When the Lord saw her he had compassion for her

It was 1967, 40 years ago, the Summer of Love, I was 16 and skinny and ready to be a senior in HS and conquer the world, or at least certain portions of New Jersey.

Out in California John Phillips, of the Mamas and Papas, sat down for 20 minutes and wrote:

If you're going to San Francisco,
Summertime will be a love-in there.

In early June, 40 years ago, we learned that it was 20 years ago that day, that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play and we could get by with a little help from our friends.

And a few weeks later there was the first ever live global TV broadcast by satellite and the Beatles sang “All you need is love”.

1967 was quite a summer for love, from San Francisco all the way to my hometown of Pumpkin Lakes.

We knew that love was a good thing.

But what we didn’t know 40 years ago was how much work it took to keep love going, what we didn’t know 40 years ago was how much courage it took to really love.

When the Lord saw her he had compassion for her

One of the popular words in much of society and in Church life these days is “passion”.

And I smile when I hear it because I have to admit that in the Summer of 1967 no one needed to encourage us to be passionate, that was the primary goal of our lives, but I know that the word has been broadened considerably from our rather narrow and misguided teenage definition.

I read articles all the time on how we need to discover our passion, how we need to pursue our passion, how we need to be passionate about our jobs and our faith and our nation, and I think that they are using the word a bit differently than we did in 1967. But I also realize, because I’m a little older than I was in 1967 – back then I laughed about “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64?”, now it is a rather desperate and understandable plea – but now I realize that we didn’t understand the word “passion” quite right either.

You see, passion is not – in its root meaning – what we care enthusiastically about.

Nor is Passion – in its root meaning – what was going through the hearts of 16 year olds in the Summer of Love.

Passion is about suffering.

You don’t have a passion for food, you don’t have a passion for a TV show, you don’t have a passion for a baseball team – although the way the Yankees season is going, maybe there is some suffering there.

Unfortunate.

Sort of.

But passion is about suffering.

That’s what the word means, it comes from the Latin “Passio”, to suffer, and if modern usage has stripped it of that meaning, well no wonder we fail to understand why we call the suffering of Christ, his passion.

Passion is the suffering that we all know in life, and compassion is the ability to love another enough to be willing to suffer with them.

When the Lord saw her he had compassion for her

So, in the OT lesson, we find the prophet Elijah, who has moved into the home of a non-Jew, the widow of Zarephath, living with her, providing God’s grace and sustenance in the middle of a drought and famine. And when her son dies Elijah suffers with her and cries out to God at the injustice of it – that’s compassion.

And we find Christ, in the NT story, suffering with the widow whose son has died – that’s compassion.

And in both cases the sons of the widows are restored to life, but if that is all that we hear in these stories than we have missed the meaning of the stories.

You see, and this is the reality of Christianity that none of us want to hear, but you see we aren’t meant to be seeking, in scripture and in life, the answer to “what is in this for me?” but rather “how shall I live?”

“How shall I live?”

And the models for our lives in both of these stories are not the dead and then resurrected sons. I’m sure that they were happy about it, but as with Lazarus, their deaths were merely postponed to a future date, which is why we hear nothing more about them, they don’t even get named in scripture.

Nor is the model the widowed mothers who are doing everything right and yet are carrying this enormous load of grief. We pretty much know how to act and we let our feelings lead the way when death comes to those we love. We cry, we yell at God a little, and then we go through the funeral rituals so that we begin, in the words of Jimmy Buffett song, to “breathe in, breathe out and move on”.

No, the models for our living are Elijah and Jesus, the men of compassion, the men who suffer with those who are suffering, the men who chose to allow themselves to suffer.

When the Lord saw her he had compassion for her

Elijah and Jesus had the courage to reach out and care and so they shared the pain that love will often bring us.

And I don’t use courage lightly here.

Elijah did what he shouldn’t have done, he crossed the borders of proper religious people of his day when he went to live in the middle of the Baal-worshipers of Zarephath, he moves in with a single mother, he touches a dead body which was a clear violation of the sanitary laws, something that no good follower of God would ever do.

Except that Jesus did it centuries later. Jesus crossed the borders of acceptable good manners; he interrupted a funeral and also touches the dead, unclean body.

And both of them did it because they shared in the passion, the suffering, of a widowed mother, a marginal member of society.

And who are you and I reaching out to?

Whose pain are we willing to share?

Who will we suffer with?

Which borders of society and culture will we reach across?

Which barriers of old grudges and past mistakes will we put aside?

Have we the courage to love?

Will we risk being rejected?

Will we risk being ridiculed?

Will we risk the inevitable ingratitude as people take us for granted?

And these are just the things that we will experience if we offer our hearts and they are rejected, the pain gets worse when we offer our hearts and they are accepted because then the pain that the others feel becomes fully ours as we suffer with them, as we have compassion.

And yet, isn’t one of the great joys of life the moment when you are at your lowest, when sorrow and failure and darkness seem to have enveloped you and a friend, a spouse, a child, a parent, perhaps even a stranger, comes to you and says “How are you?” and they pause and wait for an answer?

And you know that you are not alone.

It’s been a long time since the Summer of Love.

It’s been a long time since the prophets of Liverpool said that all we needed was love.

We’ve had 40 years to try to figure love out, I’ve had 35 years to try to live it out in marriage and there have been the wonderful, storybook moments along the way, but they aren’t the ones I remember best, and they probably aren’t the kind you remember best. No, the ones I remember best are the selfish ones, the ones where I received love, not the ones where I delivered love, the times when I was lost in sorrow, overwhelmed with guilt, feeling alone with my failures and Debi or one of the kids or one of you said or did the small and perfect thing, reaching across the boundaries that society or I had created and lifting me back to my feet, back to my life.

That is compassion, sacred and healing in its very nature.

And so I let myself suffer with others, more than I used to, all because others have suffered with me.

I cry more than I used to, as I get older, I get teary eyed at dopey movies, I get teary eyed at commercials and I have become one of those people who I used to laugh about, I have to wear sunglasses in a Hallmark store so no one can see my red eyes, all because others have cried with me.

And that is what love is, in is passion with someone, it is a willingness to enter into suffering that isn’t ours and to make it ours.

That is what God did in ancient Bethlehem.

That is what God did on Calvary.

That is what God does in Clover Hill and in all of the places our hearts lead us.

It takes courage to love like that, but the more you do it the more you can do it, the stronger your heart becomes, the deeper your faith becomes.

It takes courage to love like that, but to love without a willingness to suffer, without an eagerness to suffer with the other and to lighten their burden, that is a weak and timid love that, in truth, is no love at all, a love like that will end, in T. S. Eliot’s words from a different context: Not with a bang but a whimper

It takes courage to love.

We didn’t know that in 1967, we thought it just took some music and summer weather and we would be all set. It takes courage to love, but love is worth it, it is not only all we need, it is all we have to face the world with, it is all we have to keep us together and it is all that Christ asks of us, to love one another as he has loved us.

When the Lord saw her he had compassion for her