Chad Herring

Sermon of the Week:
Love is Kind–In Defense of Kindness

A sermon preached for The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on July 11, 2021.

Part six of a six-week sermon series about Kindness and the Christian Faith, called Love is Kind.

Special Music: Then I Shall Live
Hymn: We Are One In the Spirit

Keywords: Observation Bias, Inattentional Blindness, Kindness, Paul, Be Good to People, Bruce Reyes-Chow. #pcusa

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Titus 3:3-8
and Romans 12:1-18

Sometimes all you need is a little encouragement,
A little nudge
And you can begin to see something new, something different.

Once I had a professor do a little experiment with his class.
Close your eyes, he said.
And we closed our eyes.
Ok, the goal of this exercise is pretty simple, he continued,
All I want you to do is think of anything,
Anything at all,
Except the color blue…
Got it.
Anything but the color blue.

The professor said another thing or two, just to keep the instruction going,
But then he said we were done, and he asked us to open our eyes
And to start talking a bit about it.

Who, after I told you not to think about the color blue,
Immediately conjured up an image of something blue in your mind?

Answer: all of us had.
One: the sapphire blue ocean.
Another: a blue toy teddy bear he had as a child.
Me: George Brett in his Baby-Blue Royals Jersey…

Just a little suggestion,
And all of us couldn’t help but think about blue things
Even when the professor asked us not to.

The human mind does this sort of thing, all on its own.
And we go about sifting through all sorts of thoughts and ideas and images
That come to us as we go about our day.

Most of that we just ignore.
Sometimes we focus on some of those thoughts more than others.
We can focus when we need to focus; wander when we are free to wander.

And we human beings are good at detecting patterns and anomalies,
But we can also miss things, obvious things, as we do that,
Things that are right in front of us.

In a famous example,
The Smithsonian Magazine published an article a decade ago
Titled “But Did you See the Gorilla?”
Where they described a video
Where six people were playing basketball,
Three with white t-shirts
And three with black t-shirts
And as they are dribbling and passing and defending the basket
A woman in a gorilla suit walks on camera
Moves to the middle of the screen, thumps her chest
And then walks away…
Only you don’t see any of that when you watch it the first time
Or the second or third time,
Because you’re not expecting it. You’re not looking for it.

It happens right there in front of you, and you miss it.

The researchers then repeated the experiment,
Telling new watchers to look for the gorilla,
And they do, and look, they see her,
But, in watching for her,
They miss other obvious things going on,
Like the background changing color.

There’s a term for this: inattentional blindness,
or sometimes observer bias,
A tendency to see what we expect to see, or what we want to see.

This is what makes magicians successful, or not, right
Their ability to guide your observation here, and not there,
So they can palm the quarter or the card or the ball
and make it “re-appear” from behind your ear
or from under the cup
that was clearly empty just a moment ago.

A form of this is what makes marketing and advertising so successful
As we go along with this trend or that worry.
There’s a reason why that blazer looked better on me
in the store than it does at home.
I really wanted to look good in it, and the salesperson said I did…

We don’t need to go too in depth here.
That blazer looks just fine.
A good magic trick can be quite exciting.
Just because we can get a group of people thinking about George Brett
Doesn’t mean that the Royals are going to start doing any better this year
But it helps us to ponder just a little bit, from time to time,
The power of observation on our emotions and our thought process
And how these can impact how we go about living our lives.

///
We started this sermon series on Kindness with an assertion
That we’re experiencing a Kindness problem.
Not a niceness problem, we said
Not a civility problem,
But a kindness problem.

And then we spent some time talking about what we meant by kindness,
Kindness being the steadfast affirmation of the dignity of everyone we meet
and actions that uphold, enhance, expand, protect, affirm their humanity.

We got that definition from Bruce Reyes-Chow
In his book “In Defense of Kindness,”
Where he says
To be kind
Is to accept that each person
Is a created and complex human being—
And to treat them as if you believe this to be true.[i]

That book of his, and this topic in general,
Felt rather timely to me,
Given how central Kindness is in holy scripture,
As we’ve discovered these past six weeks,
And how fragile our relationships with our neighbors have felt of late.

