Sermon of the Week:
Love is Kind–Kindness and Conflict
A sermon preached for The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on June 27, 2021.
Part four of a six-week sermon series about Kindness and the Christian Faith, called Love is Kind.
Special Music: How Great Thou Art
Hymn: Awake My Soul and With The Sun
Keywords: Sermon the the Plain, Love Enemies, Fulguhm, Conflict, Tom and Jerry, Kindness. #pcusa
Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Psalm 103:1-13
and Luke 6:27-36
Permission to podcast / stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-733469. All rights reserved.
Some of you know that my father is also a Presbyterian Pastor.
Anything that I do well as a preacher or a minster is thanks,
at least in part, to him.
When I was a kid, we used to live in a manse,
Which is just a special word for a church owned house where the pastor lives.
There aren’t that many manses now-a-days, for a lot of reasons,
but we lived in a few and I was always thankful to live in them.
The churches my dad served were usually pretty small,
And while they might not offer a strong salary
A manse was a good way to balance that,
And along with our denomination’s Board of Pension health care
And my mom working as a teacher
We had a safe and secure childhood.
Because we lived in a manse, we’d often host committee meetings or session,
Which is the governing board of our churches,
And so we tried to keep everything neat and tidy,
Which wasn’t always so easy for three young and messy boys.
I was thinking this week about those houses,
For two reasons.
Memory is so odd and fickle.
I’m sure I have some details off and not quite right.
I remember that we had some dishes my grandmother liked to collect
Hanging on the walls
Along with some art.
We had a little bookshelf in the living room
And often a magazine or a book on a side table,
all appropriate stuff, if a church member would come over.
I think that was where I first saw this little book by Robert Fulguhm
That was titled
ALL I REALLY NEEDED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN.
It was published when I was eleven,
And contained several short essays where Fulghum tried to describe
How adult life could be improved if we just remembered
the basic lessons of kindergarten,
things like sharing,
cleaning up after ourselves,
living a balanced life, you know, not just work, and learning,
but also some recess, too.
And, interestingly, importantly, for this series,
Fulghum argues, we learn in Kindergarten how to be kind to one another.
That’s the first essay, at any rate.
There are many others, looking at a host of topics and people.
It is an appealing thought, returning to basics, even if it is trite and simplistic:
Getting back to what we learned as children,
As if we, somewhere along the way,
lost all that innocence when we grew up.
That might be true.
That is true, in some respects.
And those values are good values to remember, right:
Getting along, sharing, listening to one another, doing things together.
But it also, at the same time,
paints a far too rosy picture of childhood, I think.
The other thing I remember, about that house that I grew up in,
Is that I learned about conflict in that house.
It’s not what it sounds like.
My parents were, and are, loving caring parents,
Good partners in their marriage, wise guides and counsel to their boys.
But I learned all about conflict like most kids my age did,
Watching after-school and Saturday-morning cartoons.
You can really take your pick of the 1980s cartoon options.
I watched almost all of them:
He-Man.
Thundercats
Ducktails
The Smurfs.
The Transformers.
With MAYBE the exception of the Care Bears,
all of these shows were about conflict.
(But who really watched the Care Bears)?
Some problem came up.
It had to be solved.
Someone was determined to stop you from fixing things.
You regularly had justice or necessity on your side
Along with powerful weapons or muscles or skill
And over the next 30 minutes or so you worked your way out of it
By conquering or outsmarting or defeating anything along the way.
This was particularly true with the Bugs Bunny
and Tom and Jerry cartoons
That were my favorite.
They were good fun. Mindless entertainment.
And one lesson in conflict after another,
Usually with the moral of the story being:
Do whatever you need to do to come out on top;
Drop an anvil, light that dynamite,
use that knife or shotgun or booby trap…
WHO CARES what happens to the person you’re up against.
Conflict is about winning, not about transformation.
Not about growth. Not about our collective situation getting better.
///
Of course, this isn’t unique to my childhood or my generation,
And it wasn’t just a message we find in cartoons.
We clearly see it in music, movies, theatre, great works of literature,
though, depending on what you read or listen to or watch,
this moral is often held in tension with Fulgham’s kind of message,
with other ways of choosing how to live,
of other ways of understanding power and success:
a different approach to how we relate to one another
a life of collaboration, compassion, empathy, maybe even kindness.
The best, most profound works of art of every generation
help us work though this tension:
How ought we to live? How do we resolve conflict, scarcity, oppression?
