A Community of Compassion

Matthew 5:1-12

October 29, 2006

When Martin Luther posted his famous 95 theses on the door of the Wittenberg church, on October 31, 1517, he could not have imagined that his act of ecclesiastical disobedience was part of a larger movement that would give birth not only to a new church but also to an entirely new social order. If he had known that where once there was one Christian church in time there would literally thousands of denominations, perhaps he would not have been so bold. Perhaps his own need for security – for himself, for his family, for his community – would have outweighed his conscience. Perhaps he would have said, “let somebody else take the heat.” Perhaps he would have been frightened by the very forces of faith and liberty he helped unleash.

But his time demanded a response of conscience and so Luther said, “here I stand, I can do no other.”

We, the heirs of Luther’s original impulse for reform, stand today before a church and a social order in similar need of reformation. Where, then, shall we stand?

Considering the magnitude of the Reformation – whose founding gesture we celebrate today – it may strike you as overstating the case to suggest that the present moment calls for change of similar scale.

Still, when disparate voices begin to sound the same refrain the chorus merits attention.

Thomas Merton, writing 40 years ago, named our times this way:

… we are confused, empty and discontented. We have no spiritual and ethical center. We do not have the motives which would enable us to build a peaceful world, because we do not have a sufficient reason to restrain our violence.[1]

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter famously warned of a “crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.”[2]

Rabbi Michael Learner, founder of Tikkun, put it this way just last year:

There is a real spiritual crisis in this society, and it has everything to do with the way we organize our economic and political lives.[3]

Anne Lamott, author and sometimes Presbyterian, puts it this way:

On my forty-ninth birthday, I decided all of life was hopeless, and I would eat myself to death.[4]

Different folks respond differently to the stress of the present age.

And if the words of theologians, politicians or writers are not enough, turn the radio on.

U2 sings, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

Jackson Browne sings, “Hunger in the midnight, hunger at the stroke of noon/Hunger in the mansion, hunger in the rented room/Hunger on the TV, hunger on the printed page/And there’s a God-sized hunger underneath the questions of the age.”

Or turn to Broadway, and hear this from Rent: “And when you're living in America/At the end of the millennium/You're what you own.”

If these examples strike you as rather random, that’s precisely the point. You don’t have to look beyond what is ready to hand in all of our lives to find voices crying out in the wilderness of contemporary culture and offering various descriptions of the crisis of our age. While the perfect description of our time may elude us, putting one’s finger on the pulse of the age is not all that difficult. What strikes me as incontestable is simply this: we are living in a period of singular crisis and the present crisis is first and foremost spiritual in nature. It probably calls for lots of music, art and chocolate; it inescapably calls forth a new way of living together.

There is a sense, of course, in which every age, every epoch, calls forth a new way of being that breaks with the orthodoxy of any given moment. Indeed, as Brian McClaren, the founding pastor of the Cedar Ridge Community Church, points out in A Generous Orthodoxy,

In the Middle Ages, “straight thinking” was a kind of government function – like right business practices, similarly enforceable by censorship, imprisonment, torture, inquisition, and massacre. In the Modern Era, protest and conquest were the spirit of the age, so “right opinions” were one’s ticket to power and dominance. But in the world that is emerging out of roots in the modern and medieval worlds, perhaps we will believe again that the meek will inherit the earth and that truth is a treasure not best found or held through coercion and threat or competition and dominance, but by humble seeking, sincere faith, resilient hope, patient love.[5]

You can hear in McClaren’s description echoes of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “perhaps we will believe again that the meek will inherit the earth.” As that suggests, Jesus faced his own time in the spirit of reformation. The meek were certainly not inheriting the earth in first-century Palestine; the poor in spirit dwelled far from the kingdom of heaven; peacemakers were called many things – but children of God was no more likely then than it is today.

Yet from under the thumb of an oppressive empire, Jesus cast a vision of a future otherwise that still animates dreams and visions 2,000 years later. Likewise, from under the thumb of an oppressive church, Martin Luther cast a vision of a future otherwise that still empowers the church 500 years later. Just as Jesus proclaimed in his time and Luther in his, so I say to you today: another world is possible. Another world is possible.

But it is not inevitable. It will not simply come with the rising of the sun and the breaking of a new dawn.

God calls it forth in sovereign love. Yes, I believe this absolutely. But, in freedom we have the capacity to remain enslaved to the present time. In brokenness we can choose to remain broken. In sin we can continue to turn away from God and from the future that God is calling forth.

What does that future look like? The future of God’s imagining?

Jesus captured its spirit and cast a vision from the mountaintop when he cried out for a community of passion and compassion – a community in which the mourners would be comforted and in which lights of faith, hope and love would be lifted high against the darkness; a community in which the poor are blessed and peacemakers are called the children of God; a community of compassion structured by a politics of love and justice.

