Philippians 2:1-9
March 16, 2014
If then there is any encouragement in
Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion
and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love,
being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or
conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of
you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the
same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of
God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied
himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being
found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of
death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave
him the name that is above every name,…
I want you to stop and think for a moment. Who is the
most compassionate person you can think of? It can be someone in history, or it
can be someone you know. Can you think of one? When I think of the most
compassionate, at the top of the list is Father Damien. He was a Roman Catholic
priest who ministered in Hawaii in the mid- to late-1800s. He spent his life
caring for lepers who had been quarantined and almost left to die on the
Hawaiian island of Molaka’i.
Born in 1840, Father Damien grew up in Belgium as
the seventh child of a Flemish corn merchant. His name was originally Jozef De
Veuster. Throughout his childhood he wanted to find a way to serve God by
caring for people. After he entered seminary, he prayed over and over that God
would help him become a missionary. His prayers were answered in 1864 when he
was sent to Hawaii and ordained a Catholic priest. It was there that he found
his life’s purpose and work.
About the same time as he arrived, Hawaii was struggling
through an epidemic of what was then called leprosy, but we now call Hansen’s
Disease. It’s a disease that is said to cause people to lose their
extremities—fingers, toes, noses, ears, etc… In fact, it’s not the disease that
causes the loss of the extremities. The disease simply kills nerve endings so
that people can’t feel pain at all. And their inability to feel pain means that
they bump fingers and toes, but don’t realize it. Their lack of feeling allows
infections to grow in these bumped fingers and toes, but, again, they don’t
realize it. Eventually the extremities become gangrenous, and need to be cut
off or fall off. It’s the loss of pain that leads to the loss of fingers and
limbs. If you remember old biblical movies, those who had this disease often
lived in caves or hid from others, hiding their condition behind cloths
covering their faces. They were shunned.
Worrying that the disease might spread throughout the
islands, King Kamehahmeha V approved the “Act to Prevent the Spread of
Leprosy,” in 1865, which quarantined all lepers to colonies on north shore of
Moloka’i, an island that even today is remote and that discourages outsiders. About
8000 Hawaiians were sent to live in these colonies. They were meant to be safe
place for them, where they could live in peace, grow their own food, and not be
the target of prejudice. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out that way. Nobody
realized that people whose disease caused them to lose fingers and toes can’t
really farm. Also, they couldn’t build houses, so these colonies became like
the Wild West with people attacking each other, living in drunkenness, all
while living in lean-to shacks.
The Catholic Church realized that it had to do something
to care for these lepers, but they also realized that appointing priests to
minister for them could be a death sentence. So they asked for four volunteers
to live with them, with the idea that the priests would serve for three months
on, and nine months off. Father Damien was the first to volunteer, and once he
got to Moloka’i, he decided that this was his life’s purpose. He stayed for
most of the rest of his life.
His impact on the colonies was immediate. He started by
building a church, and getting all the residents to help him, which created a
center for the colonies. Then he helped them build decent houses, managed to
have food shipped in, built schools for children, organized the farms, and
established laws. For the next twenty years he lived among them. He rubbed
their feet when feeling left them. He dressed their wounds. He ate their food
and stayed in their houses. In 1884, he contracted the disease himself, and
literally became one among them. He died five years later in 1885, and is still
celebrated in Hawaii today. Father Damien Day is an official holiday in Hawaii
on April 15th.
What really made Father Damien stand out was that he
didn’t just have sympathy for these people, or even empathy. He had compassion.
What’s the difference? It helps to understand the words themselves.
The word “compassion” literally means “to suffer with” (com=with + passion=suffer). When we have compassion for someone, we are
literally willing to “suffer with” that person, to walk with her or him through
her or his troubles. We may not know what to do to fix the problem. We may not
have an answer for her or his struggles, but we stay with her or him anyway.
Have you ever visited someone who is really sick in a
hospital, and didn’t know what to say, but you sat with him or her anyway? Have
you ever gone to a funeral home, and didn’t know what to say, but you stayed
anyway? Have you ever been with a friend who is going through a really
difficult time, and you couldn’t fix it? Yet you listened anyway? That’s
compassion. You are wiling to suffer with the person, and suffer yourself with
not being able to fix anything.
Compassion is very different from another term we often
confuse with it, which is empathy. Empathy
literally means to “feel within” what the other person is going through. It
comes from em=within + pathy=feel. As a therapist, I have been
taught to be empathetic. I have been trained to listen to what others are going
through, and to be able to identify their feelings by tapping into my own memories
of times that I have felt like them. But I don’t suffer with them. I still stay
a step away, which is appropriate. I have to keep a bit of emotional distance,
but I still need to be able to feel something of their suffering.
Compassion is also very different from sympathy. Sympathy
literally means to “feel with” another person. It comes from sym=with + pathy=feel. When we have sympathy for people, we feel their pain,
and are willing to help them, but we usually aren’t willing to go too far to
help them. We are sympathetic, but we aren’t willing to suffer with them.
Unfortunately, the modern problem isn’t that we
substitute sympathy or empathy for compassion. Our problem is that we often
have no-pathy. Too many people look
around at other people’s struggles, and they just don’t care. They may act like
they have sympathy, but in the end they don’t necessarily care if people are
poor, struggling, hurting, or suffering. And for them it leads them to non-passion. Non-passion is the unwillingness
to share in another person’s struggles.
To really understand “compassion,” it helps to understand
the original Greek word for it used in the Bible. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus says,
“Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate.”or “Suffer
with others as your Father suffers with others (YOU).” Jesus is telling people to enter into
suffering with others. The Greek word for compassion is “splangchnizomai.” It is a word that
literally means to “feel in our intestines,” or gut. To really have compassion
means to feel the suffering of another deep within us, and to feel it
viscerally. This is the core of Christian compassion: we feel in our guts the
struggles of others, and we respond out of that core. Jesus demonstrates this
compassion when 5000 people have come to hear him, and he tells the disciples
to feed them. They tell Jesus to send them away, and Jesus says no. Luke tells
us what is going on in Jesus emotionally: “When
he saw the people he had compassion (ἐσπλαγχνίσθη, «esplangchnizai») for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a
shepherd.”
To have compassion as a Christian means to be willing to
suffer with people, even if it means that we can’t fix their problems or them. It
means doing a lot of the things that we Christians do, such as visiting someone
in hospital, sitting with struggling person even if you can’t do anything to
really help, listening to someone we can’t help, helping someone who won’t
always help him- or herself, or being the constant friend of someone suffering
with mental illness who has been rejected by everyone else.
Having true compassion comes out of having character
because it requires a willingness to suffer with people with no payoff for
ourselves. The fact is that it can be incredibly
frustrating because sometimes these people suck all of our time and efforts,
and we barely get thanked. It can be time-consuming, meaning we give up other
things we want to do in order to be with them. It can make us feel helpless
because we don’t know what to do. It can mean denying ourselves and putting
ourselves out, sometimes with no thanks and little appreciation. But it also
means serving God by being God’s presence in people’s lives.
Amen.
