At church on Sunday our pastor continued his work talking about life in the Spirit by looking at the fruit of the Spirit. He made a good point about kindness that I've been thinking about today.
"Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty" is a bumper-sticker movement that sort of peaked out about eight years ago. This is, of course, a great thing. But the pitfall of "random kindness" is that it can sometimes enable us to continue to live in the illusion that the world is a basically good place and we are basically good people. All we need to do is be a little friendlier to one another, that's all.
"PRAK&SAB" as a centerpiece of anthropology, sociology and theology replaces the cross for slobbery sentimentality. At least, as it is popularly understood.
The Scriptures read that "God's kindness leads us to repentance." If that's the kind of kindness we're talking about, then kindness can and indeed does sometimes look like this: striking someone blind (see Saul/Paul on the Damascus road), telling someone to leave their family (see Jesus and his disciples), and calling people white-washed tombs and brooding vipers (see Jesus and the Pharisees).
The fruit of the Spirit (one fruit, many facets) does indeed include kindness. But this kind of kindness has both the cutting-edge-ness of a sword as well as the fluffy softness of a teddy bear run through the dryer with fabric softener. To have one without the other is to miss the full contours of kindness. And it is to miss the point altogether.
1 comment:
Did your pastor reference "Evan ALmighty" in his sermon? That is the message of the movie; in fact, ARK is an acronym for Acts of Random Kindness (I think they found that in an obscure translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls). BTW< I would not recommend spending $ on Evan - wait and rent it. But yes, random acts of kindness are good when led by the SPirit, but can be harmful when we do them just to get the "I should be doing more" Monkey off of our back.
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