For the past several weeks one of the themes we have been exploring in worship has been the importance of honoring our embodied natures, honoring our bodies, in our lives of faith and spiritual practice. It’s not in fact true that the goal of Christian prayer or practice is to somehow evaporate off or to get beamed up as disembodied souls. Rather, according to the best of Christian theology, it’s about the union between body and soul; in the words of Karl Barth, we are “embodied souls and ensouled bodies.” The Way of Jesus is incarnational, it’s about the in-the-flesh-ness of the divine and what that means for how we should try to live together, more about on-earth-as-it-is-in-heaven, than about pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die.

A few weeks ago, I shared about how important it is to honor our bodies in our prayer lives, how deeply enriching it can be to explore postures and movements that help us to express in prayer things like awe and gratitude and reverence and need and grief and joy and serenity … all these modes of being that happen when we sincerely put ourselves into relationship with the Divine.

Last week, I shared about what embodied spirituality can mean about the healing power of our sacrament of Communion. Let’s be honest, we’ve inherited a kind of weird ritual where we eat bread and drink wine as ways of ingesting and metabolizing Jesus’ broken and resurrected body. But this strangely visceral ritual holds a – I want to call it – mystical power to help us receive unconditional love in and through our bodies and our souls in a way that can embrace and heal places shame and brokenness in ourselves. It’s a practice of embodied spirituality that honors our embodied nature.  

This week and next I’d like to explore some of the ethical implications of this kind of embodied spirituality, embodied faith.

What does it mean to be an ensouled body & embodied soul living among other ensouled bodies & embodied souls? What does that mean for how we are to treat each other?

This week, let’s talk about compassion. An important ethical value of our faith is the value of compassion, the value of being moved to help alleviate people’s suffering. What does it mean for how we are to treat each other when we realize that we’re all ensouled bodies & embodied souls living in this world, we all share the same Holy Creator who made all of us and all of this and called it “Good”? It means growing in our capacities in compassion, realizing we all are in our own ways both tough and tender, broken and beautiful, as fellow children of the Living God.

In our scriptures, compassion is described as one of God’s attributes in God’s relationship with Creation. Compassion is a common feature of how Jesus behaved. Compassion is lifted up as something for us all to aspire to as we try to live more aligned with the Spirit of our Holy Creator.*

But, to be honest, it isn’t easy. It’s nice to say but it can be hard to do. Well, I won’t presume to speak for you. Speaking for myself, it isn’t easy (I’m going to take the chance that I’m not alone in that). Compassion can easily seem uncomfortable and inconvenient, and I for one am very inconsistent with it.

Before I go any further, I need to give the good Protestant disclaimer when it comes to ethics: this isn’t about trying to do the right thing or to be good as some way to somehow earn rewards or favor or love from God. That’s not how it works in the Protestant Christian view. Rather it goes the other way around. Grace comes first. Through Grace we can come to know God’s unconditional love for us and for all people, regardless of “merit”, and the more we receive this grace and allow it to embrace us, the more it changes us, the more we become free from our petty small sense of ourselves and realize just how true and good and right and beautiful it is to live in ways that align with the true love-nature of God.

We are in fact at the deepest level made for compassion. It is one way for us to live out what is true and good and beautiful, in ways that are deeply fulfilling. But the interesting thing is that it does in fact help to do what we know is the right thing, even if we aren’t totally feeling it. The more we return to God’s grace, the more we do end up genuinely wanting to do right by other people, but we can in fact fake it ‘till we make it. When we act in ways that are gracious and compassionate and loving, even if parts of ourselves complain about the discomfort and inconvenience, this can in fact help us loosen up and strengthen those compassion muscles. Then we start to pay more attention to the urgings of compassion. Grace shapes us for compassion; and compassion shapes us for Grace.

