For better or worse, we come to think and behave like those we spend time with. We all like to believe that we’re originals — that somehow we are simply our own thing — but deep down that just simply isn’t true. The people we’re around deeply influence us.
One social psychologist summed this up in what he labeled the “average of five” rule. Basically, the way we think, believe, and behave comes to resemble the combination of the five people with whom we spend the most time. While, I’m sure there’s a lot more nuance to it, it does ring true to me.
Have you ever found yourself on a trip with friends where you spent seven solid days with each other? Let’s say one of your friends liked to say “cool” every time someone proposed the next activity. Dinner at six tonight? “Cool,” your friend would say. Time to change the pickleball teams. “Cool.” It’s raining, so we’re going to the movies. “Cool.” As the trip went on, what did you find yourself saying too? “Cool.”
Speaking personally, I never tried to distance myself from my parents and the way they think and act. But I also like to think of myself as entirely my own thing, that I came up with all of this all on my own. The longer I’ve been a parent, the more I’ve realized how wrong I was. I find I talk to my kids the way my dad talked to me. According to them, I speak in paragraphs, and they wished I’d just get to the point. I also find that I’m a lot like my mom in that I just want to get to the core of the issue, fix it, and move on. I haven’t lived with my parents since the mid-90s, but the longer I live, the more I see how influential they have been on who I am. I’ve also found lately that the longer I live, the more I look like them in pictures. It’s uncanny how I can’t seem to escape my upbringing!
This is true not simply in our relationships. It’s true with the media we take in — we become like it. If we watch news designed to make us angry, we become angry. If we read posts and tweets that denigrate others, it becomes easier to knock others down, doesn’t it? We are who we surround ourselves with. We become like the environment we choose to inhabit. In the words of Jamie Smith, “We are what we love,” or at the very least we are what we give our time to.
If you were here last week, you know that our congregation is focusing on kindness this summer. In honor of our country’s 250th birthday, we’re hoping that 250 (or more) of us commit to intentional acts of kindness throughout this summer. We’re calling this effort Kind Haven, and it’ll kick off at our picnic this Wednesday, which you should come to for good food, fun, friends, and also to sign up for this movement. We’ll have shirts, signs, and stickers for you too.
Last week I also promised that I would ground kindness biblically. What we are committing to isn’t simply being nice, although our behavior could be defined that way. Anyone can be kind. People should be kind. But as Christians, our beliefs deepen our understanding of kindness. How we treat others, ourselves, and the world around us is connected to what we believe about God. So, that’s the focus today. I want you to know the “why” behind this, and I hope it’s a treasure that you store in your hearts as you make this commitment.
Let me begin at our beginning. A fundamental truth from Scripture is that God created everything — seen and unseen — including humans. But God created humans to be special. God created us in God’s image, which means that our lives are a reflection of the very character of God. We are not God, that’s for sure, but God has endowed each of us as image-bearers, creatures capable of carrying out the purposes of God in our thoughts, beliefs, and actions. It’s a big responsibility, right?
One of God’s attributes is kindness. We see this all over Scripture, but Paul particularly susses out this idea in how he comes to understand who God is, how we relate to God, and how we relate to the world around us. We have to remember that Paul was a deeply faithful Jew. He was a Pharisee, which meant he knew and adhered to the words of God to the letter. When he came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, Paul took all of his understanding about God — including that God is kind — and brought it to bear upon everything else he understood about the world. So, for Paul, kindness begins with God. It is rooted in who God is.
In fact, the word for kindness in Greek, krēstōtēs, is a word exclusively used by Paul. Romans is one of Paul’s latest writings, and many consider it to be the culmination of his theology. Throughout that letter, Paul asserts that God is kind, and because God is kind, God has extended grace to all through Jesus Christ. In Romans 2, writing about how we should not judge others because God is the only judge, Paul asserts, “Do you despise the riches of [God’s] kindness and forbearance and patience? Do you not realize that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” Later in the book, Paul uses God’s kindness as he asserts that God is patiently saving all, both Jews and Gentiles.
In Ephesians 2, Paul drives this home. “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us…made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — so that in ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” Even in the lesser-known book of Titus, Paul shares, “But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy.”
