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[Today I deviate from the usual format
by posting one of my sermons.
It is based on Isaiah 49:8-16,
part of which was from
yesterday's lectionary and part from today's]
In the comic strip "Wizard of Id", the
Little King is notable for several personality traits, among which compassion
is not to be numbered. The Little King
is hypersensitive to remarks about his diminutive stature, he is blithely
indifferent to the abject poverty of his subjects, and he takes cruel enjoyment
in meting out torture or capital punishment—which he does at the slightest
provocation. No, compassion is not the
thing of the Little King.
The Little King has a chest x-ray taken, and when
he sees the picture, he is concerned.
"What's the blank space?" he asks. "Oh, sire," he is
informed, "that blank space in your chest x-ray is where the heart is
usually found." (The Little King is
heartless, which is to say, he has no compassion.)
This illustrates our understanding of the anatomy
of compassion. "Have a heart,"
we say, meaning "be compassionate."
Ancient Israel had a different, and I think more profound, understanding
of the anatomy of compassion. The Hebrew
verb for having compassion is racham. Depending upon context it is variously
translated as to have compassion, mercy, pity, or love, but the root word
refers to the womb. This Hebrew word
describes a feeling of nourishing tenderness, a visceral emotion, one that
comes from the gut—a feeling that springs from the bowels or (for those who
have one), from the womb.
Imagine with me.
A little child you love is suffering, and there is nothing you can do
about it. Where do you feel the
pain? You feel it in your gut. The theologian Marcus Borg talked about the
"womb-ishness" of God in describing God's compassion. God loves with that kind of maternal,
empathetic intensity.
Some of you will remember Doug Alfors, in our
choir a notable tenor, and everywhere a notorious punster. When Doug heard about the womb-ishness of
God, he immediately responded: "Oh, you mean there’s womb at the
top." Irreverent, but it makes the point. As
the womb nourishes and protects the fetus, so God—in today’s passage from
Isaiah—will show tender love for God’s people as God leads them back from
exile.
The Hebrew word for compassion is used three
times in the Isaiah passage. The first
time the word is translated "pity."
This is part of a promise about how God will care for the people on
their journey home: "Neither scorching wind nor sun will strike them down,
for he who has pity (compassion) on them will lead them."
A few verses later, the word is used again: "The LORD has comforted his people, and
will have compassion on his suffering ones." God will ease the way for the returning
exiles—the mountains will be flattened out, the roadway banked up for easy
travel; God will attend to the needs of the people along the way like a
shepherd who lets the sheep graze on the hills and waters them at springs. The people will come from east and west and
north and south, all returning home to Zion.
Yes, God has seen the suffering of the people, and will have compassion
on them, tenderly leading them home.
But the third time compassion appears, it is not
for the exiles. The people who had been
in exile were only half of the story.
Left behind among the ruins of Zion (Jerusalem) were the less important
people. Life was miserable for them,
too. They had been poor even before the defeat of Jerusalem; their
lives after the ravages of siege,
battle, and occupation must have been pitiable.
And to add to their misery was the loss of friends and relatives,
snatched up and carried into far-away exile, never to be heard from again—no
letters, no telephone calls, no e-mail or text messages, no Facebook or Twitter
or Skype.
Perhaps you know what it feels
like to be left behind when those you love, those you depend upon, are taken
away: taken away by war, or by corporate decision, or by death. Most of the sympathy tends to be expressed
for the ones who have departed—and rightly so.
But it can be hard, it can be very hard, to be left behind. The disciples felt left behind after the
crucifixion. Remember the two on the
road to Emmaus. When the stranger asked
these two what they had been talking about, they stopped in their tracks and
stood there, looking desolate. Then they
told him.
They described their
crushed hopes. They felt utterly
abandoned, forsaken. They had been left
behind by the most important person in their lives. We can empathize with these disciples. We know the feeling of being abandoned by
God. You pray for God to help. Your son is in trouble, or you have a bad
habit you just cannot break, or you have reached a dead end in your life
journey, or the suffering and violence in the world are overwhelming you. You pray, earnestly pray, for God to do
something. Nothing improves; maybe
things get even worse. God is on
vacation. God has forgotten us. God doesn't care.
When Zion (the people left behind in Jerusalem)
said, "The LORD has forsaken me. My
Lord has forgotten me," God's reply was emphatic. "Can a mother forget her nursing child,
or show no compassion for the child of her womb?"