///
But a strange thing has happened to me,
Over these past few weeks.
I wonder if it has happened with any of you.
Ever since I started thinking more concretely about kindness—
Looking for it as I read the bible,
Reflecting on it through books like Bruce’s
Trying to find moments where I can choose kindness in my day to day—
Ever since then,
I have begun to see Kindness as an idea, as something being promoted
All over the place.

For example:
On the walk that I take our pups Ryder and Annie on every day
There’s a sign that says ‘choose kindness’ in someone’s yard.
I hadn’t noticed that before.

This week, we went on vacation,
And on the bus from the long-term parking to the airport,
One of the riders wore a “Kindness is Magic” t-shirt.

Actually, when we were at Denver International Airport
And I went looking for a replacement cord to power my laptop
Right there in the middle of the terminal was a kiosk
By an organization called Be Good to People.
With the sign “Kindness Sold Here.”

They had all sorts of hats, shirts, keychains,
With the phrase Be Good to People
And Choose Kindness.

And yeah, it’s more than a bit commercial,
An airport kiosk selling kindness merch
But there indeed it was, right in the middle of the airport
A giant reminder to everyone walking by
That kindness is possible,
That you, good traveler, could make a difference
Not because you bought a shirt
But because you lived up to what the shirt was trying to get you to think about.

I talked to the worker at the Kiosk
And apparently the Be Good to People foundation was started
Because someone had an “unkind experience” in 2008—
It isn’t clear what that kind of experience was—
And she was committed to turning that around.

Seriously, you are not going to believe
How powerful wearing, carrying and sharing the Good is.
Once you experience it, you’ll want more of it. [Read more…]

Sermon of the Week:
Love is Kind–Kindness and Anger

A sermon preached for The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on July 4, 2021.

Part five of a six-week sermon series about Kindness and the Christian Faith, called Love is Kind.

Special Music: Grace
Hymn: Our God, Our Help in Ages Past

Keywords: Inside Out, Emotions, Anger, Ephesians, Pseudepigraphy, Interpretation. #pcusa

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Genesis 32:22-31
and Ephesians 4:1-6, 25-32

The 2015 Animated movie Inside Out was a major success
For Pixar Studios and Walt Disney Pictures.

In the movie, young Riley, at the age of 11,
moves with her family from Minnesota to San Francisco
when her father gets a new job.
The driver of the plot is all about how Riley and her family adapt to the new city.

But most of the action occurs within Riley’s mind,
Where we see her emotions personified—
Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger—
And how these emotions
work with or against one another
to control Riley’s actions.

Meanwhile, experiences become memories,
and her most important core memories shape her personality
and her potential for resiliency, or distress.

As the various emotions work to process Riley’s experiences,
We, the movie viewer, are invited to empathize with
how hard it is to be a tween, or really someone of any age,
how tentative some of our mental health reactions can be,
and maybe some strategies and methods for engaging our feelings positively.

I particularly liked how the creators worked hard to create space
For feelings like melancholy and grief.
These are normal feelings, you know, variations of Sadness.
Sometimes we think that our feelings ought only always be happiness
or at least contentment, and so we swallow more painful feelings.

Inside Out reminds us of the dangers of doing that.

It was a beautiful film,
A reminder that sometimes animated movies, cartoons,
Can be high forms of art,
A sharp contrast maybe from the kinds of cartoons I mentioned last week
Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry and the like
Where what you get are overly-simplistic strategies for dealing with conflict
Do whatever you need to do to win.

The creators of Inside Out consulted with clinical psychologist Paul Ekman
And professor of Psychology Dacher Keltner
In trying to accurately explore these themes.

Throughout that process, they considered twenty-six various emotions,
Fourteen apparently being real contenders,
Before they narrowed it down to the five characters in the movie,
Which, again, were Joy, Sadness, Fear, disgust, and Anger.
Some of the other emotions considered, but ultimately passed over,
include irritation,
Envy,
Greed,
Gloom,
Depression,
Love,
Schadenfreude,
which is a fancy German word meaning taking delight in the misfortune of others
Apathy,
Embarrassment,
And hope.

But that’s too many characters to make an animated movie about, apparently,
And I think they did a pretty good job selecting key feelings, right?
Even if it does simplify things a bit.

We do that, by the way,
Simplify how we think about what we feel.
Often it is easy to lump envy and greed and ire and indignation into anger,
For instance.

Depending on how you feel about it
The schadenfreude you feel might be closer to fear,
Or it might be closer to disgust,
Or it could lean toward anger.

Love often is marked by Joy, but sometimes is informed by sadness too,
Driven to unhealthy places by fear, and so on.

Our emotions are complex, aren’t they.
And sometimes, when we’re so close to them,
They are really hard to tease apart
Which is one reason why therapy is such a helpful thing for so many people.

And I was so glad when this movie came out
Because it was one way for us to look at our complicated inner life
With compassion and with an eye towards our mental health…
What we can do to nurture a healthy understanding of our emotions
What we can do to process them and, thereby, work with them
As we construct a sound relationship between our emotions and our thoughts
Our decisions and our reactions.

///
Our daughters are spending much of the summer at a local day camp.

They’re not quite old enough yet to be councilors,
so they are “Leaders in Training”
which means they are helping a lot,
mainly helping a lot of first and second and third graders
as they navigate summer camp a week at a time,
so, basically, that means
applying sunscreen, looking for lost shoes,
taking kids to the bathroom, that sort of thing…
glamorous work…
and through it all,
negotiating the kind of conflicts that naturally come up among groups of kids.

Among other things, these young kids are learning
how to understand and identify and work with their emotions, right?
That’s not the point of the camp,
This isn’t Inside Out camp…
the point of the camp is crafts and swimming and games and fun,
but they are learning about their feelings and their emotions, for sure.
That is what kids do as they develop.

Actually, we all continue doing this, through our teen years, into adult hood…
some of my most profound moments of self-understanding
even as a middle-age gen x er
have been when I’ve picked apart what I’m feeling at any particular moment
why it is this, and not that,
why it might be connected to these experiences I’ve had
and why that feeling might be driving me to want something or to do something.

Why did that Covid vaccine make me cry when I got the first dose?
Why was it pride that I felt the first time I sat in the passenger seat
While my daughter was at the wheel…
And not a more normal feeling like dread or abject fear?

(That’s not fair…they’re terrific drivers,
But I remember what I was like when I first started to drive.)

Learning how to listen to your feelings, to try to understand them
To think about them,
This is something we do as we grow.

Sometimes we take that analysis too far, of course.
We worry about our worries, we judge ourself for our basic emotions,
In ways that aren’t fair or warranted or balanced.
We don’t know how to turn off this sort of thinking when we need to sleep…

These are a different issue for a different day,
And a good thing to talk to a therapist about.
For now, I mainly want us to have in mind
The complexity of our various feelings, and what it means for us to ponder them.

It takes work to ponder them well,
To not avoid our feelings,
To not dwell on them inordinately,
But to have a fair, balanced, humble, open-eyed take
on what’s going on inside there.

Again, we’re kind of close to our feelings,
so sometimes it helps to have some help with that work,
but when we can undertake it,
it helps us be more centered, more grounded,
we’re able to work on the feelings that we have that are not helpful
to process the feelings that we have that remind us
of who we are and whom we have loved and what matters to us,
and we’re able to choose actions in a more informed way
so that we’re not always acting just out of our feelings
but, instead, informed by our feelings
along with our thoughts and our convictions and our values.

This is part of what it means to live an examined life
A healthy life.

///
Today we turn to Ephesians for wisdom in this sermon series on Kindness.

I’m the first to admit that I don’t do that very often,
Turn to Ephesians for wisdom.

Ephesians is, how do we put this, a challenging text. [Read more…]

Sermon: Love is Kind–In Defense of Kindness

Sermon: Love is Kind–Kindness and Anger