Copyright © 2004 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
The little fellow, no more than two years-old, dashed in front of my scoutmaster’s Chevrolet station wagon. He braked hard and waited for the boy to get to the curb. There was no one else in sight, no parent, not even any other children. “If we had more time,” he said to us boys on our way to a Scouting event, “we would do a good deed.” He meant that we would stop, find the little guy’s mother and make sure he stayed off the street. But we hurried on, late to wherever we were going. I can’t even remember now.
That neglected good deed was more than thirty years ago, but it’s a prime example of the factors which are at work even more today against the fruit of kindness. We are too busy to be kind, too much caught up in our own concerns, too independent of each other to have enough time to practice kindness as the possibilities arise.
Completely apart from the Christian faith, a movement arose several years ago to address the lack of kindness in our society. Meditating on the phrase, “senseless acts of violence,” Anne Herbert, in a San Francisco underground newspaper, urged her readers to “practice kindness and senseless acts of beauty.” The phrase began to circulate around the Bay Area and eventually crystallized into the bumper sticker, “Practice Random Acts of Kindness.” In response to the bumper sticker, Gavin Whitsett, an Indiana man, wrote a little booklet entitled “Guerilla Kindness,” in which he chronicled several stories of what happened when people did things like paying a highway toll for the next person in line or placing a bouquet of flowers under the windshield wiper of a random car in the supermarket parking lot. Whitsett had other suggestions, like hiding nickels in a playground sandbox or giving out free lottery tickets. Oprah Winfrey did a show on the idea.
The latest installment in the “random kindness” movement is the film, “Pay It Forward,” based on a story by Catherine Ryan Hyde. A boy comes up with notion that instead of trying to pay back acts of kindness done to one, you should “pay forward” by doing a favor for someone else. A moving scene has the young man drawing circles and lines on a chalkboard to show how passing on a favor to three others, who in turn each pass it on to three more people and so on, soon multiplies into a huge movement of kindness and good will.
By its very existence, the “practice random acts of kindness” movement highlights a lack we all feel in our lives. There really ought to be more kindness in the world. Our hearts ache for moments of genuine human contact in which people are good to each other without any strings attached. That was shown again as President Reagan was eulogized on Friday. Over and over, two facets of the man were emphasized: his optimism and his kindness. A story was told about his hospital stay after he had been shot. He accidentally spilled some water in his hospital room. The staff found the injured president down on his hands and knees cleaning up the water because he was worried the nurse would get in trouble. Hearing of that sort of kindness warms our hearts.
“Random kindness” and “paying it forward” are good ideas. If you leave here today with nothing other than the determination to do some new little act of kindness, that won’t be bad at all. However, there is more to the Christian idea of kindness, more to the fifth fruit of the Spirit, than just being randomly nice. Let’s explore it a bit deeper.
The concept of kindness is connected to some of the most important words in Scripture. In the Old Testament there is a word which appears over and over to describe the character of God. There is nothing quite like it in either New Testament Greek or in English. The word is hesed. It’s often translated “love” or “steadfast love,” as in the Psalm chorus, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.” But frequently hesed is rendered as “kindness” or as coined in the King James, “lovingkindness.” It’s the word translated “mercy” in the NIV version of our Old Testament reading today from Micah 6:8.
Hesed embraces a whole network of concepts. It is love, but it is enduring love, love that does not quit. It is love felt deeply, but it is not just a feeling. Hesed is active love, love in practice, love which never fails to look out for the welfare of the one loved. To capture all of it we would need to say something like “steadfast lovingkindness.”
Yet hesed is not a word just for an attribute of God. In the Old Testament human beings have and practice hesed toward each other. There is a wonderful story about David in II Samuel 9. After years of hiding and warfare, his enemy Saul is dead and David is king of all Israel and Judah. One of David’s first acts as kings is to call his advisors and ask if anyone of Saul’s family is left alive. Normally that question would be the prelude to a bloodbath. A new king makes sure no one is left to challenge his claim to the throne. But David’s purpose was something else. In verse 3 of II Samuel 9 he wonders, “Is there no one still left of the house of Saul to whom I can show God’s kindness?” The word is hesed, God’s hesed, His lovingkindness.
David learns that there is one grandson of Saul left, a crippled young man named Mephibosheth. He calls the boy into his presence and declares that Mephibosheth shall eat at the king’s table like one of the family for the rest of his life. What is key here is that David describes what he has done as God’s kindness.
The truth in “Pay it Forward,” and the “random acts of kindness” movement is that kindness breeds kindness. On the Oprah show, Gavin Whitsett describes research (which I haven’t been able to verify) at Stanford which showed that in shopping malls around San Francisco “people who are treated to a kind word or a kind deed are significantly more likely to behave kindly than those who have not received the same kind treatment.” What David did for Mephibosheth is the outcome of that same principle. Having experienced the kindness of God, he turns around and shows it even to the family of his enemy.
That is what Jesus is teaching us here in our Gospel reading today. In response to God’s kindness, you and I are meant to become kind like God is. Out of the greatest kindness in the universe, God’s kind grace toward us, grows the fruit of human kindness. That is how Jesus expects us to do the impossible and love our enemies. Verse 35 says, “love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.” We are to remember how God has been kind to us, even when we have been wicked and ungrateful, and then be kind in the same way.
So as Christians we have a resource for kindness which goes beyond the practice of mere random kindness. We are kind because kindness is at the center of being. As the old hymn says, “the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.” We are kind because God has forever been kind to us. We know we do not deserve the kindness God has shown us in Jesus Christ, and so we learn to show that same sort of undeserved kindness to others.
The New Testament word for kindness is also remarkable. The Greek word here in verse 35 is chrēstos. If that sounds almost familiar, it should. The Greek form of “Christ” is Christos, the title of Jesus. The similar sounding word for kindness was a fairly popular common name Chrēstos. So there was some confusion. Chrēstos was occasionally written when Jesus was meant, and followers of Jesus were sometimes called “the kind ones” instead of “Christians.”
Philip Kenneson asks, “Are Christians today likely to be identified by those around them as ‘the kind ones?’”[1] That is the question for us as we consider how the fruit of kindness might grow up in our lives, in our congregation. It will become true only if we remember who we are, remember that first and foremost we are sinners saved and secure only because of the kindness of God in Jesus Christ.
The great American preacher Jonathan Edwards is unfortunately remembered most for one of his least characteristic sermons, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” In that message he conjured up the terrible image of God suspending a sinner by a thread like a loathsome insect over the fire of hell, threatening to drop it to its doom at any moment. The truth in that picture is that we are all, in fact, in danger of that terrible doom. Yet it is not the wrath of God which threatens us so much as our own sin and failure weighing us down. The hand of God holds us out of the fire not in anger, but in kindness, in grace. It’s only because of that gracious kind hand lifting us up that any of us is saved. Lamentations 3:22 says it all, using that wonderful word hesed: “Because of the Lord’s great lovingkindness we are not consumed.”
Remembering God’s kindness to us is the root of the plant which grows our own kindness. Four times now a little lady has crossed the street from the dentist office under construction to the north of us. She’s the wife of the contractor working there. Each time she’s come to talk with Danette our secretary and then with me. And each time she’s taken out her pen and written a check to Valley Covenant. I protested that she doesn’t know us at all. Her explanation was simply this: “I can remember a time when we were living out of our car. God has been good to us and blessed us, and so we want to bless others.” That’s God’s kindness at work bearing fruit in one of His children.
Yet as I’ve said, the spiritual fruit of kindness is deeper and greater than mere random acts of being nice. After all, in some ways it doesn’t require very much of us to smile or even to buy a cup of coffee for the next person in line at Starbucks. Such kind acts will brighten someone’s day a little and are good things, but real help, the real fruit of kindness is more costly. Jesus didn’t just pass through some cosmic toll booth and pay the cost for the rest of us coming along behind. He took upon Himself the pain of living with us, listening to us, bearing in His own self all the struggles of being human.
Real kindness takes time and connection. Hesed is steadfast love, love that goes on and on caring and helping. It’s not “guerilla” kindness, not a hit-and-run affair. The kindness of God and the kindness His Spirit wants to grow in us is a lasting compassion which costs much more than a few random feel-good moments of niceness. It’s no accident that kindness follows patience in the list of the Spirit’s fruit in Galatians 5. To be really kind to someone will take a patient enduring love, not just a few minutes of charity.
