Micah and Dickinson on Kindness

Sunday

Today in church we will hear one of the most beloved passages from the Old Testament prophets. Many know the final lines of Micah 6:1-8, about justice, kindness, and humility, but what leads up to it is equally important because God (through Micah) is informing the people of what they don’t have to do. Although God “brought you up from the land of Egypt, and redeemed you from the house of slavery,” She isn’t asking a lot in return:

“With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?

Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings,
with calves a year old?

Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?

Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

This year those final lines—“do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God”– have provided our church with the theme for our Adult Forum, held every Sunday morning between the two services. We have heard or will hear faculty members from the Sewanee seminary talk about the commitment to justice as it appears in the Torah, the New Testament, Paul’s letters, and the Anglican/Episcopalian tradition. Also on the program are advocates for immigrants recounting stories, former members of law enforcement discussing violence, and our rector walking us through the Jewish tradition of welcoming “the stranger in our midst.” Speakers have shared their experiences working with urban homelessness and Appalachian poverty, and national experts have talked about René Girard’s theories of scapegoating and mimetic desire; Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s attempts to get the church to stand up to Hitler; and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Clarion Call for Justice in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Although I say it as the chief organizer, it is an extraordinary program, especially for a church as small as ours.

The word from Micah’s passage that particular resonates with me is “kindness,” which puts me in mind of a Henry James declaration:

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

Kindness also gets mentioned twice in Wordsworth’s masterpiece Tintern Abbey, the first when it is present, the second time when it is absent. The “best portion of a good man’s life,” he writes, are “his little, nameless, unremembered, acts/ Of kindness and of love.” Later he assures us that the “quietness and beauty” of Nature can sustain us when we encounter “greetings where no kindness is.” This coldness he puts in the same category as “evil tongues,” “rash judgments, “sneers of selfish men,” and “all the dreary intercourse of daily life.”

In this spirit, then, I share a simple but powerful poem by Emily Dickinson about kindness: 

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

That, Micah assures us, is all that God’s asks of us.