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
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