Therefore, if there is any
encouragement in Christ, any comfort in love, any sharing in the Spirit, any
sympathy, 2 complete my joy by thinking the same way, having
the same love, being united, and agreeing with each other. 3 Don’t
do anything for selfish purposes, but with humility think of others as better
than yourselves. 4 Instead of each person watching out for their
own good, watch out for what is better for others. 5 Adopt the
attitude that was in Christ Jesus:
6 Though he was in the form of God,
he did not consider being equal with God something to exploit. 7 But he emptied himself
by taking the form of a slave
and by becoming like human beings.
When he found himself in the form of a human, 8 he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross.
he did not consider being equal with God something to exploit. 7 But he emptied himself
by taking the form of a slave
and by becoming like human beings.
When he found himself in the form of a human, 8 he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross.
Jesus traveled among all the cities
and villages, teaching in their synagogues, announcing the good news of the
kingdom, and healing every disease and every sickness. 36 Now
when Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were
troubled and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. 37 Then
he said to his disciples, “The size of the harvest is bigger than you can
imagine, but there are few workers. 38 Therefore, plead with
the Lord of the harvest to send out workers for his harvest.”
As the
president of my college class, my most important executive action was to plan
the senior class trip. The senior class
trip was an annual spring break tradition, and previous classes had gone to
such exotic locations as Stowe Mountain, Vermont; New York City; Washington,
DC; and one confectionary-filled week in Hershey, PA. Our class had done considerably better in fundraising,
thanks to yours truly, and so it was, that we left the snowy confines of
Western New York and set sail on a Bahamas cruise.
Donald Trump might have called it, “the hugest, most
fabulous, luxurious senior class trip ever.”
And it was. Ever been pampered,
where it seems like everyone was there to serve you, meet your every whim,
whose sole reason for existence was to make you comfortable? That cruise felt sort of like that. As we arrived at dinner on the second night,
and the drinks everyone had ordered the night before were already in place on
the table, I distinctly remember thinking, “I could get used to this!”
To be sure, we all need a
certain level of comfort in our lives.
If you live with chronic pain, you know the importance of having a
comfortable place to sit. Someone who is
living paycheck-to-paycheck knows the importance of having enough money to be
comfortable. We go on vacations to
comfortable places so we can recharge and renew from the stresses of every day
life. We find comfort in relationships and foods and traditions and places, and
again, we all need a certain level of comfort in our lives.
What we don’t need, however, is to become overly obsessed
with our own comfort. As followers of
Jesus, as those who are trying, by God’s grace to live and love like him, we
are often called to put aside our own comfort in order to show compassion. Following
Jesus necessarily moves us from comfort to compassion.
The word, “compassion,” is rooted in two Latin words, com and passio. Com means “with,” passio
sounds like “passion,” but it literally means “suffer,
like “The Passion of Christ,” which depicts the suffering of Christ. “Compassion” literally means “suffer with.”
Compassion is where we see someone’s need, and we feel it
as acutely as our own, and we are moved to action with an unquenchable desire
to alleviate the suffering.
Our first Scripture reading from Philippians tells us to
5 Adopt the attitude that was in Christ
Jesus:
6 Though he was in the form of God,
he did not consider being equal with God something to exploit. 7 But he emptied himself
by taking the form of a slave
and by becoming like human beings.
When he found himself in the form of a human, 8 he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross.
he did not consider being equal with God something to exploit. 7 But he emptied himself
by taking the form of a slave
and by becoming like human beings.
When he found himself in the form of a human, 8 he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross.
Adopt the Attitude That Was in Christ
Jesus.
Think of a swimming pool, with
comfort at the shallow end, and compassion at the deep end. Our default is to hang out at the shallow,
comfortable end, but as we follow Jesus, who had all power, privilege, and
position – equal with God, all the comfort and splendor of heaven, Jesus who left
that, willingly gave it all up in order to come to us as one of us, to suffer
with us, even to the point of his own suffering on the cross. He did that, not because he had to, but
because his love for us was just that deep.
Again, back to Philippians:
3 Don’t do anything for selfish
purposes, but with humility think of others as better than yourselves. 4 Instead
of each person watching out for their own good, watch out for what is better
for others.
