The Two Wings of a Bird Called Love
Maybe you’ve heard about it. But empathy is a sin.
That is according to some so-called conservative Christians. Empathy as a sin is a thing. A couple books have been written about it, one called the Sin of Empathy by a professor at a Christian college and seminary. The other is called Toxic Empathy by Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative columnist. Elon Musk recently quoted the ideas of another thinker, Gad Saad, who claims empathy is a weakness in Western civilization. Saad, now finishing a book titled Suicidal Empathy, describes himself as culturally Jewish, but otherwise an atheist. As for his academic background, his expertise and PhD is in marketing. Nonetheless, the two Christians I mentioned above agree with Saad, an atheist, that empathy is a sin.
When you delve deeper into their words, however, you quickly find out their critique of empathy is mostly bluster and, well, marketing. Their critique is really of empathy taken too far which they of course exaggerate.
Empathy, if taken as far as condoning bad behavior, that is a kind of empathy we must avoid – that’s their basic argument. I’d tweak this by saying, if empathy is taken as far as condoning hateful behavior, that is a kind of empathy we must avoid. Empathy for Hitler, for example, well, that is a bridge too far!
These authors and businessmen selling books, they all know calling empathy a sin will produce outrage. And outrage sells!
We live in an age where everyone is a marketer trying to attract attention and trigger an emotional response. The ploy here is obvious. Purposefully make a controversial statement, knowing that it will trigger outrage. Get a cheap thrill out of seeing people get upset. Do whatever it takes to own the libs! Or own MAGAs. You hear about it all the time.
Here’s my pastoral suggestion - resist the outrage they are counting on, but speak the truth. That’s a good approach, I’d say, in this day of outrage peddling.
So is empathy a sin? No, of course not. But empathy is a risk. We should be honest about that. In feeling another’s feelings, you can lose yourself in the process. That’s a risk. When those oxygen masks come down during a rocky flight, out of empathy you might want to take care of your child first, but you risk passing out in the process and not being there to help your child in the long term. That’s why the best practice is secure your mask first and then your child’s. You might see somehow sinking in quicksand, and out of empathy jump in without a plan, and risk sinking to your death together.
But in all of these cases, would the empathy expressed be a sin? No. Just not very wise and not worth the risk.
This brings me to an extended metaphor I’d like to look at for the rest of our time. It is a metaphor borrowed from the Buddhist tradition that I adapt here. I start my description of this metaphor with a famous passage from the gospels. It is told in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but let’s look at Matthew’s take
Matthew 22:34 [The religious authorities] gathered together, 35 and one of them, an expert in the law, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
You all know this passage.
Love is the greatest commandment. If there’s question about what to do, coming down on the side of love is always the right answer. As England Dan & John Ford Coley sing in that great 1979 tune, “Love is the answer. Shine on us all, set us free, love is the answer.”
This brings me to the metaphor:
Love is a bird flying to set us free.
And Love has two wings – wisdom and compassion.
To fly, love needs both of those wings.
Love, to fly us to liberation, balances compassion with wisdom.
Let’s look at the most oft-told story in the gospels to see how this works. I read the story as told in Matthew 14, starting with verse 13.
Now when Jesus heard [about John the Baptist’s martyrdom], he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.
Grief is a love thing. You grieve the loss of those you love. Jesus loves his cousin John very deeply. What does Jesus do upon hearing about John’s loss? Does he drop everything and go directly to his family to console them? No, it is wise to deal with your own sadness first sometimes. That’s what Jesus does. In his wisdom, knowing himself, he goes to a quiet place to grieve.
But when the crowds heard it [where he was], they followed him on foot from the towns. 14 When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion for them and cured their sick.
There’s a place for wisely caring for yourself, and there’s a place for other-directed compassion
15 When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” 16 Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” 17 They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” 18 And he said, “Bring them here to me.” 19 Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and blessed and broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.
Jesus in his compassion says, no, don’t turn them away. They are hungry. You know what it’s like to be hungry. Let their hunger be your hunger, and feed them.
But does Jesus say, okay let’s feed them, but without a plan?
Wisdom means having a plan! Compassion with a wise plan makes love fly!
Jesus directs that everyone sit. Then he gathers what they have – five loaves and two fish. That’s their startup fund. You have got to start somewhere. This is not Genesis 1. Hoping to create something out of nothing like God in Genesis isn’t a wise idea. You’ve got to start with something! Start with what you got. Start where you are and ask others to do the same – rather wise advice.
Combine the wisdom of starting where you are with the compassion of seeking to nourish people and you have what? You have love in flight!
Love, true, godly love replete with wisdom and compassion, is never a sin. It is a gift from the God who is love, and it is our highest calling. Is empathy involved? For sure. Compassion begins with empathy, the choice to enter another’s feelings and feel what someone else is feeling. Compassion means to feel the pain of another with another in order to ease that pain. Compassion is the highest form of empathy and is the farthest thing from a sin.
What’s more, through empathy, feeling what someone else is feeling, we are more wisely able to love them, leading them to God. I can’t love you and lead you to God who is love if I don’t know where you are. And to truly know where you are means joining you where you are and leading you home. So real, selfless empathy is a part of wisdom’s best practice.
I close with the end of our feeding the 5,000 story.
