Known and Loved
“Known and Loved” by Pastor Rosanna McFadden
Good morning! I found out the answer to a perplexing theological question this week, and just in time to include it in some reflections for today’s sermon. If you have read the Pastor’s Page of the February Connection you may remember the question I have been pondering: why are Random Acts of Kindness so important to Brandon Borem. I engaged in a little speculation in the Connection, and as is often the case when I’m guessing about stuff, I was wrong. Fortunately we discussed Random Acts of Kindness at Outreach Team this past week, and Brandon shared — unbidden — why they are important to him. What Brandon loves about Random Acts of Kindness is that what may seem random to us, is not random to God. What may seem random to us may be part of a larger plan for God; a plan we may not be able to discern from where we’re standing.
This was not exactly the direction I was planning to go when I chose this text from 1 Corinthians 13 for this morning, but it won’t be the first time that something has happened during the week which has put me on a different path than I anticipated. You probably know, or maybe just figured out from listening to Tim read our text for today that 1 Corinthians is known as the Love Chapter. It’s pretty easy to see why. The first four verses tell us how important love is — more important than spiritual gifts, knowledge, faith, and even personal sacrifice. The next section, where our reading started, is a definition of the kind of love the Apostle Paul is talking about: both what it is and what it isn’t.
The final section, beginning in verse 11 talks about how we know what we know, and especially how our knowledge is imperfect this side of eternity. This is the section which I hope to focus on this morning. Kindness is not love, but they are surely cousins, or maybe even siblings. Verse 4 says, Love is patient, love is kind — those are the positive attributes of love. Paul also mentions some things which love is not: not envious, boastful, arrogant, or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing. Kindness is a fine place to start, but love includes kindness and goes beyond it. In fact, according to these verses, love goes beyond every other attribute or characteristic we could strive for. Verse 7 says, It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. That, my friends, is a lot of things. Paul seems to be saying that love is equal to anything which has happened or will happen in our lives.
No where in this list of characteristics of love does the word “random” appear, but I believe that it is relevant to our understanding of love and kindness. Let me share a brief history of Random Acts of Kindness Day from the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation:
The Random Acts of Kindness movement started more than 40 years ago in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1982 Berkeley writer and activist Anne Herbert published an article encouraging people to “Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Acts of Senseless Beauty.” In 1991 a local woman noticed the phrase scrawled across a warehouse wall in her neighborhood. She shared the phrase with her husband, a then 7th grade teacher, who decided to share it with his students. One of the kids happened to be the daughter of a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, who then wrote about Anne Herbert and the phrase. The first national Random Acts of Kindness Day took place in February 1995
Anne Herbert’s phrase is memorable because we usually associate random and senseless acts with violence or hatred. We would generally not want to be the target of a senseless act, or have our community be subjected to random behavior; we see plenty of random and senseless acts in the killing of a Nigerian pastor or the abduction of an 84 year old woman from her Arizona home. These are the things, at least when they happen in the US, which news cycles are made of.
Kindness and love don’t generally make news — not only because they aren’t boastful or arrogant, but because we may ignore or forget acts of kindness which we receive. If we are people who keep score, we may be waiting for someone else to be kind to us before we will extend ourselves in return. If we’re kind all the time, other people will just take advantage of us, right? I can’t tell you that that is not true, but I think it’s the wrong question. I think that is the reasoning of immaturity What’s in it for me? And not of adulthood What can I share with others? The fact is, we may not see the outcome of loving other people, or know the effect of a random act of kindness. A classic random act of kindness is if you are buying something at a drive-through, to pay for your order and the order of the person behind you. One result can be that the recipient of that kindness pays for the next person, and the chain goes on. Brandon has seen this happen at his work at McDonald’s. I paid for one additional order, but I may not know the effect of that on the 8th or 9th person in line; and I will be long gone before that person knows what I did or thanks me for it. But perhaps it is more about setting that chain in motion than it is seeing where it ends up. The beauty of random is that we don’t know; the faith of random is that we believe that God does know.
I don’t expect that paying for a stranger’s hamburger at McDonald’s will change your life, at least if you only do it once a year because your pastor said it was a good idea. But an image of ourselves and of our family of faith as people who are willing to extend ourselves for others, including people we don’t know or people who don’t deserve it, is a theological statement; it shapes who we are and who we become. It mirrors, in a dim and imperfect image, the way the God loves us. What I know for sure is that God doesn’t keep score, because Jesus wiped that scoreboard clean and ensured the win for us for eternity. It would be sheer foolhardiness for us to petition God to give us what we deserve because of our good works or good behavior or good looks or whatever, because what we deserve is the consequences of our sin — either the evil we have done or the good which we have left undone. We have no way of knowing what the final result of our kindness or of loving other people will be. What we know, even if we cannot fully understand it, is that God knows each one of us. Not just who we are, but what we’ve done — good and bad — and what our motivation was — good or bad. In other words, God knows the content of our hearts fully, even if we are not aware or very reflective about it. Verse 12 says, For now I know only in part; them I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. Being fully known is a profound and even a scary thing. To be fully known is be at God’s mercy. To be fully known is to acknowledge that we are imperfect, and that through the grace of Jesus Christ was are loved — anyway.Fully known is the opposite of random. We are loved who we are and how we are, and there is intention and purpose in that. The intent is that we extend the same love and grace to others which we have received from God; even if we don’t know them or may never see them again. Of course will do this clumsily, like a child trying to imitate a parent. We are imperfect and incomplete, but we are also fully known and fully loved, and we are given the opportunity to practice loving other people again and again and again. Consider doing something — even if it is just one small thing — as an act of kindness to someone you don’t know this week. What may seem random to us is not random to God; and each act of kindness bless the receiver and the giver. Jesus Loves us, this I know. Amen.