Hello my friends,

Thanks for being here today. Many of you have sent in questions about how to navigate conversations with loved ones who are indifferent to the suffering we are seeing around us. So, I wanted to process that with you all today and think together about some possible ways of responding productively. I hope you find it helpful.

Recommended Resources

​-What Makes Us Free? by Throughline. The conversation over what the government's role actually is has only intensified. I think I have someone express that question to me in one form or another almost daily. This episode from one of my favorite history podcasts not only explores how that question has evolved throughout our country's history, but shows how both major parties have become neoliberal in their economic perspectives and puts so much of the rhetoric we hear today into historical context. I found it really helpful and I think you will too.

​-#2352 - James Talarico by the Joe Rogan Experience. James Talarico is someone I've had the pleasure of interacting with several times online and someone I deeply admire. He not only serves on the Texas legislature but is also training to be a pastor. The calm, articulate, and courageous way he shares both his faith and his politics are as refreshing as they are needed today. I highly recommend listing to this interview. I think you will find it insightful and encouraging.

​-The Structure of Hope. I wrote this article about four months ago now and thought I would share it again here. I needed to reread recently as a reminder of some of the methods I use to keep hope alive in my mind and heart. Perhaps you might find it helpful to read in this season as well.

​-Surge in U.S. Concern About Immigration Has Abated You may have seen this Gallup Poll already about current American views on immigration, but if not, I thought I would share it here. To give you some of the big highlights found in it, it says that 30% of Americans want immigration decreased, which is down from 55% a year ago. A record-high 79% consider immigration good for the country. It also shows that support down for border wall and mass deportation.

​-Voting rights I just want to encourage you to consider advocating for ensuring voting rights in your state and local elections. Gerrymandering efforts are in full force right now and it is important to keep an eye on these maneuvers, but to raise our voices as much as we are able to ensure equal voting access for all.

-My new 30 Day Devotional: I wrote this in hopes of creating an encouraging resource for individuals or small groups pursing the ways of Jesus in our world today. You can find out more about it through the link below.

$20.00 Following Jesus In A World Obsessed With Empires: 30 Days of reclaiming the hope, compassion, and justice of Jesus. Today, our world can often feel overwhelmed by darkness, division, and despair. I created this 30-day devotional to... Read more Get it now!

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From Insulation to Incarnation.

It’s hard to put words to how heartbreaking it has been to watch people, especially those who claim to follow Jesus, celebrate cruelty.

To see news of immigrant families torn apart, asylum seekers mocked, vulnerable people dehumanized, due process being violated, lawful citizens being detained, and then watch those moments become racist punchlines, memes, and even merchandise.​

There’s a grief that comes not just from witnessing injustice, but from seeing it cheered on by those who profess to love the same Jesus who told us to welcome the stranger, love our neighbor, and care for the least of these.

As a pastor, I want to make this clear: You can’t support and celebrate mistreatment and cruelty towards our fellow human beings and follow Jesus at the same time. They are diametrically opposed to one another.

Jesus said, “I was a stranger and you didn’t welcome me.” Imagine what he would say about people celebrating that families are being ripped apart, children watching their parents being detained, and their right to due process being violated, then someone with “Christ is king” in their bio shares this news with delight.

Jesus said “I was sick and in prison and you did not come to visit me.”Imagine what he would say about people buying merch with the name of people’s detention center on it, making jokes about them being eaten by alligators, and still somehow claiming to be “pro life” and planning to go to church on Sunday.

It doesn’t matter what we think someone might be guilty of or not. No one deserves to be dehumanized and scapegoated. No one deserves to have their suffering celebrated. Each one of them is created in God’s image and should be treated accordingly.

If we’ve allowed our politics to convince us otherwise, then that’s a sin we need to repent from. We can either follow cruelty or we can follow Jesus, but we can’t do both. We take Jesus’ name in vain when we try to.

“If anyone boasts, “I love God,” and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar. If he won’t love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can’t see? The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people. You’ve got to love both.” -1 John 4:20 (MSG)

Even though we may be able to state where we stand with clarity like this, the question still remains: how are we to navigate conversations with loved ones who are indifferent to the suffering of others around us?

Traversing Indifference

This conversation still echoes in my soul like a dissonant note that refuses to resolve.

It was a quiet moment in the back of a sanctuary, an ordinary place for pastors to linger and talk after a service. It was around 2018, and I was carrying the weight of watching the vulnerable in our society, such as immigrants, the poor, the sick, the marginalized, suffer under a government that seemed more committed to cruelty than compassion.

