The Practices of Love: Compassion

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ompassion is love that listens, that seeks to understand the other person. Compassion willingly stays with another person in his or her need, often helping the person find a way through difficulties to something better.

The ultimate moral value is love. The way of love is the way of God’s kingdom, of God’s dream for the world. But what does that love look like? How do we live out the way of love in practice? Critics of love as the ultimate value claim that love does not work, that love does not produce moral behavior or stop abuse and vio-lence. Are there ways of living out God’s love in our lives which can accomplish that?

A COMPASSIONATE GOD

The practices of compassion, grace, and generosity best describe the ways of love, and compassion is the heart of love because it is the heart of God

God as revealed in scripture understood through Jesus’ life and words is a God of compassion. God listens to those who cry out for help. God understands the suffering of people in need because God suffers with us and revealed that willingness to suffer with us most clearly in Jesus. God is patient, kind, gentle, merciful, caring, and supportive. God comes alongside us to help in our times of great need. Indeed God is always with us and is closer to us than we are to ourselves, for we live and move and have our being in God who is life itself.

Christian faith is relational. We are called by God to live in loving relationship with God and with each other, with ourselves and even with creation (the way of shalom). God’s way of being in relationship with us deter-mines our way of being in relationship with God and with all people. So what is God like? What are the charac-teristics of God’s ways of relationship?

Compassion claims a top spot in defining divine characteristics of relationship. Early in the biblical narra-tive, Moses says to God, “Now show me your glory.” [See Exodus 33, 34] And the Lord stood there with Moses, calling out God’s own name, defining the essence of the divine character: The Lord, the Lord, the compassion-ate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.

This proclamation emphasizes love and forgive-ness, but it also proclaims punishment for the guilty. Yet when this refrain of God’s compassion, mercy, and faith-fulness is sung in the Psalms and the Prophets, the last part about punishment is no longer there, as in Psalm 86:15: You, O Lord, are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.

Jesus renews the song in the Gospels with this theme of God’s compassion, mercy, and faithfulness.

Be compassionate [merciful] as your Father is compassionate. [Luke 6:36]

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. [See Matthew 5:43-48]

And Paul lifts up the melody yet again, blending in beautiful harmony with the rest, when he says:

Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us. [Ephesians 4:32-5:2]

The Gospels tell story after story of the com-passion of Jesus. The stories do not need to be retold here, but remember how Jesus touched the leper whom no one else would touch; how Jesus spoke gently to the woman caught in the act of adultery, brought without the man and alone before her accusers, and said, “Neither do I condemn you;” how Jesus held the children whom the disciples would have turned away; how Jesus ate in the homes of people called “sinners” by self-righteous citizens of the towns.

THE COMPASSIONATE FATHER

One story has become for me a narrative backdrop against which I remember my own story. Jesus tells the story of a father with two sons. [See Luke 15] The story is more about the father than the sons, about a compassion-ate father who gave the younger son what he asked for, knowing that it might be wasted, knowing that the early dividing of the inheritance was not according to the rules. In this story we encounter a father who compassionately welcomes his son home after the son squandered every-thing and brought shame on the family name by his behavior.

Perhaps the story is more about the older son than the younger, the son who stayed home and worked hard and remained respected in that town. The father com-passionately went out from the party celebrating the younger son’s return to remind the angry older son that everything the father had was his and that there was love enough for both sons.

THE OLDER SON

I am the older son in the story. The older son was loyal, dutiful, moral, religiously observant, but without any depth of feeling for others. He was anxious, angry, and unforgiving toward this brother who dared to come home after all he had done. I am the older son who knew what was wrong and right, who observed the religious morals of the day, who did all he was supposed to do, and who expected to be the honored son.

At least I was that older son for the first 50 years of my life. I did what was expected of me, stayed within the moral and religious boundaries set for me, and ex-horted others to do the same. And when people broke the rules, and lived outside the boundaries, I knew they were wrong and that they should suffer the consequences and answer to God.

I was not a sinner. I was among the righteous. Or so I thought in my heart. I tithed, I went to church, I kept the rules. And now this brother of mine comes back and my father welcomes him with laughter and food and gifts and celebration? What about me? What do I get for all I have done? Where is the celebration of my life, my faithfulness, my loyalty, my hard work?

I know his heart, for his heart and mind were mine. I was confident of my own righteousness, confident that my beliefs and values were right, for I agreed with the mainstream tradition which had always taught these things. I was confident that I knew right from wrong, and my “brother” was wrong.

