost ourselves. Yes, indeed, it’s possible to wake up one morning far, far away physically or psychically from where we began and have no idea who we really are or who we were.

Some people who lose themselves never find themselves again. Some make an effort to find themselves, and some of them will succeed; others won’t. Those who try to find themselves may, on the way back, do something disgusting or distasteful for a while because finding a lost self isn’t an instantaneous or necessarily a proud process.

The road back may be tough, and there is absolutely no assurance that when we get back to where we began we will still have a place or will be able to experience life precisely as we experienced it before. We may find ourselves in spite of that, however. The thing is, there are absolutely no guarantees.

III.

In Jesus’ parable, the younger son leaves, and the father has no reasonable choice, really, but to let him go. In the companion parables of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin, God as the shepherd and God as the woman who lost one of her ten coins, all the money she had in the world, look diligently for what is lost. In this parable of the Lost Son, however, the faithful father can’t go out looking for his son. He knows that under these circumstances, all he can do, as heartbreaking as it is, is wait to see IF his son will ever come back home or not. This is an insight into the God who loves without coercion. God will not force any of us to acknowledge God in us or receive the love God extends to all.

This parable has a happy ending for the father and his lost son; the other son is as frustrated as he can be. He consigns himself to the hell he has created just for himself. The son who had lost himself begins to have glimpses of the self he’d lost while he slops the hogs and sobers up enough to take in the fact that he is satisfying his hunger with the same cuisine thrown out to the hogs. He remembers the man he had been back then--a person of dignity and responsibility, even if his older brother hadn’t thought so.

James Weldon Johnson again:

Young man, come away from Babylon,
That hell-border city of Babylon.
Leave the dancing and gambling of Babylon,
The wine and whisky of Babylon,
The hot-mouthed women of Babylon;
Fall down on your knees,
And say in your heart:
I will arise and go to my Father.

The prodigal son has plenty of time to think there in the pig sty, and who he was, “the real him,” comes back to him completely. The self he lost is found. Many people aren’t nearly so fortunate. What he can’t control is how others whom he hurt in his determination to have become someone else will feel about him, how understanding or forgiving they will be.

His big brother is entirely unforgiving, but the younger son hit the jackpot with his father. Remember, in the parable, the father represents God, the God who couldn’t go out in search of someone who thought that he wanted to distance himself from God. Jesus tells the story of the reunion with such poignance that it’s hard to keep from feeling a tear in your eye. The father, probably an older man, as explained earlier, is sitting on the porch of his big old farm house--looking constantly down the road that the son would have to use to get back home if he were still alive and ever decided to come back.

We realize he has found himself when he decides that he can’t just prance back into his father’s house and pick up where he left off, as if all were well, that he had just taken a little vacation. In fact, the only way that he would give himself permission to dare to speak to the father whose heart he had broken in more ways than one was to ask for a job as a hired hand, living in shelters with other hired hands, and eating the foods prepared for them, which were hardly delicacies from the big house, but a hell of a lot better than hog slop.

One day what papa saw was too good to be true. He saw his son walking up the road toward home, the road some years ago the son had hurried down to get away from who he had been. Fathers, especially older men, didn’t run to meet their children, but this one did. He ran as best he could with creaky hips and arthritic knees to get to his baby boy whatever the son’s age. He threw his arms around his son and kissed him.

He told his indoor servants to put on a big bash, “...for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he lost himself, but found himself again. What greater thing is there to celebrate?”

There are hosts of reasons you might have lost the real you; sometimes bad theology tells you that you are fundamentally bad and must change in order to be right with God. The parable of the Lost Son helps us find out how we lose ourselves and how we may, nonetheless, find ourselves in the embrace of the God who loves and the God who waits patiently and expectantly while we look for the self we lost. We can never be lost to God in that sense, though God will not be able to chase us and drag us, force us out of the pig pen we have chosen as our abode. God can only wait for us to dig ourselves out of there and make the journey back to ourselves; God’s love will not falter or fail, but part of the pain-filled love of a faithful father is to allow his children the freedom to head out in search of themselves, knowing the most he will be able to do is wait in hope for his child’s return, knowing that some children of all ages never find themselves and never return home. A parent’s most unconditional and selfless love may not be forever returned or reciprocated by her or his children.

The self-centered older brother appears, on the surface, to have been more of a model child than his brother, and in the sense that he never left his father’s side or shirked the responsibilities of managing the plantation that was true. He was just as greedy and just as self-centered as his younger brother, however. He wanted his share of the father’s money just as badly as the younger son wanted his. He had lost himself also; the evidence wasn’t so obvious, though. He had become the person he thought he had to become to win and keep his father’s favor so he would get all that was coming to him and more. As the older son he was already going to get the larger share of the father’s bequests; when his little brother left and broke the father’s heart, the older brother was delighted. If the younger brother never showed back up again, even though it meant an unmendable heart for their father, the older son didn’t care. All he could think about was getting all the money with the younger son out of the picture. He was heartless and self-serving. He lost himself to a hell of greed, money worship, and distorted or forgotten memories of who he’d been raised to be.

Though next door neighbors, the faithful father could no more force a change in his older son than he could in his lost younger son. If there was to be a change in either case, the faithful, loving father could only wait and hope and pray.

