by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given January 28, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

During the State of the Union address on Tuesday night, President Bush singled out Wesley Autrey, who has come to be known as the Subway Superman of New York. You may have heard his story. Earlier this month the 50-year-old construction worker was on a subway platform in Harlem when a first-year film student suffered a seizure, which sent him convulsing off the platform and onto the subway tracks just as a train was coming. Autrey jumped down onto the tracks and held the student down as the train rumbled just inches above them. Moments after the train came to a halt, the student reportedly asked if he was dead. “You are very much alive,” Autrey said, “but if you move you’ll kill the both of us.” Both men emerged from the episode with little more than bruises. Autrey also emerged a star.

When Autrey was later asked to reflect on the experience he said, “Maybe I was in the right place at the right time, and good things happen for good people.” Then, he added, “All New Yorkers! If you see somebody in distress, go for it.”

Part of why the story has gotten so much coverage is the fact that it seems to be in contrast to the image we have of cities, and especially New York. Mind your business, take care of yourself, and don’t worry about the other guy. But this story seems to be a little different.

Most acts of bravery and kindness, of course, are not rewarded with an acknowledgement from the leaders of our country. They may be hardly acknowledged by the recipient of the kindness. But sometimes a story is so extraordinary that somebody gets their 15 minutes of fame before life moves on. Would most people have done the same thing? It is hard to tell. An unscientific poll by Newsday found that 54 percent of respondents would not jump on the tracks to save someone and 46 percent said they would.[1]

Truth is we probably don’t know what we would do until we are in the situation in any given moment. We can answer surveys and imagine what we would do but until we are in the situation we really can’t know.

Most people who do jump in later say that they really don’t think of themselves as heroes—they just did what needed to be done. It is not something you think about but something you just do.

It is wonderful to read about random acts of kindness. They happen all the time and sometimes they even make the newspaper. But I am also struck by how acts of kindness stand in contrast to so much of the news we hear every day.

In fact there is some irony that the Subway Superman received a standing ovation from the leading officials in our land during the State of the Union address. Too often the message that comes from our leaders is that kindness is not the name of the game. It is every man—or every woman—for themselves.

In politics these days it is not just about winning but actually hurting your opponent. If it means smearing them then that is what you do. In popular culture the latest example has been on the TV show American Idol. The judges, it seems, not only give feedback to the contestants but rub their faces in it. It is the norm to try to get somebody to cry or to lash out, all in the name of good television. And if you look at our foreign policy it is anything but kind.

More and more these days we come to see the world as downright mean. There is sport in harming others and meanness seems to be the norm. Maybe the smart thing to do is to get ready to hit the other guy before we ourselves get hit.

It is easy to live our lives seeing all kinds of people as the other. We are on one side and somebody else is on the other. These days it might be immigrants or gay people or transgendered people or people of color or women on welfare. But it might also be Republicans or NASCAR fans or just about anybody who lives in a red state. Meanness doesn’t just happen on one side of the political divide and not the other.

What happens is that we see people not as people first but as this or that part of them or what they come to represent for us. You name it. It is easy to not see a person with some quality that is different from ourselves, we see a person only for that that dimension of self that is different.

So where does kindness come into this?

Kindness is a mindfulness about how we see ourselves in the world. It is an orientation to look beyond our individual selves and see ourselves as part of something much larger. It is an orientation to put our own struggles into perspective, to see that when someone else is hurt so are we.

It has been noted that New Yorkers may be different post 9-11, post 2003 Blackout, where neighbors helped other neighbors. But that may hard to tell. When Autrey, the Subway Superman, received word that Donald Trump was going to give him $10,000 for his act of heroism, he said that he didn’t just want Trump to send over the money but wanted a chance to meet him and to be able to tell him that he was fired. Let’s just hope that he doesn’t get caught up in Donald’s feud with Rosie O’Donnell.

So how are we to be in the world? Here’s another story about a man who was fired more than once.

Larry Stewart died on Jan. 12 at age 58 from cancer of the esophagus. He was a millionaire who gained international attention in November when he revealed that he was the Secret Santa of Kansas City for his habit of roaming the streets each December and anonymously handing money to people. He had received a diagnosis of cancer in April, and he said he wanted to use his celebrity to inspire other people to take random acts of kindness seriously.

Stewart made his millions in cable television and long-distance telephone service. His private holiday giving started in December 1979 when he was at a drive-in restaurant nursing his wounds from having been fired. It was the second year in a row in which he had been fired the week before Christmas. “It was cold, and this carhop didn’t have on a very big jacket, and I thought to myself: ‘I think I got it bad? She’s out there in this cold making nickels and dimes,’” he said. He gave her $20 and told her to keep the change. “And suddenly I saw her lips begin to tremble and tears begin to flow down her cheeks. She said, ‘Sir, you have no idea what this means to me.’”

Larry Steward was deeply touched. He decided to go to the bank that day and took out $200, then drove around looking for people who could use a lift. That was his “Christmas present to himself.” He hit the streets each December after that. In his last year, his mission was bigger than handing out $100 bills—he wanted to speak to community groups about his devotion to kindness and to inspire others to donate their time and money. “That’s what we’re here for,” Stewart said in November, “to help other people out.” [2]

I know in my own life that as I give to others, whether it is my resources, my time or my attention, more often than not I feel like I receive more than I give. That is certainly what I hear from others. It doesn’t have to be that we give away $100 bills or do something that gets a lot of attention. Most of the time it is something much simpler. What is important is how we orient ourselves to be kind to others.

