David's Blog

Grounds for Compassion - Midweek Message 10th June


Dear Friends,

Following on from Sunday’s sermon, I wanted to think a little more with you on the subject of compassion and particularly as that relates to one particular issue raised by the death of George Floyd on May 25th in Minneapolis, USA.

Remember what compassion means?  Fellow feeling – feeling (passion) with (com) another person in their situation, moved in your heart by their plight. Such compassion for others, for those in any form of need, marked the ministry of Jesus. Some years ago, BB Warfield wrote an article entitled ‘The Emotional Life of our Lord’ in which he noted that in the gospels, the emotion most frequently attributed to Jesus was compassion. (see for example Matthew 9.36;14.14;15.32;20.34) Significantly, in each of these cases, Jesus compassion resulted in his acting in some manner to alleviate the particular need that had aroused the compassion – a call to prayer (9.36), feeding the hungry (14.14,15.32), healing the sick (20.34).

How is compassion aroused? It is aroused when we try to place ourselves in the shoes, in the situation of the person  before us, when we try to understand how the world looks, how the world feels from where they are, which may of course be very different from the way it looks or feels to us. In seeking to understand, attentive listening is vital. As one writer put it: Listening is where compassion and wisdom begin.  So following the death of George Floyd, I  have found myself trying to listen to voices which help me to understand particularly how the world looks and feels from the point of view of many African Americans in the USA and along with them, many across our world and indeed within our own society, who have seen and experienced prejudice, discrimination, injustice and violence because of the colour of their skin.1

Firstly, some extracts from an article entitled George Floyd and Me2 by Shai Linne, who is a Christian hip-hop artist. He had been asked by a fellow (white) Christian how he felt in the wake of the death of George Floyd. Initially, he said he had hesitated to reveal how he was truly feeling for fear of being misunderstood but he continued,

Sister, I am heartbroken and devastated. I feel gutted. I haven’t been able to focus on much at all since I saw the horrific video of George Floyd’s murder…

This is about how being a black man in America has shaped both the way I see myself and the way others have seen me my whole life. It’s about being told to leave the sneaker store as a 12-year-old, because I was taking too long to decide which sneakers I wanted to buy with my birthday money and the white saleswoman assumed I was in the store to steal something. 

It’s about being handcuffed and thrown into the back of a police car while walking down the street during college, and then waiting for a white couple to come identify whether or not I was the one who’d committed a crime against them, knowing that if they said I was the one, I would be immediately taken to jail, no questions asked…

It’s about walking down the street as a young man and beginning to notice that white people, women especially, would cross to the other side of the street to avoid walking past me—and me beginning to pre-emptively cross to the other side myself to save them the trouble of being afraid and to save me the humiliation of that silent transaction.

It’s about having to explain to my 4-year-old son at his mostly white Christian school that the kids who laughed at him for having brown skin were wrong, that God made him in his image, and that his skin is beautiful—after he told me, “Daddy, I don’t want brown skin. I want white skin.” 

Secondly there was an article by David French, who is a Christian lawyer and writer, entitled American Racism – we’ve got so far to go3 in which he reflected on his own experience as a white father living in Tennessee who, with his wife, adopted Naomi, a little girl from Ethiopia:

I freely confess that to some extent where I stood on American racial issues was dictated by where I sat my entire life. I always deplored racism—those values were instilled in me from birth—but I was also someone who recoiled at words like “systemic racism.” I looked at the strides we’d made since slavery and Jim Crow and said, “Look how far we’ve come.” I was less apt to say, “and look how much farther we have to go.” 

Then, where I sit changed, dramatically. I just didn’t know it at the time. I went from being the father of two white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed kids to the father of three kids—one of them a beautiful little girl from Ethiopia. When Naomi arrived, our experiences changed. Strange incidents started to happen.

There was the white woman who demanded that Naomi—the only black girl in our neighbourhood pool—point out her parents, in spite of the fact that she was clearly wearing the coloured bracelet showing she was permitted to swim.

There was the time a police officer approached her at a department store and questioned her about who she was with and what she was shopping for. That never happened to my oldest daughter. 

There was the classmate who told Naomi that she couldn’t come to our house for a play date because, “My dad says it’s dangerous to go black people’s neighbourhoods.” 

I could go on, and—sure—some of the incidents could have a benign explanation, but as they multiplied, and it was clear that Naomi’s experience was clearly different from her siblings, it became increasingly implausible that all the explanations were benign.  

Then, thirdly, there is  the film Just Mercy,4  which unfortunately I can’t show you, but which I would encourage you to watch, again if you want to understand what life can feel like from an African American perspective. It tells the true story of Bryan Stevenson, an African American Harvard lawyer, who in the 1990’s went to work in Alabama to represent poor people who could not afford proper legal representation. Among others, he came across the case of Walter MacMillan, also an African American man, and on Death Row because some years previously he had been wrongfully convicted of the murder of a white woman. The film tells the story of the many barriers that were placed in Stevenson’s way as he sought simply to get justice for MacMillan and his family.  

In all this, there is a danger of our responding, Oh that’s just America. However, if we are tempted down that line I would direct you to a paragraph from an article written from this side of the Atlantic in the wake of the death of George Floyd by Selina Stone, again a Christian, on the LICC (London Institute of Contemporary Christianity) website5:

In the UK, recent research demonstrates that black children are twice as likely to live in poverty than white children. Black people face discrimination in employment and health care. They are more likely to be stopped and searched by police, to get sentenced to prison time and to be given longer sentences than white people. As a country, we have our own stories of excessive force and of the deaths of black people in police custody. Stories that do not end with justice.

In addition and more personally and poignantly, there is a line that comes to mind from Robert Murray McCheyne in which he confessed: The seed of every sin known to man is in my heart

None of us are immune from the pride and the prejudice that give rise to racist attitudes and actions nor the blindness and indifference that can allow them to go unchallenged around us. Therefore, as well as seeking to listen and understand those who have suffered and who continue to suffer and doing whatever we can in our own small way to alleviate that suffering,  we surely must  pray. We must pray  to the God in whose image every human being is made and is therefore worthy of equal respect and dignity and justice, and ask Him, not so much to reveal the sins of others but rather along the lines of Psalm 139 : Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting ( Ps 139:23-24)  And with that ask Him to teach and enable us to love others as we have been loved by Him in Jesus and to be as compassionate towards our needy neighbours, whoever they are, as our Lord  has been to us

Yours in Him

David

 

1 I hope it goes without saying that none of what follows condones or justifies the violence that has soiled some of the reaction to George Floyd’s death and none of those quoted would  do so either, but their words and lives do expose the underlying issue which I believe merits our attention and our compassion.

2 George Floyd and Me – Shai Linne – whole article can be found here

3 American Racism: We’ve got so very far to do – David French -  whole article can be found here    

4 Available on Google Play, YouTube & Amazon Prime

5 We can’t breathe – Selina Scott – whole article can be found here