Make a clean break with all cutting, backbiting, profane talk. Be gentle with one another, sensitive. Forgive one another as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you.
Ephesians 4:31-32
One of my favorite quotes is taped on a wall in my office: “To be kind, you must swerve regularly from your path.” Tara Brach, Trusting the Gold.
Family of God’s mission statement is “We share God’s light by being progressive servants in our community.” And our vision statement is what we wear on our t-shirts: We’re here for good! When we were talking our way toward those statements, we were thinking about what it means to follow Jesus in this time and place. In other words, how do we live in a way that reflects Jesus’ teachings into our time in history and our bit of the universe. In the next few weeks we’re going to put some flesh on those bones by describing “Life in Christ” in more detail. I’ve asked you to give me words that you think describe the best way to live, and we’re going to focus on one word each week until we’ve covered the landscape.
We find ourselves in these times listening to the news and thinking or saying, “That’s not right.” We have a sense that rounding up immigrants and shooting protestors and kidnapping presidents isn’t what we had in mind to describe “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Victoria and I spend our community fund each week after week and hear the stories of desperation that are very real for many of our neighbors. Often we commiserate with social workers that things are broken. But we can’t fix the system until we can describe what “fixed” looks like. The words we’ve collected, and can continue to collect, are a beginning at describing what we want our world to be like.
Jesus and his first followers lived under an oppressive empire, which also provided many benefits – good roads, safe streets, peace so long as you kept your head down and didn’t disagree. They would tell us their world was also broken, and they had much less power than we do to make change. They formed communities of like-minded people and lived with as much grace and compassion as they could, taking care of one another. But forming those communities wasn’t easy. They had to figure out their words to live by. What words they would use to describe how Jesus lived and what he taught. What words worked for them as they tried to live well together. The apostle Paul often wrote letters to some of these communities, giving them practical advice for living. Today’s letter includes good words: watch how you speak to one another, be gentle and forgiving. That seemed like a good description to use with our word today: Kindness. Those who are kind speak respectfully and treat each other with gentleness and forgiveness. Kindness sums up much of what we’re missing in the news – people just aren’t being kind.
Tara Brach speaks of going out of our way to be kind, and explains that with a story of a research study done at Princeton Seminary. Students were asked to prepare a short talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan, a man who showed kindness to his neighbor. Then they were told that they would be giving these talks at a gathering across campus. Some were told they must hurry because the meeting was about to start and others were told they had plenty of time to get there. As each student traveled across campus, they came across a man in obvious medical distress. The study wanted to know who, thinking about being a caring neighbor, would stop to help. Of those in a hurry, only 10% stopped to speak to the actor pretending to need help. Those with more time did better – two-thirds were helpful. Brach tells this story to remind us that if we are going to bring kindness into the world around us, we have to be willing to be inconvenienced. We have to be scanning our horizon for opportunities to show kindness and then “swerve” out of our way to respond.
I wonder what we would see if we made a pact this week to look for at least one chance to be kind each day? Who needs help carrying bags or opening a door? Who needs us to stop long enough to hear about a worry? Who even needs us to yield our turn at a stop sign to someone in a greater hurry? Or maybe it’s a matter of actually seeing people we pass long enough to smile.
I’ve been thinking about kindness all week in the context of Minneapolis. We hear of so much kindness there: people shopping for groceries for friends afraid to leave home. People protecting children before and after school. People filming government agents who still say, “I’m not mad.” In some ways it’s a demonstration of Minnesota Nice for the world to see. But something tells me the Kindness is more than just being nice in passing, on the surface. It’s good to say a kind word to strangers in passing. But I think there’s a deeper level to kindness that goes beyond nice. I can speak politely to someone with a smile and then think, “Well, he was nuts!” I can be civil in groups conversation while thinking disrespectful things about others to myself. We are watching what happens when human beings don’t value one another as equals. I’m not sure it matters how nice we are on the surface if our care for each other doesn’t run deep.
Yesterday Lotus Meditation Center had a retreat about the practice of loving-kindness or metta. It’s a practice of sending good will to others – people you care about and also those you don’t know or perhaps even dislike. Underlying the practice is a sense that all people are one people, and all people deserve the same good things in life. Peace, safety, health, happiness. The practice works best when the focus is on our connection to one another, even if we don’t know each other well.
I suspect that kindness is most genuine when it comes from a deep sense of connection, even among strangers. I am most able to be kind when I go beyond surface pleasantries and acknowledge that human to human we are one. I was thinking about that in the context of our community fund. I can be nice to folks when I hand them a check for rent and they thank me, but I am kind when I share resources as an equal, not a benefactor When I truly feel how hard it must be to have to ask a stranger for help to avoid eviction for your family. When I avoid blaming folks for not working hard enough or planning well enough to avoid a tough situation. That kind of kindness involves getting me out of the way to truly see another.
Kindness across our national landscape involves seeing refugees as people and not as a problem. It involves seeing people who live in other nations as neighbors and not as opportunities for enrichment or threats to our superiority. Patriotism is good, just like it’s good to root for the Vikings to win the Super Bowl, but nationalism that dehumanizes people not like us is wrong. We can love our country, work for our country, and still feel unity with all human beings, with all beings. Kindness that comes from the realization that we are all, after all, one people, one human race is truly transforming. Jesus says, “Do unto others what you want others to do to you.” That is a good word, a starting place for renewing the world.