In our Lenten sermon series this year, we are looking at Paul's letter to the Galatians, specifically at his list of the fruits of the Holy Spirit in chapter 5. And we are even looking at the original Greek Paul used to describe them can tell us about these fruits. The world and the flesh offer something different, but what we want is the real thing. We've talked about the fruit of joy, now tonight we look at the fruits of love and kindness...
Six days before he was assassinated in 1865, American President Abraham Lincoln gave his second inaugural address. The American Civil War was wrapping up and the nation was in dire need of healing and reconciliation. Lincoln started his concluding paragraph with the following famous phrase, “With malice toward none, with charity for all.” Lincoln was preaching for the Spirit-produced fruit of kindness.
Paul's Greek word that we have translated as “kindness,” is “xrhstoths,” which has the nuance of being good-hearted, particularly to strangers or to people who don't deserve it. It's the same word Paul uses in his letter to Ephesus, where he tells them to “put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another.” And it's the same word Luke uses to describe how God treats the ungrateful and the wicked – he is good-hearted towards them. There is a sense in this Spirit-produced kindness, of the goodwill that is due to all people, just because God made them.
And to begin his list of the fruits of the Holy Spirit, Paul uses the Greek word “agaph”, which has the connotation of brotherly love. In fact, the word agaph has become so mainstream, that it is now considered a label for Christian love, especially a self-sacrificing love like the kind Jesus exhibited, with its ultimate expression being “to lay down one's life for one's friends”. And maybe its most difficult expression, where the same word agaph is used, is when Jesus calls his disciples to love their enemies. There is a sense in this Spirit-produced love, of the value that relationships hold, because of their permanence in the kingdom of God.
So where has the value of relationships gone in our society? Where has the goodwill gone in our society? To some extent, the goodwill is still there – there are still more random acts of kindness happening than random acts of violence. But the violence is increasing in frequency and intensity, brought out by bitterness and wrath, and malice towards God and his created world. Cruelty towards others doesn't shock us like it used to. There is a growing sense that life is no longer sacred. Our hearts are drifting away from goodness.
And the value of relationships has dropped as the belief in eternal life has dropped – now people are viewed from the frame of “what have you done for me lately, and what can you do for me tomorrow?” We have commodified our relationships instead of investing in them, and the thought of sacrificing anything for friendship, much less laying down our lives, seems foreign to us. And don't even bring up the concept of loving enemies – in our culture today, that's a non-starter. Enemies are to be defeated, grudges are to be tightly held, and ties are to be cut at the slightest slight. Agaph is passe.