It was the year migrant children were being separated from their parents at the southern border, and the Attorney General used Romans 13 to justify it. The sound of their cries echoed across the news cycle and Christianity was being used to sanctify it. Black Americans were still reeling from decades of systemic violence, and the names of Stephon Clark and Botham Jean became part of a growing litany of injustice. It was the height of the #MeToo movement, with women across the country, especially women of color, risking everything to tell the truth about abuse, often to be met with disbelief or dismissal.

Much like our world today, the wounds were many. The empathy, not enough.

In a quiet conversation, I confessed to a fellow pastor how heartbroken and helpless I felt in light of it all.

He listened silently. Then, when I finished and after a pause, he looked me in the eye and asked: “Yeah, but how much of this is actually directly impacting you?”

I’ll never forget the chill that washed over me in that moment. Not because of the tone, he wasn’t harsh, but because of the implication: If injustice doesn’t harm me personally, I shouldn't be concerned about it.

We were both straight Christian white guys pastoring in Idaho. In terms of privilege, we were among the most insulated people in our society. Of course it didn’t affect us.

That was the problem.
That is the problem.

In my stunned confusion, I managed to respond: “Brother, the people being negatively harmed are the very people Jesus called us to love. We are also shepherding people through these times. How could their suffering not directly impact us?”

I’ve returned to that moment more times than I can count and each time it reminds me how easily the gospel can be distorted into a self-protection strategy to preserve our privilege and the insulation it provides. A way of keeping our hands clean and our hearts untouched by the world’s pain.

I think this is at the heart of a lot of what we are seeing today. Due to their relative privilege, many can maintain a comfortable distance from the people who are going through unimaginable things right now. They can shield themselves from contemplating how horrible it would be if it happened to them or their loved ones. This is especially true if it is happening to a group of people they've come to demonize. They can even celebrate in their misfortune and can even treat it as another form of entertainment.

But the gospel of Jesus was never about insulation. It was never about only having compassion for people who were going through something we were going through too.

Jesus didn’t only weep for what directly harmed him, he wept over Jerusalem. He touched the leper when no one else would. He centered the Samaritan, the bleeding woman, the poor widow, the outcast child.

The gospel compels us not to ask, “Does this affect me?”​
but rather, “Who is being hurt and how can I stand with them?”

The idea that our concern for others should be contingent on how personally affected we are is not just morally hollow, it is anti-Christ. Jesus is what God looks like in the flesh. Jesus shows us that God didn’t stay disconnected from the suffering of the world, unaffected by it all, but stepped into our world, became one of us, and experienced the fullness of humanity like the rest of us, pain and suffering included. That is the God revealed by Jesus.

Leveraging Privilege is Biblical

This should be even more important for people of privilege, like two white straight guys who pastor in Idaho. In fact, the Bible gives us numerous powerful examples of people who recognized their social, political, and religious privilege and chose to use it to serve those who were vulnerable or suffering. Let’s look at just a few examples.

In Esther 4:14–16, Esther, a Jewish woman who became queen of Persia, could have remained silent and safe while her people faced genocide. But when Mordecai challenged her not to hide behind her palace walls, she responded with courage: “If I perish, I perish.” She used her royal position—her proximity to power, not to protect herself but to advocate for others at great personal risk. Esther didn’t deny her privilege. She leveraged it to save lives.

In Hebrews 11:24–26, we read about Moses who was born a Hebrew but raised in Pharaoh’s palace. He had access to Egypt’s elite education and comfort. But when he saw the suffering of his people, he chose to walk away from power and comfort. Hebrews says he “chose to be mistreated with the people of God rather than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin.” Moses used his privilege to confront injustice and lead his people out of oppression.

In Nehemiah 2:1–8 we see that Nehemiah was cupbearer to the king, which was a trusted, high-ranking official. When he heard Jerusalem’s walls were in ruins, he risked his position by asking the king for resources, protection, and time to help. He didn’t turn away from his people’s suffering, even though it didn’t affect his daily life in the palace. Nehemiah leveraged his privilege to rebuild what had been broken and restore dignity to his people.

In Matthew 27:57–60, we see that Joseph of Arimathea was a wealthy, prominent member of the Jewish council. After Jesus was crucified, which was a moment when most disciples fled, Joseph used his access to Pilate to request Jesus’ body and bury him with honor in a new tomb. Joseph used his privilege not for comfort or status, but to show respect and care for the rejected and executed Christ.