For Paul, kindness is at the core of God’s very being, and kindness is shown repeatedly to all through God’s love, mercy, and patience. God persists in loving the creation, even when the creation has become distorted and wicked, even when the creation has so marred God’s image in it that it is no longer recognizable. That is, God’s kindness keeps going. It doesn’t give up in the face of evil. It doesn’t lose hope when it seems like everyone else is behaving badly.
So, kindness is rooted in who God is. For us to be kind, we need to understand how God is kind because we all bear God’s image. Our lives are to mirror this God who is kind. We cannot do this perfectly, understand. Elsewhere in writing about love, Paul offers “For now we see in a mirror, dimly.” As modern readers, we immediately think of what hangs in our bathrooms, but while glass mirrors began to show up in the Roman Empire in the first century, they were expensive, brittle, and rare. Mirrors throughout the ancient world and running all the way to the 19th century were made of bronze. How would you see your reflection in a bronze mirror? Dimly. You could see yourself, but it was a far cry from how you really looked.
Our lives will never fully reflect the true character of who God is, but even our dim reflections are far better than efforts on our own. It’s funny. Many of you know that Pastor Kristine loves J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. She has read it over and over and over again.
I do not love it. The movies were pretty good, but the books? Not for me at all. And I’m someone who is willing to read almost anything. So, now that Kristine is on sabbatical, it dawned on me this week that Gollum from The Lord of the Rings is a perfect example of what I’m getting at here. (No one tell her I said so…she’s on sabbatical, so no talking to her!)
Gollum wasn’t always Gollum. He was a Hobbit named Sméagol. He murdered his cousin to get the ring, and over time the person he was lost out to the beast he was becoming — Gollum. His selfish focus on the ring diminished him to the point that he lost all community and even lost himself. His whole reason for existing became disconnected from the world around him. He eventually lost the ring to Bilbo Baggins, who did his best to keep the ring from destroying his life. Eventually Bilbo’s cousin, Frodo, ended up with the ring. Gollum tracked him down to get it back, seizing it at the Cracks of Doom on Mount Doom in Mordor, but his perverse affection for the ring led to his and the ring’s destruction, as they fell into the volcano.
See? I just summarized hundreds of pages in a paragraph. (Tolkien needed an editor.) Gollum is a great example of what it means to get our loves wrong, to give ourselves to the wrong thing, particularly to things that are not God’s good intention for us. When we devote ourselves to things totally disconnected from God, we find ourselves drawn further and further away from God. We are destroying our very selves.
I think that’s a lesson we all need to learn because we all have so many influences on our lives, and many of them have led us down dark paths. Many of those influences have not nurtured the love of God and neighbor in our hearts. Sure, we’ve made excuses for those things. We disagree with someone, so we say disparaging things about them. We find ourselves challenged by someone else, and rather than listening and beholding the image of God in them, we mock them. Every time we do that, we become less human. Every time we do that, we blur the image of God in ourselves and in our neighbors.
Christianity shows us a more excellent way, and it’s so clear in Paul’s writings. I encourage you to take time this week to read today’s Scriptures on your own, to sit with them, to ask the Spirit how they fit into your life. In such beautiful, challenging, encouraging words, Paul sets before us a compelling picture of what life in Christ could look like — if only we’d polish up our dirty mirrors and get to reflecting that image out to a world that has become so self-absorbed and distorted that it no longer remembers what it looks like.
“As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience….forgive one another…clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” When you get ready in the morning, can you slow yourself down enough to imagine putting kindness and love on?
When you do, you’ll notice the difference.
Elsewhere Paul contrasts the nastiness of life apart from God — strife, anger, quarrels, envy, and so on — with the life guided by the Spirit — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Imagine your life, imagine the world guided by these things. Wouldn’t you want to live in a world like that? Well, that’s life where God is in charge. Would you make space for that?
We know that God is love. 1 John tells us as much, and Paul so exquisitely tells us what love looks like. “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”
I want to live in a world marked by kindness. Why? Because a world marked by kindness is a world in tune with the God who created and redeemed it through Jesus Christ. That’s what we’re doing this summer. We are living out kindness because we believe that God’s kindness to us needs to flow from us into a world whose selfishness has made us look more like Gollum and less like Jesus. It’s time to renew our commitment to being Jesus’ people. Let’s start with kindness.