The New Life List: Compassion

Colossians 3:12 Have you ever met someone who was so authentic – so truly themselves, so comfortable in their own skin – someone who didn’t need to pretend or put on a brave front? I think those kinds of people are truly refreshing. I had a youth minister for just one year – my senior year in high school – who was like that. She was 100% herself, all the time. She was so funny, so energetic, so fully alive. She had once been a lounge singer in Las Vegas. Whatever she wanted to do, she would do it, and always do it to the max. I remember our theme that year was something about God’s mystery, so she hosted mystery dinners for every grade, and the kickoff night had costumes, and a maze, and all sorts of other things. She absolutely did things to their fullest. And she admitted when she was wrong, too. She talked about times she had bullied other kids, when she was our age. She was totally honest, and brought out an honest faith in us too. With her, what was on the outside always matched what was on the inside. You never had to wonder what she was really thinking. She was just herself. Our Christian faith is a funny thing – Even in Jesus’ time, his Jewish faith was the same – we don’t talk a lot about whether what is on the outside matches what in inside. Or the other way around, if what is on the inside matches what is on the outside. Now we would call this authenticity, or integrity even. Are we whole – are we true – are we the same person inside as we are outside? Jesus was constantly bickering with the leaders of his faith about how their outward piety, all their rules and rule-following, all their enforcement of the rules, but only selectively – how it didn’t really match with his true faith. Jesus knew they were obsessed with controlling what went in to the body – what people wore, ate, drank, heard. But Jesus said it wasn’t what went in to the mouth but what came out of the mouth that mattered. In other words, what was inside will eventually come out. The truth will eventually come out. If you are thinking hateful things, that hate will eventually come out in some way, no matter how nice you pretend to be on the outside. The outside will eventually match what’s inside. As Christians today we can tend to be much the same as the Pharisees in Jesus’ time. What is on the outside doesn’t match what is inside – or vice versa. I read a quote from a famous Christian writer this week. He says, “Christianity is a lifestyle - a way of being in the world that is simple, non-violent, shared, and loving. However, we made it into an established ‘religion’ (and all that goes with that) and avoided the lifestyle change itself. One could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain in most of Christian history, and still believe that Jesus is one's ‘personal Lord and Savior’ . . . The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on Earth is too great.” Christianity isn’t just a profession of faith that we make. Christianity is a lifestyle. It’s something we live out. It’s not just new life on the inside. It’s about what that new life looks like when we live it. That’s what we’re talking about all this month. What does it look like to live out the new life we have in Christ? What does it look like to be Easter people all the time, not just in our hearts but in the streets? Paul is talking about exactly this in Colossians. In one sentence he sums it up, “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.” Basically Paul is saying: on the inside, you know that you belong to God. You are chosen, you are set apart for a purpose, you are so, so loved. If those things are true, then your outside needs to match that inside. Your clothing, so to speak, what is on the outside, needs to be: compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. If you have this holiness, this love, on the inside, it needs to be shown on the outside. It needs to be your clothing – the first thing people notice about you, before you even say anything. Compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.

