Sermon: Compassionate Mentoring

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Compassionate Mentoring

By Charles Rush

October 7, 2001

rk Twain was taking a train trip. He didn't want to carry his brief case with him so he asked a baggage handler if he thought the briefcase was strong enough to be checked and placed in the baggage compartment. The baggage handler shrugged, took Twain's case, and promptly hurled it to the pavement. “That sir”, he said, “is what she'll get in Philadelphia.” Then he picked it up and struck it a couple times against the side of the train car. “And that”, he continued, is what she'll get in Chicago.” Finally, he threw the case to the ground, stomped it causing the author's books and papers to spill out on the ground. He said, “That's what she'll get in Sioux City.” As Twain watched in disbelief, the man nodded at the now mangled case and said, “If you're going any farther than Sioux City, sir, I'd suggest you carry it on yourself.”

An expensive and inefficient lesson, no??? This summer Kate and I were visiting in Venice. In the middle of the night, we were awakened to an explosion that rocked the building. It was a bomb that went off in the shopping district near the Rialto bridge about 5 blocks away. The bomb shattered about 15 shops in the area that sold jewelry mostly. We were standing around in the early morning with other shop owners, watching the police work in the cordoned area, asking if anyone knew what the cause was. It was definitely a bomb and not an accident. The local reporter thought that it might have been a protest against the G-8 meeting or someone protesting globalization but no one had taken responsibility. I'm standing with these shop owners and hotel managers, and I venture a tentative, “… if you wanted to protest some policies of the G-8, aren't there more direct forms of protest than blowing up a bunch of jewelry stores for tourists in Venice…” and I shrugged my shoulders. Several of them chimed in at once, “sure… but this is Italy.”

I called someone this week to check on how they were doing. They said, “okay, I guess, but I'm still haunted.”

I said, “you mean by stuff you saw?”

“No, … sure but more by the question.”

I said, “you mean, ‘where was God in all of this'?”

“No, not really… I'm still wondering, ‘what was that?' What were we supposed to learn from all that? Do you have a clue? I've been listening to people on the radio, reading all the papers, I swear I still don't understand what the hell they were trying to say. Do you?” The answer is, of course, “In a way, but not really, and really never, not ever.”

The mood of our country is suddenly changed. One of our neighbors told me that last spring, his son was asked in Elementary school to name a hero. The kid wrote down “My Dad”. Naturally, the Dad was ecstatic when he learned of this news. His son had drawn a picture of him and the Dad was admiring the drawing. The Dad said to him, “son, why did you pick me for your hero?” There was some silence. The son said, “Well, I couldn't spell Arnold Schwarzennager.” That will keep you from an inflated sense of self… This week, the Dad was holding for me to see another picture. He pulled it from his son's early ouvre of artwork at ‘Back to School' night. It was a simple picture that said “Hero” on top and it had a guy with a big red fire hat on top. We just stood there in silence for a minute.

It is a different mood. Someone said to me, a banality Ministers the world over hear at times like these, after a prayer service. They said, “So good to be in Church Reverend, so sad that it takes something like this to get us to the sanctuary.” Sometimes, I want to say, “you know, I'd rather have all those Mom's and Dad's back”, but I don't. They mean well. And the reality is that we are changed and open to certain things, we weren't open to hearing- like the precious, simple virtue of compassion.

In our passage this morning, Jesus exercises that kind of compassion. In this story, he is surrounded by moralistic clerics- and God knows there are more than a few, now as then. A woman comes into the room where Jesus is meeting with them and wipes his feet. This is a woman, they say to themselves, that Jesus ought to know what kind of woman she was. This act of washing Jesus' feet, to be fair, is widely regarded as a fairly risqué thing to do. It was sensual in the full sense of that word- not only with a sexual undertone but also full of humanity.

Jesus says to the Pharisees, “two guys are in debt to the same banker. One owes $3.5 million. The other owes $12 million. The banker cancels both their debts. Who do you think is more grateful?”

Jesus is talking about a spiritual disposition. We ought to live out of compassionate forgiveness. That ought to be our basic disposition. It is very hard to live that way and we have to return to it, but that is the better way for us spiritually. And secondly, that is the way we teach others.

I know this is difficult to hear at the moment, but maybe that is good. Profound forgiveness, profound reconciliation is as difficult as it is important.

Profound forgiveness is deeply powerful because profound guilt is powerful. Sometimes it takes decades to work through like it.

Jesus suggests that we be people who live out of the well-spring of compassionate forgiveness. He suggests that we be people that we want others around us to grow, that we grant them a fertile ground of grace and acceptance and encouragement that will lift them up.

It is difficult to maintain in our families, let alone in any wider social circle. The self-help group Landmark, speaks of our ‘rackets' that we all have, internal games we come back to that derive from ways we have coped with frustration or exclusion in the past. In a different way, most (if not all) marriages have their own rackets. Your spouse does something that annoys you and you have some little response, usually an acerbic little barb. Over time, you repeat this and you repeat this, and it becomes less of a game and more of an autonomic response- an instinctual reflex.

Combine this with

It is a benign form of score-keeping. But when relationships really begin to falter, score keeping becomes the dominant mode of relating. We keep each other frozen in the clichés that surround our rackets and ‘I told you so' springs readily to the lips. No one wants to make the first move towards break out for fear of having their good deed punished… again. Distance gives way to bristling hostility and a ‘zero tolerance policy' and we live a good deal of the day out of our lower selves altogether.

Add outside pressures that can't be changed and alcohol and you have Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor shredding each other slowly in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

And in divorces won't settle, that is all that is left, rackets that keep ex-spouses the predictable creep, an endless score-keeping of who owes who what. It is miserable as many of you know personally.

It is entirely possible to grow old gracelessly. And why? Why watch people around you lose their creativity? Why see them become tentative and withdraw their tender selves? There is no joy in winning the “I told you so” game. It is just deadening… spiritually speaking.

Years ago, now, I had a conversation with a friend who had fallen in love with this girl… I mean hard. He was down for the count. A couple of us had taken it upon ourselves to check and make sure he was okay. He listed off her considerable attributes. Finally, I said, ‘have you two had a fight yet?' ‘Sure', he said, ‘I love the way she fights.' He went on to describe what we didn't need to know. He excuses himself for a minute. My other friend says to “I love the way she fights? Gag me.” Then he said, “this won't last.” And I thought to myself, “Maybe not… but it will last as long as he lives out of his gracious, compassionate side.”

How wonderful to be able to keep that open flexibility, to be able to really live in a way that has convictions but remains open, that expects standards with others but is creative in forgiveness, that celebrates growth of any kind, and makes a space for expressions of compassion and humanity with other people.

There is a mature gentleman that works out at the gym with me from time to time. He is well into his second decade of retirement. He wears a T shirt that says “A work in progress: your patience please”. Make space for compassion. Live out of the power of reconciliation.

As Jesus said, “I tell you, he great loves proves that her many sins were forgiven her, where little has been forgiven, little love is shown (Luke 7:47). Love, forgive, empower.

Amen.