Receiving compassion is a wonderful thing.
This week Jane and I had a wonderful time of fellowship with two Christians from south Asia who had made a point of coming to the United States at this time in our national life.
Mano Rumalshah is from Pakistan, and his wife Benita is from India.
For a number of years in the 1990s, Mano was the Anglican bishop of Peshawar,
a city in the northwest of Pakistan, not far from the capital of Islamabad and fairly close to the border with Afghanistan.
From that vantage point he knows about the difficult situation of Christians in Pakistan:
already the poorest of society, their religious persuasion subjects them to economic, professional and residential discrimination,
Sometimes there is outright persecution of Christians,
and Mano has been an effective international spokesperson on their behalf.
In recent years Mano has been the general secretary of the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel,
the oldest Anglican mission society, founded in 1701 and so celebrating its 300th anniversary this year,
so their family is now based in London.

Since the bombings on September 11, Mano had been weighing a need to visit Pakistan against an invitation to attend the installation of the new bishop of New York.
In the end, he decided he had to do both.
When Jane and I had lunch with the Rumalshahs in New York City on Friday,
he came to us with open arms, hugged us and said,
"I had to come and be with you people in the United States.
"I felt I just had to come and walk on the ground of this city after the suffering you have been through.
"I want you to know that you are not alone: we others around the world are suffering with you, and we all take this event very much to heart.
"I go to southern India to visit people suffering from drought,
I go to Mozambique to visit the victims of floods.
I must also come and visit my rich brothers and sisters in the United States in their time of suffering and express not only my solidarity but the solidarity of so many around the world."

Mano said this with tears in his eyes, and it brought tears to my eyes.
It is a wonderful thing to receive compassion.
Mano had realized deeply how much people here have been suffering in the wake of the attacks.
He could have rationalized that away in so many ways:
"Ah, Americans have so many resources, so they will recover soon enough" -
no: Mano realized that his fellow Anglicans here needed to know how much he and others care.
"Ah, well, I may not be able to meet any of those who have actually lost loved ones" -
no: Mano realized that all of us have been touched, even if we did not have a loved one in the Twin Towers or at the Pentagon or in any of the airplanes that were hijacked.
"Ah, well, I won't be able to do anything except express my sympathy, and that will seem pretty useless in the face of such a huge catastrophe" -
no: Mano realized what people need most in suffering is not for something to be fixed,
but to experience that they are not alone,
that there are others coming alongside to share the suffering.
From a dear friend in Zimbabwe I received this note:
"We share with you and your whole nation the grief you're going through at this hour of need."

That is what compassion is: Being with another in suffering,
sharing the suffering by just being there with the one who is suffering.
Since the recent catastrophe there have been multitudes of stories of compassion expressed in the drama of the trauma:
the firefighters whose compassion drove them to bravery at the cost of their own lives;
the clergy and mental health folks who have been working with the rescue workers;
the countless acts of kindness extended to those affected in whatever way by the events;
the compassion millions have felt for those who suffered.
In a way we have felt like onlookers feeling compassion for those more directly affected.
Mano Rumalshah was saying, in effect:
"No, you are not onlookers.
"All of you have been suffering in this, and I am here to stand with you as well."
This is compassion.

Compassion is what Jesus' parable about Lazarus and the rich man is about.
It's one of the most wrenching of Jesus' parables.
In just one sentence Jesus evokes the wealth of the rich:
"There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day."
In just one sentence Jesus evokes the poverty of the poor:
"And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man's table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores."
Growing up in India, where leprosy was rife, I always imagined that Lazarus had leprosy,
though I suppose that if Jesus meant that he would have said so.
Jesus dwells not on the this-worldly relationship of Lazarus and the rich man,
but moves immediately to what happens at death,
when he takes it as a matter of course that the rich man goes to hell and Lazarus goes to heaven.
The drama in the parable is in the life-after-death struggle of the rich man to get relief or at least to allow his relatives to be warned about the danger they stood in.
Abraham's response is chilling.
In effect, Abraham is saying:
"In life you had your chance.
"In life you allowed an unbridgeable chasm to develop between you and Lazarus,
between you and all the other poor like him,
"so now you must live with the fact that you are on the desolate side of the chasm between heaven and hell.

The prophet Amos has the same passion Jesus has in this parable.
"Alas," says the prophet Amos in the current translation,
where other translations have said, "Woe."
"Alas for those who are at ease in Zion . . .
Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory, and lounge on their couches,
and eat lambs from the flock, and calves from the stall;
who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp;
who drink wine from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils."