Ironically, the son who appeared most faithful is, at the end, lost to his greed, the lone resident of a hell he’d constructed for himself. The younger son, as impossible as it had seemed, is the one who finds himself and inches back home in humiliation to ask his father not for love, not for a fresh start, but for a job as a hired hand, nothing more. It was the faithful father’s exuberant love that tossed that idea! “You’ll never be a hired hand; this is your home, and we are your family. You are my son; you were lost so long I thought I’d lost you forever though my love never failed. But you found yourself and your way back to those who embrace you with love. All we can do is celebrate.”

I hope for the rest of his life and especially as he aged, perhaps with children of his own, that the younger son came to feel something of what his faithful father had felt for him all those years of having nothing to go on but hope. Sometimes, that’s all a faithful father has to get through a day.

Amen.

Marriage Equality for All

I.

An article in Psychology Today a few years ago set out to provide an extraordinarily brief history of marriage. This is how the article began:

Through most of Western civilization, marriage has been more a matter of money, power and survival than of delicate sentiments. In medieval Europe, everyone from the lord of the manor to the village locals had a say in deciding who should wed. Love was considered an absurdly flimsy reason for a match. Even during the Enlightenment and Victorian eras, adultery and friendship were often more passionate than marriage. These days, we marry for love—and are rewarded with a blistering divorce rate.

For a while, Tina Turner sang what, to me, was a surprisingly popular song, “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” That’s an interesting and an appropriate question to ask of marriage throughout history including marriage today.

In numerous civilizations, politics and money heavily outweighted emotions. In ancient Greece, for example, love was indeed highly honored, primarily love between men. Marriage of “commoners,” if you will, was more concerned with family gifts on the front end of matrimony and strong inheritances for families when the wealthy spouse, usually the husband, died. Nothing like planning ahead. These carefully arranged marriages were the forerunners of modern pre-nups. Of course, the rules were quite different.

Here’s an interesting one for you to ponder. If a man died without any direct male heirs, I’m not sure what happened to his wife, if he had one, but his daughter would be required to marry the closest male relative--second or third cousin, uncle, great-uncle, whoever the closest male relative happened to be. She would have to join in this marriage even if she had to divorce the husband she already had in order to be able to honor the custom.

South of Greece, when Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII, died, he left instructions that the rule of Egypt would be equally shared by his oldest daughter, Cleopatra, and his oldest son, Ptolemy XIII. The hitch, from modern eyes, is that they were required to marry each other. Cleopatra had to marry her little brother. Of course, this wasn’t an intimate arrangement; it was clearly a political arrangement, which--by the way--didn’t work out at all. She did not love or get along with her little brother, at least after the marriage was forced upon them. She was enamored with Julius Caesar, but the love of her life, I suppose we’d have to say, was Marc Antony.

Rome was another culture where men’s love for men was highly regarded. Wives were ostensibly useful tools or gifts. There was a deal, which would work out very well for Rome, it seemed; and it’s certainly something Congressman Weiner should consider. A noted Roman statesman, Marcus Porcius Cato divorced his wife and gave her as a gift to his ally, Hortensius, in order to strengthen bonds. When Hortensius died Cato remarried her. That was very sweet of him, don’t you think?

There was a sixth century Germanic warlord named Clothar who practiced polygamy, when it was not the thing to do. He was a devout Christian in an era when Christians on the whole certainly opposed polygamy; nonetheless, he took four wives. I can identify three of the four. One had been his sister-in-law, until his brother died. A second of his wives was that first wife’s sister. The third was the daughter of a captured foreign monarch; somehow this was strategically advantageous.

In twelfth-century Europe, there was widespread belief among the wealthy and the aristocratic that marriages should be arranged for reasons such as those I’ve already described. Not infrequently, a marriage was arranged and the deal already agreed upon by parents on both sides before the couple to be wed ever met for the first time. Peasants rarely had the time for such tom-foolery, but the upper crust types insisted that love and marriage are incompatible. True love could only flourish between man and mistress, those who could formally be designated as adulterers should anyone be so interested in keeping track of the intimate lives of others. Thank goodness we’ve given up on such sick voyeurism in our highly educated and informed era.

A couple of hundred years later, still in Europe, the lord of one manor decided that marriage was for everyone and, therefore, that all of his tenants, no exceptions, had to be married. Furthermore, since they were commoners and didn’t have the high intelligence he had, as he saw it, he would determine who among his surfs would marry whom. This pattern seems to have caught on, and when some of the peasants after a while began to cry out in protest, a provision was made that it was possible for a peasant male to choose his own wife; however, there was a bridal tax, the fee the peasant had to pay for the privilege of choosing his own wife. Naturally, that fee was paid to the lord of the manor. By the time, the Protestant Reformation got underway in Germany, one French essayist circulated claims that any man who actually did love his wife was such a bore that no other woman would ever give him the time of day.

In the years of Queen Victoria’s rule, the tide began to turn, and there was a noticeable societal approval of spouses loving each other. Still, passion was still reserved extramarital lovers. How untidy for a wife and husband to burn with passion for each other! There was another reason for a man not to have sex with his wife. Queen Victoria chose to wear white, the color representing purity, when she married Prince Albert. Many of her female subjects followed suit giving their grooms the impression that they were too pure and chaste to get rowdy in the bed chamber--immediately or later after the marriage had been solemnized.

