Ephesians 4.25-5.2, John 6.35-51
The Tenth Sunday after Trinity 8 August 2021
Austwick, Keasden
Someone in the Warwickshire village of Water Orton has been anonymously delivering poems and charms through people’s letterboxes. At least one household on every street in the village has received a package from the mysterious sender. One resident said the gifts delivered a "feel-good factor" during lockdown in the village. "They lift your spirit a bit," he said. The do-gooder posts the charms, along with a poem titled "Just a little gift to brighten up your day", under cover of darkness. "I think at these times it's lovely to think someone's thinking of you," said Sharon Arnold, who lives in the village. "I thought it was a lovely idea.” [1]
In Bridport, Dorset, Pinque Lawes hobbled into Waitrose to grab herself some tea and the lady behind the till asked her if she was ok. She wasn’t, for she was feeling low after a terrible week during which she had had two seizures, both times falling and hitting her head, and she’d also fallen off her electric scooter, breaking three ribs and pulling several muscles in her leg.
Pinque said: “It had been an absolute nightmare week. I was feeling pretty miserable when the lady behind the till asked me if I was ok. She seemed very interested and sympathetic and couldn’t do enough for me really. I’d seen some flowers I really liked and I asked her how much they were and she responded saying ‘they’re on the house’. Very occasionally staff are at liberty to use some gift vouchers and she used hers to give me these really lovely flowers. I almost burst into tears, it completely changed my day.’ [2]
They probably happen a lot more often than we hear about them: random acts of kindness, stranger to stranger: the elderly lady who leaves a thank-you note for the cafe waitress who had served her, the bus driver who stops to help a struggling passenger not just off the bus but across the road, the teenager fundraising to buy food to give to homeless people. Being kind to one another is human nature. Contrary to the belief ‘sunk deep into Western thought, [that] human beings are by nature selfish and governed by self-interest’, what many behavioural scientists say, and what we saw abundantly during the first months of last year’s lockdown, is ‘that it is realistic, as well as revolutionary, to assume that people are good. The instinct to cooperate rather than compete, trust rather than distrust, goes right back to the beginning of Homo sapiens.’ [3]
In his bestselling book Humankind Rutger Bregman illustrates this by telling the story of the real Lord of the Flies. William Golding’s influential portrayal of the darkest depths of mankind is a story which never actually happened. What did actually happen when a group of six schoolboys were marooned on a Pacific island for fifteen months between 1965 and 1966 was that they cooperated together to provide each other with food and shelter in a daily routine which sustained them; and when one fell and broke his leg the others worked together to first rescue him, then set his leg using sticks and leaves and tend his injury, so that after they were finally rescued the local physician expressed astonishment at that boy’s perfectly healed leg, and at the healthy physiques of all the boys. [4]
Of this, and many other similar examples in his book, Bregman says, ’By thinking the worst of others, we bring out the worst in our politics and economics too. But if we believe in human kindness and altruism then we can achieve true change in our society.’ [5]
This has always been a theme in Christianity, of course, from the earliest writings of St Paul, who told the believers in Ephesus to ‘Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.’ [6]
Now, we might say, with some justification, that it’s easier to be kind to random strangers than it is to people who we’re around all the time. Those next-door neighbours with their irksome noisy habits which we can’t get off our minds; that person in our social group who annoyingly always wants to be the centre of attention; we may find it harder to find ourselves speaking or acting kindly towards them.
One way to overcome our reticence towards such people is to learn empathy: to try to ‘always be kind to others, for we never know what someone is going through’; [7] to recognise that ‘There’s a story behind every person. There's a reason why they're the way they are. [To] think about that before we judge someone.’ It all depends on the lens we use - so if we look on others with beautiful intentions then kindness can arise. [8]
But it’s notable that our scriptures don’t even teach us empathy. They give just one reason why we should act kindly towards others: to imitate the way that God in Christ acts towards us.
Those who may dismiss this as ‘bleeding-hearted’ might recall where that phrase comes from: the iconographic image of Christ’s wounded heart, which symbolises his uninhibited compassion and love for a world he knows to be broken. In a famous sermon Martin Luther King Jr said that
I am thankful that we worship a God who is both tough minded and tenderhearted. If God were only tough minded, he would be a cold, passionless despot sitting in some far-off Heaven “contemplating all,” as Tennyson puts it in “The Palace of Art.” He would be Aristotle’s “unmoved mover,” self-knowing but not other-loving. But if God were only tenderhearted, he would be too soft and sentimental to function when things go wrong and incapable of controlling what he has made. He would be like H. G. Well’s loveable God in God, the Invisible King, who is strongly desirous of making a good world but finds himself helpless before the surging powers of evil. God is neither hardhearted nor soft minded. He is tough minded enough to transcend the world; he is tenderhearted enough to live in it. He does not leave us alone in our agonies and struggles. He seeks us in dark places and suffers with us and for us in our tragic prodigality. [9]
As Christ gave himself as ‘a sacrifice to God’ [10] so we are called to imitate him by giving of ourselves towards others without inhibition - whoever they are, whatever they’re like.
Thus there’s a toughness about kindness just as there is a toughness about love, and about speaking truth in love. To cultivate it requires a prayerful self-awareness and self-discipline. To practice it can transform our world.
Notes
[1] Mystery 'charmer' delivers lockdown lifts in Water Orton. BBC News: Coventry and Warwickshire, 7 March 2021
[2] Bradley White, Women's 'nightmare week' turned around by 'act of kindness’. Bridport and Lyme Regis News, 21 March 2021.
[3] Rutger Bregman, Humankind, A Hopeful History.
[4] Rutger Bregman, The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months. Guardian, 9 May 2020.
[5] Rutger Bregman, Humankind, A Hopeful History.
[6] Ephesians 4.31-32.
[7] Unattributed but popular quote.
[8] Pip Wilson's blog, 22 May, 2012.
[9] Martin Luther King Jr., A Tough Mind And A Tender Heart. Penguin Great Ideas Series.
[10] Ephesians 5.2
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