What is the sin Jesus and Amos are condemning?
Fundamentally is the lack of compassion,
the unwillingness to recognize our common humanity enough to experience another's suffering as our own.
"Hardness of heart" is another way the Bible sometimes puts it.
I believe that in the wake of the September attacks,
our own hardness of heart as a nation is one of the major realities we must face:
hardness of heart in clutching so much wealth to ourselves while 1.5 billion people in the world are desperately poor;
hardness of heart in using the economic power that wealth brings to force others in the world to follow our will and our way;
hardness of heart in using the military power that wealth brings to support repression rather than to support liberation.
Ezekiel prays that God will take away the heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh,
and from that we have our expressions "cold-hearted" versus "warm-hearted."
Self-centeredness is a modern way of putting it,
and greed, domination and cruelty are among its fruits.

A fundamental question is, What do we do with our common humanity and with the image of God within us?
How do we stand in relation to those realities?
What do we do with them?
That is a question of stewardship: How are we stewards of what it is that makes us human?
Those capacities for knowing and loving and creating that make us uniquely human,
those capacities that sign us with the mark of God -
what do we do with them?
What is the direction of our stewardship to be?
Compassion is a good starting place.

Ranjit Mathews comes to mind as a person whose life has been changed by his giving in to compassion,
by his surrendering to the compassion that welled up within him.
Ranjit is a young man from Milton I met in the spring when I was at the General Theological Seminary in New York.
He's one of the first crop of young adults who have volunteered for the Young Adult Service Corps that the Episcopal Church has established through its Mission Personnel Office.
Ranjit had graduated from George Washington University in May and had come down with some other volunteers to be interviewed by Jane and her staff at the Episcopal Church Center,
after which they were sent down to the seminary to have dinner with me in the refectory.
On the spur of the moment, I gathered a few of the seminarians to meet these young volunteers,
and I soon realized that Ranjit had a very intense sense of call.
Over dinner, one of the seminarians asked Ranjit, "Well, why do you want to be a missionary abroad?"
"Because I want to meet Jesus!" Ranjit replied in flash.
"Can't you meet Jesus here?" asked the seminarian.
"Yes, but I need to meet him outside my comfort zone," said Ranjit.

Later I heard Ranjit's story.
"I feel God's call strongly in my life," said Ranjit, who is the son of immigrants from South India. "In a thoroughly life-changing experience, God told me, through a leper girl in South India, that He wants me to become a minister and work with the poor of India. About two years ago, my family and I traveled to India, and spent a month traveling through the southern part of the country. One of our many stops included a city by the name of Mysore. We came upon a beautiful, powerful looking cathedral, which stood out as a mountain amongst its peers. Regardless, we toured the cathedral, "oohing and ahhing" at the majesty and splendor of the place. However, the most powerful occurrence came as we were walking out of the cathedral. Two leper girls were sitting at the top of the stairs, moving around on their make-shift "legs", and as I was walking out, one of the two girls looked at me, touched her hand to my feet, and then brought it to her mouth.

"That was simply the most powerful experience of my life, and it convicted me, most emphatically, of my purpose in this world. In that brief moment, I saw Jesus through her, and He told me that He doesn't care about legalism, fundamentalism and inerrancy, but rather that simply everyone in this world know of His love. His piercing eyes saw through my materialism, selfishness and spiritual poverty and showed me all that I needed to see: Jesus. Through this experience, He has elicited a passion for social justice and social consciousness, which to this day is still burning inside me. . . . I believe we must bring Jesus to those people and systems that need Him most. From the slums of Calcutta, to the freedom fighters in Aung San Suu Kyi's homeland of Burma, to the prison problem right here in the United States.

"We need to bring Jesus's love and compassion to humanity. It is our responsibility as Christians to move out on our faith and share Jesus to those who are oppressed, persecuted and starving. . . . Being complacent and resting in our comfort zones is not only an injustice to suffering people all over the world; but an injustice to ourselves."

That's the transformation that compassion works in us.
As you meditate on Ranjit's story, you realize that the crucial question is not,
What will you do? but
How will you be?
Can you allow Jesus' love to touch you?
Can you allow your heart to be softened?
As we allow compassion to grow within us, Christ can bring forth Christ's own fruit in the world.
In August, Ranjit left to work with the AIDS crisis in South Africa for a year -
that's the current fruit of compassion in his life.
What will be the fruit of compassion in your life?