Invitation to Kindness

 A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (Edmonton), a young lady was planning a picnic on a lovely day with a young man she had met.  She pulled out her grandmother’s cookbook to figure out how to make a delicious and unforgettable salad.  The recipe suggested adding a little zing with fruit like raisins, apples, or mandarin oranges in the salad.  She didn’t have any of those, but she did have some watermelon on hand, so cubed it up, as well as some cheese and mushrooms.  She added several types of lettuce and spinach and topped it off with croutons and bacon bits.  She thought it looked pretty with all the different colors mixed together, and proudly served it to her new beau.  The salad seemed to go over very well, but the watermelon was an odd touch and the bacon bits and croutons clung to them like thistles to a sheep.  The young beau didn’t say anything about the salad, so she was quite surprised a few months later when she talked about watermelon she learned he didn’t like watermelon one little bit!  Here she thought all those months ago that he liked her salad.  The truth was, he was too kind to tell her that he had not enjoyed it at all!

Or maybe he was too nice.  When I talk about picking hymns for our upcoming new hymn resource, I often say that a hymn that is ‘nice’ is not enough to make it into our final cut.  We have close to 2000 hymns that have been submitted and we only have room for a tenth of that.  Many of the hymns are nice but not thought-provoking, comforting, inspiring and engaging.  We can’t be nice if we’re to whittle down our big list to something as slim as the More Voices hymnbook.  We can still be kind as we let folks know which hymns make it into our final selection.

The church leader in the parable today was not nice or kind.  Nor was he a real person. He was a stereotype that Jesus was using.  There were Pharisees who invited Jesus to dinner, who listened to him, engaged him in thoughtful debate, and treated him with respect.  We need to remember them for it’s easy to paint them all as bad guys.  Jesus told this story not to say Pharisees bad, tax collectors good, but to highlight two different attitudes of prayer.  The Pharisee’s prayer was arrogant, yet he would have been nice to the tax collector in person.  Kindness does not stem from an attitude of arrogance!  The tax collector, who would be more like today's version of a loan shark, knew how he really measured up to God’s expectation of justice, was very humble in his attitude, and asked for help from God to become a better person.  As Paul put it in Romans, God’s kindness is a call to us to be humble.  Then once we are humble, we too can practice real honest kindness to our community, and not its shallower cousin, niceness.

I see this principal whenever I meet folks going to AA and Al Anon.  It doesn’t matter how smart they are, how much success they have in their professional lives, it’s the folks who join AA and Al Anon with a humble attitude that will be successful in rising above their addictions.  The ones who think they are better than others, or smarter, or more deserving are often the ones who fall off the wagon.  The ones who are humble, also become very kind.

Letting go of our senses of superiority can even be seen in the debate about what to do for the Athabasca homeless population.  Some see the homeless as lazy, some see them as manipulative opportunists, dangerous folks that should be able to fix themselves with a little hard work and will power.  Others see them as former classmates, friends, 4h members, teenagers in high school, next door neighbors, residential school survivors with tales of horrific trauma.  But how we help homeless people is something that society is uncertain of.  Incarcerate them? Force them to go back to their families?  We even struggle to understand what constitutes homelessness, and lump everyone with shelter security issues into one group.  If we are nice to homeless people, we smile and maybe say good morning, but if we are kind to homeless people, that takes a special level of empathy, time, and patience.  It may take the shape of talking to our politicians to strengthen existing mental health supports and building community infrastructure to house people in the community they grew up in.  I’m inspired by the James Smith Cree Nation and their call to increase the number of drug treatment facilities and beds for indigenous communities.  That’s kindness in action. Or kindness might take shape in the form of intervention programs targeting even younger people.

Programs like the Human Kindness Project, a curriculum developed in Toronto for elementary and junior high students which combats bullying.  Winnipeg police developed their “Cool 2Be Kind” project to also build empathy.  In Newfoundland, a volunteer organization, the “Kindness Project”, handed out valentine cards to strangers just as we did during Covid in 2020.  My friend Di who lives in Australia and was impacted by the flood last week, was amazed at the kind offers of support and help she received. Kindness is even seen as the way to break the spiral of divisiveness and polarization we seem to be sliding into in Alberta and around the world. 

Jesus taught his followers that God’s kindness is deep and unending, like a huge watermelon where there is always another slice to be shared.  God is not nice, God is kind, and God’s justice is more than just being nice.  When we humbly recognize that we don’t have all the answers, that we’re not perfect, then God’s kindness will envelop us, grow in us and bear fruit in us.  The fruit of the spirit, kindness, can heal and inspire us all.  Thanks be to God!

