Our focus for today is kindness.  It seems to me that kindness is having a moment these days.  Earlier this week I went out to lunch, and the sign inside the restaurant said, “We are short staffed.  Please be kind!”  A couple days later I met a friend for coffee, and the waitress had on a t-shirt that said, “On today’s menu:  kindness”.  I’ve been seeing signs about kindness all over the place this summer, and literally every day when I’m at church.  Check out this gift our after-kindergarten kids made for us in June!  They wanted to leave us with a final word, a word they had been talking about all year:  kind!  It reminds me of that saying, “In a world where you can be anything, be kind.”

Kindness is certainly an important value in the kingdom of God.  When Paul listed the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5, kindness is included on the list:  love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and self-control.  Kindness is defined as being friendly, generous, and considerate.  Friendly, generous, and considerate.  Those are the hallmarks of kindness, and kindness should be a hallmark of God’s people.

But I don’t think Simon, the host in our scripture lesson today, was too worried about kindness.  He invited Jesus to his home for dinner, but he didn’t even greet him with a kiss, or wash his feet, or provide oil for his head.  These were the very basics of hospitality in Jesus’ culture!  In our culture, we greet our guests with a smile and a hug or handshake, we take their coat, we offer them a beverage—these are our cultural equivalents of what Jesus was talking about.  But Simon did none of these things.  Clearly Simon invited Jesus but had no intention of welcoming him.  We don’t know what motivated his invitation, but it wasn’t kindness.

It was kindness that motivated the woman, though, wasn’t it?  To better understand the story, let’s think about what dinner parties were like in Jesus; day. People did not sit on chairs at tables like we do today.  Jesus and all the other dinner guests would have been reclining—basically, laying on the floor, resting on their left sides, propping themselves up with their left elbow on a low couch.  In the center was a low table.  Their legs would have been stretched out like spokes coming out of a wheel.  Also, it was common to allow other people to be in the banquet room during a dinner.  Invited guests were at the table, and other people were allowed to stand on the edges of the room so they could hear the teaching of whatever prominent person was at the dinner.  So it wasn’t like crashing a dinner party like we think of them.

Still, the woman was clearly doing something out of the ordinary.  And given the customs of Jesus’ day, really out of the ordinary!  For a woman to show her hair in public was considered extremely inappropriate.  You know that expression, “let your hair down”?  Well Jewish women were not to let their hair down except in front of their husbands.  But this woman wasn’t being solicitous.  She was being reverent.   We don’t know exactly what her sin was.  But she saw something in Jesus that changed her life.  But what do you do when someone changes your life?  How do you say thank you?  One thing you can do is to live differently, of course.  But this woman needed to do more.  She needed to treat Jesus with some of the kindness she saw in him.  So she did what she could do.  She may have understood that he was in a hostile setting.  So she showed him some welcome.  She may have understood that he had people criticizing him at every turn.  She did what she could to affirm him.  She may have known intuitively that the world would reject him.  She did what she could do to show him complete acceptance.  Kissing his feet?  Not the most attractive idea to us.  After all, the host had not washed them.  Her tears could only do so much to clean them.  But that didn’t matter to her.  She wanted to do what she could to meet his needs, even as he had met hers.

Friendly, generous, considerate.  The woman at the dinner party embodied kindness!  Kindness anticipates.  Kindness responds.  And kindness always makes a difference.  We remember when someone was kind to us.  I’ll never forget when my sister’s baby was born, and we got word that he was very ill.  Right away our neighbors across the street came over, with cookies, and sat and talked and prayed with us for a few minutes before we drove upstate to be with our family.  Such a little thing, to walk across the street and talk!  But what a difference it made, to know we were not alone in a terrible time.

Years later, shortly after my dad died, my mom took a bus trip out west.  While she was standing in line at whatever South Dakota’s version of Wawa is, my mom realized she had accidentally cut in front of someone when she got in line.  She turned around and apologized and switched places with the young woman behind her.  When my mom got up to the counter, the cashier said, “There’s no charge, ma’am.  The young woman in front of you paid for you.”  My mom couldn’t believe it!  Why, she wondered?  Simply because she realized she made a mistake and switched places with the woman whom she cut in front of?  Maybe.  But maybe it was that the young woman could see, this tourist is distracted.  She is on vacation, but she doesn’t look happy.  Maybe the young woman could sense, this was my mom’s first vacation since my dad died, and as good as it was to travel, it was also hard.  I don’t know.  But the young South Dakotan woman did what she could to make my mom’s day—and her whole trip, really—a little nicer.  Ten national parks in eight days, and the most significant thing that happened to my mom on that trip was a stranger spending $3 and buying her a cup of coffee and a roll of mints at a convenience store in the middle of Nowhere, South Dakota.

So that makes me wonder:  what kind of impact did the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair, what kind of impact did that have on Jesus?  This is the thing that struck me this week.  Kindness anticipates, kindness responds, kindness makes a huge difference!  Kindness takes courage.  Do you know what I mean?  There’s always a risk that your act of kindness will be rejected, or people will think you are crazy, or you’ll end up in a situation that you’d rather not have to deal with.  Kindness takes courage because, most of the time, there is at least the potential that kindness will be misunderstood or criticized or make us vulnerable because we have let our hair down so to speak—we have revealed something about ourselves.

Certainly the woman in our scripture lesson was aware of the social taboos she was breaking by letting her hair down and anointing Jesus’ feet.  The sinful woman needed courage in order to be kind.  And the same was true for Jesus.  He showed her kindness in return, but it took courage.  He was already on the rocks with the Pharisees.  The safer thing for Jesus to do would have been to condemn this woman for her provocative display.  But Jesus received what she gave to him with kindness.  He risked further rejection and retaliation from the Pharisees in order to meet the woman’s need.  Jesus knew she needed acceptance, she needed forgiveness, she needed to be welcomed just as he did.  And so he met her need.  One kindness begets another.  The hostile dinner party was turning into a kindness party.

But even though it was his house, Simon was not in on the party.  He was standing off to the side doing what we are so good at doing when we are left out:  he was being judgmental.  He criticized Jesus for not knowing what kind of woman this was and thought to himself, he’s certainly no prophet!  The irony of the story is. Jesus knew what Simon was thinking and made that clear.  Jesus could have rested his case right there.  But Jesus takes it a step further.  He not only accepts the woman’s display, he tells her that her sins are forgiven.  This might not sound too radical to us, but think about how sins were forgiven in Jesus’ day:  you had to go to the temple and make a sacrifice!  By pronouncing that her sins were forgiven right then and there, Jesus shows her another kindness and in doing so is taking another risk.  He’s giving the Pharisees yet another reason to go after him.

But this is what kindness does.  It anticipates needs.  It responds to needs.  It makes a huge difference!  Friendly, generous, and considerate–kindness takes courage.  This is how kindness is different from being polite.  Polite–it’s always safe to be polite.  You can’t go wrong with that.  But kindness means we make ourselves vulnerable in order to meet someone else’s needs.  It’s not without risk.  But when we make an effort to meet someone’s true need, we are right where God wants us to be.

Today in our in-person worship service, we are having a guest speaker from the Media Food Pantry.  Kathleen Yeager is a member of St. Francis de Sales in Aston and volunteers twice a week, every Thursday and Sunday, at the food pantry.  We will be recording her presentation and putting on our website for you to watch at another time.  The Media Food Pantry is our July Mission of the Month, and it’s a community outreach we have partnered with for a long time.  Just inside the front door of Lima Church we have a grocery cart in our narthex and continually collect food for the pantry, and twice a year we collect a financial offering for them.  The thing about the Media Food Pantry is, it does not solve anyone’s long term problems.  It doesn’t do anything to help people not need the food bank again.  It is not a ministry of justice.  It is not going to bring about systemic change.  But it is a ministry of kindness.  People come to the food pantry because they need food.  But they also experience friendliness.  They see generosity in action.  And they know someone is thinking about them, people are considerate.  They do not have to suffer alone.

I am very proud of our commitment to the Media Food Pantry.  Of course I wish we lived in a world where 165 families a week did not have a need for a food pantry!  Yes, you heard that right:  165 families a week from Media and the immediate surrounding area need help putting food on their tables.  Lima Church is just one of many faith-based and community organizations seeking to provide nutritional support to our neighbors in need.  And even though you might not think it’s a big deal to pick up a few extra boxes of cereal or cans of tuna fish each time you’re at the grocery store, I think it takes courage to show kindness in this way.  You are bucking the trend in our society, the cultural pressure to mind your own business, to let people solve their own problems, to not get involved.  It takes courage to risk your own food budget dollars to give them to someone else.  It takes courage to see the need right in our own community.  Kindness takes great courage, and that is why it is listed as one of the fruits of the Spirit.  It is God’s perfect love that casts out all fear.

Friendly, generous, considerate.  Are you a kind person?  I pray that kindness will definitely be on the menu today, everywhere you go.  Kindness anticipates.  Kindness responds.  Kindness takes courage.  And kindness always makes a huge difference.  Amen.