He had compassion

 Trinity 2 - 18 June 2023: Exodus 19:2-8a, Romans 5:1-8 and Matthew 9:35-10:8

Jesus saw the crowds.

He had compassion on them.

They were harassed and helpless.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, Dr Sarah Chaney notes that the word compassion is everywhere in modern healthcare. Often it is described as an awareness of someone else’s distress and a desire to help relieve it. Her work on the history of nursing talks about altruism, sympathy, tact and diplomacy and the impact of class or gendered care. 

It is perhaps easy to talk about compassion as a set of individual values, behaviours or character traits. However, she also asks if there are certain conditions which make compassion more or less possible.  

That is certainly something which emerges in the work of my former colleague Ann Gallagher, Professor of Compassion and Care at the School of Nursing at the University of Surrey: she is concerned to explore how compassion is cultivated in relation not only to patient care, but also working environment and leadership. 

The King’s Fund also places compassion at the heart of their work on leadership - to engage and motivate staff with higher levels of well-being, which in turn results in high quality care. This might look like empathy in relation to challenges - supporting others to cope and respond well. It might look like enabling others to thrive as well as to be effective - it’s about trust and mutual support.

Indeed, Ann’s work seeks to counter short term answers and instead take a positive stance in relation to “crisis”.   In conversations we had ahead of the publication of her book on ‘slow ethics’, the teaching and parables of Jesus were one of the influential threads of thought - recognising that to be motivated by compassion means our actions don’t just benefit ourselves but a wider circle. 

As we hear in today’s gospel, for Jesus, compassion begins by being present: observing, listening, noticing, being attentive.  

He saw the crowds. 

They were harassed and helpless.

There was no one alongside them, leading them, caring for them.

He had compassion. 

Jesus' work is a work of compassion: binding up and strengthening, seeking out, bringing back, inviting to rest by still waters.

He sees that the harvest is plentiful and the workers are few: so he draws the disciples into this compelling calling of compassion.

They become the answer to prayer; what he has done, they will do. 

He gives them authority to liberate and enliven the harassed and helpless. They will proclaim the good news: coming alongside to teach, heal and raise up; noticing the struggle, casting out what is harmful and making peace.

We should not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate; for it is not necessarily our instinctive or spontaneous response. As Henri Nouwen writes: What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it. 

In Ann’s work, we see compassion emerging from the risk of slowing down - being attentive to the situation and understanding the struggle before helping. As Nouwen puts it: Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely and broken. 

Jesus sends the disciples to those places.  They go so that they can make the compassion of God visible, credible, believable, knowable.

They go to proclaim a kingdom of justice and mercy, of life and hope.  The earth is the Lord’s as we hear in Exodus, yet our Lord also works through human beings so that others might rise up on eagles’ wings.

The disciples go: without payment, having received without payment. What does this way of compassion demand?

Certainly, there is a level of risk, cost and vulnerability; to go amongst the harassed and helpless is a courageous as well as a compassionate act. 

The disciples went with both simplicity and dependence: going with what they had, taking no more than they needed, expecting no payment but trusting each other and those they met on their way.

They were not alone. They had each other - but also the Spirit of God expressed in Jesus’ words of authority as he commissioned them to compassion. No doubt they would have to be wise and careful, as well as full of care: noting the complexity of the world and human dynamics. 

Their way of being faithful - as they sought to make God’s love visible and credible in a world of pain - may have echoes with the King’s Fund vision for compassionate leadership. 

They were present on the road and in the towns, on the doorsteps and in the households: listening, attentive, taking in where people were hopeful or harassed; helpless or hospitable.

They would have had to have wisdom to understand the situation - the struggles, longings, needs and possibilities. They would have had to empathise - without becoming overwhelmed themselves by the joys, grief, distress or expectation. 

And then, and only then, helping the helpless, healing the harassed through their action. That might have been in releasing some from burdens and barriers; it might have been giving to others consolation and strength. 

In all this: in words and deeds, presence and action they proclaim that the kingdom of God is near. They made God’s love believable by going to the broken middle, by bringing the margins to the centre, by dwelling in that place. 

Jesus looked on the crowds and saw their need. His response to brokenness was to send others in his name and in the power of the Spirit that they too could participate in acts of compassion and peacemaking, in bringing life and meeting needs, in doing what was just and merciful. 

Such a way is not just about behaviours, values or character; it is also about changing the conditions in the world so that compassion becomes more possible. So that, in the words of our post communion prayer, people are fed, sustained and drawn into service. 