One night when our children were little, I came
home from a trip to find all five of them waiting for me in the driveway. In their hands they held a little black ball
of fur. "See, Dad," they all
said at once, "we got the puppy with the biggest feet in the litter." (Great!)
She was a Black Lab, mostly, and we named her Crispa.
Crispa grew like a weed, and what her big feet
didn't trample, her powerful tail slapped down.
“OUTSIDE!” my wife Marilyn finally decreed, after
she could tolerate no more destruction in the house—that dog belongs outside. I
have a photo of Crispa in her backyard exile.
She is leaping four feet off the ground in excitement because we are
coming to see her. What energy!
Before we knew it, Crispa was a
"teenager" in dog years and had come into heat. We tried to be careful, but she was an
energetic bundle of passions, and eventually the children were treated to a
lesson in motherhood. Crispa's puppies
were born on a Saturday. Marilyn
relented enough to say that Crispa and the new arrivals could stay in the
basement for a few days, so the children happily took some old blankets and
made a nest for them there. The next
morning our whole family drove off to church, leaving Crispa and her newborns
secure in a corner of the basement—so we thought.
When we returned from church, we were
horrified. This young mother, true to
her restless personality, had gone for a walk up the basement stairs. At the top of the stairs, she had pushed the
door open and entered the kitchen—forbidden territory. Unfortunately, I had
equipped the door to the basement with a spring so it would close behind the children. (You know the futility of reminding small
children to please close the door.) When
Crispa pushed her way through it, the door slammed shut behind her.
There was no way she could open the door again;
yet at some point her newly acquired maternal instinct had begun to scream to
her: GO BACK TO YOUR BABIES. They
need you! In frustration she began
to scratch at the old wooden door. By
the time we returned from church, she had clawed a deep gouge into the solid
wood. Splinters lay strewn on the floor,
sprinkled with blood from the torn pads of Crispa's big feet. She wouldn't give up. She had to get back to her nursing
babies.
If a hardly-grown-up puppy will not forget her
nursing young, how much less will a human mother forget her nursing child, or
show no compassion for the child of her womb?
"Even these may forget," says God, "yet I will not forget
you." "See, I have inscribed
you on the palms of my hands."
One of our daughters had a habit of making notes
on the palm of her hand. If she wanted
to remember a name or a phone number, she would jot the information down on her
palm. When I objected, she would remind
me that it was only ball point ink; it would wash right off.
The word translated "inscribed" in this
chapter does not merely mean “written.”
The Hebrew word means "engraved," or "cut into," the
way one would write a word on metal or stone.
Our names are inscribed on the palms of God's hands. They will not wash off.
The
Kingdom of God is not the Kingdom of Id.
Are you exiled to a far country?
God is waiting to bring you home.
Are you on a journey? God will
shepherd you along the way. Were you
left behind? God will comfort and
sustain you. Our God is not the little
king, but the great God of compassion, the God made known to us in Jesus, the
one who will never forsake us, who will never forget us.
Closing
prayer: Lord Jesus, you know us right well. We are inscribed on the palms of your hands,
right beside the prints of the nails.
You will not forget us. Even if a
mother abandons her baby, even if a father deserts his child, you will not
forsake us. Give us some portion of your
persistent compassion, that we may be compassionate to others. Amen.
Lectionary Readings
Ps. 143; 147:12-20; 81; 116
Isa. 49:13-26
Gal. 3:1-14
Mark 6:30-46
Selected Verses
Isa. 49:8-16a
Thus says the Lord: In a time of favor I have answered you,
on a day of salvation I have helped you; I have kept you and given you as a
covenant to the people, to establish the land, to apportion
the desolate heritages; saying to the prisoners, "Come out," to
those who are in darkness, "Show yourselves." They shall feed along
the ways, on all the bare heights shall be their
pasture; they shall not hunger or thirst, neither scorching wind nor sun
shall strike them down, for he who has pity on them will lead them, and by
springs of water will guide them. And I will turn all my mountains
into a road, and my highways shall be raised up. Lo, these shall come
from far away, and lo, these from the north and from the west, and these from
the land of Syene. Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult,
O earth; break forth, O mountains, into singing! For the Lord has comforted his people, and
will have compassion on his suffering ones. But Zion said, "The
Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me." Can a woman
forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget
you. See, I have inscribed you on the
palms of my hands…
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