The Bungee Cord 7-13-25

Hello,

Last week, I was with a group of local pastors where we do two things: support each other, and join together in preparing for the upcoming Sunday’s sermon. Being a pastor can be quite isolating for a number of reasons, and the more minds the better when it comes to working on delivering the Good News of Jesus each week. I find these weekly gatherings to be important. Anyway, as we were discussing the Gospel lesson for this past Sunday, the story of the Good Samaritan, one of the pastors started talking about something that is going around in some circles of Christianity, speaking out about “the sin of empathy”.

Maybe it is because I am retired, but I had never heard of this before, and so I asked, “What is the ‘Sin of Empathy’?” Apparently, as I learned from my fellow pastors and from doing some research, it is something of the sort of being so deeply drawn into someone else’s problems that emotions take over decision making, rather than logic and reason. Joe Rigney, a proponent of the “Sin of Empathy”, gives this analogy: “The analogy that I give the most often is if someone’s drowning, empathy wants to jump in with both feet and get swept away. Empathy jumps in. Whereas compassion says, I’m going to throw you a life preserver. I’m going to even step in with it and grab you with one arm, but I’m remaining tethered to the shore. I’m not letting go of what’s true, what’s good.”

I find this troubling, and the reason is that as I am fluttering and flailing my way through life, caught up in all sorts of flooding rivers … rivers of anger that ahold of me, rivers of depression that sweep me up, rivers of selfishness that pull me under and blind me to the pain of others … over and over again, I see Jesus, the Son of God, risking everything, even his life, jumping into the raging water and taking ahold of me. And when I see Jesus doing that, I find myself wondering, “Why would Jesus do that for me?”

The answer is that God loves me, and love is not something that stays within the boundaries of logic or reason. Love is driven by emotion, and out of love, Jesus jumped in to save me. Instead of staying on heaven’s shore with a life preserver to throw at me, a preserver that I might miss, Jesus jumped into this world, with both feet, and grabbed ahold of me with nail driven hands and rescued me from being washed away from God’s love.

Loving is a risky endeavor, and it is risky to jump into rivers which are swallowing people up and carrying them away from God’s love. But unless we jump into those rivers, we never discover how hard the struggle is to try and stay afloat in those rivers. It is far too easy for us to stand on the shore and judge someone else’s ability to swim. It is impossible to feal the fear and pain that envelops their lives.

When I was a pastor in East Toledo, where drowning rivers of drugs, violence, and poverty were raging way over their banks, I discovered that by taking the call to be the pastor of that church, I had jumped into major flood waters. Something I learned in those years of being tossed by those rivers is that desperate people do desperate things. I saw things happening as I bounced around that I knew were not right, and as a matter of fact, made the rivers run with increased rage: lying, killing, stealing, assault, overdoses, spousal abuse, family violence. I never lost sight of the destructive power of those things, but because I was in the water with the people (that is what empathy is all about), I saw and felt the desperation that was stirring everything up, which opened my eyes to how I might best be a little Christ in that river.

So, if you find yourself fighting the torrents of a raging river, know that there are people who won’t just stand safely on shore and watch you be carried right by. They are the people who have taken you by the hand and have invited you to worship with them, to receive the communion with them, to be loved and cared for by them….people who have jumped into the waters of your life. And why have they done that? Because that is what Jesus has done, and he has shouted to those who bear his name, “Follow me!”

Have a great week.

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger