Fruit Flavour of the Month: Kindness -- Newsletter Piece

If love is, as I suggested earlier this year, the predominant flavour of the Fruit of the Spirit it is good to ask what each undertone adds to that base flavour. What does kindness mean in conjunction with love, with the commandment to love each other as God first loves us?

Or to put it the way I did in my Google search this morning: “why is kindness a fruit of the spirit”.

As I was reading some of the articles in response to that search I was pushed to ponder a slightly different question: “what do we mean when we say someone is kind?”, which led me to a new starting point (there is a reason writing this has taken all day today...).

In the last couple weeks of my vacation I discovered a couple of YouTube Channels about etymology and found the topic quite interesting, so my eventual starting point for this newsletter piece was to go to the Online Etymology Dictionary and look up the word kind. Turns out the word has its origin in Old English. As an adjective the word means "friendly, deliberately doing good to others," and also "with the feeling of relatives for each other,". Kindness seems to have appears as a word around 1300 with the meaning "courtesy, noble deeds," with added meanings "kind deeds; kind feelings; quality or habit of being kind" showing up later in the 14^th century.

All of which means what for the life of faith, for striving to live as Spirit-filled people?

It means putting love into action. Maybe kindness is love with flesh on. Maybe kindness can be as simple as putting the needs of others ahead of our own wants (or even needs). It could mean big grand things, or it can be as simple as holding the door for someone and other basic courtesies. Living as a Spirit-filled person pushes us to care for the common good, to worry about what is good for all of us, not just good for me. Kindness, is a choice to make that more than a theoretical position.

One of my Google results was from GotQuestions.org. Normally this is not a website I find helpful as it tends to be much more traditional/conservative than I am but in this case there was a piece I found very helpful as we explore kindness as a flavour of the fruit of the Spirit:

When we exhibit the kindness of God, we are tender, benevolent, and useful to others. Every action, every word will have the flavor of grace in it. To maintain this attitude toward those we love is hard enough. To express kindness toward those who are against us requires the work of God (2 Corinthians 6:4-6). That is why kindness is a fruit of the Spirit.

We live in a world where kindness and kind people are sometimes most notable for their absence. In a world where more and more people are worried about getting what they want/need/deserve or a world where seeming strong and self-sufficient is highly prized being kind, worrying about what others need, can seem a little out of step with ‘how the world works’. Or maybe we are just too busy to take that extra second or hour to do the kind thing. It is easy to forget.

However the way the Reign of God works is different than the way the world works. I fully believe that to follow The Way of Christ means we have different priorities. We are called to remain humble, realistic about our own importance; to act lovingly toward ourselves, family, neighbours, and enemies; to do the big and small things that benefit each other; to be kind, to deliberately do good for others.

Kindness adds sweetness to the fruit of the Spirit. Kindness makes the world a better place. Kindness keeps us humble (I believe it is harder to be kind when you are too full of yourself). I think kindness also helps keep us from worrying too much (or maybe worrying too much makes it harder to be kind – or maybe both).

Who was kind to you today? When have you chosen to be kind to someone today?
--Gord

Looking Ahead to September 1, 2024 -- 15th Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 17B

The Scripture Readings this week are:

• Psalm 15
• Psalm 24:3-6 
• James 1:21-27

The Sermon title is Am I Worthy?

Early Thoughts: How do we make ourselves worthy? Do we just have to work harder? If we just try harder, do more, spend more hours in service will we make ourselves worthy in the eyes of our families? Our neighbours? Ourselves? God?

Some (many?) of us wrestle with feeling worthy from time to time. For some people the default is to assume that for some reason they are unworthy: unworthy of love, unworthy of friendship, unworthy of success, maybe even unworthy of life. We might pick up those messages from a variety of places: family, teachers, peers, social media, our own self talk, tv/movies. How do we counteract that?

To be honest I don't think our readings this week help with that.  Both Psalms seem to set a pretty high bar for being eligible to stand in God's presence. Not that any of those attribute we find listed in them are bad, in fact they are indeed good things to aspire to, just that how many of us can honestly say that our lives meet that standard all the time? Maybe, like Wayne and Garth, we fall to our knees and declare:

And yet, in the years when I was most beset by feelings of guilt/shame and inadequacy the church was one of my refuges from those feelings. I think there were a couple of reasons for that. One was certainly the community, the community that I had been a part of for so long, the place where so much surrogate family could be found. But there was also something deeper. Since I was a young child the church taught me about the God who looks at creation and says "it is very good", the God who sees me as their Beloved Child, the God who knows my failures and mis-steps and offers forgiveness. In short the church reminded me that in God's eyes I have worth.

Sometimes we might think that if we were just 'better" that would make us feel worthy. We just need to do more (and better), to work harder and longer, then we would earn worthiness. Our culture can support that idea, the idea that we are only worthy because of what we do/accomplish/earn (and buy). But I think that misses the mark.

I believe that God call us worthy by virtue of existing. This does not mean we always get it right, t means that we are worthy even when we get it wrong. So I think the Psalmists might be a bit off. Or maybe the Psalmists were being aspirational, encouraging us to live into God's vision for who we could be. Maybe James is doing that too. Because there is a mirror to not feeling worthy, it is to get too comfortable in the idea that God calls us worthy "just as I am without one plea". The path of wisdom is in remembering that we are called worthy and Beloved AND that we can probably do a bit (or a whole lot) better.
--Gord

Looking Ahead to August 25, 2024 -- 14th Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 16B

The Scripture Readings this week are:

• Joshua 24:14-18
• John 6:56-69

Source

The Sermon title is Where Would You Go?

Early Thoughts: Let us begin with a memory...

It is 1991. I am meeting with representatives from the M&P Committee as a first step in entering the candidacy process. During this meeting one of them asks if I am sure that the UCCan is the right place for me. He says that over the last couple of years he had heard from many members and clergy who were realizing that they may have been in the wrong place. At 22, as a third generation UCCan person who had grown up in that specific congregation since I was 2, I found it a very odd question. Why would it not be the right place? 30+ years later I see it was actually a very wise question. [In hindsight I have to wonder if the 1988 General Council Decision regarding human sexuality was a part of the background to this question.]

Sometimes we need to be challenged, we need to be pushed to consider if we are in the right place --even if we see no reason we would go anywhere else.

The sixth chapter of John begins with a miracle story. Jesus feeds thousands of people with just a couple of fish and a few small loaves. The chapter then has an extended discourse on Jesus as the bread of life. Now, as the chapter comes to a close some in the crowds are finding that the teaching is too hard and are falling away. So Jesus asks those who are still there if they also wish to leave. They return with the question "where would we go?". In Jesus they have found the path to Life, in Jesus they have met the Word Made Flesh. Why should they leave?

In our other reading we stand at Shechem with the people of Israel as Joshua, the successor to Moses, the one who led them across Jordan into the Promised Land, gives his final address to the people. He has reminded them of all that God has done since the time of Abraham until this very moment, then he challenges them, asking if they will remain faithful to the God who led them there or will they fall away to the other gods worshipped by their new neighbours. The people respond that pf course they will remain faithful. [It is worth mentioning that in the next verses Joshua tells the people that they are not going to keep their word but that this day will be a witness against them when they fail at the task.] How could they turn away from the God who has done so much for them? Where else would they turn?

How might we answer these two question, the one asked by Jesus and the one aske by Joshua? When things get challenging will we fall away? If we did where might we go?

IT is a harder question than it seems. The easy response is to pretend it is an odd, even irrelevant question. Surely we would stay where we are, we would not fall away. So maybe the first thing is to ask ourselves what might lead us to fall away. After all what leads us to look for a new path/place may shape where we would end up going.

If we are honest with ourselves and each other we know that we change over time. A place that has always felt like home may eventually feel like a foreign land (either because it changed or we changed). Sometimes to be faithful to who we are and to how God is moving in our lives we need to find a new place, a new expression of the faith, a new home. SO how do we know where we might go as we look for the words of truth and life?

And for the record, my answer to the question about the UCCan from 30+ years ago is the same. I love my ecumenical partners and colleagues, but this denomination is where I find the best expression of my faith. Where else would I go?
--Gord