I lived in the religious community of the older brother. We have to live by principles, we said. We have the scriptures, and they are clear that what my brother did was wrong. If we don’t live by the rule of law, we will have anarchy in our religion and in the society. Or so we said. Principles and law were more important than people.

If people broke the rules, they were to be con-demned. If they acknowledged that what they did was wrong, they could come back but would have to prove themselves before they could be fully accepted and trusted again. If they had a different idea of what was right and wrong, and refused to acknowledge they had done wrong, the door remained closed. There would be no welcome home, no party, no celebration. They were still lost. This was the community of the older brother. It was my com-munity for a long time.

WHEN MY LIFE CHANGED

Then my life changed. Our 20-year-old son died in a car accident, and my wife and I divorced after several years of the relationship coming apart. How can I speak of these things only with stark words on a page? I felt that my life, as it had been and as I had hoped it would be, had come to an end. The darkness of sadness and grief felt like death to me, like a sudden dying and a slow coming back to life.

I came to understand what Paul said about his own experience: I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. [Colossians 2:20]

Before all that happened, I remember saying to someone, many times, that I could do whatever I decided to do. I spoke not as a rebel or lawbreaker, but in an overly-confident and arrogant way. As a child I learned self-control and was so good at it as a young adult that others considered me rigid and controlling. My choices grew from a root of fear of being embarrassed if I did not maintain control of myself and my circumstances. But my circumstances, of course, included other people, whether my wife, my children, or the members of the con-gregations I served as pastor. To others my decisions to do whatever I thought best felt dominating.

I persevered in my belief that life could be con-trolled. For years I failed to realize that controlling life’s circumstances meant molding other people into my image of what they should be. If it were not so tragic, it would be laughable that I thought I could decide what other people should be and how they should live. Yet that is the world of the older son in Jesus’ parable.

OLDER SON COMMUNITIES

The older son community believes life can be controlled and that we know best how to do it. We are confident in our understanding of moral values, of what behaviors and beliefs are correct and right in the eyes of God. Religiously, our confidence comes from how we read the scriptures of our religion and how we understand our tradition. (Every religion has its own older son community.)

The leaders of religious communities often come from this older son tradition and so their confidence also grows out of their place of authority and power in the organized religious community. In most cultures, including traditional Christian cultures of the western world and the United States, this authority and power interweave with the male-dominated social and family communities as well. Men have been in charge at home, at work, and at church.

That kind of confidence, rooted in positions of authority granted by the religious tradition, too often becomes arrogant and proud, sometimes even abusive toward people who disagree or are on the fringes of those communities. This is where the older son tradition often leads us. I know because I was there.

Older sons often preach compassion as an essential moral value, but the practices of the community often deny its primacy. For example:

• Compassionate conservatism which makes princ-iples more important than people and sacrifices respect for individuals to maintain the principle
• Preaching that proclaims the love of God for all people, then says that if we don’t accept certain beliefs God will send us to hell
• Insisting that the way I interpret certain texts of scripture is the absolute truth and that anyone who disagrees denies the truth and is opposed to God’s will, insisting at the same time that “I love the sinner and hate the sin”

Even though I never went to an extreme, I know

I was part of a larger community which often did. My journey of the past decade has moved me out of that older son community, but the inner tendencies still surface.

A LIBERAL EVANGELICAL

The mind of the older son can be seen both in people characterized as “liberal” and in people charac-terized as “conservative.” No one theological position holds a monopoly on the older brother mindset.

I no longer call myself conservative; maybe I never was. Most conservative Christians would now characterize me as liberal, but categories don’t reflect reality well.

I am evangelical, as I mentioned before, because I believe in the good news of the kingdom. I believe in the authority of the scriptures for my life. I believe in a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ and in eternal life given by God’s grace through Christ. But I am also liberal.

If “liberal” means to be generous and open-hearted toward people and toward God, I claim the title. If being liberal means to commit myself to God’s love as the ultimate moral value, then I accept it. If being liberal means to put people before the principles I believe to be correct, then that’s what I am. If being liberal means to believe that God really does love the whole world and that Jesus came to save and heal the world rather than to judge and condemn it, then I am liberal.

If “liberal” means to believe that God’s essential nature is love and that love is seen most clearly in the compassion, mercy, and forgiveness of God, I gladly accept such a name. God clearly revealed the divine nature in the stories of scripture – to Moses, through the pro-phets, in Jesus – as compassionate at the core, at the heart of God. So if labels were helpful, I might call myself an evangelical liberal or a liberal evangelical.

