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Foundry United Rev. |
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“To Love Kindness” Sunday, June 3, 2007 |
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Micah: 6: 6-8
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The
Hebrew word is hesed. Micah 6: 8
says: “What
does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love hesed, and to walk humbly with your God?” We
don’t quite know how to translate the Hebrew word hesed. In one version of the Bible it is translated “mercy,”[i]
but that is not quite what hesed
means, so in the next version it is translated “kindness,”[ii]
but that is not exactly what it means. So in another version it is translated
“love,”[iii]
and in another version it is translated “grace.”[iv]
The
biblical scholar Katharine Doob Sakenfeld says that,
if you study the use of the word hesed
in the Old Testament – if you pay careful attention to the circumstances in
which the word is used – there are certain consistent characteristics in its
usage: First, the word hesed
is used when the help of another is essential; the person in need cannot
help him- or herself; Second, the word is used when help is essential; without
help the person’s situation will turn drastically for the worse; Third, it is used when the circumstances dictate that
one person is uniquely able to provide the help that is needed; there is no
alternative if this person doesn’t provide the help; Fourth, the person in need has no control over the
decision of the person whose help he or she needs. There are no negative
implications for the helper if he or she chooses not to help. The potential
helper must make a free choice of whether to help or not. There is nothing particularly
in it for them.[v] Katharine
Doob Sakenfeld says that none of the words we use to translate hesed – love, loyalty, kindness or
mercy – quite do it. Hesed is when you are in big trouble
and something really bad is going to happen to you and there is one person or
group or institution that can help you and they really have no reason to go
out of their way to help you but they do. That is to be a recipient of hesed. When
there is somebody who needs your help or mine or ours, and their life will be
much worse if they don’t get our help and we have no particular reason to
help them, but we do, that is hesed.
That is to bestow hesed. Now the
interesting thing to me about Micah 6: 8 is that it tells us that we should
do justice. “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice…” It tells us
that we should do justice, but it tells us that we should “love hesed.” Justice
is something we are called to do because it is right and God expects it of
us. It is an obligation. We do what is just because our Creator and Lord, to
whom we are accountable for our lives, says to do justice. But our
Creator and Lord doesn’t just want us to do hesed… The Lord does not merely require us to be kind or to be merciful
or to be loving…to help each other when we need help. According to Micah 6:
8, the Lord wants us to love hesed. Not
just to help others who need our help because we have an obligation to do so
but because we love doing it. And
notice that in Micah 6: 8 loving hesed
is not just about loving to help others; it is also about loving when we need
help and others help us. The Lord expects us to love it when we need help and
others who have no obligation to help us do so. According
to Micah 6: 8, we are expected to do justice but to love hesed. There
seems to me to be a strange relationship between affluence, need, and
kindness. It seems to me that affluence, as a rule, does not make us kinder.
I mean, we give to others in need. This congregation just donated $25,000 to
the Hope Fund. We give
generously to help others who have nowhere else to turn, but I am not sure we
love doing it. I
mean I try to give. I do it our of a
sense of responsibility and because I want to, but I must confess that what I
really love is buying a green ginger tea every morning at Starbucks, and buying
books at Amazon and bicycle equipment at Spokes. Affluence
may make us more responsible. I am not sure it makes us kinder. I am not sure
affluence helps us love kindness. We have
a Volunteer in Mission team going to One of
the amazing things to me every time I travel to these places of need is how
generous people who have so little are with one another. You’d think poverty and
need would make people more protective of what they have, but it seems to
make people more eager to help one another. Perhaps
it is the experience of being desperate for help that causes them to really
love kindness. Not just to do it out of a sense of obligation but to love
doing it…to love hesed. It is
counter-intuitive – affluence seems to make us more protective and need seems
to make us more generous. I once
heard Bishop James Mathews repeat a story his father-in-law E. Stanley Jones
had told him. Bishop Matthews is in his 90s now so this story happened a long
time ago last century. E.
Stanley Jones was a missionary to India who went there to save Hindus and
came back to tell American Christians that he had discovered that Hinduism
had something to teach us about Christ. He transformed our understanding of
what it meant to be a missionary. E.
Stanley Jones was from It was
his habit to get to church where he was speaking very early. When he got to
this church there was no one there except an older man sitting and playing a
simple one-finger tune on the organ. They
got into a conversation, and this is what E. Stanley Jones learned about the
man. As a young man he had been very successful and affluent. Then the Great
Depression had hit and he had lost everything. He could not find a job until
his church needed a custodian and they had hired him for the job. The
organ that he was playing a tune on with one finger was an organ he had
donated to the church when he was young and affluent before the Depression. He said
he loved coming to the church early in the morning before work and just
sitting at the organ. This is
what he told E. Stanley Jones. He said, “The only things I have left, are the
things I gave away. The only things that I have been able to keep are what I
shared with others.” When I
heard that story it occurred to me that it would be a great story to tell on a
Stewardship Sunday sometime. But it occurred to me this week that it is even
a better story to tell on Peace with Justice Sunday. In a
world of need where we as an American people are affluent beyond the rest of
the world’s belief, what is lasting is not the wars we fight, not the cities
we build, not the wealth we accumulated. All those things will fade away and
wither. They will become ruins someday. What
will endure is our hesed, our
kindness, our willingness to share – our loving to share. There
is a world of women, children and men who need help; without help their lives
will get drastically worse. We are uniquely positioned to help. But no one
can make us, we have to decide to. The need our hesed. But
they may have something that we need. We need to learn to not be kind but to
love kindness…to love hesed…to love
helping…to love giving…to love sharing. May they teach us how. www.foundryumc.org |
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