Here’s my sermon from April 18, 2021. A helluva week for race-related violence in America. In this sermon I postpone the call to work for justice with kindness. We’re not there yet. Sorrow and repentance must come first if kindness is going to mean anything at all. The sermon’s based on Luke 24:36b-48 and the poem, Kindness, by Naomi Shihab Nye
1.
A few weeks ago, as I planned this service, I chose the second reading, the poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, because I’d wanted to explore kindness as a virtue sorely needed in our world today. Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Palestinian father and an American mother. Among other places, she’s lived in Ramallah in Palestine, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas. In her books of poems and fiction, she’s given voice to her experience as an Arab-American through writings that flow with an open, generous, humanitarian spirit. The poet William Stafford has said that “her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life.”
I wanted her poem to dance with the Gospel reading, encouraging us, enhancing our lives.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, she writes,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
There’s grit and reality in that, insight too. I’d wanted us to hear this Palestinian-American who, in her family line, knows the harsh memories of persecution and war, suffering and grief. I wanted her to urge us toward kindness in these days of our own American experience right now when words, weaponized against those we disagree with, turn to hatred, anger, and acts of violence. I thought maybe hearing her work could enhance our lives, make us more humane, agents of God’s vision for a better world.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, she writes,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters
and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Kindness is what we are looking for. Kindness is what we need walking beside us now like a shadow or a friend—that close. The words coming from this Palestinian-American are true, but raw, uncomfortable, and un-sentimentalized.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
2.
Maybe it’s true that “it is only kindness that makes sense anymore.” It may be that in the end, only kindness will heal us, only kindness save us. Maybe if we were kind, truly kind, there would be no injustice—for how can kindness, true kindness, and injustice co-exist?
We need to raise a new kindness in our world. But right now, I see so little of it. That doesn’t mean that kindness is scarce (I don’t think it is), but it’s harder to see. Bigger, stronger, heavier is the sorrow I feel, the sorrow we feel.
And maybe, as Shihab Nye says, sorrow is the way to raise a new and holy kindness in our world, a kindness that helps, a kindness that heals, a kindness that changes things for the better.
To know kindness, she says, we have to know sorrow. Sorrow comes first. Sorrow trains the human heart for kindness.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
This week, I feel sorrow and outrage and sometimes despair. I’m so tired, bone tired of the unrelenting violence and the fear so many people I care about feel.
I woke up Tuesday and read the news. A 20 year old black man, Daunte Wright, had been shot and killed Monday during a traffic stop by a veteran cop in a suburb of Minneapolis. “This can’t be happening,” I said out-loud as I did the breakfast dishes. I was feeling the anger and fear of the black community there and everywhere. I was imagining the sorrow and fear of the cop who killed him and that of so many cops like her. I was muttering to myself about the insanity and sick irony of this killing just a few miles from where Officer Derek Chauvin is being tried for the killing of George Floyd a year ago.
I felt grief, anger, bewilderment. I felt sick to my stomach; I felt that way most of the week.
In the days since, I’ve talked with black friends and listened to their anger and fear. “I’m numb,” one of them told me. “This has been going on for so long. I appreciate your solidarity as a white person, and your outrage. Truly, I do. But it’s not enough. Honestly, I’m losing hope. Nothing changes. It just gets worse. It feels like I’m constantly in danger, like my children are being hunted. ”
Other members of non-white communities said similar things. Anger. Fear. Trauma. Despair.
And then on Thursday, new outrage at new revelations about Adam Toledo’s defenseless posture just before the 13 year old boy was shot and killed last month by Chicago police.
Protests have erupted across the country. It feels like the nation’s on fire again.
Then on Friday, eight were shot and killed in Indianapolis, a number of them from the American Sikh community. We now have a Sikh-American in our family, and so I feel a new solidarity with the fears and vulnerabilities of these Indian-Americans.
