Day 1247 - Tourists and Pilgrims

The primary readings offered this year by the Revised Common Lectionary over the course of weeks between Easter and Pentecost draw on the Acts of the Apostles. I am interested how many pastors chose to pass over these selections to use the secondary ones in the Revelation of John of Patmos, and the Gospel John.

My interest is not to put down those who chose alternate texts because in reality are there texts in the scripture not worthy of preaching? However, I suggest that we run the risk of giving Acts short shrift in deference to easier preaching.

My reason is that Acts seems to be a text of double intent. True to Luke’s overt intent, it reveals the record of the nature of the Jesus experience and the emergence of the body of believers that has come to be called the Church. On the other hand, the text, as William Willimon points out, seems aimed not at the unchurched but the churched. Acts seems a to be a practical, not intellectual prescription for the faithful.

The word “compassion” buttresses my conclusion. I cannot make you see how the demand for compassion overwhelms every transformed Christian. The only thing I can do is encourage you to understand what Luke is telling us about the very meaning of Christian compassion. 

One can find in Acts almost exact parallels to actions of Jesus. Certain characteristics emerge in Acts. Whether it is Peter or Paul, Steven or Barnabas, John Mark or Timothy, the Philippian, Thessalonian or Roman congregation, every positive step of the growth of the body of believers towards freedom is accompanied not only by grief and heartbreak but is called to be a refuge and solace from  grief and heartbreak. 

Paul is beaten, jailed for acts of grace and apparently eventually executed outside Rome. Stephen is martyred because of his testimony. Paul calls members of his congregations to task on cases of backbiting, sloth, immorality, pride, miserliness (stinginess), decorum in the face of persecution and the like. Slave girls are freed of demons, eunuchs are no longer “dry stumps.” The least, the social outcasts, lead the greatest.

The gospels, and Acts, as Trevor Hudson observes, make it clear that every Christian stands beside a pool of tears, be it from their own eyes or from some poor broken soul on the street.

There is no judgment, no  “If he would just get a job” or “He/She only has themselves to blame. Don’t they know about birth control?” There is no "They can't stay in my backyard."

What is the blind find in Acts is sight. If you are honest with yourself, you also will agree that when you look around you see first and foremost, persons standing in a pool of tears. 

I will not mention names but I know of several pools of tears in congregations I have been blessed to share time. These are people of grace who struggle with unanswered questions around inexplicable tragedies. Perhaps, some of those tears are your own. Perhaps if you looked and thought deeply about it, you would identify the tears of others with your own? Perhaps if you looked deeply you would see that pool of tears behind a smile.

Whether the pool of tears is yours, or of someone you love, they are calling you to compassion, the essence of what Acts demonstrates about the ministry of Jesus. The tears are the call to embrace and exhibit the compassion of Jesus. The compassion he felt as he looked upon the crowds of people, God's children, who followed him around the Sea of Galilee as he sailed across the sea with his disciples looking for a quite place to rest having heard from them of their success on their first solo mission and news of the death of his cousin, and soul mate, John the Baptist. He looked upon the crowd desperately seeking freedom with compassion because he saw them as sheep without a shepherd. Time after time, Jesus looked upon the suffering of God’s children with gut-wrenching compassion. You cannot escape the call for compassion and be true to your faith.

Realize that compassion is first directed at you. It is not just an act of compassion for you, it is a call for you to discover and share your own compassion with others.

It is the compassion the Good Samaritan felt when he saw the wounded, if not dead man in the ditch as he descended the road from Jerusalem. It drove him to risk life, limb and money to treat the wounds, put him of his steed and take the wounded man to an inn leaving money for his care until the Samaritan returned.

It is the compassion the father felt as he saw his long lost son coming down the road home, not dead but alive, but more importantly, not lost but found. This is the son who had demanded his inheritance and left with it spending it profligately on wine and women, eating and living among the swine and finally poverty and despair in a pool of tears until he understood the call to come home having only the the absolute lack of justification to expect anything from the father but the most minimal care, if any at all.

That compassion is not just a “feel good” sense of relief or an afterthought, post feast, about some poor person whose family went to bed hungry. It isn’t some intellectual exercise about social injustice while we drive around in new cars with ipod earplugs in our ears, drawing a salary from a congregation that has little left to give because it has lost the meaning of compassion and giving interviews to news reporters.

You see, you can’t find compassion by thinking about your own misery. You can't find compassion with the intellectual exercise of thinking about the misery of someone in despair, a person on death row, a homeless person who needs more than a place to sleep, a person in a jail cell who needs to understand how to walk the path to Christian vocation. If you cannot find that compassion you are but a tourist, sightseeing, even if you are carrying a placard protesting those who put them in the state of need.
You’ll never find it in some intellectual exercise of a stale theological debate about the nature of the Trinity, or whether we ascend to Heaven, whether we find paradise immediately upon our death or later. On one level all that is pedantry compared to experience.

You see, Jesus said God is the God of the living. If you want to find God, to find the meaning of the Easter event, to have Pentecost be a real, concrete transformation of your being, you are going to have to wade, if not swim in a pool of tears of the living and understand and practice compassion.

When you do that, when you stop being a tourist and become a pilgrim who truly understands the nature of another person’s grief, when you get to the point you are living another’s grief just by standing in solidarity, you will discover what Acts and the gospels are all about. You will understand the compassion Jesus felt as he looked upon God’s suffering children as sheep without a shepherd.

You will understand the power of your random act of grace to the one standing beside a pool of tears. You will understand Christ’s compassion, the compassion that moved the Lord after accomplishing creation to say, “It is Good.”

You will be transformed. You will be what you are called to be, a shepherd.

Grace and peace.