The best stories about empathy show something sympathy alone cannot: what it looks like to step inside another person's pain and stay there for a while. Paul put it simply: "Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn" (Romans 12:15). Empathy is not fixing people. Very often, it is just refusing to leave them alone.
Below are five sermon illustrations about empathy, each retold in full in our own words. You will meet the twelve people who refused to look away from the slave trade, a rabbi who raised his son in silence so he would learn to hear suffering, a little girl who could not fix a bicycle, a Holocaust survivor who found an unexpected companion in Jesus, and a soldier who finally saw his enemy's face. Each story ends with a takeaway for preaching or reflection.
Stories in this post:
- The End of Slavery: Twelve People Who Refused to Look Away
- In the Silence, Hearing the World Cry
- "I Stopped to Help Her Cry"
- "After All, He Was a Jew Too"
- Enemies No More: The Soldier in the Shell Hole
The End of Slavery: Twelve People Who Refused to Look Away
At the close of the eighteenth century the slave trade was a thriving and enormous business. Prominent British families owned enslaved people or held shares in the trade, a huge number of ordinary people depended on it for their living, and public opinion was hardly troubled by it at all. So when a young Anglican named Thomas Clarkson threw in his lot with a small group of Quakers who opposed the trade, their chances of success looked close to impossible.
On 22 May 1787, Clarkson and eleven others met at 2 George Yard in London, the bookshop and printing house of the Quaker publisher James Phillips. Nine of the twelve founders were Quakers. That afternoon they formed the committee that became the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Their plan was practical. They would gather hard evidence about the trade, expose its inhumanity through pamphlets, posters and public lectures, and build enough public pressure to force Parliament to ban the British slave trade.
Clarkson became the committee's one full-time campaigner. He travelled tirelessly around England collecting information, visiting ports, interviewing sailors and doing everything he could to draw people's attention to the cruelty of the trade. It was frightening work. Few people involved in the business would speak to him. He received death threats and survived at least one attempt on his life, and many people simply mocked him. Early on, standing in the great slave port of Bristol, he admitted that he "began now to tremble, for the first time, at the arduous task" he had taken on, and wondered whether he would even get out of the city alive.
Yet slowly the tide of opinion began to turn. Petitions carrying thousands of names started arriving at Parliament. More people joined the cause. The potter Josiah Wedgwood produced a small medallion showing a kneeling, chained African with the words "Am I not a man and a brother?" It became one of the most popular emblems of the age, worn on bracelets and set into hairpins and snuffboxes. Hundreds of thousands of people stopped buying sugar, the main product of slave labour, and sugar marked as "not made by slaves" began to appear in shops. The autobiography of the formerly enslaved writer Olaudah Equiano became a bestseller, and crowds came to hear him speak.
Within about five years of that first meeting at James Phillips's shop, public opinion had turned against the slave trade. Parliament would take much longer to win. The leader of the parliamentary campaign was a young MP from Yorkshire, William Wilberforce, who told the House of Commons in 1789: "So enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did its wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for the abolition... Let the consequences be what they would, I from this time determined that I would never rest till I had effected its abolition."
Like Clarkson, Wilberforce met fierce opposition and ridicule. Admiral Horatio Nelson, the national hero, wrote scornfully of "the damnable doctrine of Wilberforce and his hypocritical allies." But Wilberforce also had powerful friends, among them the Prime Minister, William Pitt.
Bills against the trade were brought to Parliament again and again, in 1791, 1792, 1793, 1797, 1798, 1799, 1804 and 1805, and every one of them failed. Finally, on 23 February 1807, the House of Commons voted for abolition by 283 votes to 16. The Slave Trade Act received royal assent on 25 March 1807.
The campaigners had assumed that once ships could no longer carry enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, slavery itself would collapse. That assumption proved naive. No new captives were shipped, but people remained enslaved on British-owned plantations in the West Indies, and their children were born into slavery. So the campaign went on. A mass uprising of enslaved people in Jamaica at the end of 1831 made it clear that the system could not be held together much longer, and in 1833 the Slavery Abolition Act finally brought an end to slavery across most of the British Empire.
It took forty-six years. But who would have thought that a meeting of twelve people in a London bookshop on 22 May 1787, armed with nothing but their determination and their voices, could change the course of history?
Takeaway: Empathy is where the abolition movement began. Clarkson and his friends chose to see enslaved Africans as "a man and a brother" when most of their country did not want to look. Real empathy does not stop at feeling sorry; it moves us to "speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves" (Proverbs 31:8-9). Whose suffering is easy for you to ignore because it happens out of sight?
Source: Historical details from the life of Thomas Clarkson and the records of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
In the Silence, Hearing the World Cry
Chaim Potok's novel The Chosen (1967) tells the story of Danny Saunders, the brilliant son of Reb Saunders, a strict Hasidic rabbi in Brooklyn. For years Danny's father hardly speaks to him at all, except when the two of them study the Talmud together. Danny does not understand it, and neither does his friend Reuven. The silence seems cold, even cruel, though Reb Saunders is clearly a man who feels deeply.
Near the end of the book the mystery is finally explained. Reb Saunders says that God blessed him with a brilliant son, a boy with a mind like a jewel. But when Danny was four years old, his father saw him reading a book, and he was frightened. The book told the story of a poor Jew and all his suffering, and little Danny enjoyed it. He was not moved by the man's pain at all; he was simply delighted by how much he could read and remember.