20 And all ate and were filled, and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full.
That is according to some so-called conservative Christians. Empathy as a sin is a thing. A couple books have been written about it, one called the Sin of Empathy by a professor at a Christian college and seminary. The other is called Toxic Empathy by Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative columnist. Elon Musk recently quoted the ideas of another thinker, Gad Saad, who claims empathy is a weakness in Western civilization. Saad, now finishing a book titled Suicidal Empathy, describes himself as culturally Jewish, but otherwise an atheist. As for his academic background, his expertise and PhD is in marketing. Nonetheless, the two Christians I mentioned above agree with Saad, an atheist, that empathy is a sin.
When you delve deeper into their words, however, you quickly find out their critique of empathy is mostly bluster and, well, marketing. Their critique is really of empathy taken too far which they of course exaggerate.
Empathy, if taken as far as condoning bad behavior, that is a kind of empathy we must avoid – that’s their basic argument. I’d tweak this by saying, if empathy is taken as far as condoning hateful behavior, that is a kind of empathy we must avoid. Empathy for Hitler, for example, well, that is a bridge too far!
These authors and businessmen selling books, they all know calling empathy a sin will produce outrage. And outrage sells!
We live in an age where everyone is a marketer trying to attract attention and trigger an emotional response. The ploy here is obvious. Purposefully make a controversial statement, knowing that it will trigger outrage. Get a cheap thrill out of seeing people get upset. Do whatever it takes to own the libs! Or own MAGAs. You hear about it all the time.
Here’s my pastoral suggestion - resist the outrage they are counting on, but speak the truth. That’s a good approach, I’d say, in this day of outrage peddling.
So is empathy a sin? No, of course not. But empathy is a risk. We should be honest about that. In feeling another’s feelings, you can lose yourself in the process. That’s a risk. When those oxygen masks come down during a rocky flight, out of empathy you might want to take care of your child first, but you risk passing out in the process and not being there to help your child in the long term. That’s why the best practice is secure your mask first and then your child’s. You might see somehow sinking in quicksand, and out of empathy jump in without a plan, and risk sinking to your death together.
But in all of these cases, would the empathy expressed be a sin? No. Just not very wise and not worth the risk.
This brings me to an extended metaphor I’d like to look at for the rest of our time. It is a metaphor borrowed from the Buddhist tradition that I adapt here. I start my description of this metaphor with a famous passage from the gospels. It is told in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but let’s look at Matthew’s take
Matthew 22:34 [The religious authorities] gathered together, 35 and one of them, an expert in the law, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
You all know this passage.
Love is the greatest commandment. If there’s question about what to do, coming down on the side of love is always the right answer. As England Dan & John Ford Coley sing in that great 1979 tune, “Love is the answer. Shine on us all, set us free, love is the answer.”
This brings me to the metaphor:
Love is a bird flying to set us free.
And Love has two wings – wisdom and compassion.
To fly, love needs both of those wings.
Love, to fly us to liberation, balances compassion with wisdom.
Let’s look at the most oft-told story in the gospels to see how this works. I read the story as told in Matthew 14, starting with verse 13.
Now when Jesus heard [about John the Baptist’s martyrdom], he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.
Grief is a love thing. You grieve the loss of those you love. Jesus loves his cousin John very deeply. What does Jesus do upon hearing about John’s loss? Does he drop everything and go directly to his family to console them? No, it is wise to deal with your own sadness first sometimes. That’s what Jesus does. In his wisdom, knowing himself, he goes to a quiet place to grieve.
But when the crowds heard it [where he was], they followed him on foot from the towns. 14 When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion for them and cured their sick.
There’s a place for wisely caring for yourself, and there’s a place for other-directed compassion
15 When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” 16 Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” 17 They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” 18 And he said, “Bring them here to me.” 19 Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and blessed and broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.
Jesus in his compassion says, no, don’t turn them away. They are hungry. You know what it’s like to be hungry. Let their hunger be your hunger, and feed them.
But does Jesus say, okay let’s feed them, but without a plan?
Wisdom means having a plan! Compassion with a wise plan makes love fly!
Jesus directs that everyone sit. Then he gathers what they have – five loaves and two fish. That’s their startup fund. You have got to start somewhere. This is not Genesis 1. Hoping to create something out of nothing like God in Genesis isn’t a wise idea. You’ve got to start with something! Start with what you got. Start where you are and ask others to do the same – rather wise advice.
Combine the wisdom of starting where you are with the compassion of seeking to nourish people and you have what? You have love in flight!
Love, true, godly love replete with wisdom and compassion, is never a sin. It is a gift from the God who is love, and it is our highest calling. Is empathy involved? For sure. Compassion begins with empathy, the choice to enter another’s feelings and feel what someone else is feeling. Compassion means to feel the pain of another with another in order to ease that pain. Compassion is the highest form of empathy and is the farthest thing from a sin.
What’s more, through empathy, feeling what someone else is feeling, we are more wisely able to love them, leading them to God. I can’t love you and lead you to God who is love if I don’t know where you are. And to truly know where you are means joining you where you are and leading you home. So real, selfless empathy is a part of wisdom’s best practice.
I close with the end of our feeding the 5,000 story.
20 And all ate and were filled, and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full.
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