The time which real kindness takes to grow is just another reason why the fruit of the Spirit requires the Church, requires a community committed to each other in Jesus Christ. The culture we live in keeps telling us how important we are as individuals, how good it is to be independent and self-sufficient. We don’t imagine that we really need too much from others and so it’s hard for us to imagine they need much from us – just a few random acts of kindness.
Yet the Christian story is that we are at every moment, every hour, every day utterly and completely dependent, dependent on the kindness of God. We really are suspended by a thread over personal doom and destruction. It’s only the kind hand of our Lord which keeps us from a horrible fate moment by moment. It’s only because Jesus Christ came into the world in a long, costly work of kindness which still goes on that we have any hope, any opportunity to experience to life and know some joy.
So we come together in a church community to develop and remember that sense of dependence, not just on God, but on each other. Kindness requires a community where we realize that we were created not just as individuals, but as people meant for each other, meant to live interdependent, connected lives. That’s the soil in which real kindness grows.
The fruit of kindness, then, is not just random acts. Kindness is a relationship, and relationships, as you all know, take time. Just really listening to a person can take a lot of time. But how are you going to be kind, to be really helpful to someone, if you do not listen, if you don’t know what she really needs? You all know how it feels to find a car mechanic or a doctor who will really listen to your problem. What a jewel, what a gift! That sort of listening is the beginning of kindness like God’s, lasting, steadfast kindness. Yet it’s hard, it takes time. And it takes a kind of death, a death to your own agenda, your own thoughts, your own words. To really listen, you have to put yourself aside and focus on another person. It’s like dying. Listening is the beginning of learning to let yourself be crucified for the sake of someone else, just as Jesus Christ was crucified for your sake.
Kindness is at the center of the fruit of the Spirit to remind us that, ultimately, spiritual life means becoming like Jesus. And that means becoming like Jesus to others. The fruits all stem from love, love which is expressed most deeply by Jesus’ own command to love each other as He has loved us. Here in Luke 6:36 He tells us “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” Kindness means becoming to others like God is to us in Jesus Christ, full of tender, steadfast, compassionate love.
It takes time. It’s not easy. Kindness is more than paying forward a few favors done for you. It means a whole life that begins to be directed outward, more concerned about others than you are about yourself. Once again, it’s like dying, so you can learn to live in a whole new way.
The fruit of kindness is wonderful when you experience it. I’ve said before that I am a Covenant pastor because of an elderly man named Howard. As I reflect on it, I realize now, that more than anything else about Howard, it was his kindness which helped bring me to where I am.
I’ve told the story before of how Howard became my landlord during graduate school at Notre Dame. He kindly welcomed a long-haired bearded young man with no other possessions than a backpack and a stereo into the apartment next to his own home. But Howard’s kindness was not just one random act. It went on. He carried a bed up out of his basement so my apartment wouldn’t be completely empty and I’d have a place to sleep. He found me a place to park my car in his garage. When my car wouldn’t start in the winter, he gave me a battery charger I still use today.
Even more important, Howard took the time to get to know me. He and his wife invited me over for coffee. Eventually he took me fishing in his son’s boat. One afternoon he rowed me all over a little lake south of town counting out the beat while I learned to cast my new fly rod.
Most of all, Howard listened to my expression of Christian faith and desire to be a pastor. Then he invited me to his church. I turned him down over and over. But he gently, kindly persisted. With a steadfast patience he wore me down until one Saturday I said, “O.K., Howard, I’m coming to your church tomorrow.” And when I walked in the door of the Evangelical Covenant Church of South Bend, Indiana that Sunday morning I discovered a whole community of kind people, not all gems like Howard was, but still kind. They welcomed me in kindness and when Beth came along they welcomed her just as kindly. Four of them made a day’s drive to St. Louis just to watch us be married.
That steadfast, lasting kindness changed my life. I’m here where I am very confident God wants me to be because someone was kind. That’s the calling of us all in Christ. Our Lord has been kind to us, awesomely, tremendously kind. We have the assignment and the grace of being kind like He is kind, of dying to ourselves so that others might find life and joy in Him.
Chrēstos, Christos. There was that ancient confusion between the word for kindness and the name of our Lord. May that same providential confusion arise again. May people see the character of Christ living in us as Christians. May we again be known as “the kind ones,” because we follow and imitate the One who is ever kind.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2004 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj