Last week, in the first of our Commitment Celebration Sundays, Rev. Michael said that “we are hard wired for empathy and compassion” … and that “altruism is sexy.” I’ve seen that science too – the way the brain lights up in pleasure when a person reaches out to help another person. I know this to be true from a thousand acts of kindness I have witnessed and a few I’ve participated in. But I’ve spent this week wondering, if this is so, why is the world so mean?
I mean, what planet did Rush Limbaugh come from? Why do we let so many people go hungry? Why do we kill one another? Why, when we help somebody, do we sometimes wonder whether we’re a chump?
And am I the only one who feels this way? – I can barely say the word “kindness” without a Vivian Leigh accent. “I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers.” If you remember Streetcar Named Desire, you know that Blanche DuBois’s articulation of this, the last line she gets in the script, is deeply ironic, because the truth is, Blanche is not in that moment and never has received much kindness from anyone, except in crude exchange for what it was she had to give.
Kindness. There’s not enough of it abroad in the world today – not in the political campaigns, not on the radio or TV, maybe not in the place where you work. If you are very lucky, and if you work at it, you have it in your home. Not everyone has even that.
We are hard-wired for kindness but short-circuited by the culture around us, a culture that encourages us in thousands of messages every day to see our lives with others in terms of a market metaphor. There’s room for kindness, sure, but often it’s a self-interested kindness – a reciprocal kind of kindness. We extend kindness to people in hopes of getting kindness back from them. We withhold it sometimes from those who have no hope of giving us anything. For example, when somebody tells you there are no more tickets for the Chalice Theater production you were so looking forward to seeing … Letitia Haworth, who handled ticket sales for Seussical, told me that a few people were positively mean to her when she told them it was all sold out.
Of course, they weren’t church members.
It’s as if the Golden Rule had been rewritten to say, “Do unto others as you expect them to do unto you.” This way of thinking can lead whole countries into a doctrine of pre-emptive war.
What if we traded in that market metaphor of human relations for an ethic of unconditional kindness?
I am trying to learn human relations from my dog. Some of you have met Toby, who encompasses much diversity in his houndish body; I like to call him a beagle with a false nose. Toby gets along really well with other dogs. I mean, really, really well. All Toby wants to do with other dogs is play. Well, play and sniff their private parts. When we’re walking on the trail, we meet all kinds of dogs. Some of them don’t want to play; they warn Toby away with a snarl. No problem! Toby wags his tail and moves on. Some of them are scared of Toby, who’s not huge but who’s bigger than a typical beagle. And this is when it gets really interesting. If they’re scared, Toby will try to get near them so he can plop down on his back and show them his vulnerable belly. If they let him get closer, he scrunches down on the ground and puts his head under their chins. I submit! He says joyfully, and most dogs seem to realize from this that he is not a threat. You should see him trying to get his head under the chin of a Chihuahua. It’s hysterical.
It’s a joy to walk with Toby, who so easily solves the problems of species relations, who doesn’t feel diminished in the least by another’s wish to be top dog. Who doesn’t demand anything from anybody before he shows his hand, or his belly. Toby knows how to practice unconditional kindness.
Kindness to strangers is more than an ironic line in a deeply depressing play. From the earliest civilizations, it has been seen to be indispensable for human survival; unconditional kindness was a universal moral obligation. In the Hebrew Bible, God pulverizes Sodom and Gomorrah not for homosexual lust, as some readings of that good book would have it, but for the violent and inhospitable way these people greeted visitors to their towns. Later, when Moses delivers the Book of Laws, this ethic is stated explicitly: You must treat the stranger “as one native-born among you.”
Some religions try to enforce loving your neighbor by threatening eternal torment, if you don’t. Our Universalist ancestors, on the other hand,believed God was too loving and good to damn anyone to suffer forever. They believed people would respond to love with love, and this would keep them behaving kindly toward one another. There’s a great story about Hosea Ballou, one of our Universalist worthies of the 19^th century. He was out riding over the hills of New Hampshire with another itinerant preacher, a Baptist, and they argued theology as they traveled. The Baptist asserted that people need the fear of hell to keep them in line. At one point he said, 'Brother Ballou, if I were a Universalist, and feared not the fires of Hell, I'd hit you over the head and steal your horse and saddle.' Ballou looked over at him and replied, 'My brother, if you were a Universalist that idea would never occur to you!'"
