If I asked you for a one word answer, ‘name the value which sets Christianity apart?’ what would you say? Love is good, but I’m looking for something more specific. I wonder for how many of us the words that immediately came to mind were negative: hypocritical? judgmental? Did something like that come to mind? If so, I get it.
Some of us might like not to have to use the label “Christian” at all. The writer Anne Lammott said her friends in San Francisco
“like to tell each other that I am not really a born-again Christian. They think of me more along the lines of that old Jonathan Miller routine, where he said, ‘I’m not really a Jew — I’m Jew-ish.’ They think I am Christian-ish. But I’m not. I’m just a bad Christian…And certainly, like the apostle Peter, I am capable of denying it, of presenting myself as a sort of leftist liberation-theology enthusiast and maybe sort of a vaguely Jesusy bon vivant.”
I know I can identify with that desire not to be lumped in with the so-called Christians.
But what if I asked you, really, what is the true hallmark of Christianity? If it’s not hate, or the agenda of the Heritage Foundation, how would you name the central value of our faith?
I wouldn’t be a good preacher if I didn’t give you at least some answers. So today, I want to argue the hallmark of our faith is compassion. Compassion, the word finds its root in the latin, and means quite literally, “to suffer with” which is why I think it may be our hallmark. We Christians say we believe something truly radical about suffering together. Our faith teaches us that we are “one body” as St. Paul tells us today, one body in Christ. Believing we are one body means the suffering of any is my suffering. We are rooted in compassion.
The Eucharist and Compassion
For those of us who are Eucharistic Christians, for whom Communion is the most regular way we worship, that question of embodied compassion comes up again and again. We gather around the table and we say we share the body of Christ, under the species of bread.
One of my favorite invitations to the Eucharist comes from St. Augustine. “The Body of Christ, behold who you are. Become what you receive.” We practice together this teaching that we are all united, we are one body. We receive what we are. That kind of belief can ruin you for polite society.
There’s a famous banner from the Cathedral in St. Louis. The banner was created in the late 1980s at the request of the Very Rev. Michael Allen, then dean. It read simply “This Church Has AIDS.” In the 1980s and early 90s those words were radical. Remember, in those early days, many Churches were creating policies to be sure people who were HIV positive didn’t drink from the same cup as people without the virus. The federal government was denying funding for research. Dean Allen said, with the banner, “if one part of the body has AIDS, then the body has AIDS. This church has AIDS.” It was a radical call to compassion in a world marked by fear.
Jonathan Myrick Daniels
Our world has too often been marked by fear, rather than compassion. Fifty nine years ago this week, an Episcopal seminarian was martyred in Hayneville, Alabama. Jonathan Myrick Daniels was a seminarian at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts when he heard a radio story about Dr. King calling students to join him in Selma. Initially, Daniels didn’t think much of the call, but something happened in chapel. He heard words from Scripture anew. Daniels wrote about the experience later:
“My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.” I had come to Evening Prayer as usual that evening, and as usual I was singing the Magnificat…Then it came. “He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things.” I knew then that I must go to Selma.
Daniels went to Selma and then stayed in Alabama through the rest of the Spring Semester. Coming back briefly to Cambridge for his exams he returned South that summer. The young seminarian made people angry.
Daniels wasn’t particularly welcomed, even by the Episcopal Churches, in Alabama. It was a tough diocese. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” was partly addressed to the Episcopal Bishop of Alabama. The bishop had asked Dr. King to quiet down, to leave the state. The Episcopalians were the “white moderates” to whom King responded with criticism in the letter. While *he was in Alabama, the seminarian Jonathan tried to integrate a parish against the will of the rector. It did not go well for him.
Failure didn’t slow down his calling. Jonathan Daniels wanted to integrate not just Episcopal churches, but all aspects of society. Along with 29 other activists, he was arrested that summer in Lowndes county for protesting segregation. This county was known as “bloody Lowndes” for its reputation for lynchings and violence against civil rights workers. They transported the protestors to jail in a hot garbage truck, and the group was left in jail cells without air conditioning for four days in the heat of an Alabama August. When they were finally released, they weren’t given transportation home. A leader in the group went to call for a ride, and Daniels accompanied by a Catholic priest named Fr. Richard Morrisoe, and two young black activists, Joyce Bailey and 17-year-old Ruby Sales walked over to buy a cold drink at a local shop.
They were met at the door by an off-duty sheriff’s deputy who leveled his shotgun at Ruby Sales. Myrick Daniels jumped in the way. He was killed instantly. Sales survived, and is a civil rights activist to this day. Dr. King said of his sacrifice, “one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry was performed by Jonathan Daniels.” There seminarian’s face is now carved into the stone of the National Cathedral, because he practiced Christian compassion and without blinking gave his life for the life of another. In 1991 The Episcopal Church named Daniels a martyr, and the Bishop of Alabama was one of the sponsors of the resolution.
“The bread that I will give, is my flesh for the life of the world.” Jesus says.
Mike Brown
Many of you know, I was in St Louis ten years ago, when Mike Brown was killed. I watched as my new hometown became the center of our nation’s debate on race and policing. In the years that followed, through the Ferguson uprising, through the protests over the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others, I have often been stunned by what I would call a lack of compassion, often from those who call themselves Christians. Our society turned the names of victims into political tests.
Are you on one side, or the other? Do you support the police or do you support civil rights? In a world addicted to dualistic divisions, to us and them, compassion is the Christian response, I’d argue. How do we practice compassion for a young man, even one who did something stupid like the petty theft a packet of cheap cigars? Over the years, I’ve heard so many people say Michael Brown was a criminal, as if stealing Swisher Sweets justified his death. True compassion doesn’t allow us to only consider one side, one point of view, one life. In the years after Ferguson, I listened to several police officers and their families, who were scared all the time. When we dig down, we find most abuses of power are enabled by fear. But I had to learn to askHow do we practice compassion for police officers, who never know whether a suspect might be carrying a weapon, because we refuse common sense gun reforms in this country? How do we avoid the political either/ors that are so common? How do we start with compassion?
Implicated in the suffering of the whole body
Time can help bring clarity. The deputy who killed the seminarian Jonathan Daniels was brought to trial, and though the community where Daniels was killed was majority black, the gunman was acquitted by an all-white jury. That initial verdict was devastating. But a nonprofit, the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity, ESCRU, refused to give up. They brought a lawsuit against the state in response to the acquittal. Along with others, they helped force Alabama to integrate its juries. Given enough time, compassion will win against division and hate.
If we say we are Christians, we are implicated us in the suffering of the whole body. Compassion is hardly ever convenient or conventional. Compassion isn’t our society’s immediate default mode. It takes practice. If we say we are Christians, we are asked to practice a radical compassion which can be costly. Frankly, it might be less complicated for us to identity as vaguely Jesus-y.
If we were just vaguely Jesus-y we wouldn’t have to do as Paul tell us and forgive one another. We wouldn’t have to be so inconveniently united with people we find difficult to love. But we’re not vaguely Jesus-y. We’re not Christian-ish. We are Christians, called by God to be one body, even when we disagree, even when we are frustrated, even when having compassion asks a lot.
Our defining teaching about God is as simple as it is radical: God is a God of compassion. Christians believe God chose to suffer with us. Jesus offered his whole body, his whole self. And costly as it may seem, Jesus says this self-offering way of love, this being united in one body, it is for the life of the world. Practicing compassion, practicing embodied love, is meant to be life-giving. Life-giving for us and for the world.
So, if someone asks what it means to be a Christian? My advice? Start with compassion.
Mike Angell 