Loving Kindness
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – 7/23/23
Loving Kindness – Micah 6: 6-8
I wish I could say it was my idea, but it wasn’t. It was my neighbor Toni’s. She’s got to be one of the most observant, thoughtful, and kind people I know. I’m glad she moved onto my block.
You see, she heard our neighbor Val one day, when she sighed and said how much she loved the porch swings three of the rest of us have on Rugby Place. She laughed then and said it was probably because she didn’t have one herself. But she hoped maybe she could get one.
It was a comment that could have been overlooked but Toni took action. She got on our neighborhood text thread and coordinated the financing, purchasing, shipping, and hanging of a swing to surprise Val. It took weeks to get it done. But one day there was a knock on Val’s door. Her husband, two children, and as many of us neighbors as could be mustered stood in her front yard with mischievous smiles on our faces, as her brand new porch swing rocked in the breeze. Later that night, I could spy Val across the street, still swinging late into the evening, a blanket wrapped around her, and a contented smile filling her face.
This act of kindness didn’t stop Val’s breast cancer from taking her from us less than a year later. But it made her heart glad in a way we might even call healing.
The Hebrew word for kindness in today’s scripture is hesed. It can mean kindness between two people. It can mean piety toward God, and it can also mean a favor, a good deed, or beauty. That’s the definition that most catches my attention when I think of Val sitting on her new porch swing, awash in contentment that sparkled like the sun. Kindness can be so very beautiful. Kindness can be easy to love.
There are other words in this scripture selection that I find less beautiful and less easy to love. In this scripture selection those words include sin and transgression.
To be sure, many of us have benefited from the honest if hard-to-hear words of a loved one that helped us change and grow. But I think it’s also true that many of us carry an unhelpfully heavy knapsack of judgment that we fill with the harsh words of marketing campaigns or unkind others or our own too often unkind thoughts.
At their best, words like sin and transgression help us to name and lament harm that we have either caused or experienced. But at their worst, those words can cause harm, especially when leveled like weapons against others or ourselves.
The biggest sins the book of Micah calls out are sins of people with wealth or power neglecting the well-being of others. It’s a lack of kindness and compassion that God is concerned about.
The weird thing I have learned about being kind to others is that it’s actually hard to do that with authenticity, if we are really awful to ourselves and vice versa. Perhaps it has to do with the way we are part of one another as last week’s scripture selection from Ephesians attested. But whatever the reason, it’s not just Christians who understand that true kindness is predicated on loving others as well as we love ourselves.
The mindfulness movement that is largely rooted in the practices of Buddhist meditation has made popular something I have heard called Metta or Loving Kindness meditation. It involves sending loving words or feelings to those dearest to us, then sending loving words or feelings to those about whom we feel ambivalent, and finally sending loving words or feelings to those with whom we have challenges or conflicts. It’s a practice that is meant to grow our compassion muscles. But the first step, before we send loving words or feelings to anyone else, is to send loving words and feelings to ourselves. This is because self-compassion is understood to be the root of compassion toward others.
If we are going to learn how to name the harm in our lives and to truly love kindness, as we are asked to do in Micah and elsewhere in the Bible, I think we would do well to begin by offering that kindness to ourselves. When we can love ourselves as we are, accept ourselves as we are, and be at ease with who we are, then kindness can flow from us with genuine generosity. And when we can love ourselves as we are, accept ourselves as we are, and be at ease with who we are, then we can be brave enough to see any shortcomings with the kind of compassion that will bring healing and growth.
Sometimes though I think kindness can be hard to notice. We may ignore it or trivialize it as unimportant. But that’s not what the prophet Micah reports as the way to win God’s favor. It’s not sacrificing our first born or our suffering for suffering’s sake that God is after. No, it’s a way of living our lives that includes loving kindness.
In this scripture, so familiar to me, I have often skipped over this part. I’ve been more interested in the doing justice and walking humbly bits. What does it mean to love kindness and why would we do that?
Well, for one thing cultivating affection for kindness can “raise its capital,” according to one NPR Life Kit episode on “How to Raise Kind Kids.” Any method for practicing gratitude for kindness like a journal, a way of praying at the end of the day, or a time at the dinner table or in the car to share the kindnesses witnessed or acted out, are all opportunities that celebrate kindness and let its effects linger in ways that will make all of us of any age more likely to want to perform those celebrated acts ourselves.
Today we are making a kindness wall together as one means of doing that, but I hope you will consider how you celebrate kindness every day in your own lives and households, too. Noticing it when it happens seems to me like an important step, if we are going to truly love kindness and to let it make a difference in our lives.
And what of those other instructions? Micah tells us God wants us to love kindness, to do justice and to walk humbly with God, understanding all of these as a means of living that is the worship that God truly desires. What does that look like when someone lives in a way that does justice, loves kindness, and moves humbly through the world? What good might that do?
Maybe you’ve witnessed it. Maybe you know someone who used their power or influence to right a wrong. Maybe you know someone who went out of their way to make a difference for you or someone you loved. Maybe you can think of someone who lived their life in a way that inspires you to fill yours with justice, kindness, and a quiet trust in their worthiness to be loved and everyone else’s worthiness, too.
A podcast I love called Hidden Brain with Shankar Vedantum has a spinoff series called Unsung Heroes about people whose kindness left a lasting impression on someone else. One that I recently discovered came from Dorothy Tiernan who sat by her father’s bed in 1986 as he lay dying of cancer. Her father was unable to communicate but his family sensed he was in pain because he was writing around in this bed. Dorothy begged the nurse to do something to make him comfortable, but the nurse told her there was nothing she could do. He had only been prescribed so much morphine every four hours. The whole family felt helpless and in despair.
That evening the nurse manager, in charge of the entire hospital, stuck her head in the father’s room to see how he was doing. Upon seeing his pain, she found the nurse attending the father and told her to “Medicate this man now.”
“But I don’t have an order,” the nurse replied.
But her superior answered, “You go ahead and medicate him now, I will take responsibility for it.”
The nurse came back quickly and medicated Dorothy’s father. He appeared to finally get comfortable, and within the next 24 hours or so, he died.
Dorothy can’t remember the nurse manager’s name, but for decades she has remembered with gratitude the way the head nurse used her authority to do what she could to ease her father’s suffering. After that day, Teirnan decided to go to nursing school, and for 20 years, she was a hospice nurse. Often, when she was helping a patient in distress, she thought about that nurse’s act of compassion for her father.
Dear ones, there are so many things we cannot do. We cannot fix all the world’s pain. But there are things that are within our power to do justly, kindly, and humbly. When we do, we never know the effect it may have on others. But I believe we can trust that we are worshiping God and bringing healing to the world every time we practice loving kindness.
May it be so. Amen.