Yes, there is the hope of a joyful, heavenly banquet: but there is also the ‘slow ethic’ of an earthly movement towards God’s kingdom. Paul is radically honest about a trajectory that moves from suffering to endurance and only then to hope.  This isn’t cheap optimism, a passive consolation or the demand to put up with a status quo.

It might not be instantaneous, but it is a trajectory rooted in God’s love for the world: for in Jesus, that love is purer out whilst we were still harassed and helpless, separated from others and unable to cherish ourselves, carrying burdens and seeking hope. 

Therefore, he says, because we are justified by faith we have peace with God through Christ. Therefore, we are forgiven and stand in grace; therefore we grow in character and hope, in defiance of all we endure. Because God’s compassion is seen in love poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. 

That is today’s prayer. That we might receive that most excellent gift of love. The true bond of peace and all virtue. The gift that gives all our doings worth, and draws us into the fullness of life. 

We are commissioned to be agents of compassion; to take responsibility for the credibility of God’s love. In the words of Etty Hillesum, who was aware of God’s place in her life despite the horror of occupation and concentration camps: there must be someone to live through it all and bear witness to the fact that God lived, even in these times. And why should I not be that witness [cited in Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust]

(c) Julie Gittoes 2023

Whose mother-tongue is love

 Sunday, 28 May 2023 - Pentecost: Acts 2:1-21, 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13 and John 7:37-39

 

Yn enw’r Tag, y Mab a’r Ysbryd Glân

Dw i’n dysgu Cymraeg ar Duolingo. Dimm da iwan ond dw i’n caru’r gymraeg.

I am learning Welsh on duolingo; not very well but I love welsh.

As a platform, DuoLingo claims to be the world’s number one way to learn a language.

It’s effective, efficient and bite-sized, personalised and gamified to make you love learning; but today we go further than that.

Image from inews

Pentecost takes us deeper in language, speaking and loving; naming our heart’s desire.

It’s about how God speaks and how God longs for us to speak;  expressing the desire of God’s heart.

We move from a few people gathered together in one room, to a multitude gathered from the nations in one city. 

There are no more locked doors or fearful hearts as the Spirit stirs, awakens, consoles and emboldens.

Neither the intimacy of domestic space nor the clamour of the public  square can contain or control this movement of calling, joining, longing in love.  

As Willie Jennings puts it:  Disciples speak in the mother tongues of others, not by their own design but by the Spirit’s desire. The new wine has been poured out on those unaware of just how deeply they thirsted.

Jesus had already named the thirst, that deep thirst for loving-mercy and acceptance. He invites us into an encounter - person to person. He invites us to trust - and to receive. 

In the face of division and dispute, he looks ahead to the giving of the Spirit. In the face of suffering and death, he looks to the horizon beyond resurrection. 

Jesus looks into our hearts and longs for the abundance of the Spirit to revive us with springs of living water. 

We long for it, deep within;  the same Spirit rising up in us as that which brooded over the waters in creation; the same Spirit that overshadowed Mary as God’s Word became enfleshed; the Spirit that came as a breath of peace on the lips of the risen Lord.

Those who had waited in prayer are drawn into God’s action. 

An action that breaks open and enlarges human hearts; that breaks open and enlarges this community.

Jennings calls this sheer act of God a revolution of the intimate. 

For the absolute power of God is known and felt in the rush of wind; and warmth like a flickering flame. This act of God moves the human heart; the fullness of the Spirit is felt in our most intimate familiar and yet unknowable selves.

This movement of love is known in perhaps the most ordinary aspect of our life; the thing we take most for granted. That is language itself. The words and gestures that bind us together and drive us apart. 

The language that commands and cries out; the familiar expressions of affection; the daily means of relationship; the language of friendship and community; the stuff of praise, prayer and protest becomes the bearer of the fullness of God in the Spirit.

As Jennings puts it:  To speak a language is to to speak a people. 

At one time or another, most if not all of us will have learnt a language other than our mother tongue. We know how slow that can be; and how joyful. Duolingo might be a million miles away from the grammar tables of  school, but it demands the same repetition. 

We learn language out of necessity: to be understood, to work, belong, make a home. We learn out of curiosity: to understand and make connections; out of courtesy and to expand horizons. Unembarrassed, we try; we risk vulnerability; see see the other. In bore da and diolch.

And sometimes, that humbling, patient and demanding process gives way to the sheer love of it: the sounds, the food, the poetry; the culture, traditions and places; the landscapes of places and of our minds. It becomes about people.

Jennings reminds us that:  God speaks people, fluently. And God, with all the urgency that is with the Holy Spirit, wants the disciples of his only begotten Son to speak people fluently too. 

In this there is an undoing of the ways in which mastery of language has become the mastery of people; here we join with God’s work of translating and loving.