"There was no soul in my four-year-old Daniel," the rabbi says, "there was only his mind."
In anguish he cried out to God. What had God done to him? A mind like this he did not need for a son. A heart he needed for a son, a soul he needed for a son, compassion, righteousness, mercy, and the strength to suffer and to carry pain.
So Reb Saunders did what his own father had done with him. He raised the boy in silence. He hoped that if Danny had to live with his own loneliness and his own pain, he would learn to recognise the pain of others. And in the end, he says, it worked: in the silence between them, Danny began to hear the world crying.
Takeaway: Cleverness can coexist with a cold heart. Empathy has to be learned, and very often we learn it through our own pain, the way Paul says God "comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble" (2 Corinthians 1:3-4). The question is not whether you understand suffering but whether you can hear it.
Source: Chaim Potok, The Chosen (1967), as quoted in John Stott, The Contemporary Christian, pp. 119-120.
"I Stopped to Help Her Cry"
This is a short anonymous story. We cannot confirm where it first appeared.
A little girl came home late for supper. Her mother was waiting at the door and did what anxious parents always do: she demanded to know where on earth her daughter had been.
The girl explained that she had stopped to help her friend Janie, whose bicycle had broken when she fell off it.
"But you don't know anything about fixing bicycles," her mother said.
"I know that," the little girl replied. "I just stopped to help her cry."
Takeaway: Most of us think we have nothing to offer people in pain because we cannot solve their problem. This little girl knew better. Job's friends did their best work in the first seven days, when they sat with him and said nothing at all (Job 2:11-13). Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do for a hurting friend is not to fix the bicycle, but to sit on the kerb and cry with them.
Source: Source unknown.
"After All, He Was a Jew Too"
We have not been able to confirm this story independently; it is reported in the work of Maggie Ross.
Kilmer Myers, who later became an Episcopal bishop, was once a priest at a church in Manhattan. One of the most disturbing parts of his ministry there was a woman named Emma. Every afternoon at four o'clock she would stand outside the church and scream insults at Jesus.
Her anger was not hard to understand. Emma was a survivor of the Holocaust. Whatever she had seen and lost, she laid at the feet of the God the church proclaimed, and she said so, loudly, every day.
One afternoon Myers went outside to her. Rather than telling her to stop or move on, he said, "Why don't you go inside and tell him?"
Emma went into the church and disappeared.
An hour passed and she had not come out. Myers began to worry, so he went in to look for her. He found Emma lying on the floor before the cross, absolutely still. He bent down and touched her shoulder. She looked up at him with tears in her eyes, and quietly she said, "After all, he was a Jew too."
Takeaway: Emma discovered that the God she was furious with had suffered too, and suffered as one of her own people. Christian faith does not offer a God who watches pain from a distance but one who entered it. "We do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses" (Hebrews 4:15). Notice also the wisdom of the priest: he did not argue with her anger. He invited her to bring it to Jesus.
Source: Reported in Maggie Ross, The Fire of Your Life.
Enemies No More: The Soldier in the Shell Hole
Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1929 and set in the trenches of the First World War, contains one of the most haunting scenes in war literature. (Many versions of this sermon illustration place it in the Second World War and soften what happens. We have retold it as it appears in the book.)
Paul Bäumer, a young German soldier, is out on patrol when an attack begins. He throws himself into a shell crater in no man's land and lies there, terrified, clutching his knife. Suddenly a body falls into the hole on top of him. Without thinking, Paul stabs the man again and again.
The man is a French soldier, and he does not die straight away. For hours Paul is trapped in the crater with him while the shelling goes on overhead. He listens to the man's gurgling breath. Slowly his panic turns to horror and then to pity. He crawls over, brings the dying man water from his own canteen, and tries to bandage his wounds. It is no use. The Frenchman dies.
Afterwards Paul opens the dead man's wallet. Inside are letters and photographs of a woman and a little girl. From the papers he learns the man's name, Gérard Duval, and that he was a printer. Paul speaks to the body as if Duval could still hear him. He had only ever thought of the enemy as an idea, a target. Now he sees a husband, a father and a working man, someone exactly like himself, and he promises to write to Duval's wife.
In that crater, Paul and Gérard stopped being enemies. Paul saw the man he had killed in a completely new way: not as an enemy combatant but as a father and a husband, someone who loved and was loved. Someone just like him. Remarque's point is devastating. The war only worked as long as each side never looked closely at the other.
This is always the path of peace and reconciliation: learning to truly see the other person, and recognising in them someone just like yourself. If you want to know more about the novel and its film versions, Sopranu has written about why it remains the best war book and about the 1930, 1979 and 2022 adaptations.
Takeaway: Empathy begins when we look closely enough to see ourselves in someone else. Jesus asks us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44), and that becomes possible only when they stop being a category and become a face. Who have you been seeing as "them" when God sees a husband, a mother or a child?
Source: Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), chapter 9.
Final thoughts
A campaigner who would not look away, a son taught to hear the world crying, a child on a kerb, a survivor before the cross and a soldier in a shell hole. These stories about empathy all point in the same direction. Empathy is not a feeling we wait for. It is a choice to move towards pain instead of away from it.
That is exactly what God did in Jesus. If you are preaching on empathy, you might close with a simple question: whose cry have you been too busy, too clever or too comfortable to hear?
More stories you may like:
These stories are retold in our own words for preaching, teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story. Scripture quotations link to the NIV on Bible Gateway.
Comments
Post a Comment