How about them apples?

 I’ll never forget the day that someone told me about the secret star inside every apple.  No way, I thought.  We had always cut our apples from stem to blossom end, and it never occurred to me to try any other way.  What a revelation to see that pretty, 5-pointed star smack dab in the middle of my fruit.  Like a little miracle of love, unseen under the delicious flesh, ignored by many, but there none-the-less.

Rather like the first time I realized my parents loved me.  Not something we ever said in my family, and whenever I got into trouble for doing something mischievous, I was sure my parents hated me.  There were times when I did wonder if they could love me when I dropped plates, spilled milk, made a mess in my bedroom and other such monstrous misdemeanors. My parents did love me in their quiet and undemonstrative way, and showed it when I least expected it.  Flying to Halifax to see me convocated or tying up my shoes for me when I was eight months pregnant or quilting a beautiful runner for my coffee table.  Signs of love hidden like the apple’s star, unseen until I looked at their actions in a different way. Many people are not so lucky – the Blanket Exercise reminded me of the disruption of love caused by residential schools and generational trauma.  Parental love is missing from many people’s lives.  God’s love is not, even when it’s hard to see.

Jeremiah knew that it was hard to see God’s love in the midst of tragedy.  He had been preaching bad news for so long, it was unexpected to preach something different to the people.  And preach the idea of God loving us not because we follow a rule book that God gave us.  No, because God was reminding Jeremiah of covenant, like a loving spouse married to a troublesome partner, but not holding it against them when the partner breaks promises and gets things mixed up.  A partnership that God would not end or abandon, and thriving would happen once more. 

Jesus was preaching on a similar vein.  God more loving than a nagged judge, more patient than a wronged widow, in it for the long haul, in it because that’s what the character of God is.  Hard to see that when we are in difficult times, when the world around us seems empty of any sign of God.  How do we keep going with the news from Ukraine, or a premier who insults people facing real discrimination for their race or gender identity or their physical or mental abilities by comparing them to folks who knowingly chose to ignore science and medical best advice?  How do we keep going when the price of an apple at the grocery store is now 1.50/lb or more?

Jesus was also preaching about prayer.  And how important it is.  How we need to persist like a nagging street person at the gates of MaraLago demanding justice from a billionaire who wants anything but justice.

How often do we pray for justice?  How often do we nag God for fair play?  It’s an interesting question.  And how often does it feel like our prayers are falling on a God who can’t hear us?  Probably more often than we think or like to admit to ourselves.  It would be so easy to give up, to assume that there is no one listening, that God doesn’t care, God judges harshly without any love whatsoever.  And yet, and yet.

This week I came across a story about Frederick Douglass.  He was born in 1818 and looked as dignified as Morgan Freeman.  He was brought up on a slave plantation by his grandmother as his mother was not allowed to stay with him, most mothers were taken away from their children when they were very young.  He had four or five masters before he was even 16, and managed to learn his alphabet and to read, mostly without any help from a teacher.  One woman taught him a little before her husband convinced her it was evil to teach a slave to read.  But Douglass persisted and eventually took the Underground Railway to freedom where he changed his name and married.  He became a Methodist preacher and travelled to England and Ireland where he preached against slavery.  He wrote impassioned essays on abolition. He convinced Abraham Lincoln to let blacks enlist in the Union Army to fight against the Confederates.  But just prior to the Civil War, he was feeling frustrated and discouraged.  All his attempts to end slavery had bogged down.  He was feeling depressed and his speech at one conference lacked fire and compassion.  He was tired of praying for freedom, for justice, for equality, for everyone’s the right to vote, including women.  At that moment, in that hall of crowded people hoping to be inspired, another famous lady, Sojourner Truth, also a powerful speaker for abolition, was in the audience.

She heard his lackluster speech and stood up in the middle of it.  She hollered a question so loudly everyone in the room heard her.  She said it over and over until Douglass answered her.  That question changed everything.  Douglass remembered his passion, his love for justice.  He became reenergized and his speech energized everyone who heard him.  And it got him back into remembering why he was there.  The question she yelled at him with so much passion?

“Is God Dead?  Is God Dead? Frederick Douglass, Is God Dead?” “No,” Douglas replied, and that was the answer they all needed to hear.

We need to hear it too.  God is not dead!  God loves us and will hear our prayers for justice.  It’s not easy, it’s not fast, but God will answer.  The world does change.  Slavery does end.  Women do vote.  Love does change everything, maybe especially when it is as tiny as a star hidden in an apple!  

