Being Kind
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – July 16, 2023
Being Kind – Ephesians 4: 25-32
I do the bulk of my grocery shopping at the east side Elgin Aldi. I’m partial to their low prices and their competent, friendly staff. But more than that I shop there to watch the miracle of the cart quarter exchange chain.
Maybe you know just what I mean but in case you don’t, allow me to explain that at Aldi, shoppers must bring a quarter to retrieve a shopping cart. This is a job often fought over in my family: who gets to put the quarter in the cart slot and remove the chain that connects it to all the other carts before triumphantly wheeling it away. It’s the small pleasures that move us.
This system reduces costs for the grocery store by incentivizing the return of the cart back into position in a neat line at the front of the store, since it’s the only way to get your quarter back.
If you’re not a regular Aldi shopper, please know that it’s common etiquette upon entering the store to offer someone your quarter and to take their empty cart from them on their way back from unloading groceries or vice versa. It’s okay to get your own cart but if you’re able, this can be a sweet exchange that saves each other a few steps.
Quite often though someone will forget their quarter or a cart will get stuck or someone will just get a twinkle in their eye and the great cart exchange chain begins. You will know you are part of it when you offer your neighbor your quarter but are waved off and told to keep it. Now you have both a cart and a quarter! Maybe it’s a small thing, but at least for me it feels like it’s my lucky day and that I’m that much more clearly connected to my neighbors. Plus, I spend the whole shopping trip looking forward to continuing the chain by surprising the next person I meet in the parking lot with their own free cart.
Today’s selection of the letter to the ancient church in Ephesus instructs Christ followers to “be kind to one another.” Surely greater kindnesses exist, or at least ones that cost more to the giver than a mere quarter. But I have come to see even these small kindnesses as vitally important, for they are part of the fabric that connects us all. I would go so far as to say for followers of Christ, these small acts of kindness can be a means of living out our convictions in everyday doable and delightful ways that remind us how much indeed we are connected, even as the letter says, “members of one another,” called to treat each other with “tenderheartedness and compassion.”
Yes, I think being kind to strangers is a great way to follow Christ. Being kind to strangers can grow our muscles, too, for the heavier lifts of kindness: the times when we are angered or even harmed.
At the Church of the Brethren Annual Conference, which I attended last week, I found myself unexpectedly reading the Desmond Tutu book God’s Dream to a group of third through fifth graders. There was still time left when we were done, so I began to ask them how we live out God’s Dream as Archbishop Tutu writes of it in the book: “that every one of us will see that we are all [family–all siblings to each other], yes, even you and me…”
I do find Tutu’s words in keeping with so much of what I read in the Bible, including today’s scripture passage, which instructs Christ followers to “be angry but do not sin… [and] not to let the sun go down on your anger.”
I was overwhelmed by the wise and earnest sharing in that room of young people. They knew more than many adults I know about feeling our anger but not letting it lead us to violence. They even had strategies like punching pillows or counting to ten or an exercise I know as box breathing. Useful in many situations, it involves breathing in for four, holding the breath for four, breathing out for four, and finally, holding the bottom of the breath for four.
This is one example of a tool that helps us do the important thing, the group agreed, which is to take in the information the anger gives us but not to let it alone be what drives our decisions. Anger can tell us something hurts us or others. Anger deserves some sort of expression whether it leads us to stand up for ourselves or for others or just to vent it out in private. Personally, I do not believe anger is entirely bad. I believe the danger with anger is in how quickly it can lead us to hurt others or ourselves, the very opposite of God’s dream for us. The trick is in finding the space between our anger and our action. And I think many of the children I talked with are well on their way to outpacing their elders in this respect. Indeed, I pray it is so for I fear they will need it as much if not more than we do.
When we were done talking about anger. There was still more unexpected time in that conference room of bright, engaged children. So, I asked them about how we say we’re sorry and about how to forgive. We agreed that both could be very hard to do. And I think that’s true no matter our age.
I don’t know exactly how the ancient church members in Ephesus were treating each other but whatever they were up to it caused to Paul to write to them about the rules for living a new life in Christ as he saw them. According to Paul, it should make a difference in our lives that we are trying to follow Jesus, and I tend to agree. I haven’t yet seen that it can make any of us perfect. But I have seen that it has the power to put us on a life-long path of transformation. Taking Christ as the model, Paul writes to the Ephesians, “be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.”
If you’ve ever tried it, maybe you know that forgiveness is not for the faint of heart–not when the hurt has been deep enough. Sometimes forgiveness can be a long, hard process but it is one that leads to healing.
If revenge is a poison we drink hoping it will hurt someone else, forgiveness is a kindness we perform that opens the way to healing for everyone involved. Forgiveness is what we do to emulate Christ. It’s also a kindness to ourselves. For when we forgive, we begin to let go of our tight grip on the hurt and we turn our hearts over to holy healing.
The last gift I want to bring you today from Annual Conference is an excerpt from Ruthann Knechel Johansen’s Bible study, which she presented one morning to the delegate body. Ruthann is an interdisciplinary teacher and scholar. She’s professor emerita at the University of Notre Dame and president emerita of Bethany Theological Seminary. She’s also someone with whom I count myself privileged to spend any time in her presence which exudes kindness, grace, and wisdom.
“Some years ago,” begins Ruthann, “I gave a lecture at the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary on Japanese linked poetry (known as Renga or collaborative poetry). I explained how poets from the same area, even from different areas, across generations or centuries would take a line from an earlier poet’s poem and carry it into his or her own. They created an almost endless linking in verse. In the middle of my explanation,” Ruthann continues, “an international student from Somalia interrupted enthusiastically saying, “That’s what we do in my village. We have a tree in the center of the village. We call it the storytelling tree. When there is a conflict, everyone gathers under the tree to listen and link everyone’s view of the conflict until we see it more clearly or it is transformed.”
I know very little of the life story of the stranger at Aldi who swaps a cart for my quarter. But that’s not the only place where my knowledge of other people’s stories fails. In conflict, so often I have found that much of our pain comes from a lack of understanding of each other’s stories. Sharing our side of the story doesn’t change the past or erase harm or even necessarily mean we don’t need to make changes that mitigate the harm from happening again in the same way. But sharing our side of the story and listening to the other multi-faceted sides of any story can lead to better understanding. It can open the way for forgiveness, for grace, and maybe even for kindness.
What stories do you carry today?
What acts of kindness have you witnessed or been a part of?
How will you welcome the new life in Christ that transforms us, heals us, and leads us to be as kind as we can to one another and to ourselves?
Archbishop Tutu closes his children’s book with these words:
“Dear Child of God, do you know how to make God’s dream come true?
It’s really quite easy.
As easy as sharing, loving, caring.
As easy as holding, playing, laughing.
As easy as knowing we are family
because we are all God’s children.
Will you help God’s dream come true?
Let me tell you a secret,” writes Tutu,
“God smiles like a rainbow when you do.”
May it be so. Amen.