In the years leading up to the founding of a new nation on these shores, the Brits living here brought with them their disdain for passion in marriage. Even preachers who dared not get too graphic with their sermonic points and illustrations let their congregations know in no uncertain terms that wife and husband must not love each other too much, especially physically, and that using pet names for each other was a no-no since the manly, husbandly authority that had to prevail in every good home would be undermined if he lowered himself to use such nicknames for his wife and if she sweetened him with “honey,” “baby,” and “my big Puritan teddy bear.”

While a revolution was brewing here, back in England love as well as passion within marriage begins finding greater acceptance among the movers and shakers. Still in the influential ladies-only debating societies, the gifted female speakers did not blush to say that, when choosing a partner, it was perfectly in order for a woman to take into account her husband-to-be’s financial standing. We’ve equalized things in our time and place because many men now too wish to marry a woman only if she has the proper pedigree and portfolio.

In the mid-nineteenth century, there was a custom in place called a “bridal tour,” which had the bride with her groom leaving the wedding ceremony and marital festivities and immediately heading out to visit those relatives who hadn’t been able to attend the ceremony. Typically, many of the bridesmaids accompanied the couple on their tour, and there was no consummating of the marriage in such contexts where bride and groom had no privacy and, in many host’s homes, weren’t invited to sleep in the same room, much less the same bed. Only when the bridal tour custom began to wane did a new custom show up here and there; it was called “the honeymoon.”

A number of psychologists and marriage counselors say that many twenty-first century US Americans, despite a consistently high divorce rate, worship the ideal of a monogamous couple, sharing intimacy only with each other. This led the rank and file citizen to believe that, as in numerous ancient cultures, she or he HAD TO get married or be regarded as a spinster or a bachelor--a little sad, and somewhat eccentric if not relationally desirable, part of society.

Lesbian and gay Americans grow up absorbing the same values and pressures, and when they fall in love, they many of them feel that they, too, should get married except that the laws in most places forbid it. Civil unions allowing for the same spousal benefits that marriage ensures are perfectly acceptable to some gay and lesbian citizens; others, though, feel that while the legal benefits such as being carried as a legitimate dependent on a partner’s health insurance policy are nice as well as appropriate, if marriage is an option for heterosexuals, exactly the same opportunity should be afforded homosexual couples who desire it. Obviously, not everyone agrees.

II.

Many of those at Jenn’s and Dave’s wedding are going to be on cloud nine. This terrific young couple has chosen each other with care. They have loved each other over several years. They have loved each other through sickness and health, and they want to say to their families and their friends and to their pastor, “This is what we want for life.” I will happily give them their vows and bless their union. Then, while the guests are beginning to sample the wine that they have so painstakingly chosen, I will be at a table tucked away somewhere finalizing the marriage license that originated in the office of the Clerk of the Peace, authorizing me on behalf of the state to legalize their decision to be wife and husband.

I sign the paperwork for the State of Delaware, or whatever state in which a wedding ceremony occurs, as an act that has no meaning for me whatsoever. I don’t hate doing it. I don’t mind doing it, but I bless their wedding, the marriage, their life commitment not because I work for this state or any state. I do what I do with them because I am their pastor, and I love them. I delight in their love for each other.

The state, again, should have nothing to do with monitoring, blessing, or even noticing how consenting adults couple up or not. The papers I sign will be in triplicate. One copy will go to Jenn and Dave to keep so they can prove they are legally married if someone asks for the license before serving them champaign or renting them the honeymoon suite.

Another copy will go to Clerk of the Peace Ken Boulden for permanent filing in state archives. In the years ahead, if either Dave or Jenn ever runs for public office and someone in the press wants to know if they are really married, Mr. Boulden will have a copy of the certificate they can present to the press post haste.

The third copy goes to me for my permanent files so that in my old age, I guess, I can sit back at home or at the home and flip through a notebook trying to remember who the heck all those couples were whom I had a hand in marrying. Most I will likely not remember though I will remember unusual events that occurred at certain ceremonies such as the Baltimore bride who was an hour late for her wedding, but I will remember Jenn and Dave forever. I’ve already forgotten the names of the Mafia couple I married a few years ago though I may be able to call them back to consciousness when I see the card from the father of the bride I paper-clipped to my copy of the marriage license. It’s a nifty little card that reads, “Will fix one complicated situation for you if you ever need that done. I guarantee that it will disappear for good.” Such a sweet sentiment. I thought about using it a couple of times at church, but thought I might wait to see who all signs on to run for president of the United States next time around.

Let me be blunt about marriage and the state. It shouldn’t be any of the state’s business who marries whom--unless siblings or cousins start marrying again, which isn’t likely to happen again except in Tennessee and Arkansas. Should someone need financial protection if and when a marriage dissolves, that should be raised if and when there’s a dissolution of a marriage.

If straight couples can get married, then so should gay couples. Trying to draw any distinction whatsoever there is purely homophobic, but civil union has been used as at least a step in the direction of full equality; and some homophobes aren’t as offended at the thought that gays and lesbians are civilly united as they are when the word “marriage” is used with the words “lesbian” and “gay.”