Where, today, can we find our own Martin Luther? Where, today, can we find people willing to forego security for the sake of conscience? Where, today, can we find a community of reformation unafraid to declare boldly to the world that there are at least 95 more things that need to change?

Well, as I have said to you before, we are the ones who we’ve been waiting for. The task of our time is to name the present age accurately and to cast a vision of a future otherwise.

We have begun tacking our own 95 theses on the door. We have said, loudly and publicly, that the present way of ordering and arranging family life is inadequate and incomplete. We have said, loudly and publicly, that the present way of ordering and arranging church life is inadequate and incomplete.

In the same manner, we must also say that the present way of ordering and arranging our economic life is inadequate and incomplete, the present way of ordering and arranging our political life is inadequate and incomplete, the present way of ordering and arranging international affairs is inadequate and incomplete. These may sound like political or social concerns, but they are first and foremost theological concerns and our response to them must be grounded in the vision that Jesus casts in the Sermon on the Mount.

The vast economic inequality and growing gap between the have and the have nots is an affront to the gospel. The consolidation of political power in the hands of the wealthy at the expense of the poor is an affront to the gospel. Preemptive war is an affront to the gospel.

And yet the church, too timid and tepid to lift again the banner of reformation, acquiesces quietly to a status quo that relegates spiritual questions to the confines of private life all but oblivious to the deep and public spiritual crisis of our age.

“As daily life is stripped of its spiritual dimension by the seemingly unstoppable triumph of market consciousness, as work and human relationships seem to call for a continual deadening of our life energies, as our experience of the world is emptied of its magical and enchanted dimension and increasingly filled with manipulation, self-protection, and consumption, people reach out in desperation for mind-numbing devices to deaden the pain that this loss of meaning and connection to spirit inevitably generates.”[6]

Where is the church? Where is the community of compassion that can respond to this crisis of spirit? Where is the vision of a future otherwise?

Here we stand. We can do no other. Therefore, let us offer, as mere bullet points, and by way of closing, a glimpse at the church of the second reformation. So, then, 9.5 theses for the community of compassion and transformation. Such a community will:

1. Be committed to nonviolence, in its community practices and in speaking a prophetic word to the nations that “they shall study war no more.”
2. Will honor and respect non-Christian paths to the divine, recognizing, as Jesus said, that the “father’s house has many rooms.”
3. Be a community of discernment developing the capacity to explore each one’s call and empower each one’s gifts to serve the commonwealth, that, as Paul said, we might “not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our minds, so that we may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
4. Will honor children and uphold families of many kinds, recalling Jesus’ admonition to “welcome the little children.”
5. Will welcome, honor and empower the outcast, the oppressed and the silenced; especially women, gays, lesbians, transgendered and bisexual people, recalling that Jesus came to bring “good news to the poor, release to the captive and to let the oppressed go free.”
6. Will honor and celebrate creation and work to protect it, recalling the psalmist’ words that “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is therein.”
7. Will live sacramentally and joyously, and develop indigenous rituals of celebration and of sorrow, remembering with the psalmist that we are called to “sing a new song unto the Lord.”
8. Will serve alongside the poor and marginalized, and work in the public square for justice, recalling God’s requirements of us “to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God.”
9. We will learn together to live simply that others may simply live, recognizing that, like the children of Israel in the promised land, we live in “cities that we did not build, in houses filled with all sorts of goods that we did not fill, drinking water from cisterns that we did not hew, and eating from vineyards and olive groves that we did not plant;” therefore we are connected to one another inescapably and owe a debt we cannot repay except insofar as we leave for our posterity a future otherwise.

9.5 We will eat more chocolate! Couldn’t find a scriptural reference for that one, so it merits only .5 on the theses scale, but if cocoa were indigenous to the Middle East I’m sure that scripture would sing its praises in all kinds of ways!

Remember that Luther’s theses set in motion not so much a singular new institution as long journey into new ways of being together, I offer these as food for our thinking and bread for our journey together.

Let us pray. God grant us wisdom to order our common life according to your purposes, and grant us grace with one another in our inevitable failures. But give us vision that we might not perish in the darkness of the present age. Amen.

Martin Luther taught us that we are all the saints, so let us honor his vision and the wisdom that we have inherited from the saints that have gone before us as we sing our closing hymn, For All the Saints.#526

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[1] Thomas Merton, Peace in the Post-Christian Era (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004) 19. This volume of Merton’s work went unpublished for more than 40 years. For a description of the controversy surrounding the work, see the introduction by Patricia A. Burton.

[2] Jimmy Carter, “A Crisis of Confidence,” July 15, 1979; available at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_crisis.html.

[3] Michael Learner, The Left Hand of God (San Francisco: Harper, 2006) 27.

[4] Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005) 3.

[5] Brian D. McClaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervans, 2004) 294.

[6] Learner, ibid. 265.

Rev. Dr. David Ensign