Mission: John Drane on Compassion and Finding God in Strange Places – A Sermon.

Paul writes – John Drane makes some wonderful points in a short sermon based Mark 6: 30-43. The sermon is titled Finding God in Strange Places. It was delivered at the First Baptist Church of Pasadena on March 5^th 2006. There is much in it that resonates with thinking around “mission” and being “mission-shaped”. You can download it as an Mp3 by right clicking here. Olive Drane gives the communion talk.

Here’s a statement from the sermon, “God’s Kingdom is God’s way of doing things.” I hadn’t thought of it in this way.

At another point John talks about compassion: he says is, “mission starts with compassion” (e.g. Matthew 9:36; Mathew 14:14; Matthew 20:34; Mark 1:41; Mark 8:2; Luke 15:20). Compassion (it’s “near-enemy” is “pity”) is an interesting concept. It’s a quality of being that enables us to open ourselves (in a deep sense) to the discovery of God and God’s activity in the world. It has the sense of a heart touched and touching the sorrow, longing, pain, loss, groaning, unfreedom, and suffering of people; and in fact, of all of creation (cf. Romans 8:20 & 21 – creation groans too). It is, as Jack Kornfield has said, “the quivering of the heart in the face of the pain of the other… compassion arises not because we’re supposed to be compassionate, but because we are all connected.”