Let us pray.
Almighty God, may the words of my mouth
and the meditations of all of our hearts
be acceptable in your sight.
O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer,
in the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
we pray, Amen.
Robocop, blade runner, Terminator, Tron,
even E.T. and back to the future,
the Star Wars trilogy, Transformers.
My youth in the 1980s was full of cultural influences,
suggesting that a revolution was coming,
that at some point the dystopian future to come,
humanity would be threatened by machines,
or that humanity would find ways
of transcending the normal human limitations
and merging with those machines.
So something was happening in the 1980s,
something was in the air,
there was this cultural obsession with the idea of technology
as a potential threat to humanity as we know it,
or possibly as a tool that would redefine
what it means to be human itself.
And so that is kind of happens,
maybe not exactly in the way that the 1980s predicted,
but without us even noticing,
Apple and Google have turned us into organisms
living symbiotically with technology,
part human, part machine.
We now outsource part of our memory,
contact books, calendars, to-do lists.
You don't have everyone's phone number memorized
as you did in the past.
We no longer need to remember these basic facts
about the worlds.
We continually Google while we're cooking,
how many tablespoons are in a quarter cup?
Even though we should just know that.
Does this make us less human?
Are we beginning to merge with the machines?
Now, I don't want to go too far down this particular rabbit hole,
though it is a fascinating one.
But just to suggest that the question
of what really defines us as human
has been around for thousands of years,
it's actually not a new question.
In a dialogue of Plato called Fadress,
the concern is that writing,
this relatively new technology would replace memory.
And therefore replace something that is quintessentially human.
Our ability to use our minds to put together the world,
not to rely on things that are written down.
Other societies have had different ways
of answering this question of what defines us as human beings.
And they have often tended to say that their way
of defining it is the best way,
or in some cases should be the only way.
Take the Romans, please.
I knew you would help me out.
Thank you.
The Roman century before Jesus was born was very tumultuous.
There was this period of great instability in civil war.
The Roman Republic had been around for 500 years,
and then it turned into the Roman Empire in 27 BC.
A man named Octavian emerged from these Roman civil wars
and became the first emperor of Rome
and his friend Virgil wrote a poem to celebrate his rise to power.
It's a really long poem.
It took him 10 years to write it.
And it was completed just about 20 years before Jesus was born.
And in this poem, Virgil tries to set down
for all time what it is to be a human,
that is what it is to be a Roman human at least.
As Rome said at sight on world domination,
on conquering lands and territory,
they also wanted to extend their ideas
about what makes life valuable,
what makes life worth living, what makes life human.
And while there were many noble ideas
within their understanding of humanness,
what they really wanted was to make the whole world Roman.
They even had a word for it, Romanitas or Roman-ness.
And this is what it looked like according to that poet Virgil.
He says, others will hammer out bronze
that breathes with more delicacy than us.
Others will draw out living features from the marble.
Others will plead their causes better,
traced with instruments to the movement of the skies
until the rising of the constellations.
But remember, Roman, it is for you to rule the nations
with power, that will be your skill,
to crown peace with law, to spare the conquered
and to subdue or crush the proud.
And so what the poet is saying here
is that other nations like the Greeks were better at art
and sculpture, other nations could argue legal cases
better, other nations were better at scientific inquiry
and discovery, but Roman-ness consisted in the ability
to conquer, to rule, to govern.
And yes, to ensure peace, but to recognize
that peace only came at the end of a sword.
This is the imperial way.
And it worked, even though nearly a century later,
the Roman philosopher Seneca said,
I am reluctant to call mercy, but was really
the exhaustion of cruelty.
The poem that Virgil wrote explained
what we might call the burden of greatness
when this new humanity of Rome should look like.
In short, people, especially leaders,
should subdue their emotions, carefully guard
their relationships, purge their lives
of anything that would distract them
from the path of duty and loyalty to the cause of empire.
This was the basic essence of humanity.
This was the reason you had come into being.
And if you could embrace it and become part of it,
it became a compelling vision of what it meant to be human.
But that vision could only be embraced
if, as Rome conquered your land,
you left behind whatever previous customs, language, clothing
of your people, and embraced Roman-ness.
To become this new type of human, you had to assimilate.
King Herod, whom we saw last week,
beheading the prophet John, the baptizer, Jesus' cousin,
was someone desperate for Roman approval,
desperate to show Roman authorities
that he could match them in cruelty,
desperate to show them that he could put down
these petty Jewish messiahs and restore Roman order
and Roman peace to these backwards, impoverished kingdoms.
Nothing could have been farther
from imperial power and might than the sea of Galilee.
It's people rich in agriculture and fishing,
but poor in imperial wealth and status and influence.
They had no idea what it took to be Roman,
just that they were being taxed out of existence
and that there was talk that the emperor portrayed
on the coins they would not use claimed to be a god.
They also knew that people like John, the baptizer,
people like the prophets of old who may be represented
some hope for their people seem to be in danger now
from these Romans who were ruling their land.
