Real Faith Dares to Serve

[This message was shared with the people of Friendship Church on October 23, 2005.]

Matthew 22:34-40

It’s called compassion fatigue. That’s the term that experts on charitable giving and volunteerism use to describe what happens when people are overwhelmed by a long string of disasters. When compassion fatigue sets in, we’re apt to say things like, “I have nothing more to give.’ Or, “I can’t help everybody.’ Or, “That’s so far away.”

This morning, I don’t intend to beat you over the head with condemnations for the evils of compassion fatigue. But, I don’t want to be misunderstood: It is evil for us to grow weary of being compassionate or loving toward others.

We see just how evil when we consider our reaction to a true story from the life of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov. He apparently was a butterfly afficionado. One day while on an excursion, he saw a rare specimen and began obsessively chasing it. He later returned to his home, ecstatic that he'd caught his quarry. Almost as an afterthought, he told someone there that while in the woods, he'd come across a man who had tripped and sprained an ankle badly. "Did you help him?" Nabokov was asked. "No," he said. "I had to find my butterfly."

I wonder if Nabokov suffered from compassion fatigue? Would it make his decision to ignore another person's needs any less defensible?

Jesus’ words in today’s Bible lesson show us that there is absolutely no mystery about God’s will for our lives. It boils down to two equally important things: We’re to love God with everything we’ve got and love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

Now, you and I all know this. So, how is it that compassion fatigue sets into the lives and psyches of Christians, as well as non-Christians?

How many of you have heard or read the term impulse buying? Raise your hands. Okay. Now, how many of you have ever been guilty of impulse buying? Be honest!

If you raised your hand on that last question, welcome to the club! But I have to tell you, its membership isn’t very exclusive. Especially in America, where we seem to have forgotten all about being frugal.

I nearly re-upped my membership in the Impulse Buyer’s Club on Friday night. My wife and I had stopped at a discount store in order to look in on our daughter, who was working there that evening. While there, we decided also to look around. We ended up in the Book Department. A book of classic stories from the Superman comic books caught my eye.

I leafed through it with rising excitement. I turned to my wife. “Take a look at this!” I enthused. “Cool!” she said. “I think I might buy this,” I told her. “Well, P-Diddy [a blog euphemism] might like to read it too,” she suggested. “You would too,” I told her. “How much is it?” “Thirteen dollars. Do you think we should get it?” I asked. “If you want to,” she said. I held it in my hands and even started to walk toward the register with it. But then, I thought, “I don’t need to get this. At least, not right now.” So, I took it back to the Book Department.

Impulse buying happens any time we fall prey to momentary emotions. We see something we like and we derive a rush from capturing it and making it our own.

The funny thing is that the more we give into impulse buying, the less enjoyable the buying becomes. Quite apart from getting ourselves in debt, we also suffer from something we could call buying fatigue.

It’s at this point that impulse buyers come to a fork in the road. Either they’ll keep buying, looking for that high, or they’ll learn to engage in more responsible and ultimately, fulfilling, spending patterns.

So, why bring all this up? Because there’s an analogous phenomenon I call impulse loving or impulse serving or giving. We see the devastation in Pakistan and we write a check. We see the suffering in Louisiana or Mississippi and we collect gently used clothes to be donated. We see people in need of shelter and we volunteer for a Habitat for Humanity project.

Those are all good things to do, of course. But if we do them as the result of fleeting emotions, flashes of empathy, we grow weary of being compassionate. They're acts done out of guilt or spasms of concern. Compassion that’s rooted in our emotions will dry up because it isn't deeply rooted in us and because our emotions are so changeable.

To become the loving people God calls us to be, we need to learn to make our love less dependent on our feelings.

From the standpoint of the Bible, love isn’t primarily about emotions. Thank God it isn’t.

If God’s love for you and me was dependent on God’s emotions, we would be in a heap of trouble. Every time we sinned, God wouldn’t love us any more. Fortunately, love--real love--is about a lot more than emotion.

I’ve told the true story before of the man and woman who had arranged to visit a pastor friend of mine one day. They were both members of his congregation, but each were married to other people.

They wore smiles on their faces as they told my colleague, “We’ve fallen in love. We want you to help us tell our spouses and then you can do our wedding. We’re sure this is from God.” My colleague told them that he was even more sure that this wasn’t from God. “But we’re in love,” the man told him. My friend gave him a very Biblical response: “So what?”

Love is about an ongoing commitment, whether that commitment is to a spouse, a child, a neighbor, or God. It is not limited by our fleeting or fluctuating emotions or moods.

Love listens.

Love sets aside time for others.

Love goes the extra mile to speak the other person’s language of love.

At this point, you may feel even more guilty or frustrated than you did when I started talking. Hold on!

If we’re inclined to get compassion fatigue, but God expects us to love everybody even when we don’t feel like it, is there any way we can ever love like God calls us to love? One of my favorite passages of the Bible to use with couples who are getting married is one in which Christians are told to “Put on Christ.”

The resilient love and the commitment to serving others of Jesus is foreign to our natures. But when we put on Christ and let His love live in us and guide us, we won’t suffer from compassion fatigue. Christ will be loving the world through us.

So, when we’re given the chance to spend time with someone who needs us, we just pray, “God, I’m not capable of loving or serving this person as they need or deserve. So, please help me to take the time and make the effort so that You can love them through me.”

I talked this past week with a man who was dreading a luncheon meeting with an old friend. This guy knew that all this old friend wanted to do was talk about old times. The guy really didn’t have a lunch time to spare for reminiscing. But he did anyway. Some of you parents or spouses who’ve been exhibiting compassion fatigue with your own families might ask God to love your kids or your husbands or your wives through you and then, take the time to let that love do its wonderful work.

Now, in calling you to love and serve others, God isn’t asking you to save the world. After all, Jesus has already done that. But He is calling you to serve whatever piece of the world you can.

You’ve undoubtedly heard or read the story of the man who used to throw starfish that had become stranded on the ocean shore back into the water. A friend who walked with him as he did this asked the man why he bothered. “If I don’t,” the man explained, “they’ll die.” “But you can’t possibly make a difference to all of them,” his friend objected. At that, the man bent down, picked up another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. “It made a difference for that one,” he said.

Whether it’s filling a shoe box for Operation Christmas Child, donating food here on the second Sunday of each month for the Amelia food bank, volunteering for Power Hour, the homework help time at our local Boys and Girls Club, caring for a family member suffering from cancer or Alzheimer’s or loneliness, listening to the people under your own roof, or undertaking a ministry here at the congregation, all God calls you to do is to let His love shine through as you take the time to be an instrument of God’s love for someone.

When you do that, you won’t be fatigued; you’ll be recharged.

[This series of messages is inspired by the work of the staff at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, Burnsville, Minnesota.]