The Beatitudes of Jesus are eight wisdom sayings that stand at the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. They are not moral teachings as much as they are soulful riddles that invite the hearer into a new way of being human. They are an invitation to see, from the inside of our lives—from our souls—what it could mean to be truly human. At this time of such a massive reassessment of human life on this planet, the Beatitudes, what I call, "Novel Attitudes," could point the way to a better way of life for our communities and our world.
This sermon reflects on the contagiousness of contempt that’s affecting our society and the habits, practices, and assumptions that can counteract that dis-ease.
1.
For the last three years, ten friends have met every month for dinner and conversation. Last Sunday, we met again, over Zoom. I framed the conversation with two questions. The second question was this: “What are you doing now, because of the crisis, that you’d like to carry forward beyond the crisis?”
I wonder what you’d say. “What are you doing now, because of the crisis, that you’d like to carry forward beyond the crisis?” It’s a good question, a constructive question.
But it’s the first question I want to dwell on today. “What has surprised you about this crisis?” That is, what have you seen, said, heard, or experienced that you didn’t expect?
One friend told me that he’s surprised about the way complete strangers have reached out to each other. Complete strangers are going out of their way to help each other. He calls these “seedlings”—little, vulnerable plants of goodness he hopes will carry over into the future, attitudes and behaviors he hopes will help us rebuild the world and make it a better place.
Another friend is surprised about how much she misses bodies—real human contact. She says she’s heard some people say they think people are learning that they can get along without in-person gatherings like church. She doesn’t agree. She thinks we’re gaining a better appreciation for what we’ve taken for granted, the way religious communities like ours foster the kind of embodied community we can’t live without. The “hidden pandemic,” the mental health crisis we’re facing is largely a crisis of disembodiment, she says. We need each other desperately. And the force of that hunger for real community has surprised her. She doesn’t take it for granted anymore. She doesn’t think others will either.
These are two good surprises. Each of my friends wants to carry forward something from these surprises: one wants to carry forward the kindness shared between strangers; he hopes we don’t lose that commitment to the common good; the other wants to carry forward the deep, enduring value of what we’ve too easily taken for granted in the past—our need for real flesh and blood connections, and the vitality we experience when we are together—closer than six feet, alive to all the wonder of our shared humanity.
I wish I’d had such beautiful answers. It’s not that I don’t see or feel those things too, but they’re overshadowed by something else I didn’t expect. Maybe I was naive. What’s surprised me most is the anger, the division, the way things like face-coverings have become badges of political allegiance, ideological commitment, signs of the extreme polarization of our society. I think I’d hoped to see a greater commitment to the common good, a surging wave of kindness. But what’s surprised me is the opposite—the contagiousness of contempt.
2.
To hold someone in contempt is to despise them—to detest, hate, loathe, and abhor something about them. It is understandable. We hate what we don’t understand; we despise what we fear. And when the lines are drawn, as they are today, when our freedoms are curtailed, habits and assumptions and practices are critiqued; when we feel controlled, when life hangs in a balance and we are afraid, anger erupts.
Fear is instinctive. It’s designed to keep us safe. Fear is an inner signal of danger, and knowing what’s dangerous has been essential to the survival of our species. Twenty-thousand years ago, give or take several thousand years, when our species, homo sapiens overpowered our nearest other living relative, the neanderthals, and came to dominate the planet, we did so largely because we seemed better able to respond to danger, to meet and defeat the threats around us.
Fear is a basic drive that helps us survive. In many ways it’s helping us now. Fear has helped us work together; fear has driven us to suspend our freedoms and the normalcy we once knew so we could help flatten the curve, minimize infection, and curb the death rate. Living organisms evolve into new forms when they stop competing and instead recognize that cooperation is the only way forward. Fear of extinction can drive living things away from competing against each other toward cooperating with each other.
Our fear is doing that today, and among many people there’s a drive to deeply value each and every human life, to change what we need to change, and do what’s good for all of us. But cooperation is fragile. If our fear drives us toward contempt rather than cooperation, it will derail everything we’ve worked for, everything we could become.
Fear is instinctive. But contempt is learned. It is passed from one person to another. Contempt is contagious.
3.
