Proper 23, Year C

It was a wonderful sabbatical.  I went to some wonderful places.  And in between being in the wonderful places, I also spent quite a bit of time driving to and from them.  I often like to listen to podcasts when I drive, and one of my favourites is a psychology podcast called Hidden Brain.  In each episode, the host Shankar Vedantum interviews someone who studies why people act the way they do, why people think the way they do, why people feel the way they do.  It is fascinating to me to understand better what’s happening in other people.  And it is also fascinating to get a better understanding of why I act the way I do, think the way I do, feel the way I do.  I particularly appreciate the episodes that prompt me to improve the way I manage my life, and all the ups and downs in it.  While the podcast is based in facts and scientific research, what makes the podcast particularly engaging is that there is a lot of attention to telling the stories of how these dynamics affect the lives of real people.  

This was true for an episode entitled Radical Kindness that I listened to a few weeks ago, which I found very moving.  While I can only include a few excerpts in today’s sermon, I will include the link in the written copy of the sermon, and I encourage you to listen to it and experience the stories yourself.  The episode begins with the account of a woman who is trapped in the doors of a subway car in New York city, and as she is suffering and clearly in need of help, hundreds of commuters rush by and none of them stop to help. One person records a video of it on his phone.  It raises questions about why we don’t help a stranger, and why we do.

Abigail Marsh tells what happens when she is a university student who is driving from Seattle to her home in Tacoma late one night on the freeway.  She swerves to avoid hitting a dog, and her car fishtails numerous times and then spins in huge donuts across several lanes of freeway and then stops, in the fast lane of the freeway, facing backward into the oncoming traffic, just past the crest of the overpass.  The car won’t start.  She has no phone because it was the 90’s.  There is no shoulder, nowhere she can run to, the car is shaking every time the big cars and semis swerve around it at the last minute.  She knows it is only a matter of time until one of them hits her car and kills her. 

Then a stranger appears in the window of the passenger side of her car and asks, “Do you need some help?”  She goes on to describe the way this man she has never met risks his life several times in order to help her.  She is so rattled by the whole experience that she forgets to ask his name, and so she never knows who he is.  

Hearing her description of what this stranger does, I was filled with awe and admiration. It also reminded me of the section of scripture in which someone who knows that the commandment of the law is to love your neighbour as yourself, asks Jesus, “who is my neighbour?”  Jesus replies by describing the injured man on the side of the road, the way the scribe and the lawyer walk past him, and the way the stranger from Samaria is moved with compassion, and sacrifices his own money and time and effort to care for him.  Jesus asks “which of these three was a neighbour to the man who needed help?”  Jesus teaches us that one of the two most important commandments involve sacrificing to help a stranger.  

Abigail Marsh is a university student at the time, and she says, “What very quickly happened after that is I started thinking about the psychology of why people help other people, why on earth somebody would make the decision to risk their own life to help another person. And very quickly my research took a turn toward that specific topic.”

She pursues this topic as an undergraduate, graduate student, and in her career as a psychologist.  She says the first group of people she chooses to study to understand real world extraordinary altruism was altruistic kidney donors, who give a kidney to an anonymous stranger.  She chooses them because there are databases of these donors, so she is able to reach out to them to start recruiting participants that way.  Since she knows how difficult it normally is to recruit people for a study, she is startled by the flood of email replies from the altruistic kidney donors offering to participate in the most cheerful and helpful way.  I loved hearing that, and I wanted to be more like that myself.  As heard her use the word cheerful, it reminded me of the way our scriptures encourage us to be cheerful givers. 

She describes various aspects of her research, and I was intrigued by her studies of what psychologists call “social discounting.”  It is a measure of how much you value the well-being of another person: whether another person’s well-being counts to you, and which people’s well-being doesn’t count.  She notes that most people in standard social discounting tasks are very willing to sacrifice to benefit people close to them, their close family and close friends, but their willingness to sacrifice drops dramatically, hyperbolically, toward people who are more socially distant.  She says, when we tested the altruistic kidney donors, “we found a curve unlike any that’s ever been found in any social discounting task, which was a curve that dropped almost not at all across social distances.”  She says, “they have a much wider circle of caring.  They view the outcomes of people they’ve never met before as intrinsically valuable, as something that it’s worth caring about and worth sacrificing for.” Hearing that, what immediately came to mind is that that’s the way Jesus sees us.  It’s why Jesus tells us in today’s gospel passage and throughout his ministry, to love people beyond those who happen to be closely related to us or in our inner circle.  In the parable of the sheep and the goats, Jesus tells us that what we do for those who are beyond our immediate family, what we do for the people who are hungry, naked, imprisoned, sick, we do for him.  Jesus calls them “the least of these” because they don’t count for much in social discounting.  Jesus also calls them his brothers and sisters, because Jesus has a wide circle of caring and sees them as family.  

One altruist mentions God directly.  Abigail Marsh talks about the actor Danny Trejo, who often plays villains in the movies, as he does in Spy Kids.  In his real life, hee sees a terrifying car crash in which an SUV is flipped upside down.  And Trejo reacted immediately.  He could smell gas trickling out of the wreckage of the cars, but despite that, he crawled into the upside down SUV and figured out how to extract the little boy who was trapped inside, and then sat with him and helped keep him calm while the emergency rescuers got his mother and grandmother out of the car.  What he said about it afterwards was, “People have to understand that God put us on this earth to help each other. We're here to serve, we're here to welcome, we're here to love. That's what we're supposed to be doing. I'm just thankful to God, because he let me do that today.”  Hearing that, I thought, yeah, yeah, that’s what I believe about God too.  That’s the way I want to live my faith.