‘What does this mean?’ say the crowds, astonished, perplexed and amazed at speech that speaks to their hearts. 

This is the amplification of God’s speech to Israel by the patriarchs and prophets - the commandments to love. To love justly and with mercy.

This is the love that in Jesus Christ goes to the depths of alienation and despair; to the richness of our most tender longings and hopes; to the hidden places of minds; healing wounds, making whole, accepting us in love.

This is the Spirit moving to open hearts to neighbours and strangers; shaping homes, relationships and lives by the fluent movement of love; the Spirit that gives courage, creativity and compassion.

It is this Spirit that enables us to say Jesus is Lord; that enables us to see that in him God reconciled the world to Godself; that in baptism we are drawn into the fullness of life and the possibilities of being drawn together in love.

Paul and Peter echo Joel and the prophets in this extraordinary vision of joining together - across language, ethnicity, age and gender.  The Spirit is being poured out on all flesh - dreams, visions and prophecies find form not only in human language, but human lives.

To be drawn into one body, made up of many members is to see both a rich variety - of gifts, activities and acts of service. 

What does this mean?

It means that the gift of faith is stirred up in us - each using our gifts for the common good.

It means that the church is given over to the Spirit - revived with a breath of love.

It means that in a rich variety of ways - we witness to the love of God revealed in Jesus.

It means that the face of the earth is renewed - with care for creation and hope for all peoples.

This does demand wisdom and knowledge, the ability to heal, reconcile and keep safe; it redirects power from human distortion, abuse and selfishness to divine purposes of the flourishing of all. 

Such power is poured out in the language we speak with our words and our bodies: prayer and thanksgiving, mutual support and blessing. The mother-tongue of love speaks in the body language of broken bread and poured out wine. One body, one flesh, one desire, one God; a variety of embodiments, activities, gifts; for the sake of the common good.

A poem by Malcolm Guite

Today we feel the wind beneath our wings

Today  the hidden fountain flows and plays

Today the church draws breath at last and sings

As every flame becomes a Tongue of praise.

This is the feast of fire, air, and water

Poured out and breathed and kindled into earth.

The earth herself awakens to her maker

And is translated out of death to birth.

The right words come today in their right order

And every word spells freedom and release

Today the gospel crosses every border

All tongues are loosened by the Prince of Peace

Today the lost are found in His translation.

Whose mother-tongue is Love, in  every nation.

Yn enw’r Tag, y Mab a’r Ysbryd Glân

(C) Julie Gittoes 2023

Friendship: virtue, choice and glue

 St Barnabas 2023: Acts 11:19-end, Galatians 2:1-10 and John 15:12-17

Call to mind for a moment, if you will, one of your friends. 

Perhaps it’s someone you've not seen for a while, someone you speak to regularly or someone you were close to for a particular season of life. A friend you’ve known for years or someone you’ve recently connected with. 

As you call them to mind, give thanks for them - their personality or influence, kindness or wisdom. As you think of them, notice the love or encouragement you’ve received from them; what you might appreciate as a particular grace from God in them.

In his 2015 poem, ‘The Friend’ Matt Hart writes:

You put your hand on her shoulder,

or you put your hand on his shoulder.

The friend is indefinite…

… you’re talking

together about the glue of this life…

He goes on to explore this hand on shoulder way of relating in friendship: the nearness and familiarity; there in the crisis and as we recount the best of things; in the dreams and the imaginings, in faith and belief;  the specific and the universal colliding and coinciding - we find, he suggests, a higher power in such a friend.

As we give thanks for the life of Barnabas the apostle today, we are drawn into a rich and enriching way of thinking about friendship. 

In him, we are given an example of someone who was generous in his time, resources and judgements. Someone who was unselfish in his service to others, even or especially in the face of disagreement. Someone who was gifted with a particular grace of being able to encourage.

Thomas Aquinas regarded friendship as one of the things to be most prized and valued on earth. Such high regard comes not from the good fortune of simply being blessed by a good friend, but by the way in which God, in Jesus, relates to us as friends.

For Aquinas, human flourishing and charity could be summed up as friendship with God. This gives us a common ground and equality which opens up the possibility of freely relating to God; it also opens up the possibility of friendship with those who are different to us or with whom we disagree. 

This takes us to the heart of John’s Gospel - where Jesus speaks not only of keeping God’s commandments of love, but also of abiding deeply in God’s love. Such abiding is joyous; such loving is generous. 

The one who had abided close to the Father’s heart comes near to us - placing a hand on our shoulder, inviting us into a life of loving service. A life rooted in friendship with God and each other - showing honour, sharing delight, growing in wisdom, deep trust and mutual love.  

