Combining Compassion with Power
June 10, 2007
Rev. Dr. Jon Smoot
I Kings 17 and Luke 7: 11-23

It was the summer of 1965, I was 10, and part of an evangelistic team from my Presbyterian church in Towson. During the sweltering Baltimore summer every Saturday morning we climbed into the blue Pontiac Tempest station wagon, and headed for inner-city Baltimore, to bring the good news of Jesus to what to me felt like the Heart of Darkness. The pretty homes and well-kept lawns quickly gave way to crumbling tenements, boarded up shop-fronts, alcoholics in the alleyways, gushing fire hydrants dousing gleeful children, broken glass, and incessantly screaming police sirens. We entered another world within the span of 20 minutes. We had a gifted speaker for a street-corner evangelist; I played the trumpet to lively gospel tunes, we handed out cold drinks at the end. Crowds of city dwellers would turn out for the free entertainment and lemonade put on by us. Then we would climb back into blue station-wagon, head north to safety, breathing a sigh of relief – we had brought good news – and no one got hurt.

We came, we spoke, we left. We came with good news that cost us nothing, then left them, getting out of Dodge as fast as possible. Putting it all behind us until next Saturday morning. But was that mission, other than the lemonade? Was it good news, for them or for us? Was anyone “saved?” Were we? Looking back on it all, what were we doing, and why? I doubt that Jesus would’ve climbed back into the Pontiac – he probably would’ve joyfully preached about God’s liberating news to the poor, fed them, swept up some glass, and then demand to see Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro about his city’s squalor and despair. Or maybe he would’ve just stayed with them, leaving us suburbanites to our own self-absorbed devices.

Looking back is often helpful – but how faithful am I – or are you - with looking at things as they are, with the way things could be, through Jesus’ eyes? How faithful am I, or you – with employing faithful imagination, and then doing something about it?
Therein lies the rub. We have plenty of faithful imagination, but then fool ourselves into thinking that there is little or nothing that we can do. We have plenty of compassion, but suppose that we have little or no power. Compassion and power – are these mutually exclusive? Let’s talk about this.

Compassion is literally, “suffering with.” Jesus bumps into a funeral procession walking along with his disciples one day. Luke tells us two vitally important things in this story: the young man who had died was a widow’s only son, which means that she was emotionally and financially dead as well, having buried a husband and only son – her only financial lifelines. When Jesus gave the son back to the widow, his life had been restored; but so had hers. Secondly, Luke tells us that when the Lord saw her, he was filled with compassion. The English translation is pitiful – in the Greek it means that he was slammed in the gut by her plight. The crowd, the disciples disappear, even the corpse fades away; he only has eyes for her.

Now the tricky part – he doesn’t say, “Lady, I am so, so sorry” – which is about all we would or could say. One commentator on this passage points out that Jesus doesn’t stop with compassion in words – but uses the power he has from God to call that widow’s son back to life. Now, whatever it is we as savvy and smart if not cynical 21st century Christians feel about such wonders, the point to really grapple with is that Jesus combines compassion and power to help a woman apparently beyond helping.
This is tricky, because we usually safely compartmentalize compassion and power from each other so that they don’t contaminate each other – like if we mixed the two, it would be mixing matter and anti-matter and end the universe as we know it – which may not be a bad idea at all.

In this world, compassion is seen as gentle, sympathizing, comforting, at its best. At worst, it is ineffectual, soft, sentimental, or naive. In this world, power is seen as confidence, effectiveness, forceful, at best – or at worst, cold, over-bearing, calculating and brutal. In this world, if you have power, you sometimes feel that you have to swallow your compassion to make good decisions. In this world, if you have compassion, you are really loathe to exercise power with what appears to be an already traumatized person or situation.

But God’s world is different – and Jesus, who brings God’s world into ours, seamlessly combines power and compassion. In his work, which is God’s work, power and compassion flow together in a way very rarely seen in this world. But for those of us called to be his disciples, the incredible challenge and opportunity is to do the same.

This church has plenty of compassion – and there are, from time to time, flashes of power combined with compassion. Yet we are called to daily combine fire in the belly power with steady compassion. The fire in the belly is the power of God’s life and authority unleashed in you and me to confront death’s shadows in all of its contemporary guises.
But please note: This fire is not about the passionate pursuit of our own pet projects, however important they may be to us and feel that they should be for others. This is about listening to God, standing close enough to God to catch fire with the fire in God’s belly. We are disciples of Jesus Christ, who burned with the fire of God – and that fire, that person, that focus, that activity fuels our power and authority.

We believe that Jesus is God’s Messiah, so we are to pay very close attention to what he did. If he is God’s Messiah, then what we are saying is that in the ministry of Jesus we are seeing what God is doing in the world, what the reign of God looks like. And that, of course, is to say what we are to be doing in the world, impelled and empowered by God’s fire in the belly. And what is that fire? Jesus tells us and shows us as he did John the Baptist: God’s powerful people are those who give slammed-in-the-gut attention to the dead, the destitute, the dispossessed, the diseased, the distressed, and the denunciated of majority culture’s conventions. For these, we are promised with power from on high.

Now, combine that power with compassion. As modern-day disciples, compassion means to have the eyes of Jesus – who could not take his eyes off of that widow. Had Jesus passed by that funeral procession on the other side when he had the power to stop it in its tracks, none of his other works or teachings would have made much difference. If we pass by on the other side of our community’s and world’s small and large funeral processions and its grieving widows that we see most every day – if we pass by and have the power to stop it, then our religion has absolutely nothing to say.

But we do have something to say and something to do. The reign of God and the Gospel of God claim that wherever power and compassion come together for the sake of the least, the last, and the lost, Godly wonders can and do occur, regularly. Stand close to God and catch fire with the fire in God’s belly. Combine it with slammed-in-the-gut compassion, and watch what God does. Thanks be to God!

(Resources: I am especially indebted to the “Pastoral Implications” column in the June/July 2007 issue of “Lectionary Homiletics,” pp. 17-8 and to Fred Craddock, Interpretation -Luke; New Interpreter’s Bible, Luke; “Pulpit Resource,” Vol. 35, No. 2.)