The government should stay out of it altogether. I want to tell you, as I believe I have told most every couple I’ve ever married, that the papers I sign and file with Mr. Boulden’s office do not for a minute make them a couple. There are two factors that will make them a couple: 1) selfless love; and 2) daily care to make sure that the love grows and takes deep roots.

Except for trying to ensure rights for one’s lesbian or gay love partner such as the health insurance I mentioned earlier and to that I add the right to be treated respectfully as family by the medical community when decisions are being made for a partner who cannot at this moment speak for herself or himself. I could also add to that another potential legal issue: the automatic rights of inheritance.

Aside from those issues, I would not give the state any role in my love relationship. It’s none of the state’s business if I begin such a relationship or end it. Those who are fighting for marriage rights for all are justice seekers, and I fully stand with them. Still, if every state offered full marital rights to homosexual and heterosexual and asexual people too, the most the state can do is to ensure rights. That may be needed at times, sad to say, but I want to tell you as someone who has signed a couple of hundred marriage licenses that the paper doesn’t make the marriage whether you’re homosexual or heterosexual. Only love makes the relationship take shape and endure.

One thing that can’t legitimately be done to try to get civil unions or gay/lesbian marriages tossed is to reshape Jesus as a homophobe. This is not to say that all enemies of the arrangement will give up and walk away. Plenty of people will keep on trying to limit freedoms for anybody and everybody who isn’t like them--like the goofy, racist Justice of the Peace in Louisiana who got away, for several years, with refusing to perform weddings for couples who were not of the same race.

Times are changing, though. Very significant new poll results from the Human Rights Campaign were released about three weeks ago.

Sixty-eight per cent of respondents said they support laws banning discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in the areas of employment, housing and public accommodations. Twenty-two per cent of respondents said they don’t support such laws.

A near universal majority of Christians (86%) said government should treat all people equally, including LGBT people.

A large majority (70%) said religious-based anti-gay rhetoric does “more harm than good.”

Finally, a previous HRC-commissioned poll found fifty-two per cent of respondents said they oppose the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the Clinton-era law that bans federal agencies from recognizing the marriages of gay and lesbian couples, while 36 per cent said they favor the law.

III.

I believe that a healthy marriage or civil union is a beautiful thing, and few pastoral tasks thrill me as much as uniting a couple in marriage. I’m so excited about Jenn’s and Dave’s wedding coming up in about a week and a half that I was prepared a year ago!

My most favorite pastoral task is conducting family dedication ceremonies and presenting babies to the congregation as their spiritual charges. Hint! Hint!

That said, we have to recognize that the Bible does not establish one woman/one man monogamy; nor is marriage necessarily recognized as the ideal state in which to find oneself. If said it before, and I have to say it again today. Both Hebrew and Christian scriptures that comprise what we call the Bible assume the possibility, yeah the probability, of male-maintained polygamy. That is, a husband could have as many wives and concubines as he could afford. I couldn’t afford one--wife, I mean, but I’m not bitter!!! Women, however, couldn’t be married to more than one man at a time. A woman’s faithfulness to her husband was enforced with deadly punishments prescribed for women who had sex outside the bonds of marriage. The laws provided equally stern punishments for men who cheated on their wives, but those punishments were rarely upheld for men.

One of my favorite comic moments in the collection of Jesus stories passed down to us is certainly not funny for the woman at the heart of the story, but indeed IS funny in how the story is set up. The story has a nickname: “the Woman Caught in the Act of Adultery.” That’s a great name for this story because it’s about a woman caught in the act of adultery! To test Jesus’ faithfulness to the ancient Jewish law by which he and his brother-sister Jewish contemporaries were supposed to be living in addition to the demands Rome made upon them, some of Jesus’ ever-present male detractors drug a woman through the dust and threw her at Jesus’ feet. They said to Jesus, “Here is woman we caught in the very act of adultery. The law demands that we stone her to death for this offense. Do you join us in keeping the law, or are you too good to get your hands dirty doing what God told us to do?”

This is tense and tragic, and what I find funny isn’t funny ha-ha but funny how-typical. This woman had been caught. You know what she got caught doing. I know what she got caught doing. Bill Clinton knows what she got caught doing.

Where’s the guy? You cannot commit adultery by yourself. It takes two to tango or adulterate. (I made up that word just for this sermon. How do you like it?) The point is, no man was brought with her and thrown down at Jesus’ feet because his buddies had given him a pass, just as he had and would again do for them when they got caught with their togas up.

Without saying outright that the old law was cruel and inhumane, not to mention theologically repulsive, Jesus saves this woman’s life and her dignity. He played along with her accusers and said, “Yep. She surely does, no question about it, look like one prime sinner, and the law teaches us as we’ve known since we were little boys that we have no choice but to stone her to death so that’s exactly what we’re going to do. Any of you who has never sinned in any way, you step up here to the front of the line and cast the first stone. Crush her sinful skull with the first heavy rock you throw. You be the one to maul her sinful face with the first throw of the afternoon. Come on, sir. Make yourself known; we bow before our sinless brother who will take the first step toward making this world a better place by smashing all we can of her and leaving the rest for the flesh-eating birds that will peck her bones dry. Let us praise God with our exemplary morality and thereby warn every other woman who dares to sleep with a man married to another woman or other women will know what’s in store for her too. Come on, now. Where is the sinless one among us? There’s a pile of perfect stones just waiting here for us; it’s as if God put them here for us.”