The self-centered life is a shallow life. Jesus draws us from the selfish shallows to
deep compassion. The more closely we
follow Jesus, the more compassionate we become, no longer splashing around in
the shallow end, but saving lives and keeping people from drowning in the deep
end. Following Jesus plunges us from
shallow comfort to deep compassion.
Compassion for the Crowds
Compassion for whom?
Matthew’s Gospel says, “Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he had
compassion for them because they were troubled and helpless, like sheep without
a shepherd.” (9:36)
Jesus had compassion for the crowds. Compassion – a desire to suffer with, and
actively alleviate the suffering – for the crowds – a nameless, faceless rabble
too numerous to count.
When you think of who Jesus spent most of his time with,
who comes to mind? His disciples – the
12 men he tapped on the shoulder and said, “Come, follow me.”
Imagine, if you would, three concentric circles. The very center of the middle
circle –that’s Jesus. We will call the
first, tightest circle around him “the core” – that’s his 12 disciples. Now, we also know there were other people who
followed Jesus, at different times in his ministry, it fluctuated somewhere
between 100 and 150 people. This group
is represented by the second circle, and we’ll call this circle “the
congregation.”
But what about that outer circle? Well, you can call that outmost circle “the
crowd.”
The crowd comes and goes.
It varies in size. There are
times in Jesus’ ministry when the crowd is heavy, and other times when it
practically disappears. The crowd
doesn’t have direction, it’s aimless, and it’s vulnerable. “Now
when Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were
troubled and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”
Jesus has compassion for the crowd. Being like Jesus means we have compassion for
them, as well. Following Jesus is
signing on to a life that shows compassion for the crowd, for those beyond our
own circle. Jesus invested in his inner
circle, his core, training them, equipping them, empowering them to invest in
the congregation by empowering them and equipping them to invest in the
crowd. It is Jesus’ compassion for the
crowd that drives the whole process, consumes all the organizational energy –
like pebbles being continually dropped in a pond, with the movement of the
ripples constantly spreading his love further and further and further.
But, when we start to prioritize comfort over compassion,
that’s the beginning of spiritual
death. In the medical world, comfort
care is what happens at the end of life.
From Members to Disciples
Right now, 75% of churches in America are either
plateaued or in decline. One way to
reverse the decline would be to talk less about church membership. Our obsession with church membership is
killing us. Membership isn’t Biblical. Jesus
didn’t tell us to go and make members, he told us to go and make
disciples! Clubs have members. Institutions have members. The Church has disciples!
Membership is a term that carries all sorts of baggage of
privilege. Catering to people’s
preferences, and so comfort is given a higher priority than compassion. The comfort of the inner circles gets to be
more important than showing compassion to the outer circle. We end up with something completely inverted
to what Jesus intended.
Our obsession with membership has created a situation in
which too many in the church have forgotten, or never really knew in the first
place, to whom the church belongs. It
belongs to Jesus! He is its owner! He is its Lord! He bought it with his own blood. The church is Christ’s body, his
representative to the world, a world he loves and for which he died.
A club has members.
The church has disciples. Small
change in language, huge change in culture – to stop referring to ourselves as
members, and to start calling ourselves disciples. Members are motivated by what they want. Disciples are motivated by what Jesus wants.
What’s he want? Compassion for the crowds. Or maybe you prefer the way he said it in Luke
19:10 - seeking and saving the lost. Or Matthew 28, he told us to go into the
world and make disciples of him. So call
it what you will: compassion for the crowd, seeking and saving the lost, or
making disciples – however you slice it, this was his passion; it’s what the
church, who belongs to Jesus, must always be about.
Compassion for the crowd – it drove Jesus; does it drive
us? Where would you put yourself,
honestly, this morning – in the shallow end, or in the deep end? Splashing around and making noise with your
buddies, or diving deep in order to save others? Member or disciple? Your own comfort, or compassion for others?
Sometimes we in the church can forget who we are, to whom
we belong, and what we’re about. When
the church starts to feel and act too much like a cruise ship, remember we’re
really a fishing vessel – none of us are here as passengers, we’re all part of
the crew. Let’s follow and live like
Jesus. Let’s move from comfort to
compassion.
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