I find it helpful to recognize the embodied nature of compassion. Both the Hebrew and Greek words that are translated as “compassion” have literally visceral roots. The Hebrew word is rooted in the word for “womb”: rechem. The Greek word is rooted in the word for “guts, intestines, bowels”: splagchnon. These aren’t nice and pretty words, these are tough and gritty words.

Compassion isn’t just about being nice; it isn’t just about abstract ethical principles. Compassion is about life-giving gutsiness. Compassion is about being moved into action. Compassion is about recognizing someone else’s suffering and allowing that to move us to do something about it. It’s about both feeling and action.  

There’s research in contemporary psychology and neuroscience that confirms the ancient wisdom. When most people witness somebody suffering there are parts of the brain and body that register distress – there are parts of the brain that scientists call “mirror neurons” because they respond sympathetically to others. But what’s important is what happens next. The healthiest thing, what is actually healthiest for us, is when action sequences of the brain and body kick in, which gives us energy and motivation to do something in response to the distress. This is what leads to compassion. It isn’t just feeling sympathy or empathy, but also doing something about it, and please make it something actually helpful and upbuilding.

Psychological researchers exploring compassion find the most resilient responses to stress are what they called the “’broaden and build’ response to stress, in which people seek to build cooperation and relationships in the face of stress, rather than fight or flee.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/parenting-from-a-neuroscience-perspective/202102/understanding-the-neuroscience-of-compassion)

This is as important now as ever. These days we have screens and cameras everywhere, and satellites and fiber optic cables wrapping the globe, we can be confronted with images of human anguish and devastation both near and far in nearly real time; we can communicate with other humans across continents and oceans at slightly less than the speed of light. Yet people in our culture report greater feelings of disconnection. We know there’s a lot of numbness, callousness, selective empathy, and even worse, cruelty.

But that’s understandable in its way because, well, isn’t it overwhelming to care?

But it doesn’t have to be. Responding with action and connection leads to a sense of health. I may not be able to be on the ground in Eastern Washington helping folks to lost their homes from the wildfires, or directly help victims of war, but I can show up at my local food back and connect with the good folks there, and put some work in there, which is especially needed now due to cuts in SNAP, and more folks having their legal immigration status disappear overnight … or choose your own adventure … Acts of service actually help regulate our nervous systems and, more importantly, actually help others.

It is important to remember that, as people of faith, we know we don’t need to feel alone in any of this, in the most cosmic sense. The Creator of the cosmos is the ultimate source of Love, and is actively present through the spirit of Love. 

When the writer of the book of Genesis tells the story of the first murder, when Cain killed Abel, they write that Abel’s blood cried up from the ground and it cut God’s heart to the quick. God’s heart is the first to break, to paraphrase William Sloane Coffin. God is “the most moved mover,” in the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, in contrast to Aristotle who said that God is the “unmoved mover.”

This means we are far from alone in caring. The Creator Godself bears the worlds’ heartbreak – somehow. This means God can bear our own heartbreak.  Knowing that, trusting that can help us to have the strength and sensitivity to overcome numbness, disconnection, cynicism, and start to do our part of helping to bear each other’s hearbreak.

The gifts of embodied spiritual practice and incarnate religious life is that can allow us to slow down, and reconnect with our souls, reconnect with our bodies, to let our bodies reconnect with our souls and our souls with our bodies, it can allow us to reconnect with our feelings, our needs, our yearnings, our feelings of moral discomfort and distress …. embodied spiritual practice and incarnate religious life can allow us to reconnect with each other, with the world around us, with all our relations and inter-relations, with the wisdom of those who have gone before us … it can allow us to reconnect with our God whose Spirit is with us and among us and beyond us, far beyond …

All this can give us the strength to be moved by suffering into action, action that creates connection, real connection between real human beings, simple, clear, concrete, living-giving and gutsy, acts of service that create connection and forge solidarity, a real sense that, “we’re all in this together.” Because Lord knows we are, whether we know it or not. 

Thanks be to God.

Delivered Sunday, August 9, 2026, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.