This kind of friendship flows from the Father’s love for us - a love intimately involved in the whole of creation, revealed in Jesus and continued in the Spirit - a higher power of life, fullness and flourishing.

Aquinas dwells on the passage we heard today and asks: when all our Lord’s sacred discourses are full of his commandments, why does he give this special commandment respecting love, if it is not that every commandment teaches love, and all precepts are one? Yet, he goes on to note that the highest, the only proof of love, is to love our adversary…. Our Lord came to die for his enemies, but he says that he is going to lay down his life for his friends, to show that by loving we are able to gain over our enemies, so that they who persecute us are by anticipation our friends.

That sounds like a lot for us to take on - when our friendships are both close and indefinite, when our love of them forms part of the glue of life, how can we be bold enough to extend such love into the realm of disagreement?

My friend and colleague Gabby [Thomas] has reflected on this challenge in relation to areas of disagreement within the life of the church - and the calling, choice or invitation to mutual flourishing. She locates this first in God’s grace. Friendship located within God’s grace - putting friendship with God first and then friendship with the other.

Jesus says to the disciples: you did not choose  me, I chose you. And perhaps it is that habit of choice that we also take into our friendships - the familiar, easy, challenging and complex. This is Gabby notes a movement towards God and others in the Holy Spirit - it does mean calling out unkind or ungenerous behaviour, as well as offering encouragement and consolation. 

This kind of friendship, writes Aquinas, is: a kind of virtue in as much as it is a habit of choice.

Icon of Barnabas

Such habits and choices become the Spirit-infused glue of our life together.  We see this in Barnabas’ life - in the risks he took, in the boundaries he crossed, in the gifts he affirmed in others and in his patient encouragement in the face of disagreement.

He is described in Acts as: a good person, filled with the Holy Spirit and faith. He was fully himself as Barnabas - created, called and chosen by God, with his own particular gifts and goodness. He was also a person of faith, open to the work of the Spirit in those daily, moment by moment choices and habits of friendship. 

He was so united with the apostles in prayer, fellowship and the breaking of bread, that he gave all that he was and all that he had to support the church. Personally, this meant selling a field and giving the proceeds to the apostles to build up the community and strengthen or sustain their witness. Collectively, it meant as we hear Paul recount in Galatians, that within the economy of grace and friendship, the poor were never forgotten.

We see the habits of generosity and encouragement in his dealings with others - with friends within the fellowship of Jesus. 

He gave the younger man Mark a second chance - making allowances for youthful energy and enthusiasm. He was a wise elder, taking time to understand and giving him space to grow in maturity. He consoled, encouraged and supported him. 

He gave the older man Paul a chance too - being generous in his judgement of him, based on his own values rather than the opinions and fears of others. With Paul in particular, he not only rejoices in the grace and gifts of others, but committed to the work of building up Christian community and shared ministry. He was reliable, compassionate and kind over the year they spent together.

It was in Antioch that we see Paul and Barnabas reaching across theological divides and disagreements; bridging Jewish and Gentile communities, building trust and loyalty, collaborating with patience and enthusiasm. Together, they listened to the prompting of the Spirit as they faced the struggles of the present - attentive both to the legacy of the past and the hopes for the future.

 

Barnabus in particular connects Jerusalem and Antioch in himself - in his friendships and loyalties, bound together as bodies within the Body of Christ. Through the one Spirit, two peoples and communities are drawn into a shared life. In friendships forged across differences, a new reality is made possible. 

 

Such friendship was not about being like-minded but the choice to spend time together and to find in that the gift of mutual flourishing. The commitment to friendship in community was a conviction of both heart and mind - building bonds of trust and offering time and money to that work. Their collaboration, their friendship, begins to remake the world.

Friendship is a way of holiness - habits, choices, practices which draw us more deeply into the life of God for the sake of the world. Such friendship embodies the depth of God’s love, the life and teaching of Jesus and the vitality of the Spirit, breath by breath. 

As friends, hands are raised in signs of forgiveness and blessing - tracing the cross in bodies and in air; the hands we extend towards each other also reach out to receive Christ Jesus in the gift of the sacrament.  Friendships may be indefinite, but here we are  talking together about the glue of this life…

The glue of God’s love mediated friendship with Jesus; the glue of the life-giving Spirit sculpting and reforming. In worship we attend to the dazzling brightness of such love; in the world, we are involved in responding to human need, to those places of loving concern, human and divine. 

In that task, may we be friends: united in prayer and the breaking of bread; generous in judgement and service; encouraging and building up; choosing those habits of goodness and kindness. All this, in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Spirit.

(C) Julie Gittoes 2023