The self-righteous accusers slipped away one by one because not a one was sinless, and Jesus and all their buddies knew so for a fact. He said to the terrified and humiliated woman, “My daughter, go and live a healthy, wholesome life. No one is left to condemn you, and I certainly don’t.

My one time professor and mentor, and now my treasured friend, David Buttrick, loved to stir things up among his theological students, in his books, and in his sermons by simply telling the truth about what the Bible really had to say. Once in class, he had the homophobes in a multi-faith group of students all riled up big time. There’s another story about Jesus in material passed down to us about Jesus healing a centurion’s “son.” The centurion was a Roman soldier who had as at least a part of his job monitoring/policing the Jews at the Emperor’s command. He, the centurion, would have been the commander over 83 soldiers, and they followed his command to a tee.

Gospel writers Matthew and Luke tell the story as if the person healed, and that’s a spoiler for those of you who didn’t already know the story, was the centurion’s servant. The Gospel of John, however, says it was the centurion’s son, however. There actually is no discrepancy. John’s word for “son” is supposed to be translated “boy,” meaning servant, but not just any servant; instead, a servant with whom the centurion had a very special relationship, an intimate relationship to be precise. These centurions were away from home a great deal and sometimes engaged in battle; they were away from their one wife or many wives a good bit of the time, and some of these centurions, many of them in all likelihood, had a male consort, often a servant, with whom they’d fallen in love. Remember, as I reminded you earlier that men loving other men and women loving other women wasn’t looked down on in ancient Roman culture. Not only was it accepted, but also it was seen by many to be normative.

So the centurion comes to Jesus for help. Listen, he wasn’t used to having to humble himself in anyway, but for the sake of his lover he would. He wasn’t a dummy, and Jesus was no dummy. When he said to Jesus, “My boy is really sick. Could you heal him, Jesus,” he knew that Jesus knew he was talking about his lover, the man who traveled everywhere with him when the wives had to be left behind. He hoped that Jesus would be accepting of male with male intimate relationship, and based what he’d heard of Jesus’ affirmation of all people except arrogant, religious holier-than-thous, he was relatively confident that Jesus would not withhold his compassion from someone whose sexual orientation differed from his.

The centurion had pegged Jesus correctly. Incidentally, anyone today who wants to use Jesus to condemn lesbian and gay relationships, civil unions, and marriages are wasting their time. Jesus never spoke a single harsh word, never a condemning word; in fact, no word at all against or about homosexuals. And since it would have been in his face all the time interacting with Romans, had he disapproved or wanted to get it on a sin list he absolutely would have done so.

The centurion, still a little shy about how far a holy man could go in affirming a gay relationship especially when one of the partners, namely the centurion himself, was committing adultery when he shared intimacy with his boy, his servant, said to Jesus, “Your power is well attested. You don’t need to go to my home. You can say the healing word right here at a distance from where he lies in bed struggling for his life, and he will be healed just the same as if he were here sitting at your feet.”

Jesus didn’t stay away because he would have been uncomfortable at the centurion’s home, but he did agree to heal from afar. Jesus said, “Your boy is now well. By the time you get back home, you will find his health fully restored.”

So, Jesus didn’t say, “It’s OK to be gay.” Neither did he say, “It’s bad to be gay.” What he did do was to heal the lover of a powerful gay Roman military leader; that said and says worlds doesn’t it?

Compassion as Living Theology

I.

I began my seminary studies at Southern Seminary in Louisville in the hot summer of 1978. One of the first books assigned in a course called “Contemporary Preaching” was written by Frederick Buechner. Buechner, noted American writer and preacher, had delivered the prestigious Lyman Beecher lectures on Preaching at Yale a couple of years earlier and published his lectures under the title, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. I devoured the book, loved every word, and mistakenly assumed that every book I’d be asked to read for the next three years would be so fascinating and so stirring. Mercy! Was I ever wrong about that! Buechner, though, was brilliant, engaging, entertaining, and indescribably insightful. I still have that book on one of my shelves, and I know exactly where it sits, precisely where I can put my hands on it when I want it or need it, which I can’t say about every book I own.

Here is a Buechner quote related to our topic for today: compassion. I don’t know in which of his many books it originated, but it is “on point,” as my younger son likes to say.

Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.

So, for Buechner, compassion is a two-pronged reality or emotion: one) the sometimes fatal capacity to be empathetic and two) the acceptance of the fact that I can’t rejoice while someone else is suffering.

Jesus was the embodiment of compassion. There is no way, seriously, to be a Christian or a follower of Jesus or a church that tosses around Jesus’ teachings without being compassionate people. A surprising level of condemnation, brow-beating, and threat go on in Jesus’ name by individuals and churches that would have us believe they are Jesus’ best buddies, always on the inside track with him and able to garner favors from him for them and plagues for their enemies. Thinking of God in such terms is beyond ridiculous.