In Philippians 2:5–8, we see how even Jesus himself leveraged his own privilege for the sake of the whole world. No one had more authority or privilege than Christ. And yet, Paul writes that Jesus “did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself...” He took on the form of a servant, entering fully into our pain and ultimately dying a criminal’s death to redeem the world. Jesus didn’t hoard his privilege or use it to shield himself from the pain of others. No, he surrendered it in radical love for us all.

The call of Jesus then is to carry one another’s burdens, to lay down our lives for our friends, to enter into suffering that is not our own precisely because we are bound together in the Body of Christ.

If the church preaches a gospel that does not move us toward the pain of others, it is not preaching the gospel of Jesus. It is not preaching Christ crucified, it is preaching comfort justified. And that false gospel must be repented of.

Because if we cannot be moved until the suffering reaches us, then we have stopped following Jesus and started worshiping ourselves.

Empathy Is a Threat to Power

It’s no accident that empathy is being treated like a weakness in American culture right now. That grief fatigue we feel? That pressure to “move on” from injustice? That mocking of people who care too much? It’s all part of a deeper resistance.

Because once people begin to care deeply for the poor, the marginalized, the immigrant, the sick, the incarcerated, then the systems that benefits from their suffering begin to tremble.

Empathy leads to solidarity. Solidarity leads to action. And action leads to change that threatens power built on existing exploitation.

Those in power do not want us to care for each other and certainly not for the least among us. Because when we do, we begin to unite together and question the machinery that makes some lives matter more than others. We start asking about who benefits from our numbness, division, and apathy. We begin to see that the comfort of a few is often built on the suffering of many.

Empathy is not weakness. It is dangerous. Holy. Disruptive. That is why Jesus embodied it so fully and why empires always try to crucify it.

So if you’ve ever been told you’re too sensitive, or that it’s not your issue, or that you’re overreacting, take heart. That probably means you're standing closer to the heart of God than you think.

What Can We Do?

So how do we love people, especially those closest to us, who cannot see what they do not suffer themselves?

I have found that the most productive thing I can do in conversations like this is to never resort to shame, but persist with story. Notice in the gospels how so often Jesus responded to deflections and bad faith questions with parables? He did this because stories are always effective tools in breaking up binary thinking and inviting people to go deeper. The same is true for us today.

We invite them, not indict them. We share the very real stories of those experiencing pain in ways that make it harder to look away and we keep sharing their stories.

We will never be able to argue people into compassion. We can walk with them, model it, and tell the truth without letting bitterness take root. More often than not, inviting people to be more compassionate is a marathon, not a sprint. It is accomplished by faithfulness, not by force.

So, sometimes, we ask questions like:

• “Who is missing from your world?”
• “Whose voices are you not hearing?”
• “What if this happened to someone you loved?”
• "Aren't they your neighbor whom Jesus called you to love?"

These are not traps, but invitations to curiosity, to courage, to Christlike love.

In all this we must remember a difficult truth: we cannot make someone care.

We cannot logic or guilt someone into empathy and spending all our energy trying to change someone who refuses to be changed will slowly steal our ability to be present where compassion is needed most.

There comes a point, maybe after you've tried every kind, clear, and courageous conversation, when you have to choose to release them. Not out of apathy, but in order to stay faithful to the work God has called you to.

When someone in your life refuses to see another’s humanity, even after you’ve tried your best to help them, you are allowed to grieve. You are allowed to step back. You are allowed to protect your heart. And you are allowed to carry on in your call to keep loving, keep advocating, and keep showing up for the hurting, not because your voice changed someone's mind, but because love has changed you.

Don’t let someone’s refusal to soften their heart harden yours. You never know who will be changed by your remaining faithful to loving others as yourself. Even if they refuse to change now.

Prayer

Jesus of the margins,
open our eyes to the pain we do not see,
soften our hearts to the stories we have ignored,
and stretch our love beyond what is comfortable.

Teach us to weep with those who weep, even when we do not share their wounds. Make us brave enough to confront comfort,
faithful enough to stay near to the suffering,
and humble enough to keep learning.

Let us never mistake our insulation for your blessing,
and never confuse silence for peace.

May we become people who walk toward the hurting, who stand alongside the vulnerable, and who love as if our neighbor’s pain were our own.

Amen.