She clarifies that altruists are not people who are immune to fear.  She tells the story of Cory Booker, who was mayor of Newark, New Jersey in 2012, and who saw a neighbour’s house on fire, and a mom on the front lawn screaming that her daughter is inside.  She says,

He jumped out of the car, he ran across the yard, and started to run into the house with one of his security detail running right behind him. And of course, once he got into the door, he discovered that the air was full of smoke, and he could see hardly anything as he's gasping and choking his way up to the kitchen on the second floor. Once they got there, they discovered that there were flames everywhere going up the walls across the ceiling. They could hear little explosions and the security detail whose name was Rodriguez was like, I've had enough. You are not going any further. He tried to get Booker to leave the house without rescuing his neighbor's daughter. Booker refused. They wrestled for a little bit. Booker said, you have to let me go in. If I don't go in, she's going to die. And so the detective said, okay. And Booker plunged into the house, fought his way through the smoke into the bedroom where his neighbor's daughter was barely conscious, flung her over his shoulder and staggered back through the kitchen, which was engulfed in flames at this point. Burning embers are raining down on him. And he finally makes it back out of the house and collapses into the yard, where he was taken by ambulance to the hospital with injuries from smoke inhalation and second degree burns to his hands.”

As people find out about this, they figure he is someone who isn’t afraid. Marsh says this is a common misperception about altruistic people, and she clarifies, “In every interview he gave after what happened, he was very honest about how terrified he had been throughout.” She says, “I think it's really important to distinguish between people who are truly fearless (which is really a form of recklessness to not even log the danger that you're confronting in a scary situation) and people who are brave. And people who are brave are people who recognize that there's a danger to themselves, who might feel quite frightened on their own behalf, but who realize that there's something more important than their fear for themselves, and who act anyways in the face of their fear. And that's real virtue. And I hope that people can appreciate just how often real heroes are very frightened and they're acting anyhow.”

She says this is true of the kidney donors as well, that they often feel fear, but they are willing to tolerate the fear because what matters most is that they want to help someone who needs help.  I really admire that.

Here’s the part that was particularly striking to me.  Abigail Marsh says, “One of the most important things to know about altruistic kidney donors is that although many people who themselves would not consider donating a kidney find the choice to donate a kidney to a stranger in need of explanation, actual donors feel exactly the opposite. They think if you have two kidneys and you could survive just fine with one, which is true, that if another person is going to die unless they get your kidney, the choice to donate to them is the obvious choice. It feels to them so intuitive and so clear that they have trouble understanding why anybody wouldn't make that decision.”  My reaction to hearing that was, they’re right.  When you look at it that way, it makes perfect sense.  I thought, since I really admire the people who give a kidney to a stranger, and I want to be more like them, it suddenly occurred to me that the obvious way to be more like people who give their kidney is to give my kidney too.  I thought to myself, haven’t you been praying for something like this?  Throughout my sabbatical I have been reflecting on the ways people harm others or help others, the ways people are hostile or compassionate, the ways people scapegoat others or embrace them, the ways people are greedy or generous, the ways people act with cruelty or do good.  I had been reflecting on these themes in the Auschwitz exhibit in Toronto at the ROM, in each of the plays I saw at the Stratford Festival, in the lectures and the stories at Chautauqua, in worship services.  And as I’ve watched the current administration in the States and authoritarian regimes in the world, and seen the increases in harm, hostility, scapegoating, greed, and cruelty, and felt helpless to stop it, I’ve been praying for some way to increase my ability to do some good.  If I can save another person’s life by giving a kidney, yes, I want to do that.  

When I got home after listening to the podcast, I googled how to donate a kidney in Ontario, found a form to start the process and began filling it out.  I called my doctor and took the first required blood test.  The application process to donate a kidney takes months.  I don’t know if I’ll be accepted.  They might take one look at my cancer history and turn me down.  They might refuse me for the same reason I’m not allowed to give blood anymore, which is that I did a Junior Year Abroad in Oxford when I was twenty years old, and oddly they’re afraid anyone who lived in England for more than six months in the late 80’s might have mad cow disease.  But I hope I’ll be accepted.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  

Ultimately, this sermon is not about me or my kidney.  There are a wide variety of ways to love God and to love our neighbours.  In fact, in today’s gospel passage Jesus tells us if we want to be his disciples, to give up all our possessions.  That’s a stewardship message from Jesus and I’m not going to pass it up.  Giving up 100% our possessions to be a disciple of Jesus is a tall order.  To make it more feasible, the church has often referred to the Biblical practice of a tithe, which is giving 10% of your income to the ministry of your local church.  That’s what I do.  To make it even easier than that, if you’re not ready for 10%, I invite you to take 1% of your income and increase your gift to St. John’s and its ministries by that amount.

The sermon is about the fact that there are two ways to look at the teachings of Jesus.  One way to look at the teachings of Jesus is that we are being asked to do something difficult that we don’t want to do.  I admit that I’ve looked at Jesus’ teachings that way too.  However, the point of the sermon is that when we look at people who actually do what Jesus teaches us, who act altruistically, who love their neighbours the way Jesus teaches, we see how beautiful it is, how admirable it is, how inspiring it is, how much we want to love that way ourselves: generously and altruistically and courageously and sacrificially.  It is why Jesus tells us parables such as the parable of the good Samaritan.  It is why Jesus shows us in his life and in his crucifixion the way he loves us and all our neighbours with a love that is overwhelmingly generous and altruistic and courageous and sacrificial. And Jesus invites us, once we see how inspiring it is, to love that way too. 

The podcast link is https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/radical-kindness