The great American preacher--maybe the greatest in the second half of the 19th century, Henry Ward Beecher, son of highly regarded preacher, Lyman Beecher (for whom the aforementioned lecture series was named), and brother of courages author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, said, and I agree with him whole-heartedly, “Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.” There are some of us, but very few of us, who miss the affirmation displayed in acts of compassion done on our behalf and on behalf of our loved ones. Aesop, of fable fame, said, “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”

I grew up in a home where compassion for strugglers was a way of life. Both of my parents had grown up dirt poor and knew what it was not to have two nickels to rub together. My mother’s parents, during much of Mom’s growing up life, were sharecroppers on a farm in Kokomo, Indiana. Later, on the best of terms with the Shinn family for whom they had worked, they came back to my grandmother’s place of birth; Gilmer County, Georgia; in search of a better life for themselves and their children--their daughter who would become my Mother and their son who would become my Uncle Bob.

Life was still hard there for them so they eventually settled in Knox County--specifically, the city of Knoxville. My Grandfather became a laborer on the project to build the massive Norris Dam, and my Grandmother became a nursing assistant and studied to pass her exam and become a Licensed Practical Nurse. They weren’t wealthy by any means, but they were doing substantially better than they had done as sharecroppers.

Mom ended up with an essentially inbred compassion for the poor, and she has shared money that she really didn’t have to share across the years with people whom she believed needed the money more than she did--including, but not limited to, the sales personalities on QVC. For a while, the QVC on-screen salespersons were mother’s favored charities, and they still have her believing from time to time that if she doesn’t support them they might go hungry.

Some of you remember that right in the midst of last Christmas season, the conscience of our nation, Bill O’Reilly, said that giving to help the less fortunate is fine, but that God didn’t mean for us to give so much that it becomes self destructive to us. Really? If that’s not what God means, how did that word miss getting to Jesus? I don’t think my Mother ever understood that; she figures if she parts with the money she thought she absolutely had to have, she will just tighten her belt in some other area so things will all smooth out in the end.

My Dad was one of seven children born in a little cabin on Lone Mountain, Tennessee. He was the baby. One brother died in infancy. Another brother took his own life while he was young, and that left four brothers and one sister. My Dad’s Father was an alcoholic who sort of came and went from the family home way up in Claiborne County, Tennessee, and was dead by the time Dad was 11 years old. This left my paternal Grandmother to raise four sons and a daughter by herself.

As luck or fate would have it (Mom and Dad would eventually meet and fall in love there!), his family also moved into the city of Knoxville for better job opportunities, and my grandmother, with little formal education and little work experience off a farm, got a job as custodian in Knoxville General Hospital. Each of the four boys joined military service as soon as they could; they didn’t wait to be drafted. Economically, being in military service made great sense for them and their family too.

By the time I was on the scene, I saw that Granny Farmer had gotten to the age where she couldn’t do physical labor any longer, and Dad’s oldest Brother, Uncle Jim, who had a large family, was out of a job more than he was with one. I finally realized that Dad dropped by to see Granny and Uncle Jim about every week not just to visit, but to pass along as much money as he could afford to share that particular week, which was usually enough to leave Mom and Dad short on cash.

It wasn’t just happenstance that when Dad became a deacon in the Beaver Dam Baptist Church, and there were people in the church and community who needed financial help, he would frequently be the one or one of the ones sent to assess the situation. His compassion because of his rough growing up experiences was unbounded. He would report back to the Board of Deacons nearly every time that a request was legitimate and that the church should help all it could.

We--my sister, brother, and I--grew up observing compassion for the poor and many other kinds of strugglers as a central concern in how our parents lived and how they modeled living for us. It took with each of us.

When I first began working as pastor, I told my church leadership not to send people in need to me because I’d say, “Yes,” nearly every time.

Someone asked, “But what if someone asking is lying?”

I answered, “I’m sure that happens, but I’d rather err on the side of compassion every time.” I tell you that not to pat myself on the back in any way, but to let you know I was raised on compassion.

II.

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote: “Compassion is the basis of all morality.” Indeed. True, but not prevalent.

The Apostle Paul was once writing to the Christians in Corinth, and he was miffed! Worse, they didn’t care that he was miffed, which only made him more angry.

Now in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse. For, to begin with, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you; and to some extent I believe it. Indeed, there have to be factions among you, for only so will it become clear who among you are genuine. When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper. For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What should I say to you? Should I commend you? In this matter I do not commend you!

So, if, when you come together as a faith or seekers’ community, things get worse instead of better, Paul wants to know why you’d come together at all, and I think he raises a significant issue. Thankfully, we don’t have to deal with that matter here at Silverside, but I have been a part of churches in the past who did have the problem. There were so many factions in those churches that when the whole body came together for worship or fellowship, supposed fellowship, the competition for which group was more holy or more faithful or more suited for leadership was thick. It was rare to leave any kind of get-together there with a feeling of having been uplifted, encouraged, or inspired. Those churches would have been better off never to meet; that’s a harsh word, but I believed it; and Paul certainly believed it of the Corinthians. Because some of you Corinthian church members just try to stir up conflicts and problems every time you gather, Paul said, it would be better not even to bother. Ouch!