BORN AGAIN IN LOVE

Let’s go back to what Paul said in Colossians 2:20: I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

In my experience, to be crucified with Christ meant to die as the person that I was and to be born again as a person learning to be like God, not arrogantly taking God’s place but humbly following the ways of God as I understand them. I no longer say that I can do whatever I decide to do. I learned the hard way that such arrogance is not of God.

My son, Phil, died alone in his car one dark night along the road. He was coming home from college for Christmas and driving too late with too little sleep. On a section of road under construction, he hit the side and over-corrected and drove off the other side, slamming into a tree. I wasn’t there to hold him as he died, alone in the darkness. I didn’t know it happened until the next afternoon. I couldn’t have stopped it if I had known.

My wife and I did all we could do, in our humanity and our weakness, to keep together our marriage of nearly 30 years. We talked and talked. We went to counselors. We tried, but we failed. We let go of something that seemed to be killing us. I learned the hard way that I could not save our son’s life or our marriage.

The rigid, controlling, arrogant man I was died. That dead man lived in the darkness of the tomb of grief, of sadness, of anger, of despair, for a long time. It felt like a tomb. I felt alone, cold, numb. But looking back, perhaps it was really a womb. I was being born again. Birth itself follows a long process of formation and growth, learning to feel and to be aware of new things, experiencing what we’ve never known before. My new birth was like that.

I became aware of my own weakness, my inability to control anything including myself, my anger and pride and condescension. And I became aware of other people’s weaknesses, their inability to do what I expected of them, and their own particular humanness and sin. Then I knew we were all on the same journey together. I could not do more than other people. I was no better than other people. What I learned to do was to suffer with them, to be with them in their humanness, their weakness, their sin, and their pain – in our humanness, weakness, sin, and pain.

Compassion marked my new birth, my return to this world from the womb. I returned from the tomb, for it was a resurrection, being raised to new life, as the Bible says. And I came forth from the womb as a new creation in Christ. I am crucified with Christ, Paul wrote, nevertheless I live; yet not I but Christ lives within me.

In these past ten years, my life has been one of growing up in compassion and in love – growing up into Christ, into the compassionate heart of Jesus; learning each day how to live compassionately more than the day before; becoming the person God wants me to be, becoming more like God – kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. [Ephesians 4:32]

For the first time, I began to listen to other people’s stories with true compassion. I had been a pastor for 25 years and had talked and counseled with hundreds of people, hearing them tell their stories. But I had always seen my role as the one who should have the answers, who could help them find solutions to their problems.

Now I understand that what they needed was someone to hear their stories, to listen to their hearts, and to care. They needed compassion, not counsel. They needed love, not solutions. They needed someone to sit with them in the ashes of their sadness, their temptations, their grief, their sins, their weakness, their humanness. They didn’t need another one of Job’s friends – someone who would judge them and tell them what to do. They needed a friend to be with them in the midst of life.

I finally knew that because now that’s what I need-ed from other people. I needed compassion, not judg-ment. I needed love, not condemnation. I needed some-one to listen, to hear, to care, not someone to tell me what to do next.

A NEW ENDING TO THE STORY

I am the older son now, but with a different ending to the story Jesus told. I have gone into the house and joined the party, the celebration of God’s love for everyone who returns home. I am letting go of my arrogant claims of religious knowledge and perfection and am entering the kingdom’s celebration for those who understand that they are not in charge of their lives.

The only life we have is the life given to us by God, the life of Jesus within us. The life I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. It is not my life, it is Jesus’ life. Only Jesus can live it. I will fail every time I try to take it back and control it again. And if I cannot even be in charge of my own life, how could I think I could be in charge of someone else’s life?

THE NATURE OF COMPASSION

Compassion has the humility to not tell other people what to do. It understands that we are not in charge of our own lives, let alone the lives of other people. Compassion allows people to be who they are and gives them up to God, just as we accept who we are and give ourselves up to God. Compassion surrenders any pretense of knowing what is best for other people and allows the Spirit to work in their hearts and lives in whatever way God desires.

Compassion convinces me that I do not have all the answers. It’s easy to say, “Well, the Bible does.” But the church’s experience over 2,000 years is that we seldom interpret the scriptures the same way, and there has never been unanimity in doctrine.