A few weeks ago, the staff decided to make a statement. Julie Herdt, our Minister of Communications and Administration, created a huge yellow banner and had it placed it over the church sign on the corner of 4th and C Streets. In English, Korean, and Spanish, it reads, “Make Kindness Contagious.”
Kindness. A good contagion. A holy contagion. The kind of contagion we need. Maybe it’s the kind of healing contagion religious communities like ours can promote.
“The purpose of all the major religious traditions,” says the Dalai Lama, one of the world’s great spiritual leaders, “is not to construct big temples on the outside, but to create temples of goodness and compassion inside, in our hearts.”
Contempt begins in our hearts. It’s a virus that infects us from the inside before it spreads outside. And when contempt infects us it makes us terribly sick. To despise another, to hate, loathe, and abhor someone outside us afflicts the inside of us. But when we find we’re infected with contempt, and before it goes viral inside us, we can counteract its effects with something more powerful inside us.
“By developing a sense of respect for others,” says the Dalai Lama, “and a concern for their welfare,” we can turn from contempt, and instead, cultivate kindness. And kindness, says the Dalai Lama, “is a natural source of goodness.”
4.
Goodness is what Jesus is pointing us to in this fourth Novel Attitude.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” he says, “for they will be filled.”
Righteousness, in the language of Jesus, is not about some kind of holier-than-thou piety or religiosity. A way to speak of it in our language would be to speak of wholeness, wellness, balance, goodness—and it’s not just individual and personal, but global and public. In the Beatitudes, what we’re calling the “Novel Attitudes: Eight Ways We Can Help Remake the World,” Jesus envisions ways to live in the world that make the world work for everyone. And here, in this Novel Attitude, he says that a world can come into being—the divine world we want and need—if we will bend our natural energies and drives toward goodness. Jesus says, that if our most basic hungers and thirsts are for goodness then a new and holy contagion will spread throughout the world, and we will work together toward the day when we are only hungry for compassion, never hungry for good food; we are only thirsty for kindness, never thirsty for clean water.
5.
Victor Hugo’s nineteenth century novel, Les Miserables, is a sign of this truth. You may remember the scene that is the driving force of the entire tale. In the early 19th century, social conditions in France are appalling. Inequities are massive. Human suffering is epidemic and there is no real justice. The masses will eventually revolt in armed violence. But Victor Hugo points to another way, the way of the gospel of Jesus.
The story opens with Jean Valjean, the central character, released from twenty years of hard labor for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s daughter. He is a broken and bitter man. He has known only contempt. He feels only contempt. Paroled, he seeks work. No one will hire an ex-convict. Finally a kind bishop takes him in, feeds him, and gives him a room. But Valjean, tempted by the silver from which he ate his dinner, steals the knives and spoons, and disappears into the night. Caught by the police, he is brought to the Bishop for identification. He fears condemnation, a return to prison. The Bishop identifies him, but instead of condemning him, he tells the police he gave the silver to Valjean. In fact, tells Valjean he’d intended for him to take the silver candlesticks as well. Valjean is astonished by such a sign of kindness. And before he leaves a free man, the Bishop pulls him aside and says, “Don’t forget. Don’t ever forget. You’ve promised to become a new man. Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil. With this silver I’ve bought your soul. I’ve ransomed you from fear and hatred.”
The Bishop is a Christ-figure. He not only is a sign of goodness and what God’s world is like, but he sees and names the goodness in Jean Valjean. The goodness that drove a hungry man to steal a loaf of bread for his hungry niece is a goodness of a soul too long shrouded by fear and hatred. Our intrinsic goodness, seen and named by someone outside us, can ransom us from evil. This is a better way, says Victor Hugo, to make a better world. Jean Valjean becomes a good man and though he cannot save France from unrest and upheaval, he does save some. He becomes a sign of what we can become in our day and age.
Like the Novel Attitudes that open Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, Les Miserables is a vision. It was a vision when Hugo wrote it in 1862; it is a vision now. It’s a vision for the way into our future—beyond this crisis, beyond the sickness, beyond the political dysfunction, the economic fears, the revolutionary impulses, the violence, the hatred, and the contempt.
Kindness not contempt. Goodness not greed. These will build the world we need.
They are inside us. Buried maybe, and we’ll need each other to find them. But we’re hungry enough now for a better world, thirsty enough now for another way. It’s never too late to turn from contempt toward kindness, compassion, and the goodness that can remake the world.