Pastor’s page July 2008                            

SUFFERING WITH THOSE WHO HURT

Dear Friends in Christ,

 Sometimes it is hard to let go. This last few weeks, as I have been hitting stride as the new pastor of W.M.P.C. and beginning to really know the members of my new congregation, I have also been distracted by events happening to the congregation and city I just left less than three months ago. Flood waters from the Cedar River and its tributaries have ravaged through the streets of my former home in Iowa, and many members of the Echo Hill congregation there, where I was pastor, have been forced from their houses. Four families in particular face the prospect of bulldozing their homes and either building again on the same site or finding another place to live altogether. The city itself is in a shambles, as many of the most prominent government offices and civic institutions were located along the scenic river that ran directly through the downtown. The library has lost most of its books. The city hall was flooded up to three stories. The beautiful old Paramount Theater, home to the symphony, may never recover from the disaster. Up to a dozen churches must be leveled. Factories further up along the river may not open again. Jobs will be lost and bridges must be reconstructed.

It is difficult for me to sit 1100 miles away and do nothing, as I watch pictures of devastation sent to me by my daughter or my former secretary. There is a feeling of helplessness that is not filled by sending a few dollars to the Red Cross or Presbyterian Disaster Assistance. These things help, and there is more we can do also, as the notice elsewhere in the newsletter conveys, but the feeling lingers. What is that feeling of helplessness good for? What can we learn from it?

Perhaps if we don’t dismiss the feeling too quickly, we can learn empathy and sympathy. We think about the people we know in the flood and what they are going through now. We remember how hard it was to clean out our own basements annually, even just to sweep around things for dust, and we imagine the mess that must await flood victims as they re-enter their homes for the first time. We know the disruption of going camping for a few days, and then we realize that some of the refugees from the flood will be camping in a school gymnasium for weeks on end. We know the dent in our budget made by the purchase of a new sofa, and we are troubled to consider how people will manage financially if they have to buy even used furniture to replace moldy chairs and beds. Sometimes we learn empathy by recalling our own misfortune and trials and then magnifying those inconveniences by many times when they apply to others in dire circumstances.

This has been my own venture in empathy and sympathy, but I expect that all of you have some similar situation. You recall the worry you have over a pregnant daughter just prior to her delivery, and you push out the borders of those feelings a bit to include the pregnant daughters throughout the world who have no mother or father to worry about them. You discover that the recent stock market doldrums have weakened your retirement fund, and if you let your mind play a bit, you can begin to imagine the devastation of someone who made really bad investments and now faces the prospect of home foreclosure. You break a leg playing soccer, and if in your youth you can learn to empathize, you will consider the lifelong prospects for a soldier coming back from Iraq with a prosthesis from the knee down.  These moments of empathy and sympathy are part of what it means to love, to identify with people unlike us, whose woes and misfortunes thoroughly overshadow ours. These feelings are good. But they are not enough.

There needs to be a next step.  If this feeling of sympathy is combined with our Christian faith, we are prompted to respond someway, to make things better, even from a distance, even if it is just a little, because we have seen the example of Christ in his empathy for us. He didn’t just empathize. He acted too. And we have been transformed because of that action. Many of us have learned the virtue of sympathy. But many of us also feel helpless, or distracted, or inadequate. It is now that the message of the Christian gospel combines with the human feelings of empathy to take us to the next level of love. To look at Christ on the cross, to remember the sacrifice of God, is to be dissatisfied with empathy. It is too cheap if that is all there is. The grace that redeemed us did not come cheaply. It came with a cost, and in return, we are ready to combine our compassion with a costly endeavor to help those we feel compassion for.

I hope you are all empathetic, sympathetic people. I hope I am too, and I know I have been given plenty of opportunity recently to clarify those sentiments. But let us not stop there, not after what we know about the Christian faith and the one on whom it was founded. To feel with those in trouble is good. To act to help them is better.

Shalom,

Duane