Church fights over biblical interpretation have divided congregations, denominations, and the church around the world time and again, just as they do today. Professing Christians have rejected, abused, imprisoned, tortured, and killed other professing Christians [not to mention non-Christians] over their differences out of the arrogance of the older son. When a community of older sons has the power, compassion is lost.

Compassion persuades me that the mystery of God is beyond my understanding, that God is always working in the world and in people’s lives in ways that I cannot explain and may not even be aware of. The Spirit blows where it will, Jesus said. We often forget that. We want to control the wind of the Spirit. We want to believe that we can tell where the Spirit will move and how the Spirit moves and what people will do if the Spirit is “truly” moving them. Jesus said we cannot do that.

Compassion moves me to listen to people’s stories and learn from them what God is doing in this world. “But we have to test the spirits,” someone will say. “Human experience has to be judged by scripture.” And I would agree with that. But scripture and my interpretation of it are not identical. What I understand it to say is not always what it says. And what I think God may do is not necessarily what God will do. So I listen to human exper-ience, to people’s stories, and read the scriptures, and hold it all up before God and wait for God to continue teaching me what is true and loving.

Compassion and tears go together in my exper-ience. I was seldom without tears for several years, and I cry easily today. In my family men didn’t cry. As a child I shut down my feelings, and tears were seldom part of my experience. Now I know that “rejoicing with those who rejoice” means laughing out loud and that “weeping with those who weep” means shedding real tears with them.

Tears and laughter are both signs of compassion. Their absence in a relationship indicates a lack of com-passion. In the church, do we laugh easily together out of real joy and not with stifled laughter or uneasy laughter at someone’s expense? And do we cry together out of sincere sadness in the moment, ready to shed tears with the one who hurts? These are signs of love, signs of the presence of God, signs of our oneness in Jesus.

In Jesus’ parable, the older son didn’t know how to laugh or cry. He had no compassion for his father or his brother. He refused to enter the house to be with other people. He rejected them because he was convinced he was right and they were wrong. He could not forgive nor accept his younger brother, and he could not understand why his father did. Perhaps he could not forgive his father.

An older son community does not know how to laugh or cry together well. Conversations, prayers, and preaching staunchly proclaim their self-perception of faithfulness to the truth and to God, but God’s own love and willingness to forgive and to accept others seem to be lacking. I wonder, sometimes, if they can forgive God for accepting people they have rejected.

Compassion calls me to behavior and actions I still struggle with. When I see obviously handicapped people, I still sometimes look away. My discomfort with their appearance or physical weakness or disability makes me feel helpless. I know it’s not really about them; it’s about my own weakness. But I’m sure they notice at times how I flinch or look away. They see my discomfort.

God’s call to compassion shouts to me through Jesus’ words in Matthew 25 about feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, sheltering the homeless, visiting the prisoner – and by implication doing whatever I can to help the poor and the weak in our communities. Jesus’ words reverberate like an echo chamber, pounding my heart open to go beyond anything I have yet done to help the poor.

I remember James’ words which demand an answer: How can I see someone in need and pray for them and send them away without help and think that I have true faith? I don’t like those words because they make me feel helpless. What can I do in a world where the needs are so great?

COMPASSION AND ABORTION

Compassion calls us to be life-giving in all we do. And I struggle with that. I am pro-life because God is God of the living. God created all life, and we are responsible for encouraging and preserving life.

Human beings do not come to life just at the moment of birth. Abortion – even natural abortion like an early miscarriage – always means a human being, even in the form of a fetus, has died. Life-giving responses to pregnancy would never make abortion a first choice; indeed, it would always be a final choice. It certainly is for the forming infant.

Yet life-giving responses to difficult or unwanted pregnancies may demand choices which fall between the first and the final choices available to us. The life of the mother, both as a physical necessity and as a matter of living responsibly and with dignity, may elicit a com-passionate choice for her which would end the pregnancy.

I know that many pro-life advocates reject abor-tion under any conditions. Some demand that it be called murder. I also know that Jesus never spoke about abor-tion. So we don’t know what he would say. I also know the Bible does not talk about medically-induced abortions. So we have no direct word from scripture about the matter.

Compassion for the woman and for the unborn child might well lead us to decisions which a rigid pro-life position does not allow. Respect for the woman demands that we at least consider the circumstances of the preg-nancy, the irresponsibility and perhaps abuse of the man involved, the potential consequences of giving birth, and similar factors. Compassion for the unborn child might mean considering what kind of life that child would have and sometimes suggest that ending the pregnancy is more compassionate, more life-giving, than giving birth.

