Jesus, Buddha, Martin Luther King Jr., Francis of Assisi, Dorothy Day, the 14th Dalai Lama, Harriet Tubman, Mother Theresa, Thich Nhat Hanh, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Henri Nouwen, and many unnamed women and men in history: What do they have in common.
This morning I am focusing on two verses, Pslam 33:5, “Earth is filled with the compassion of the Lord,” and the other in Luke 6:36. “Be compassionate as Abba God is compassionate.” The usual English translation is usually translated “merciful.” For the Hebrews, the root word for compassion is the “womb-like (racham).” In Jeremiah, God speaks of care for a child,, “Therefore my womb trembles for the child; I will truly show motherly-compassion upon my child.” When the Hebrew scriptures speaks of God’s compassion, it denotes a “wombishness.” What does it mean to say God is like womb? Marcus Borg answers,
Like a womb, God is the one who gives birth to us — the mother who gives birth to us. As a mother loves the children of her womb and feels for the children of her womb, so God loves us and feels for us, for all of her children. In its sense of ‘like a womb,’ compassionate has nuances of giving life, nourishing, caring, perhaps embracing and encompassing. For Jesus, this is what God is like.(Marcus Borg)
In both testaments, the word compassion is used 145 times, mostly describing God or Jesus in the gospels. In the first three gospels, Jesus is described as having or feeling compassion (splagchnizomai) –literally, “moved so deeply that you feel it in the pit of your stomach.”
In his baptism and wilderness experience, Jesus was led by a Spirit Guide, the Holy Spirit in the image of a dove, into a vision quest in the wilderness. There he learned by listening and being attentive to life in the wilderness and the Spirit of God that resided there. There he learned the meaning of the prayer of Psalm 33:5: “Earth (the land) is filled with compassion of the Lord.” Jesus understood the central characteristic or feature of Abba God is compassion. He would encourage his disciples and audience to ‘be compassionate as God is compassionate. That he urged them to be like a womb as God is like a womb. To view and act like a womb to feel love and act caring as God acts. God has provided the Earth as a life-giving gift that nourishes and sustains our lives. The compassion of the earth is the gift of life, the nurturing gifts that make our lives possible: air we breathe, the land produces abundance and food, the water is that quenches our thirst and vital to all life, and the healing dynamics of the Earth for us. Earth is understood as maternal, a mother, who compassionately provides for all life. Jesus discovered that God’s compassion was deeply embedded in the natural world, created as sacred and gift for abundant life. He heard the voice of the Spirit within a world created as, sacred and beloved—within which all life belongs. Humans were integrally part of this sacred and beloved created world of life and gifts that sustain life. God’s Spirit was a primal force, a wild grace and impulse of God’s compassion in the world. Jesus called this kin-dom, not kingdom.
Jesus learned that all life and the Earth were interdependent upon each other for life and flourishing. The Earth and its components, all creatures, were “good” and beloved were God’s original gift we were born into live and relate as a beloved community. Compassion was the spiritual force, impulse embedded in our hearts and soul, and whose dynamics of mercy, love, and forgiveness the Spirit commissioned him to preach, heal, and practice in the social world that was broken and alienated. Jesus practiced a God’s fierce compassion that did not accept outsiders, it did not accept.
Rodney Stark a sociologist of religion, studied the growth of Christ community from its beginning. Te Christ community became an urban movement, spreading to the cities of the Roman Empire. He estimated that there 5000 about 50 CE, about 50,000 at 100 CE, 200,000 at 200 CE, and 4 million by 300 CE. What led to the exponential growth of the Christ community. There plague in the mid 2nd and 3rd centuries ….The Christians stayed in the cities and compassionately cared for their own members and for non-Chrsitians. Their witness led to that growth of the Christ community.
In my book, God is Green: An Eco-Spirituality of Incarnate Compassion, the first chapter is entitled, “Snakes, Worms, and Compassion.” It was strange title to me since I have a phobia of snakes, especially, poisonous snakes.
The chapter begins with a medieval historian at UCLA, Lynn White, who wrote an article for Science magazine in 1968, “The Origin of the Ecologic Crisis.” His article appeared two years before the first celebration of Earth Day in 1970. He argues that the Christian reading the text in Gen. 1:28 where God instructs humanity, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it and have dominion over the earth.” He observed that Christianity was the most anthropocentric religion, meaning human-centered or privileged. Over the centuries, this verse has led Christians to justify exploiting and recklessly dominating nature for greed, profit, and God.
Dr. White received a violent backlash from Christian leaders and many theological scholars for his article. He was called “godless, secular,” and, of course, a “junior antichrist in partnership with Communist Russia.” He was not godless atheist: he was a “PK,” a “preacher’s kid.” His father was Presbyterian minister. All sorts of biblical scholars played linguistic gymnastics to disprove that the Genesis instruction really meant “subjugating and dominating the earth.” Lynn White offered a solution to the ecological crisis with less insight than we now have about climate change and environmental destruction by humanity. He argued that a technological fix was not the solution, but he looked to the examples of St. Francis of Assisi and Albert Schweitzer. Almost everyone ignored his models for a solution. But White “believed in the Holy Spirit was still whispering to us,” and looked to a spiritual solution to the ecological crisis. Most critics ignored his examples.