Measuring up?

 How big does faith have to be?  Jesus told his disciples that they didn’t need a big amount of faith.  Size didn’t matter to him, and neither does it matter to God.  Which, I’m sorry, is a hard pill to swallow some days. 

I wish I could throw bushes around with my faith, but that would not make me a Christian.  It might make me a hurricane, hopefully much smaller than Fiona, but certainly a blowhard and a destroyer of forests.  If I want to know I have faith enough to do what God is calling me to, how do I measure up my faith and know I have enough?

I may be looking around at other people and saying – “oh, look at what they are doing, they must have a lot of faith.  I can’t do that because I don’t have enough faith.”  It’s a perfect excuse to get out of doing anything that I might be nervous about. 

Maybe that is what the disciples were doing.  They were realizing how difficult it would be to live out these new ideas Jesus was teaching them.  Ideas that were scary, outrageous, challenging and culture changing.  Ideas that pushed against what ‘everybody knows’ or what common sense told them.  Ideas that challenged the belief that insignificant people like them could have a profound difference on the world they lived in.  It challenged the belief that might is right, or he who has the most toys wins, that the person with the most money must have the best life.  That it’s a dog-eat-dog world, kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, and might is right because only the strong will survive.

And those same fears and tensions that the disciples faced are the same fears and tensions we face.  Jeremiah too, struggled with fears and tensions from being a person of faith.  He was uncertain what was going to happen to him, or even that he had the ability to be a prophet to the people.  Certainly, his words of challenge and lament were not appreciated by his peers.  They got so angry at Jeremiah’s sermons that they threw him in the stocks to publicly humiliate him and to stop him preaching any more.  He continued to preach anyway.  He preached that the king’s actions were full of arrogance. He preached that the country’s leaders had lost touch with ordinary citizens.  He preached that the decisions being made by the politicians were trying to make them look more important and powerful than they really were.  And he preached that all these people and their choices would lead to disaster.  Their attempt to measure themselves in terms of wealth, power, and strength instead of measuring themselves by their faith would doom them.

So rather than support freedom of speech, they threw him in jail.  Not unlike the protesters in Russia who are being arrested and sent to jail or worse, Jeremiah’s arrest was designed to intimidate him and stop the unrest.  But it didn’t stop him, and it didn’t stop the Babylonian Army that circled the city. 

Jeremiah had the faith of more than a grain of mustard, then, when he bought a piece of land where the army was camped, not knowing if he would survive or if his family would once again grow crops on their land some day.  But he did it anyway, in a grand public gesture of faith and protest and hope.  In the face of war, in jail for being a dissident, on the brink of having the city invaded by foreign soldiers, he gave hope to everyone who witnessed to this ridiculous real estate deal.

We see similar acts of public faith.  Women in Iran burning their hijabs and cutting off their hair.  Russian men fleeing their homeland in droves.  Ukrainian refugees coming to Canada.  Other Ukrainian farmers and students, women and men doing their bit to protect their homeland.  Astronauts planning a return to the Moon.  Jesus dying on a cross, executed by the state.  We are not called to such outrageous, dramatic acts of faith.  Jesus said we didn’t need to do a huge song and dance to get our message across, to promote our faith, to counter the culture we see around us that hurts so many in the competition for success.  Instead, we can have the faith of a grain of mustard seed.  We may not be familiar with mustard seeds, but we all know sunflower seeds.  We know how they are not very big, but they are delicious when seasoned and cooked.  We know that it would take a lot of sunflower seeds to fill our stomachs, so they are too small to use as our only source of food.  But what a plant can grow from them!  They grow very easily in our climate – I have heard countless stories of people finding sunflowers growing under their bird feeders. 

Faith can be the size of a sunflower seed.  It is not something that needs to be big and strong, weighty and massive in order to grow something marvelous.  It can be as simple as deciding to ask questions at a forum on a proposed shelter for the Homeless in Athabasca or knitting a hat and mitts for the RCMP to give out to people in need.  It can be as small as helping write a grant that helps us sponsor the Blanket Exercise for the One Book One Community program.  It can be as simple as cooking hot dogs at a Pride picnic or being supportive of our new youth group and leaders.  It can be as quiet as cleaning the Lion’s Park up repeatedly after vandals. It can be as simple as coming forward to eat a small piece of bread and drink a small cup of juice in memory of Jesus.  Whatever the size of our acts of faith, Jesus says they are enough.  May we find the courage to live them in our daily lives.