Compassion often leads to difficult choices. The poverty, abuse, and violence of our world make it im-possible at times to choose what normally would be best or right. I am pro-choice as well as pro-life because I know that the “best” or “right” choice is not always open to us. It is not always a possibility. Sometimes life has become so complex and difficult that we must make choices we don’t want to make. I am also pro-choice because the choice is not mine to make. I am not that woman, and I cannot judge her heart.

Many Christians who call themselves pro-life also supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq where over 1,200 Americans – not to mention perhaps 100,000 Iraqis, in-cluding unborn children – have died as I write this. Can such an invasion ever be the “best” or “right” choice? Even for people who supported the military action, surely it was not the first choice. If they believed there had been some other way, would they have thought the U.S. should have invaded? I hope that most pro-life Christians would give a negative answer.

Pro-life principles, to be consistent, must respect the lives of all people. How can we support a ban on abortions and support an all-out military invasion of another country, knowing that it must result in destruction and death for many people? How can we support a ban on abortions and support the dissemination of automatic weapons and the state-sponsored killing of other human beings in prison?

Compassion is pro-life. But pro-life is something more than a narrow opposition to abortion. Compassion is life-giving, desiring life for all human beings. It makes us willing to do whatever we can to save lives and to make those lives we save as safe and strong and stable as possible.

COMPASSION AND HOMOSEXUALITY

God’s call to compassion moves me in directions I would not have gone in the past. As a leader in the older son community, I confidently taught an interpretation of the scriptures which said that sexual intimacy between persons of the same gender was sinful and unacceptable. I voted for years against every effort to say otherwise.

After my new birth experience, as I began to grow in the ways of compassion, as I began to listen to the stories of people who are gay and lesbian, the Spirit moved my heart and mind to walk a different path on this journey.

I heard people say consistently that just as I had known from childhood that I was attracted to persons of the opposite gender, they had known they were attracted to persons of the same gender. They had the same desires and feelings I had, but in a different way.

My memories of being attracted to a girl go all the way back to first grade, to a little girl who rode the same school bus. In the third grade, I had my first real “love” who I walked with after school. I remember girlfriends in sixth grade, in ninth grade, and on through high school and into college. I even remember some of their names.

Other people saw all those relationships as cute when I was younger and acceptable as I grew older. What must it be like for people whose attraction from those early years is for someone of the same gender if almost no one thinks it’s cute or acceptable?

Many of them had learned, as I had, from church and culture that same-gender sexual intimacy (commonly called homosexuality) is sinful. They struggled against their feelings and desires. They felt them as normal for them but were constantly told they were abnormal, even sinful. Many tried to change who they were. They dated and even married in heterosexual relationships and found them-selves in despair, for they knew it felt wrong for them.

I wish Jesus had said something about homo-sexuality, but he did not. In all the Bible, there are only a handful of direct references. I returned to the scriptures and read books on all sides of the question of whether such relationships are right or wrong. And I have come to an understanding of scripture that God desires love and faithfulness to the other person in a relationship, but that the Bible is silent on whether people of faith can live in a lifelong relationship with a person of the same gender.

The creation stories, in Genesis 1-2, focus on the creation of a man and a woman, made in God’s image and given responsibility for the rest of creation. The necessity of two people being able to “increase in number and fill the earth” requires them to be male and female. Jesus understood this story [see Matthew 19:1-9 and Mark 10:1-12] to mean that God intended two people to continue in a faithful relationship throughout their life together. Jesus was responding to a question, asked out of the hardness of some men’s hearts, about whether men should be allowed to divorce their wives for just any reason. These texts do not speak about homosexuality but about the importance of a mutual and faithful commitment to the other person, just as God is faithful to us.

The story of Sodom [Genesis 19] is often used to condemn homosexuality because the men of the city wanted to have sex with these two angels who looked like men. But sexual orientation is not the issue. Rather the story at that point is about violence and rape, perhaps even about the ancient tradition of hospitality.

Then and now, heterosexual men commonly use homosexual rape as a tool for achieving power and dominance over strangers, in war and in prison, for instance. Lot even offered his daughters to the men, believing he could appease their violent lust for power, but the angels prevented that.

There is nothing in the story remotely similar to committed gay and lesbian relationships. Ezekiel 16:49 offers another view that the sin of Sodom was that the people were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned and they did not help the poor and needy. Those are sins prevalent in a heterosexual society and have nothing to do with sexual orientation.