One of the places where the problems of disunity really reared their ugly heads was at, of all places, the Lord’s Supper. How in the world could celebrating the Lord’s Supper together be a prime focal point for church problems? Shameful, but true. Whatever else that meal is supposed to be, it is intended to unify; not to tear down or factionalize. If there are problems with congregational unity, though, they will glow like Rudolph’s nose when the people who sing, “Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love,” realize they’re standing next to someone whose aunt once offended their grandparents, when someone who hates the pastor realizes that by some grand miscalculation she is standing right beside someone who loves the pastor; and in a very few minutes they will have to share the bread and the wine with each other, the appearance of love disappears completely. Oh, it can get bad, and I’ve seen it and don’t ever want to or plan to see it again.

In Paul’s day, in the Church at Corinth, and likely in all the churches he’d had a part in founding, thankfully, they didn’t know any better than to mix classes of people: the rich and the poor sitting on the same pews, the well read having theological discussions with those didn’t read and who weren’t well educated, those who’d been Christians longer than several newbies getting no special recognition for their seniority and experience. The Lord’s Supper became a ritual intended to recall Jesus’ last earthly supper with his closest followers and friends. That supper had been initiated at a Jewish Passover feast so after the feast, Jesus did the brief bread and wine thing as a little add on, but the feast was first; and evidently in some of the earliest traditions the feast was retained as a prelude, if you will, to the partaking of the symbols of bread and wine.

In Corinth, the feast part of the Lord’s Supper took the form of a good old BYOW (bring your own wineskin) covered dish dinner. Everyone who could cook brought her or his favorite dish and each family brought its own wine for family sipping, not for sharing with the crowd. If you had wine at all or to share, you weren’t destitute. If you had food and a place to cook it, you were one of the better off members of the Corinthian Church, even if you didn’t consider yourself rich. Otherwise, you were at least poor and maybe destitute, but remember that those contentious Corinthians had put in their bylaws that members were received without consideration of financial standing, and while many members of that Church grew to despise those bylaws they knew the beggar who always positioned himself just outside the church house or house church could rightly be a member as could a high ranking and well to do tax collector. Fine. Well, fine theoretically. Practically, not so much.

In reality, what was happening was that those with food only wanted to share their food with others who’d brought food, but not with those who had no food to bring. If you think you’re missing the compassion here, you’re exactly right; this was essentially a compassionless congregation in most respects. Those with food wanted those who arrived hungry to go home that way. I want to tell you that if you ever attend any meal planned and overseen by Marie Neal, you eat whether you can afford to pay or not. If anyone ever leaves one of her meals hungry, it’s strictly a matter of that person’s choice.

Oh, let’s not forget the Corinthian winebibbers. Those with wine not only intended to keep the wine in the family, but to make certain the beggars couldn’t talk them into a swig, many of them were gulping their wine and were drunk as could be before the really important part of the Lord’s Supper, the sharing of the symbols of bread and wine--just a bite and just a sip, though.

I had one deacon at one of my congregations in Indiana who was intoxicated most of the time so he likely partook of and served the Lord’s Supper with Pabst Blue Ribbon on his breath a few times, but he was an alcoholic; and that little church would never do anything to make him feel unwelcome at church, even when he came close to spilling the communion juice cups because he was tipsy. Other than that deacon with a drinking problem, I’ve never known of any other of my deacons attending communion or serving it under the influence of alcohol. Not so at Corinth! Lots of the folks who brought wine, gulped up the wine they brought, and by the time the symbols were to be shared in remembrance of Jesus they were too drunk to know what they were eating, drinking, or saying.

Paul really scolds these self-serving, callous church members. You let others go hungry while you eat more than enough at your home each evening. You let those who could really benefit from a few sips of wine do without so that you can be drunk at church and avoid sharing at all costs; even though you could drink your wine at home, and from what I hear you hit the wine pretty hard at home, you make a spectacle of yourself at church because you don’t have even an ounce of compassion in you. You who stuff yourself refusing to share your food and you who guzzle your wine refusing to share even a few sips with those who can’t afford any wine, you are showing contempt for your church and contempt for the memory of Jesus who specifically, unmistakably said showing compassion is not optional for those who would continue his ministry after him.

The Buddha once said: “In separateness lies the world’s great misery; in compassion lies the world’s true strength.”

III.

There’s a Buddhist commentary on meditation called “Stages of Meditation in the Middle Way School” from which we get the following pointed teaching:

Generally, everyone feels compassion, but the compassion is flawed. In what way? We measure it out. For instance, some feel compassion for human beings but not for animals and other types of sentient beings. Others feel compassion for animals and some other types of sentient beings but not for humans. Others, who feel compassion for human beings, feel compassion for the human beings of their own country but not for the human beings of other countries. Then, some feel compassion for their friends but not for anyone else. Thus, it seems that we draw a line somewhere. We feel compassion for those on one side of the line but not for those on the other side of the line. We feel compassion for one group but not for another. That is where our compassion is flawed. What did the Buddha say about that? It is not necessary to draw that line. Nor is it suitable. Everyone wants compassion, and we can extend our compassion to everyone.

The Dalai Lama has said, “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

Have you ever noticed that the only people Jesus condemned were holier-than-thou, compassionless religious people who thought God could be bought by their superficial piety? People caught up in morally compromising situations received from Jesus not criticism, but compassion.

It’s not a bad idea for those who think themselves spiritually superior to the rest of us, those modern-day Pharisees I mean, to keep a DVD of the film, “Schlinder’s List,” around. They should, we should, watch it from time to time and internalize the Schlinder had for those whose lives were on the line.

We have talked about the Charter for Compassion several times in recent months. I’m absolutely intrigued with and committed to the intention of the Charter as you know.

An interfaith panel made up of some really smart people like Karen Armstrong said, with great insight, “If we keep trying to find points of theology on which we all agree, we’re going to get no where because there are fundamental differences between the great religions of the world that can’t be ignored and probably can’t be changed. It is certainly possible to agree to take on some joint tasks together despite our differences, but our differences theologically will continue to exist. Since theological differences do indeed hamper what we could do if there were more bases for agreement, is there a non-theological principle around which we could all gather without reservation, without worrying about stepping on someone’s toes?” What they came up with was the Charter for Compassion. Regardless of theological bias, all the great religions of the world promote compassion in some way so the Charter was born.

In summary, “The Charter for Compassion is a document that transcends religious, ideological, and national differences. Supported by leading thinkers from many traditions, the Charter inspires worldwide community-based acts of compassion.” Without a doubt, this is the right way to go.

Some of you may have gone to the website and signed on as supporters of the Charter. I did, and I hope there are other Silverside folks on the list. The Charter’s website shows that they now have nearly 73,000 sign-on-the-dotted-line supporters. When I look at how quickly other movements sprout and grow online, that seems like a measly number of people in the English-speaking world willing to say, “I’m all for compassion, and I’m going to live out my commitment to compassion.”

I believe that all promotion for the Charter is by word of mouth except for the original letter that was mailed around to various probable supporters. This means that any funds that come into the hands of the organization keeping this thing going support acts of compassion. I’d like to see a million supporters, and when I say supporters, I mean supporters in principle. I don’t believe they have asked for dues or membership fees.

Why wouldn’t everyone including those who are anti-religion and who do not believe in God sign on for this? Well, sadly, many of us who are compassionate people practice selective compassion the Buddha has said. “Anybody who really wants a job can get one.” “She was out at night wearing that skimpy clothing; she was asking to be raped.” “AIDS is God’s punishment on homosexuals.” “Why was he driving through that part of town at all, especially at night? He asked for it. He asked to be shot.”

In a book titled, Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life by Donald McNeill, Douglas Morrison, and Henri Nouwen, we are stunned at first sight by an analysis of people in general in the modern world, people of faith included: “When we take a critical look at ourselves,” the authors write, “we have to recognize that competition, not compassion, is our main motivation in life.” We modern US Americans reply to that charge by saying our society has forced us to be competitive, or else we lose. Compassion is nice if we can work it into our lives somewhere, but competition gets the bills paid. The authors then come back at us with their unrelenting position: “This all-pervasive competition, which reaches into the smallest corners of our relationships, prevents us from entering into full solidarity with each other, and stands in the way of our being compassionate.”

Another reason not everyone shows compassion or wants it shown to others is that corruption is a painful, persistent reality in our world--at many levels--and compassion offends corruption. Many of the corrupt politicians and their handlers resist showing compassion and shy away from those who are compassionate.

I have always believed Jimmy Carter might well have won a second term in the White House had he been more able to deal with political corruption and if he had been a much less compassionate person than he was, than he is. I’m not saying someone in political office has to be corrupt to survive, but she or he has to be able to tango with those who are corrupt--many of whom are well entrenched--in order to keep a seat.

The number of high-ranking elected officials, media darlings to boot, who show no signs whatsoever of compassion saddens me to the point of overwhelming me. I am not so naive as to believe that one country can solve the problems of every other troubled country, and I don’t think trying to do that or pretending that we can do it is wise. But I do believe every American should have access to some kind of healthcare coverage that allows them to seek medical attention before they are having an emergency situation causing them excruciating pain and/or ushering them quickly toward death.

Ah, but the politicians are too, too easy to pick on these days. Let me bring my concerns and criticisms a little more within reach. For who knows how long, a shocking number of churches have been spending more on the maintenance and beautification of building and grounds than they have invested in compassion, helping to provide basic needs for the destitute.

Prayer for Compassion

(From First Parish Cohasset, adapted)

Spirit of Life, we give thanks for the opportunities to love that present themselves in the turmoil of life.

When the light catches the tears in another’s eyes, where hands are held and there are moments without words, let us be present then, and alive to the possibility of changing. We would seek to make another’s wellbeing the object of our concern. We would be present to another’s pain, to bathe another’s wounds, hear another’s sadness, celebrate another’s success, and allow the other’s story to change our own.

We stand in the morning on damp grass, hear the syllables of bird song, and fill up on sweet air that rolls over oceans and continents. We look up at the stars and the planets that fill the night sky with majesty. We witness the first fresh buds of spring amid the brown sticks of winter. And for all this, we are grateful.

We will not defend ourselves against the discomfort of unruly emotion, nor seek to close down our hearts for fear a new love will come to shake our foundations. We will instead be open to discovering a new way of seeing an old problem, or appreciating the perfection of a seashell, or the possibility of friendship. For in giving ourselves to what we do not understand, we receive life’s blessings, and in taking care of another, we are cared for.

Amen.