Recently, I was engaged in highly risky behavior. I was spending time online, ingesting people’s opinions on this, that, and the other thing. Dangerous, I know! It’s what the wise ones always tell you not to do!

In the midst of my risky and unadvised behavior, I came across a post warning people about the sin of empathy. Now, when you’re online, you can’t always tell what’s meant to be satire right away. Or if folks are just making stuff up about what they think other folks think, but they don’t really. Or if people are just saying dumb things that they don’t really mean. Online discourse is really messy.

So, when I read this post about the sin of empathy, it was so strange an idea to me, I thought I’d do some digging and see what category this fell into. Satire, confusion, or a sort of imprecise expression … because surely it couldn’t be a real thing. But no, I found in my hunt digging that there are indeed Christians who warn about the “sin of empathy.” The thought is that the devil tempts us away from our moral clarity through the temptation to have empathy and compassion for others. This empathy muddies our moral clarity and the devil wins.  

While I don’t agree with this stance at all, I can (using my skills in empathy) imagine how someone would say this. If we seriously believe some particular “truth”, whatever that may be, it would dangerous to that belief to take seriously someone else’s experience that challenges it. It might feel dangerous enough that it could feel like a spiritual attack from forces of darkness. I can imagine and empathize with how frightening that might be.

This could be equally true for people who do not necessarily believe in God or the devil, or resonate with the word sin at all. They would use different words to describe why it’s dangerous and bad to listen well to others with who they disagree. They wouldn’t call it sin, but the fear and anger associated with empathizing with “those people” would be the same. We’ve all heard, no doubt, about how some folks believe that even just talking with others who they consider “bad” shouldn’t be done. To have empathy with these “bad” people is actually a wrong thing to do, aka a sin.  

According to my online digging, when we have empathy for others, there is a risk of our moral clarity being contaminated. Our judgements about right and wrong might be shifted and that’s apparently bad to some folks.

We all do this, by the way. We do this in big in small ways. For example, we can be so sure that we don’t like mushrooms that we spend our entire lives not eating this wonderful vegetable just because our aunt so-and-so was a horrible cook and made us eat slimy gross-ness when we were five.

Now, this is a small thing, of course. But we all know people who will declare with great passion about how we should all fall into line with their judgements about something, such as mushrooms being horrible. So, let’s imagine our person with great moral clarity on this issue that mushrooms are horrible. Maybe they even picketed a grocery store or shamed someone in the produce department. So, if this person was later seen eating mushrooms (because they are in fact delicious when cooked well), it could be awkward for everyone, but mostly our anti-mushroom crusader. It would take some humility on their part to admit that their “great moral clarity” on the issue of mushrooms was flawed or at least limited.

In the 1 Corinthians text, Paul is writing to the church in Corinth. The folks in Corinth were fighting about who is better than who because of the variation in spiritual gifts. You know, normal human stuff. In a previous part of this letter, he’s already said that all our gifts have a place in the community. We need all the gifts for the sake of the community and for the sake of love.

Paul is teaching us that it’s not all about us and our individual abilities in this letter. What’s important is our ability to love. So, what if it’s not all about us and our great moral clarity on whatever issue. After all, if our moral clarity can’t sustain the challenge of really listening to a different point of view, maybe we’re not as clear we think.

I believe Paul would agree with the idea that if we have great moral clarity without love, then we are in fact in trouble. We’d be noisy gongs, going about telling everyone about how they shouldn’t love mushrooms. We’d be noisy gongs if we are going about our lives with great moral clarity on any issue if we do it without love. And I don’t know how we love one another if we’re not listening to each other and without taking each other’s worries seriously. I don’t know how we love one another without listening with curiosity and imagination about what their lives are actually like. I don’t know how we’d actually love one another without empathy.  

I’m not saying that this is easy. I’m far from being able to do this with the folks or situations who exist in my “mushroom” category. But this is the challenge! When we face difficulty, grief, or pain, do we respond with opening to the world or do we close in? We’ve all seen folks who respond to loss or anger by pulling back, pulling into themselves, and maybe even resenting the world that has the audacity to continue despite their suffering. At different times, we’ve likely all done this. We’ve also seen folks who respond to loss or challenge by opening their heart even further, to include even more love so that the world’s beauty, love, and goodness can coexist with their loss or the reality of what’s challenging them.

The people in our gospel story today first responded to Jesus’ preaching with wonder and appreciation. And then he challenges them. He names the stories where prophets were closer to people outside of the Hebrew community than they were to their “own people.” I’m sure for a variety of reasons, he didn’t bring the miracles to his hometown that he gave away freely in Capernaum. They respond to Jesus’ challenge with hurt and anger. They didn’t take the time or exercise the self-control to wonder about Jesus’ teaching.

They were clear about what they thought should have been happening. Their ears were closed. They weren’t listening with love or curiosity. They weren’t listening to this situation with an assurance that they too were included in the fulfilled promise of Isaiah. Instead, they held tight to their judgements and understandings. They didn’t risk the humility of admitting that they did not in fact know this Jesus, this prophet and teacher, as they assumed they did.

With all that said, I want to acknowledge empathy and compassion can feel quite horrible, particularly when we do not want to extend that grace to someone. It doesn’t feel good to have to humble yourself and admit you don’t know what you think you know. So, it’s not surprising to me that someone has decided it’s a sin to extend mercy and empathy. It can feel horrible when it’s someone you’re angry with or when it’s someone whose beliefs fly in the face of everything you hold dear. And the “righteousness” of holding onto our anger, judgement, and moral clarity can feel good. Not good in a good and healthy way, but good all the same, right? This “goodness” of self-righteousness, however, is not love and without love, Paul tells us, we are noisy gongs.

It seems to me that the journey empathy can take us on is not unlike death and resurrection itself. I imagine the journey of a death to new life in our lives is like going from one mountain top to another. We can stand on one mountain and have a clear view of what’s going on around us. Everything seems clear and we know where we are. In the distance, there’s another mountain top that looks like it might be even taller than the one we’re on. But to get there, we have to go down into the valley. We lose our view, we may lose our bearings, we may begin to question why we left that perfectly good mountain where we were. It was good back there. Life made sense and now we’re lost.

But eventually, we find ourselves with the grace of God on the new mountain top. We see where we came from and it’s goodness, but we have a new perspective now. We know more. We learned something. We likely met new wonderful folks along the way. We experienced the grace of God in helping us through our dark fears and days in that horrible valley. We came through to new life.

Entering into an experience of empathy can feel like that; stripping away our assurance and clarity and handing us back humility and confusion in return. It can feel fearful, being flooded with feelings of insecurity, perhaps insufficiency, or guilt. It’s that dark time in that valley between mountain peaks.  

But the promise of resurrection is always with us. We can always trust that we can let go of our small thinking, judgements, or our little identities for the sake of love. It may not feel good. It may feel like the loss of moral clarity or assurance, but love is always the path. And who knows, we may listen deeply with empathy, following the path of love, and still conclude that our deep moral clarity is in fact correct. In that case, we can trust our moral clarity it all the more while continuing to be loving to the challenging one in front of us.

This is not something we can do by ourselves! We need our community to help us see the pathways to greater love. We need our scriptures to remind us that this is God’s call for us. This is the challenge and it is a challenge! And so we need God, in all of God’s expressions, to continue to guide us towards love. This we can trust in, we can have faith that this is so, and rest in the hope and anticipation that the path of love is always the answer.

AMEN