Ordinary Kindness: As my wife and I were preparing for a family gathering over the Labor Day weekend, it was a painful reminder to me that some of my own fundamentalism over the years didn’t just stay with me. Inevitably, some of it trickled down into my children too, and lately I’ve been thinking more seriously about what I taught them, not merely with words, but by the way I responded to people. Whether I intended it or not, they learned something about Christianity from the way I reacted to people whose beliefs, relationships, or way of life I regarded as wrong.
One of my daughters and her husband from Colorado were in town for the weekend, and relatives of my son-in-law were also gathering in town to have a family portrait taken. A few members of his family, including a nephew and niece, are gay and identify as transgender, and the instinctive response from a couple members of my family was basically: “We don’t want to be around them,” or, “We don’t want them coming over here.”
And I found myself thinking: Why not? Are we no longer permitted to care about them? Can we not speak to them, eat with them, laugh with them, and simply treat them like ordinary human beings, showing them the same everyday kindness we would show anyone else? Must every encounter become an opportunity to demonstrate our disapproval? I’m certainly not saying that everything people believe about themselves is therefore true, or that we have to suddenly abandon every moral distinction. But I’m beginning to wonder whether we have made ordinary kindness toward people sound like agreement with everything they believe or do, and whether showing them mercy somehow feels to us like compromising the truth.
Don’t you think people know when believers look down on them? They can usually tell when they are being treated as a morally inferior class. We may never say the words directly, but they can sense when we see ourselves as cleaner, wiser, safer, or more respectable. We may call that “being separate from the world,” while what they actually experience is something very different: the feeling that we consider ourselves morally above them – that we are willing to speak about them, judge them, and keep our distance from them, but not simply meet them as fellow human beings in need of the same mercy we ourselves have received.
If I truly believe that I stand entirely by the mercy of God in Christ, then how can that produce in me a spirit that looks down upon another person? There are sins I do not understand. There are lives I would not choose. There are convictions I cannot affirm. But none of that prevents me from being kind. MPJ
PostScript 1. I think this is such an important reminder. Once we stop locating the difference in ourselves, it changes not only how we think about others, but how we treat them. Humility does not require us to pretend that every belief is equally true, or that we can worship indiscriminately with everyone. But it should make contempt very difficult. We can disagree, separate where conscience requires it, and still be genuinely friendly, patient, and kind. There is a real difference between standing for what we believe to be true and standing above the person who does not believe it.
PostScript 2. This really got me thinking. Can even our desire to be obedient become another way of reassuring ourselves about ourselves? We can take perfectly real biblical warnings and begin using them as proof that we are the careful ones, the discerning ones, the faithful ones. The outward action may be entirely defensible, while the heart turns it into another reason to feel superior. That is why your line about hating the Pharisees hit so hard. We can hate Phariseeism in everyone else while still being very much in love with the Pharisee in ourselves. We can even become proud of how clearly we see religious pride in others. That really does boggle the mind. And I think “See, Lord, I hate what you hate!” exposes the same thing. Even hatred of error can become something we present as evidence of our own faithfulness. At some point there is nowhere left to stand in ourselves – not in our obedience, our discernment, our separation, or even our doctrinal correctness. “To whom can we go?” really is the right question. Only Christ.