Let’s look at these things. Compassion means feeling together with someone else. Throughout the scriptures, old and new testaments, God is described as having compassion on us. Sometimes the same word is translated as mercy or tender mercy. But compassion, in Greek, is funny. It’s often paired with the gut. Sometimes in our modern Bible it is translated as having a “heart of compassion,” because that’s where we think of compassion living in the body today. But in Greek, it was a gut full of compassion. As in, your viscera, your guts, your organs. The dirty stuff you pull out of an animal before you eat it. A gut full of compassion. It isn’t very poetic in English. But we can still understand the feeling that they’re describing. We can still understand that gut-based reaction when we see someone hurting, or see a difficult situation. We can feel it in our gut. Have a gut full of compassion – Paul is saying here to allow yourself to feel with other people. In those times, the poor were not well cared for, the sick were not well cared for, the widows and orphans were left to beg in the streets. Have a gut full of compassion for them – he’s saying. Allow yourself to notice them. Allow yourself to feel for them. Kindness here is similar, but it means more than being nice. It means a useful kindness. Don’t just smile at the people you feel compassion towards. Feed them. And then comes humility and meekness – as if to say, OK, you’ve noticed them, felt for them, and fed them, but don’t get too full of yourself. Don’t think more highly of yourself than you should. Humility means thinking lowly of yourself. Remembering your place in things. And meekness means a kind of gentleness, a mildness. I’ve even heard it described as gentle strength. We’ve all known people who get an idea of some good they want to do – and are willing to be as mean as it takes to get that good thing done. Barking orders to people at the food pantry. Shouting about the way the fundraiser is run. Paul is trying to say, don’t just do good things for people. But do them in good ways. And finally, patience. When other things fail, and they will, be patient. Be patient with the people you’re serving. They might not always receive it well. Be patient with the people you’re serving with. They might not always see things exactly the same way you do. And be patient with yourself. You may not be able to do all these things well, all the time. You will fail. You will have bad days. You will disappoint yourself or other people. Be patient. This is a lifelong process, this new life list. Can you begin to see how these things fit together? We have new life on the inside, and we want to clothe ourselves with it on the outside. It begins with feeling for other people’s needs, then doing acts of useful kindness with them, all the while remembering we’re not God, doing it gently, and being patient when we fail or things don’t go according to plan. Now, all this is well and good, but I know that whenever I hear a list like this, on my good days I think, great, just another to-do I have to add. And on my bad days I think, well, just another thing to fail at. And on my terrible days, I think, when’s someone finally, for once, going to have compassion on meeeee? But all this fretting is exactly why Paul doesn’t address this statement to us individually. This whole passage isn’t to individuals, it is to a group. It can be hard to tell because in English the word “you,” meaning you as a single individual, is the same as the word “you,” meaning all of you. If only we lived in a region of the country that had come up with the perfect word to differentiate between the two – oh wait, we do. You, meaning one person. Y’all, meaning all of you. All y’all. Plural. Paul isn’t talking to you. Paul is talking to y’all. This compassion, this helpful kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience isn’t something we have to do on our own. Just like everything else we’ve talked about. It’s something we do as a group. And it’s something we do so much better, so, so much better, together. On my own, when I’m driving past someone with a cardboard sign I sometimes nod, or give them a dollar or some crackers, or some water, whatever I have. But sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I’m in my own world and don’t even notice them. Sometimes I just don’t want to. Or I don’t have change. Or I’m in a bad mood. But I’ve noticed that when I drive with my husband, the times I’m trying so hard to avoid eye contact, he already has a dollar out and a kind word. Or when he’s looking at his phone, I’m ready. And that’s just with two of us. Imagine what more of us can do, together. If we don’t have to do this alone, it changes everything. We can rely on each other to do what each of us authentically does best, we can remind ourselves to be humble, because there is almost always someone out there who can do exactly what we’re doing, just as well. Real talk. And we can remind each other to be patient, when things don’t work out. We don’t have to do it alone. None of this. It’s hard work, making the outside match the inside. It’s hard work to be mindful of these things all the time. But it reminds me, in a lot of ways, of hiking up a mountain. First of all, it’s never recommended to hike alone, because it’s dangerous. But hiking together we can point things out, that other people may not have noticed. A waterfall, a deer, a flower. A cloud that looks like mickey mouse. That’s sort of like compassion. Noticing. Then we can help one another – be kind in helpful ways. We can hold someone’s hand if they need to cross a big log. We can help them up if them stumble. We can give them sunscreen or bug spray or share trail mix. We can practice together humility and meekness – not going too fast for ourselves, or too fast for other people – setting a gentle pace. And we can have patience, when the trail gets rough, or someone needs a break, or it rains or we lose our path. We could do all this on our own. But I don’t think we’re meant to. And in the end, don’t we want some folks to share the view with? Eventually these good things aren’t things we even have to think about – they’re just how we hike. They’re just how we get from A to B, how we travel as Christians in the world. So this is our challenge this week – does our outside, our life, match the new life we have on the inside? Spend some time meditating on these amazing truths – that you are chosen, that you are set apart for a purpose, that you are so loved by God. And ask how we – together – not on our own – how we can show other people the same. By our compassion, our helpful kindness, our humility, our gentleness and our patience. Thanks be to God. Amen.

#lifesjourney #righteousness