Divine Empathy – Letter from the Executive Director

Dear Members, Partners and Friends, 

Back in August, nearly 375,000 households in Northwest Indiana found themselves suddenly without power, the result of a severe windstorm and multiple tornadoes which tore through towns, cities and counties across the region. In my case, the outage lasted nine days. Others, like many residents of Gary, IN, an economically struggling city whose population is over 75% African American, went two weeks or more without power, a situation exacerbated by sewage backups and the late summer humidity. 

For me, while the situation was certainly challenging—basement flooding, navigating downed trees and power lines, and keeping a family fed, hydrated and cool in the face of closed stores and limited supplies—it was also marked by a deep sense of empathy. A few days after the storm hit, I ran into a neighbor at a hardware store about 20 miles from my house. I was there for the second time that day, having been told that a shipment of gas generators would be arriving around 7pm that evening. My neighbor was on a similar quest. Born in Nigeria, he shared with me that power instability was a daily occurrence in his country of origin, a sentiment I heard repeated over the coming days from friends and neighbors with roots across the globe: Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Mexico…Meanwhile, as we in Indiana were navigating the aftermath of this unprecedented weather event, people in Nepal would soon suffer their own, much more deadly and devastating climate catastrophe: massive flooding which claimed the lives of over 1,400 people. 

Empathy—the ability to imagine ourselves in another’s shoes, even while recognizing their unique experience and distinct humanity—stands at the very heart of God’s mission on Earth. The Triune God, who made us in their very image (Genesis 1:26), “so loved the world” that they sent the Son to live, walk and suffer for and among us (John 3:16). In Jesus, God sought and seeks to close the distance between Heaven and creation. Jesus’ earthly journey is, in many ways, a journey of increasing empathy: when his mother informs him at a wedding that their hosts—“they,” in Mary’s words—have run out of wine, Jesus’ first response is one of emotional detachment: “how does your concern affect me?” (Jn. 2:3-4). Likewise, when Jesus is approached by a Canaanite woman who pleads for her daughter’s healing, he at first sees her simply as “other,” not of “the House of Israel” and thus not worthy of his intervention (Matthew 15:22-24).  

And yet, in both cases, he intervenes. Throughout the Gospel, Jesus’ growing sense of empathy becomes the hallmark of his life and teaching: when the crowd in John’s Gospel seeks to condemn a woman caught in adultery, Jesus challenges them to imagine facing similar condemnation for their own sins (Jn. 8:7). In the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, the sin for which the servant is condemned is that of a lack of empathy: having had his own debt forgiven, he fails to recognize and respond to his fellow servant’s plea for forgiveness (Mt. 18:30). By the time his Passion approaches, the Lord so empathizes with the stranger, the hungry, the sick, and the imprisoned that he names their suffering as his very own (Mt. 25:34-40). 

He compels us to do the same. Perhaps no teaching of Jesus highlights the primacy of empathy in the Christian imagination than the commandment teaching to love our neighbor. In the Gospel, that love is wholly conditioned on an empathetic understanding of the other: not merely to “love” our neighbor, but to love them as we love ourselves (Mt. 22:39; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:27). For Jesus, the purest example of neighborly love is that of the Good Samaritan, the stranger moved by compassion to respond to suffering of another (Lk. 10:33-34). Writing for Word on Fire in 2018, Christopher Hazell aptly identifies the bridge between the great commandment which this parable exemplifies—second only to love of God—and the Jesus’ formal “mission statement” expressed in Luke’s Gospel (Lk. 4:18-19): “The problem unfolds quite logically: if we can’t empathize with others, then we can’t as easily love them…By cultivating a more empathetic worldview, we are making it easier to fulfill Christ’s command to heal the sick, set captives free, and spread the Gospel of life.” 

Empathy is not only the driving force of Christian mission, but one of its primary fruits. By living and serving alongside the poor and vulnerable, by choosing to share in some of their struggles, we encounter more deeply the dignity of those whose lives and experiences once seemed so distant from our own. At the same time, we understand that a great chasm exists between our voluntary and conditional periods of simplicity and austerity, and the totality of a life at the peripheries. Whatever the inconvenience of traveling from town to town and across state lines in search of needed supplies, I could at least do so freely. Others in my community, those with undocumented or otherwise tenuous immigration status, did so only at the risk of detainment and deportation—a result of the significant presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials in the region, everywhere from nearby Chicago to the local Wal-Mart.   

As a community of faith leaders committed to God’s mission, we at USCMA are called to live, proclaim and commission others into Christ’s empathetic love. We do so at a time when empathy is seemingly in shorter supply than ever, where the plight of so many—the poor and the hungry, the migrant and refugee, the young and the very old, the sick and the dying, the victim of war, famine and genocide—goes unnoticed, unremarked and, worse still, taunted and ridiculed. An “era of artificial intelligence,” as Pope Leo observes, in which “human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization” and, this, “ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human.” (Magnifica Humanitas, no. 15) 

Amid all these challenges, many may ask much the same as Jesus did his mother, “How does your concern affect me?” Let our unwavering witness to the empathetic love of God serve as our answer…and invitation for all to “Go and do likewise” (Luke 10:37). 

Together in mission, 

Kevin Foy
Executive Director 

Other September Encounter Updates:

Fall Speaker Series
2027 Conference
2026 Annual Meeting Recap
Membership Directory Form
World Mission News