Room for Kindness
FROM THE RECTOR
Last week, on a bitterly cold morning, my car battery gave out. I had dropped a child off at school and stopped by a gas station to fill up my tank. After completing the transaction and climbing back into my car, I pressed the ignition button and heard the unmistakable sound of an engine’s half-hearted attempt to turn over. After that, the only noise was the confirming clicks of a battery that could not push enough electrons where they needed to go in order to get me where I needed to go. I called Elizabeth.
While I waited on her to come and jump me off, several cars pulled in behind mine, waiting for me to move so that they could use the gas pump. Each time I got out and explained that my battery was dead and that they would need to use another pump. No one seemed frustrated by that, but, even though my jumper cables were visible, no one offered to help either—not even the person working behind the counter at the gas station. I do not blame any of them, though, because I did not ask. In the midst of a pandemic, getting close enough to assist someone in relatively minor distress feels like an unnecessary risk. I knew that Elizabeth was on the way. I knew that everything would be just fine. Even if someone had offered, I may have declined, worried that it had been made out of obligation and not genuine kindness.
Kindness seems in short supply these days. Although the pandemic has made things exponentially worse, I recall a shortage of kindness even before we all started keeping our distance from other people. Over the years, countless factors have contributed to this phenomenon. Instead of front porches, we build back decks. When the phone rings, we only answer it if we know who is calling and then only sometimes. The fracturing of media into partisan echo chambers discourages dialogue across our differences, and we begin to identify other people unfairly, obsessing about what divides us instead of focusing on what we have in common.
Kindness, at its linguistic root, is treating others as if they are your kin even when they are not. As Jesus taught in Luke 6:32-36, “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same…But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return…Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” God is merciful. God is kind. And Jesus shows us that kindness is not only a polite gesture but a way of loving others as God loves us.
Kindness is not niceness. Since the twelfth century, the meaning of the word nice has evolved considerably from clumsy or foolish to fussy or dainty to precise or careful to agreeable or thoughtful. [1] Although sometimes used as a synonym for kind, the word nice can still carry a negative connotation. People are nice when they present a sweet, agreeable disposition in order to get from you what they want. People are kind when they want to help you regardless of how gruff or impolite they may seem. Niceness, therefore, often has an inward, self-serving characteristic, while kindness is always about the other.
Kindness is not always welcome, but it is always given selflessly. When we subject a child to shots at the doctor’s office, they may scream and cry, but we have their wellbeing at heart. When we discipline them, they may tell us how much they hate us, but discipline offered in kindness is a formative lesson designed to make them better. Punishment, on the other hand, when it is an expression of our anger, is fundamentally unkind. When we confront the alcoholic in our lives and tell them that we cannot live with them until they get help, they may reject our offer, calling us all sorts of terrible names and accusing us of not caring about them, but we do so having reached the point when we would rather risk the permanent loss of a relationship that is dear to us than see the one we love continue down a path of self-destruction.
Kindness does not come naturally. Although we are predisposed to love and protect our offspring, extending the same sort of selfless love to a stranger requires something more of us. Real kindness means offering a stranger the sort of sacrificial gesture that would normally be reserved for members of our family, our clan. Moments of kindness do happen, of course, but they are relatively rare and, therefore, remarkably powerful.
Think about those moments when you have experienced deep kindness. Recall those moments when you have been able to extend kindness to another person—to someone with whom you did not have the sort of relationship that anticipates or deserves a loving gesture. What made those experiences possible? That kindness is grace, and, like a cascading tower of glasses that is filled successively from one row to the next as each glass begins to overflow, grace has the ability to inspire more grace from those who encounter it.
Last weekend, after buying a new car battery, I went to a conference in Tulsa that focused on the kindness of grace. I heard several speakers lament the shortage of kindness in the world and articulate not only a wistful longing for more of it but also a clear rationale for how we might find it and share it with others. There, I was reminded that as Christians we believe that the incarnation, death, and resurrection of God’s Son reveal God perfect love for us. Jesus shows us that God is absolutely and unequivocally for us. Because that is God’s eternal nature, we are filled up by God’s self-giving, self-sacrificing love, and, when we are filled completely—even to overflowing—we find within ourselves the capacity to love others in the same way.
As a self-sacrificing gesture, an act of kindness costs us something. The more it costs the more kind it is. But, when we have been filled up completely by God’s grace and, thus, have nothing to lose, we can afford to give something up for the sake of another person, even a complete stranger. In effect, even though it may cost us significantly in worldly terms, perhaps even costing us our lives, in the real, eternal sense, an act of kindness actually costs us nothing. Because God has loved us first, we can love others with no strings attached and with no expectation of anything in return.
God has always loved the world like that—even before the incarnation of Jesus Christ. The uniqueness of the Christian faith is that, in the cross of Christ, we see that God is for all people, completely and totally. Because of the gospel, therefore, we know that God’s love cannot be inhibited or diminished in any way. As recipients of that limitless love, we are free to love others with the same reckless abandon. Of that freedom, Paul writes in Galatians 5:1, “For freedom, Christ has set us free.” In this life and in a world that is ready to be transformed by God’s grace, that freedom shows up as kindness.
Yours Faithfully,
Evan