Bill Fogarty has been compiling answers from the congregational assessment survey many of you filled out recently, and he shared that one of the things we want most is for UUCA to be a caring community. We need to think together about all of what that means, but certainly it means we reach out to one another in various ways when one of us is in need – grieving, ill, in life crisis – the kind of caring Barb talked about this morning. This isn’t “kindness to strangers” -- we’re not strangers to one another in this community. But we’re not necessarily family either. We are a group of people who have made a covenant with one another to walk together in the ways of love.
That makes this church a terrific place to practice unconditional kindness.
And do we need practice! We live in a country and increasingly a world where the market metaphor pervades all our thinking; capitalism has become a kind of religion. Capitalism works pretty well, in a day-to-day way, to run the economy. But as a set of rules governing human relations, it leads to an ethic of reciprocity and not mutuality. Make no mistake about it, this shapes the way we see the world and one another. It encourages us to let our kindness muscle go limp, and we need a place to exercise it.
Peace Camp, established by some visionaries in our church, is one of the ways we practice. It is a place we teach our children and children from the community the skills of kindness, across cultures. Another way we practice is by walking with each other through tough times.
We are fortunate in this church to have a gifted parish nurse. Carolyn Menk will take your blood pressure, help you navigate the medical system when you are ill, and listen to your fears. She works closely with the ministers to extend spiritual care to the members of this community.
Today you commissioned a Pastoral Care Guild, who are expanding our ability to care for one another spiritually.
You may be wondering, what is spiritual care? Any facet of human life can be spiritual – that is, connected to mystery and to our highest values. But we think of spiritual care primarily as listening, letting a person tell her or his story until the story begins to make a new kind of sense to the teller.
Every one of the members of the Pastoral Care Guild will tell you how much they “get” from the work they do of visiting people in our community who are in crisis or unable to get to church. But that’s not why they do it, or not the whole story anyway. All of them will probably also tell you that they have to struggle to make room in their lives to do this work of kindness. It’s the very work of making room that exercises the kindness muscle, and this, they might tell you, is why they do it. Once you begin making room in your life for kindness, kindness grows in your heart and in your life.
In your Page 2 this morning, you will find a caring questionnaire asking whether you would be willing to make yourself available to give a ride or bring a meal to someone from this community who is in need of help. This too is pastoral care; this too is the work of the caring community. Don’t think if you fill this out you are promising more than you can deliver; you get to say how often you can respond to these requests, and sometimes if we call you it just may not be the right time for you. If we do call, though, we ask that you look and see whether you can say yes.
Here at this church, we make music together and we make justice together, but this isn’t a choral society or a political association. We teach our children that their whole lives are religious, but it isn’t a school. We have a lot of fun together, but it isn’t a social club. What makes it different is that we do all that we do – and if you were here last Sunday, the Banner Parade gave you a good idea of all that we do – we do all of that in covenant with one another. We care for one another, and we treat one another with kindness.
Sometimes we fail. That’s why it’s a practice. When we fall short, we acknowledge it, forgive one another, and begin again, in love.
It isn’t always easy to be kind. I bet nearly everyone in this room could remember a time we were less than kind to a store clerk, or maybe to the tech support person who couldn’t fix your internet line over the phone or schedule a service call soon enough. The people who snarled at Letitia because the Chalice Theater tickets were sold out are probably not bad people either.
It isn’t easy. It’s countercultural, even, to make room in your life for kindness, especially when it isn’t going to get you something back. For that matter, it’s countercultural to come to church; to dedicate this time in the week to grow your spirit; to give outside the market metaphor of value received for services or cash tendered. Let this church be a place where giving – of service, of money, of kindness, whatever – happens freely, all the time. Let this be a place in each of our lives where kindness is unconditional. And let an ethic of unconditional kindness spread from this church into the lives of everyone we touch, out into the community and into the world.
BENEDICTION
May the circle of our kindness expand ever wider, till it “embraces all the living.” And may you be held in the loving care of this community, in all the joys and sorrows of your life, all your going out and coming in. Amen.