My friends gently roll their eyes every time
I talk about the musical Les Miserables, for example,
In part because it is somewhat cliché,
And I’m always tempted to break out into singing
Which is dangerous because I’m out of tune and pitchy and all the rest,
But I don’t really care, to be honest.
As it is a really good example, for me, of this tension,
The struggle between adopting a philosophy of power used to dominate and win
Or a philosophy of using the power you have
to heal and to mend and to sacrifice for the common good.
What about you? When did you learn about conflict?
About power? About sharing or about winning?
///
We’re shifting just a little bit in this sermon series on Kindness.
We started by exploring what kindness is, and what it is not.
We affirmed that Kindness is
a resolute affirmation of the dignity of other people
All other people
Just because they are people
And treating them as such
And not because we will benefit, or get something out of it,
But just because people deserve to be treated with dignity.
If that is what Kindness is,
Then we note that Kindness is not the same thing as niceness.
Niceness often understood as adopting a posture of civility or gentleness
or even deference, not rocking the boat.
These are often conflated, perhaps,
because Kindness requires that we treat others with respect,
And that often is paired with niceness.
It is not that being nice is bad. Niceness is often good.
But Niceness doesn’t have to be kind.
In fact, it often is not,
and often calls for niceness
provide cover for injustice, or bullying,
or all sorts of behavior that harms the dignity of the people involved.
Instead, with the Apostle Paul, we affirmed that Love is Patient, Love is Kind,
Love doesn’t rejoice in wrongdoing, but it rejoices in the truth.
It bears all things, hopes all things,
Love never ends.
Kindness affirms that every person deserves basic respect and dignity,
Which impacts what you can do, and can’t do, right
You can’t treat other people as a means to just some end
You can’t ignore their humanity
just because they don’t vote like you
Or look like you
Or do what you want them to do,
Just because they come from another country
Or have a different religion
Or are attracted to other people in ways you don’t understand.
All people deserve basic respect and dignity.
Jesus’ life was devoted to sharing this love, this kindness,
Particularly to those who were denied it by powerful people.
Kindness, we then explored, is therefore one aspect of the Christian life
That we call the fruit of the spirit,
Things like joy, peace, goodness, gentleness, self-control,
and Kindness too,
And we are called to help others see that that fruit is good and pleasant
and oh so lovely,
not something special that only we get to enjoy, as people of faith,
but something intended for all.
Last week, we talked about the prophet Micah
And how God ties together the doing of justice
The loving of kindness
And the act of humble walking,
Three legs of a stool, so to speak, so that if you remove any one of the three
Justice or kindness or humility,
The chair tumbles over and we no longer are sitting upright.
Kindness alone is not enough.
Treat others with dignity,
While also seeking their welfare and the welfare of all…a just society
And do so while guided not by our individual desires alone
But God’s vision for the world. Humility.
///
This week and next week we’re going to confront
the things we hear that urge us to abandon kindness,
either because it doesn’t work,
or because it is weak,
or because others may not be kind, and therefore will take advantage of us,
or because we don’t know how to fit kindness into other feelings we have
feelings like anger or righteous-indignation.
Next week, we’ll look at two wonderful scriptural stories about the latter:
Paul, and his strange teaching to be angry, but not to sin, whatever that means
Along with the story in Genesis about Jacob wrestling with God all night long
A struggle that left him with a messed up hip, a new name,
and the self-understanding that wrestling with these hard, difficulty, messy things in our life
Is a good thing, a human thing, a God thing.
But today we turn to Luke, and his telling of Jesus’ sermon on the plain.
Did you hear the echoes, when I read it, to the Sermon on the Mount?
We read from that last week,
from the Beatitudes in the Gospel According to Matthew,
where Jesus goes up to a high place,
like Moses, to offer wisdom about the realm of God.
Here, in Luke, Jesus stands “on a level place,”
not nearly as exciting, maybe,
but with his own blessings and woes to share,
as only Luke can describe it.
If you read the Sermon on the Mount, which is Matthew 5, 6, and 7,
And then the Sermon on the Plain, you see the clear similarities,
Along with what Luke leaves out, or what Matthew puts in,
Depending on how you look at it.
Scholars are divided over whether this was one sermon,
And Matthew and Luke got the details a bit different,
Or if Jesus had a stump speech,
a message he delivered in several different places,
that might differ here and there depending on the crowd.
We’re looking at Luke’s teachings here about conflict:
Turn the other cheek,
Go the extra mile,
Give your cloak as well as your shirt…
And it sounds familiar.
We see this both in Matthew and in Luke,
Though here in Luke you have much more language
about the people pressing this sort of situation:
They are the enemy, sinners, abusers, haters. [Read more…]