And therefore, the shepherds of the sheep
were in very short supply.
Before our gospel passage for today begins,
Jesus had sent out the disciples two by two.
He had given them authority to cast out demons
and to heal the sick.
And now they are back from these short journeys
in which they have helped Jesus to begin
these most radical of incursions,
this most peaceful revolution of the kingdom of God,
which begins with healing and restoration
and wholeness of those overlooked and forgotten
by the powers that be.
They were back and they are eager to talk to Jesus
about their successes and failures.
And Jesus first encourages them to rest.
Notice what he doesn't do.
He doesn't ask them how many people they had visited.
He doesn't log their hours into his managerial notebook.
He doesn't remind them of their duty to keep going,
no matter how tired they might be.
He invites them to rest and to eat and to restore their energy.
He pays attention to their humanity, to their human needs.
And then he turns his attention to these crowds,
these crowds that know Jesus and his disciples already.
They are already loved by the people.
And Jesus sees them and has compassion on them.
The text says because they were like sheep without a shepherd.
And this word compassion means that he felt something
in his gut, something deep within.
An outpouring of emotion, empathy, care.
Jesus has a rich, emotional life.
And unlike those stoic Romans who are encouraged
to suppress their emotions so they could maintain
their sense of duty and loyalty above all,
Jesus embraces every bit of what it means to be human.
He feels for the people.
He allows himself to have this reaction,
this deep well of compassion,
to lead him to embrace all the people
the Father has given him to love, to shepherd them.
Who else was going to shepherd them after all?
The Roman emperor, King Herod, the king who pretended
to be the king of the Jews,
but was really just looking to impress Rome
and enrich himself not to protect and feed his own people.
When Jesus sees the crowd, he doesn't want to impose
his rule on them.
He doesn't want to remake them into something that they are not.
He doesn't want to subdue them.
He simply and profoundly has compassion on them.
He loves them.
He wants them to be whole and well.
He wants them to know how the love of God works.
The God of Israel who has not forgotten or abandoned them
but continues to proclaim and inaugurate the kingdom of God.
He wants his first words in the Gospel of Mark
are the time is here.
The time is now the kingdom of God is here.
Repent and believe he says in the goodness of God
and that God has good news for you.
Jesus' picture of humanity is of a humanity restored
and renewed in God of a humanity who takes their very image,
the deepest parts of themselves
from the creator and sustainer of life.
The one who was loved them into being,
who was called them into a covenant
and everlasting promise of blessing.
Jesus' picture of humanity is that of sheep
who need a shepherd.
And so the writer of Ephesians illustrates this vision
of God's renewal of humanity through Jesus so beautifully.
This writer is dealing with the question of the others,
the Gentiles, the outsiders, the people who were believers
in this Jewish Messiah that who themselves had no connection
to the covenant of the God of Israel
through their own culture or background or language
or history.
And so on the other hand, there were Jewish believers
who thought very suspiciously of these idle worshiping outsiders
who all of a sudden presumed to have access to their God,
the God of Israel.
How to reconcile these two groups?
How to bring them together into one new humanity?
And so the beauty of the gospel is that Christ conquers
and breaks down walls without violence,
without conquest, without imposing heavy burdens.
He conquers through compassion.
He puts death hostility through the cross,
through his submission to that Roman instrument of torture
and pain and humiliation.
In his death and resurrection, Jesus shows us how God has chosen
to make us all citizens of a new kingdom,
regardless of our own history, our own past.
Through the compassionate citizenship of the kingdom of God,
no one is any longer an alien, an immigrant, a stranger.
Through the compassionate citizenship of the kingdom of God,
every humanly constructed barrier comes down,
and everyone, everyone has access to God.
This message is no less scandalous now than it was then.
It was a hard pill to swallow for those early Christians
that really and fully grasp how indiscriminate the love
of God was, that it was really going to be poured out
on all people, young and old, male and female,
rich and poor Jew and Gentile, people of status and influence
and those with no standing in society whatsoever.
It was a hard lesson that God did not play favorites.
It is still a hard lesson.
There are after all many ways in which we think we know
what makes for our humanity.
There are many ways in which we find our place in this world
through forming groups and alliances and parties and factions.
There are many ways in which we determine who is in and who is out.
There are many ways in which we determine who is worthy
of compassion and who is not.
Jesus has compassion on the crowds
because of all the leaders available to them,
of all the people tasked with taking care of them,
of all the factions and parties of their own day,
no one sees them, no one cares for them.
No one really understands them.
Only Jesus sees them and loves them in their humanity
just to see sees us and loves us in ours.
He is our peace.
And in him we are being created into the new humanity.
He longs for us to be.
In him we are being made into a holy temple,
a dwelling place for God.
In him we are the recipients of a compassion too deep for words,
too beautiful for contemplation.
In him we have a shepherd to lead us and guide us forever.
Let us pray.
Almighty God we give you great thanks for your compassion
that flows deep from your heart for each one of us.
We pray that you would make it known to us
and make it real in our lives, this day and always.
Amen.