To be honest, I think most of us are exhausted by the violence. If you’re not, you should be. We’re alarmed by the trauma that so many of our friends and neighbors and family members live with. If you’re not, why aren’t you? We’re disillusioned by the failure of our society to make the changes needed to right the wrongs so many Americans suffer. If you’re not disillusioned, why not? And we are being sensitized to the cries of fear and anger of Black, Indigenous, People of Color. If you’re not sensitized, please humanize yourself; feel the pain.
3.
It may be that kindness is the only thing that will heal and save us. We need kindness. But I want to caution us about moving to kindness right now. To call us to kindness right now is like calling a person who’s been betrayed to forgive before forgiveness has a chance to rise authentically and organically from inside her. Let’s remember the virtue of kindness but not rush there. Here’s why:
First, to ask people, especially those in traumatized communities, to be kind now in the face of injustice can feel like an attempt by people in power to blunt their cries for justice. To say, “Go ahead and make your concerns known, but be kind about it,” can feel like a power play by us in the white community of such inordinate privilege; it can feel to the injured like we just want to protect ourselves from the discomfort we must feel if we are to work alongside them for transformative justice. If there’s going to be change, it’s going to be messy. If we’re going to face the systems and laws, attitudes and behaviors that privilege some at the expense of others, the dialog isn’t going to be polite.
As a white cis-gendered male with enormous privilege in our society, I must learn to dwell inside the discomfort I experience as I hear the concerns, complaints, and demands of those who have been marginalized, minimized, and dehumanized by the same systems and laws, attitudes and behaviors that benefit me. If we’re going to move into what Easter is all about, if we’re going to raise up a new humanity, we must work together to create a culture where what’s awkward, difficult, and even painful is not merely tolerated but is encouraged, and where we have processes to protect all parties so they can each tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth from their own unique perspective.
We’ll need kindness to do all this, but let’s be careful that we who hold racial, ethnic, and cultural power don’t ask people to be kind in an effort to blunt the effect of their truth telling. We need the truth to get well, and the truth won’t feel kind. The truth will make us feel worse before we feel better.
Second, let’s remember that kindness rises from our experience of sorrow. True kindness comes to those who know what it means to hurt; because we have been hurt we may be more sensitive to the hurts of others and because we know what it’s like to hurt we might not want others to go through what we’ve gone through.
Jesus said, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”
Compassion is another word for kindness. And compassion comes from the experience of knowing what it’s like to hurt. So, feel the emotions, especially the uncomfortable ones that are trying to get your attention during these hard times. Anger. Fear. Bewilderment. Grief. And right now, if you’re white, allow these emotions to lead you into a new empathy with those who know them more acutely this week—your friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family members who are black, Latinx, Asian and Indian. The truth is, many of them have lived with such feelings for a long, long time.
4.
Of course, all I’ve said is consistent with the person and work of Jesus as the Gospels bear witness to him. But there’s a particular line at the end of the Gospel of Luke that I want to highlight:
“Thus it is written,” said Jesus, “that repentance is to be proclaimed to all nations.”
Repentance means to wake up, to realize that things are going in the wrong direction, that we are too. Repentance is a summons to turn ourselves around and do whatever it takes to move in the direction of righteousness.
Often this saying of Jesus is taken personally and that it’s about individual salvation. But given the serious social implications of Jesus’ ministry, we have to ask ourselves, “What does repentance mean today in our social context?” “What might it mean to call our nation to wake up to the evils of racial injustice and violence?” “What’s been my role, your role, even our church’s role in perpetuating racial injustice and the tolerance of violence, whether is implicit or explicit?” “What will it take for me, for you, for our church to turn ourselves around and do whatever it takes to move our nation in the direction of righteousness?”
“Thus it is written,” said Jesus, “that repentance is to be proclaimed to all nations.”
We must turn our nation from the evils of racism and racialized trauma and toward the righteousness of God.
But today may be too soon for repentance, just as it may be too soon for kindness. Repentance and kindness must come. But first comes sorrow, grief, anger, even despair. We must first dwell in the discomfort. And if we do, repentance will come, and kindness will follow. If we dwell in the discomfort, kindness will come back from the dead; it will—
raise its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and [it will go] with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
And God’s kin-dom will come.