Prohibitions against homosexual behavior in Leviticus 18 and 20 are surrounded by prohibitions against a number of things which are usually accepted today, such as creating hybrid plants, wearing clothing with multiple fabrics, eating steaks cooked “rare,” trimming our hair and beards, and getting tattoos. This “holiness code,” as it is commonly called, also permits some things which are normally condemned today, such as polygamy and slavery.

If the scriptures allow us to understand any of these laws to be no longer applicable – such as polygamy and slavery laws – are we not free to reconsider all of them in the same way?

Romans 1:26-27 is the only text to include women in the discussion of same sex relations. The question for us is whether what Paul describes is in any way the same thing as a committed, monogamous relationship between two persons of the same sex.

What Paul talks about is how people have refused to glorify God, their Creator, and to be grateful to God, and to worship God. Rather they turned to idols, to “gods” of their own making. In that day people commonly visited temples dedicated to the worship of various gods, and that “worship” often included sexual relations with temple prostitutes, both men and women. In the context of this chapter, many people agree that the sexual relations described here were in the context of idolatrous worship and are not descriptive of committed same-gender relationships.

In the New Testament [1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10], two Greek words at the heart of the current debate probably refer to men who regularly engaged in sex with young boys for their own pleasure. That is pedophilia or pederasty, not just homosexuality, certainly not what gay and lesbian Christians experience. Both verses are in the context of describing how some people continue to abuse other people, to refuse to worship God, to be unfaithful to people and to God, to treat other people and themselves without respect or honor. Gay and lesbian Christians would as quickly condemn such behavior as anyone else.

Given this too brief discussion of these scripture texts, is a person’s sexual orientation even a matter of concern to us in the church? Our concern is to be people who worship God, who are faithful to God and to people, who do not abuse but rather respect and honor other people and themselves. Our concern is to encourage faith-ful, committed relationships of love and grace and faith. If gay and lesbian persons live such lives, the scriptures seem silent on the question of their sexual orientation.

COMPASSION’S CALLING

Some of you reading this book may be ready to discard it right now and declare me wrong and heretical. But if you have read this far, is it not because you know that love is the ultimate moral value and that the first outward signs of that love are compassionate attitudes and actions toward other people?

I readily acknowledge my own discomfort with my journey into new interpretations of scripture and new principles of human behavior. Yet I know the One com-ing alongside me in this journey and guiding me on the path is One I can trust.

Because God loves the world, I am called to love the whole world. Because God loves the poor, I choose to love the poor. Because God cares about the deep pain of women considering abortion and cares deeply about people in Iraq and prisoners on death row, I care deeply about them. Because, I am convinced, God freely accepts people of faith and faithfulness without regard to the sexuality which is normal for them, I accept them as well.

God’s call to compassion includes a call to political involvement at some level. That remains a mostly unexplored area of calling for me. I grew up in a home where politics was barely mentioned, and until I was a young adult I seldom read the newspaper or watched the news on television. The world was mostly unfamiliar to me. As a Baptist minister in smaller churches in Kansas for nearly 30 years, the common expectation (which I accepted) was that I would not be involved in or even mention politics. Stick to religious matters. That was the rule.

Only in the past decade have I begun to read the Bible differently and see that God’s dream for this world is political as well as personal. God desires to heal and to save the individual; but God desires to heal and to save nations and the whole creation as well.

Compassion for people who are poor, diseased, handicapped, alone, imprisoned, shunned, grieving, and for people who hurt in any way is central to how the scriptures describe God. God’s compassion calls me to share the same concern. But so much of the world’s poverty and misery come out of decisions made by government and corporate leaders. The system we live in keeps people in poverty and in oppressive conditions.

Political decisions include the laws of a nation or community which regulate corporate and business inter-ests. As long as those laws and regulations give preference to people who have money and who belong to certain majority groups, poverty and oppression will continue. God favors the poor and oppressed, not the rich and powerful or people who happen to be in the majority.

Can God’s dream for shalom and for the kingdom be realized in this world? That has been the question of the prophets and poets – and the poor – in every age. It has not always been the question of the church or of its leaders. The time is now not only to ask the question but to work for an answer, to work for the Kingdom and to seek shalom for the world.

Compassion continues to drive me to new principles, new behaviors, and a new sense of calling in life. I share my story with you in the hope that you may recognize something of your own story and perhaps hear more clearly God’s calling in your life to live in love and compassion, to live a life of love just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us. [Ephesians 5:2]

 The Practices of Love: Grace