A sermon for the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, Massachusetts, preached on Sunday, 12 August 2012. To God be the glory.
In the end is our beginning. So saith T.S. Eliot (East Coker).
For those of you who are visiting or who have been traveling, today is the fourth of four sermons on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. We’ve discovered several invitations: to be in, to claim the expansive embrace which Christ offers all to be part of the church. Be in. And we’ve heard the exhortation about fulfillment, and maybe even understand a little more about how life with Christ is much richer than anything we can achieve or attain or acquire. Be fulfilled. Last week we noticed a shift in the tone of the letter, from doctrine and theology, to practical counsel for living. Be mature, humble and faithful, even if there aren’t any medals for living a grown-up faith.
Today we end with “Be kind.” But it’s really the beginning, it’s a first step in a life-long Christian practice. I think of kindness as the essence of resurrection-shaped life. Kindness is more than being nice, more than putting into practice the sentiment on the bumper sticker “practice random acts of kindness.” To be kind acknowledges the Christ within, a way to show forth the truth that each of us is made in God’s image.
The story is told that a pastor in an Alpine village wrote a blessing following an avalanche which took the lives of several of his parishioners. Funeral after funeral, the kind that are really sad and mournful, the pastor looked out onto a congregation of pain, so he wrote a blessing, which he used at the subsequent funerals. (told by Marcus Borg at a Jesus Seminar conference at Trinity Cathedral in Portland, Oregon, in 2002).
Before long it became the signature blessing at the church. Years later the rector at St. Bartholomew in Manhattan made it famous, first using it at the hastily put together 9:00pm service on September 11, 2001. The church was packed with people, many of them already grieving the deaths of their loved ones, others awaiting word in hope that the inevitable wasn’t true. So William McD. Tully, a preacher’s preacher, ended the candle-lit service by saying, Life is short, and we do not have too much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel the way with us. So be swift to love, make haste to be kind, and may the blessing of God be with you.
Make haste to be kind. It’s a more colloquial way to say what St. Paul says in today’s reading: “let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” To what extent though? How much kindness should we, or in the face of real evil, can we show? Well, the word “all” is used in this section not once, but twice. “All bitterness and wrath,” “all malice,”
Notice the word anger is not preceded by the word all. There’s nothing unfamiliar about anger; Jesus himself expressed it when he turned over the tables in the temple, and when he confronted the pharisees about their narrow interpretation of the law. So let’s be clear: the opposite of anger is not kindness. Anger can be a productive and even God-sanctioned response. I think St Paul refers here to the inner bitterness and malice--those are the things that must go. Here’s how I think about it: kindness isn’t merely an external display of manners, it’s an internal change of heart. To be kind is to be tenderhearted. If our hearts are hard on the inside, and the manners are meek and polite and helpful on the outside, it’s not kindness.
My friend Diana Jewell Bingham tells the story of her mother, Anne Rea Jewell. Near the end of Mrs. Jewell’s life she spent much of her days in bed, though she was still very much alert and able to talk. One day Diana was grousing about her sister-in-law, going so far as to suggest that only Diana herself should be nearby. Mrs. Jewell took Diana’s face in her hands and said, “Diana, be kind.”
Sometimes you hear me say that I believe a Gospel value is to have a thin skin, not a thick one. Soccer coaches tell their players to get a thick skin. It’s easier to get through middle school, at least, with a tough skin. So we say “shake it off. Tough it out. Don’t let it bother you.” To be kind or to be tenderhearted is to have our insides easily touched. When our skin is tender it’s not very long before we feel pain, and when our hearts are tender, we feel easily and quickly.
Which is why we can’t just decide to be kind, it’s not like a faucet that can be turned off and on, and that’s because kindness is a deep character quality. From whence does it come, kindness? For sure it’s not exclusive to Christians, or even to Jews, though its importance runs throughout both testaments of our scripture. Nor is it limited to religion, plenty of non-religious people are kind, even folk who are hostile about religion and spirituality. What then about kindness is particularly Christian?
Let’s look at the text to find two things. 1) Forgiveness, and 2) Christ’s love, so fierce that it became a fragrant offering. Forgiveness and Jesus’s love--they’re the lenses through which we see kindness, and the roots from which our own kindness grows outward and upward. Something else that’s particular to Christianity and kindness is that our baptisms incorporate us, fuse us if you will, into Christ’s own self. We are anointed with the Holy Spirit, and from that moment all the way through life and beyond death, we embody the loving kindness of God.
About a month ago I called a friend to apologize for something I had said, and on the phone I asked his forgiveness. He didn’t say, “oh, that’s okay” nor did he say, “don’t worry about it, it was nothing.” He said, warmly and genuinely, “forgiven and forgotten.” He meant it, I could tell. We can’t have a kind core if we forgive a wrong but secretly plan to keep it in the back of our minds for a later argument.
T.S. Eliot’s words, “in the end is our beginning” couldn’t be more apt. To be kind isn’t the end, it’s the beginning. As we conclude this series remember the expansiveness of Ephesians, hold fast to its strong counsel about how to live, its gentle and unswerving principle that growing up is an ongoing task for which we’re already equipped. We must never forget that we’re in, and we will live well if we claim the wisdom to be fulfilled, and the gentleness to be mature. But that’s not all. From Christ’s own store of love, we’re given a precious and infinite gift, sometimes quietly given, sometimes loudly, throughout every generation, in every person every morning, when we hear him say, perhaps even with a sense that his hands are holding our face, addressing us gently by our name, to say, “be kind.”
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