(Luke 6:35) Sermon by Kim Thoday As a pastor I find that worship services that celebrate rites of passage are moments for engagement with the community. For instance, at our Church we conduct thanksgiving services for parents with new babies. It is a time to celebrate with parents in the gift of their new child and to offer God’s blessing. It is a time where parents can commit themselves to nurture their child in the Christian faith so that the child may one day make his or her own decision to follow Christ. People will often bring their extended families and friends. Recently I conducted one such service and the Church was filled with members as well as many visitors. In the announcements I gave an appeal for assistance for a family in need. As usual I was elated with people’s generosity. Later in the week I received a call from a man who was one of the visitors at that previous service. He told me he wasn’t a religious person and that he had attended the service as a guest of the family whose child had been blessed that day. He then proceeded to tell me that he had gone out and bought one hundred dollars worth of groceries for the other family that was in desperate need. Could he please deliver the food to me to take to them, he said. Eventually a big hulk of a man in overalls arrived at my office with the boxes of food. He shook my hand and nearly crushed it. I offered him a coffee and he accepted. We sat in my office and before long, his awkwardness disappeared and he began to tell me about his life as an orphan. God had sent me an angel in the form of a builder’s labourer, a rough diamond from the school of hard knocks. By the end of an hour or so he wept. I believed him when he told me that he hadn’t cried in many years. He cried when I gently told him that his kindness in bringing the food for the family was the kindness of Christ in his own life. It was a truly a God moment.

Kindness is a Christian virtue, so the Bible tells us. The New Collins Dictionary gives some secular definitions for kindness: 1 having a friendly nature or attitude, 2 being helpful to others and 3 being considerate or humane. But Christian kindness is much deeper than an act of duty or even empathy with someone. Christian kindness is distinctive, though it by no means excludes humanitarian ideas about kindness. Indeed, I would argue that God is the initiator of all such human impulses for good. Jesus’ ethical teaching recorded in Luke 6:35 is illustrative of a distinctively Christian kindness: “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish.” Christian kindness is, as it always has been, a counter-cultural lifestyle of bravery and spiritual solidarity with God. It is counter-cultural because our culture does not tend to love enemies. It is bravery because to be kind to those who are ungrateful and selfish is a huge risk. It is solidarity with God, because Jesus insists that the nature of God is to be kind to those who don’t deserve it. It is a lifestyle because to be kind like this can only genuinely come from a life lived as a prayer.

It is hard to be kind to people we don’t like. Jesus calls us to especially be kind to them. I think it is often just as hard to be kind to friends and family we know well. It is hard because we get to know their faults and we can become cynical. “It serves him right!” we say. The reality is of course, that those we love the most we can hate the most. Those we are closest too are potentially our greatest enemies. In the end, we are our own worst enemies. And so we need to learn to be kind to ourselves. Unless we learn to receive kindness, how can we offer it to others? I will never forget my feelings when a colleague and I lived and worked in a refugee camp in Thailand. We were totally dependent for our survival upon the kindness and generosity of our hosts who lived in abject poverty. It was the most humbling experience of my life. Day after day they supplied us with food when they had so little to share. One day we realised that certain families in the camp had been giving us their more nutritious rice and scarce pieces of meat, at their own sacrifice. I learned what Christian kindness truly means. It is having empathy but also sacrificial giving and it comes from a heart that has experienced such kindness. These people would often bring testimonies to us of God’s kindness upon them even within their extreme adversity.

In 1921, Lewis Lawes became the warden at Sing Sing Prison. At this time the prison was notorious for its brutality. However, when Warden Lawes retired some 20 years later, that prison had become a humanitarian institution. When asked about the transformation, Lawes said, “I owe it all to my wonderful wife, Catherine, who is buried outside the prison walls.”

Catherine Lawes was a young mother with three small children when her husband became the warden. Everybody warned her from the beginning that she should never set foot inside the prison walls. Yet such warnings did not stop her. She felt that she had an important part to play alongside her husband, and so she became involved in various activities in the life of the prison. She eventually became acquainted with the prisoners and their records. She discovered one convicted murderer was blind, so she taught him how to read Braille. Later, Catherine found a prisoner who was deaf and mute, so she went to school to learn how to use sign language.

Tragically she was killed in a car accident. The following day, her body lay in state in her home, and a large crowd of prisoners stood by the prison gate to keep vigil. When the acting warden saw them, and he saw their tears of grief and sadness, he realised how profoundly they had been affected by Catherine. He opened the gate, and allowed the men to go to pay their respects. And every one of them checked back into the prison that night. (cited: Tim Kimmel, from A 4th Course of Chicken Soup for the Soul, 1997, by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor et al.)

Catherine’s mission to the prisoners of Sing Sing captures something of the meaning of Christian kindness. It is empathy yes, but it is more. It is about seeing others from God’s perspective. It is about knowing that if things were different for us that we might well be one of those prisoners. Showing kindness can often be done in a condescending manner. Christian kindness is about solidarity with God who in the form of his only Son, Jesus Christ, came and lived amongst us as one of us, sharing in the joys and the pain of humanity. So Catherine became one with the prisoners. In this she took many risks. Christian kindness is a call to bravery. And her mission to these prisoners was counter-cultural: hardly a respectable thing for someone to do in those days, especially a woman.

Jesus too in his earthly life demonstrated the giving and receiving of kindness. There is of course the wonderfully mysterious encounter Jesus had with a woman who intruded into the men’s meeting at Simon’s house in Bethany (Mark 14:3-9). She came to Jesus and anointed him with very expensive perfume. And some of those present were offended by this great act of kindness. Jesus rebuked them for their lack of insight and mean spiritedness. Jesus said that it was a very beautiful thing that the woman has done and the encounter ends with Jesus declaring that the Gospel will be proclaimed in the whole world in memory of her. This declaration of Jesus gives God’s perspective upon the cosmic proportions of loving kindness. This woman’s action embodies the very nature of God and God’s mission in the world. Loving kindness is fundamental to God’s purposes for humanity and all things. The woman’s anointing of Jesus is counter-cultural, she took a great risk, her action was one of solidarity and for the action to be complete Jesus accepted her kindness.

George Washington Carver once said, “How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong, because some day in life you will have been all of these.” Friends, God’s call upon us to develop a lifestyle of loving kindness is not a summons necessarily to do extraordinary things. Rather, it is a call to be counter-cultural when necessary. It is to be in solidarity with God. It is to be in solidarity with those who don’t deserve it. It is to be brave and take risks when necessary, and to recognise that to be fully human we need to develop a receptive life – open to God’s kindness and the kindness of others. May our gracious God disturb us through his radical kindness as we become God’s kind of people. What acts of kindness do you plan to do this week, this month, this year? How can we plan our lives, change our lives, change our Church to become more and more God’s kind of people?

Blessings in Jesus’ name

KIM THODAY, HEWETT COMMUNITY CHURCH OF CHRIST, SOUTH AUSTRALIA

http://www.hewett.com.au