Nix the Negative

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Matthew 5:21-24 and James 3:1-12:

When Charles Darwin was originally formulating his idea of evolution, he said that one of the things that almost undid it for him was the idea of kindness and altruism, let alone sacrifice. After all, if it’s about the survival of the fittest and making sure that your genes survive for future generations, taking care of your own makes sense, but why would you ever want to help others, especially strangers. But later on, according to Dr. Dacher Keltner, a professor at UC Berkeley, he says that Darwin actually came to believe that our need to be social and caring may actually be stronger than our desire for self-preservation, and it’s ingrained not socially learned. Indeed, Dr. Keltner says, “evolution [has] crafted a species—us—with remarkable tendencies toward kindness, play, generosity, reverence and self-sacrifice, which are vital to the classic tasks of evolution—survival, gene replication and smooth functioning groups.” That is, kindness is ingrained in us, and we can see this even from the earliest age.

In a study done with six-month-olds, they were shown a round piece of wood that had eyes glued onto it and it was struggling to climb up a felt mountain. After seeing the circle struggling, a triangle piece of wood, also with eyes glued on it, came along and tried to help push the circle to the top. But then along comes a square piece of wood, with eyes, that tries to push the triangle and the circle down so they can’t make it to the top. What experimenters wanted to know was how the infants would respond, and while they couldn’t verbalize how they felt about the pieces of wood, they could express it by which blocks they played with, and which do you think they refused to play with? The square. The block that wasn’t kind. They even introduced a neutral observer block who did nothing to hinder or help, and the children still preferred the triangle to the others. So, even before we know what’s happening, we have a natural preference for those who help and are kind over those who are unkind. And what scans of the brain have also found is that when we participate in acts of kindness that the pleasure centers of our brain are activated, and so kindness in and of itself can be its own reward. And so with that we continue in our series on the Kindness Challenge, which is based upon a book of the same name by Shaunti Feldhahn.

The Kindness Challenge: Nix the Negative

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Matthew 5:21-24:

In Jewish tradition, every sin is ultimately atoneable, or forgivable in this life, except one, and that is the sin of desecrating or profaning God’s name, which can only be atoned after death. When we think of profaning God’s name, it’s usually something about taking God’s name in vain, or cursing, but according the Rabbi Rav, the core desecration occurs when those who are most closely associated with God act in ways that would be perfectly legitimate for other people, but that are not for those who proclaim faith. That is, when representatives of God appear to act in ways that do not adhere to the highest moral standards, their behavior reflects poorly not just on the faith, but more importantly their behavior reflects poorly on God, and consequently God’s name is desecrated. In the daily baptismal prayer we have talked about, and have available, we pray that everything we do that day would honor God, but what if we thought about that not only honoring God but also not dishonoring God to others, because what we do matters.

As we continue in our series on the kindness challenge, I had a number of people come to me to tell me that the person they were going to do the challenge for, the person they were going to work on practicing kindness towards, were not believers, which means it’s even more important that our actions match what we proclaim to believe, because it’s not just that we are setting a bad example and picture of Christians, and there are plenty of people who do that already, as we see on an all too regular basis, especially in trying to use scripture to justify bad, or even illegal, behavior, but within this understanding we are also desecrating God’s name, just to add a little more pressure for us all.