This led me to play detective. I learned that as young man of sixteen he traveled to South Asia and recorded an experience then in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. He reminisced about an event of a road construction with a Scottish Presbyterian manager and indigenous Buddhist laborers. The workers came to halt in the work. There were a series of large sand mounds, and they refused to destroy them to make way for highway construction. These mounds housed snakes, and they refused to destroy the homes of snakes. White writes, the workmen spared (these nests) not because they were afraid of snakes, but that the snakes had a right to their houses so long as they wanted to stay there. He notes, ”If the workers had been Presbyterian Christians, the snake nests would have been destroyed.” My Buddhist radar went off, the workers were Buddhists and were ingrained with notions of compassion not to harm or create suffering. I read his follow-up essays years later. He wrote, “I am searching for ways to regain a perception of spirituality of all creatures and demote man’s absolute monarchy over nature.” (God is Green) I want you hear his prophetic words of compassion:
Do people have the ethical obligations towards rocks? To almost all Americans saturated with ideas historically dominant in Christianity…the question makes no sense at all. If the time comes when any considerable group of us that the question is no longer ridiculous, we may be on the verge of a change of value structures that will make possible measure to cope with the growing ecological crisis. One hope that there is enough time left. (God is Green)
Bishop Stephen Charleston, a member of the Choctaw nation, looks at Jesus’ vision quest in the wilderness. He writes about the first challenge that Jesus faced:
He pays attention to the stones around him in the desert, And in his hunger, he imagines the stones as loaves of bread on the desert floor teach him? Are they physical nourishment for him or spiritual nourishment of a different kind? (God is Green)
Stones are the eldest of living things for the Choctaw. And Jesus listened to the stones who told him they embodied the divine. The stones led back to spiritual balance from temptation and thus Jesus professed “the people do not live by bread alone but every word that come from the mouth of God?”
No wonder Dr. White turned to Francis of Assisi who imitated Jesus’ compassionate solidarity with the suffering: with the poor, the lepers, outsiders, and even with the more human life.
The saint understood human beings as creatures and a democracy of all nature and biokind because all of us children of the Creator. Francis in his Canticle, spoke of “Brother Sun and Sister Moon” and view all creatures as sibling creatures.
White takes up the notion that all nature are kin with a powerful understanding of compassion promoted by Jesus the Christ and the Buddha. He affirms,
…Today we have the creaturely companionship not only of the flowering trees that so enrapture…we can sense our comradeship with a glacier, a subatomic particle, or a spiritual nebula. Man must join the club of creatures. They may save us from ourselves. (God is Green)
Francis of Assisi was a perfect model in being “like a womb” for our times of climate crisis. He understood that to love is to be in relationship. He called the Earth “Mother.” And it was not any new ge spirituality or paganism. If we can love one person, one plant, one animal, one special place, there is no reason to that we extend that love to all creatures, all life, and the whole Earth. Francis taught a compassionate love for all creatures. If we can love our creaturely selves, then we can extend that love to our creaturely neighbors, both flora and fauna, and even to the Earth. We are creaturely siblings, and he viewed all creatures and all creation through the eyes of the Creator as “beloved.” His spirituality was viewed as too radical, then, and even now. But just a week ago was the feast day of Francis of Assisi. White may have drawn on Buddhist notions of compassion, but there are strong roots in Jesus’ womb-like compassion dnd Franics of Assisi.
Let me say a few words about the other example of womb-like compassion, Albert Schweitzer—a Lutheran clergy, theologian, musicologist and accomplished organist, went to medical school and became a doctor, and served the poor in the Congo. But he cared for not only humans but also animals. He wrote a book A Reverence for Life and won a Noble Peace Prize for his compassionate, womb-like medical care of indigenous Africans as well as non-human animals. He wrote, “The ethics of reverence for life is noting but Jesus’ great commandment to love…” He also observed,
Wherever you see life—that is, you! In everything, you recognize yourself again…a compassionate sharing of experience with all life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life…We are ethical if we abandon our selfishness, if we surrender our estrangement toward other creatures, and share in and empathies with that from their experience which surrounds us. (God is Green)
Lynn White draws upon his own Christian traditions of compassion—Jesus, Francis of Assisi, and Albert Schweitzer and taps into the Buddha and his path of compassion. The path of compassion is attentive to the suffering of the poor, vulnerable both human and the more human life. Jesus’ commandment to love your neighbor include the trees, the waters, the mountains, creatures, the snakes, worms, insects ,and the Earth herself. I applaud the work of David Houseal and Windsong in bridging indigenous spiritualities and lifeways that understand nature as kindred and Earth as Mother—all my relatives. The Lakota Sioux use the phrase mitakuy oyasin (all my relations) to refer to the interconnection of every member of creation. All my relatives sound similar to Francis’ Canticle of Creatures where speaks of nature and all creatures as siblings.
The challenge to imitate God’s womb-like compassion invites us to a path of compassion to alleviate the human harm and corporate destruction of life on Earth and all life. We are part of the web or community of life. The path of compassion is transformational by breaking down the barriers of self-centeredness and placing ourselves as fellow creatures in the web of life.
Blessing;
Praised be You, my Lord, with all Your creatures,
especially Brother Sun, Who is the day and through whom You give us light. And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendour;
and bears a likeness of You, Most High One.
Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars,
in heaven You formed them clear and precious and beautiful.Praised be You, my Lord, through Brother Wind,
and through the air, cloudy and serene, and every kind of weather,
through whom You give sustenance to Your creature