In a class at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., called “Science of Well-Being,” a psychology professor named Todd Kashdan gave students an assignment. They were to do two things. The first was to do something that gave them pleasure and then to perform an act of selfless kindness.

For the pleasure part, one student recounted having sex with her boyfriend 30 feet underwater while scuba diving. Another said he “went to Coastal Flats and got hammered.” A third attended a NASCAR race in North Carolina, smoked, drank and had sex. Some also watched favorite TV shows; others chatted with friends.

When it came to the second part of the assignment, the students were excited, too. The NASCAR attendee, who was afraid of needles, gave blood. Another collected clothes from family members and donated them to a shelter for battered women. The boy who had gotten hammered bought a homeless person alcohol at a 7-Eleven, wondering if it was the right thing to do. A fourth gave her waiter at Denny’s a $50 tip.

The students found their giving to be rewarding. In a summary one student submitted she compared “a day at the spa covered in really expensive French” stuff and “a day of community improvement covered in horse” manure. The smile on the community organizer’s face “beat out the smile on the masseur’s face any day.” That is, she had learned that doing good is good for you.[3]

The teacher made the distinction between feeling good—which many psychologists say only creates a hunger for more pleasure—and doing good, which can lead to lasting happiness.

An orientation to helping others sounds like an obvious thing. But how many messages do we receive that are just the opposite. Just think about the headlines on the front page of the paper most days. Instead of being something that is a no-brainer, really grounding ourselves towards kindness might actually be a pretty radical concept. It might ask us to move out of our selfish selves and towards something that makes us aware that we are really interconnected.

Frederick Buechner wrote: “As we move around this world and as we act with kindness, perhaps, or with indifference or with hostility toward the people we meet, we are setting the great spider web atremble. The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.”[4]

A couple years ago I was spending some time in a small village in Bali, Indonesia. Bali is a magical place where most everybody creates art and where there doesn’t seem to be the same kinds of divisions we have in our culture between work and family and spiritual lives. Everything seems to move in a whole different way. So in the middle of my stay there I received an email that a close friend of mine in the States was trying to reach me to let me know that his son had been killed in an accident. Here I was, thousands of miles away, and I didn’t know what I could do. I felt terrible that I was not there for my friend and that it would be a few hours before I could try to call.

It was a time when all of a sudden I felt very far away from home. I walked back through the rice paddy to the cottage where I was staying. I told my hostess, who speaks very good English, a little about what had happened. A few minutes later her brother, who didn’t speak much English came to be with me. We had a hard time communicating about what was happening but we sat together. And then he just looked at me, right in the eye and said, “I sorry.”

And in that moment in that place far away from home that is just what I needed.

Sometimes all we can do is be present with another person. Sometimes all we can do is to be present with the news of more killing somewhere in the world. It isn’t about being heroic or doing something that will make us famous. Most of the time it is just about showing up and being present with another. This sounds so simple, and yet sometimes it can be so difficult to do. And yes, that really does make a difference.

We may have learned a long time ago that kindness was a good thing. It may have come in Sunday school or Hebrew school or in the home we grew up in. But over time it may have come to seem a little out of date, maybe even naïve.

Over time we have come to learn that the world these days can be anything but kind. In the midst of war, in the midst of hatred and separateness, in the midst of partisanship, we learn so much is divided, so much is broken. There is plenty of meanness all around us. It might come from our leaders. It might come from how we treat other countries. It might come from the judges on a TV show. It might come from how we treat the person behind the counter or working next to us. It might come from the little voice inside that says, I’m just going to make sure that I have all I need and I’m not going to worry about anybody else.

But we soon come to know that that is not how we want to live.

As we are able to live mindful of how kindness might flow from us to others and from others to ourselves, we might come to see the world in a different way. We might come to see kindness as an act of resistance to the violence and cruelty so often present. We might come to see that as we can forgive the limitations in others we might also be able to more fully accept our own limitations. We might be in the world with a renewed sense of possibility, aware that we are part of the creation and that that creation is good.

In closing, words of poet Mary Oliver:

Some black ducks
were shrugged up
on the shore.
It was snowing

hard, from the east,
and the sea
was in disorder.
Then some sanderlings,

five inches long
with beaks like wire,
flew in,
snowflakes on their backs,

and settled
in a row
behind the ducks—
whose backs were also

covered with snow—
so close
they were all but touching,
they were all but under

the roof of the ducks’ tails,
so the wind, pretty much,
blew over them.
They stayed that way, motionless,

for maybe an hour,
then the sanderlings,
each a handful of feathers,
shifted, and were blown away

out over the water
which was still raging.
But, somehow,
they came back

and again the ducks,
like a feathered hedge,
let them
crouch there, and live.

If someone you didn’t know
told you this,
as I am telling you this,
would you believe it?

Belief isn’t always easy.
But this much I have learned—
if not enough else—
to live with my eyes open.

I know what everyone wants
is a miracle.
This wasn’t a miracle.
Unless, of course, kindness—

as now and again
some rare person has suggested—
is a miracle.
As surely it is.[5]

Amen.

Prayer

Spirit of life, be with us this day. Be with all the people of the world. Call us to the work of love, call us to the work of compassion, to kindness in all that we do. Hear our prayers for peace and give us strength to keep praying. Help us to build a land where justice is all around us. Bless us on the journey. Amen.

Benediction

As you leave here today, think of an act of kindness as an act of resistance. Go in love and go in peace.

It actually may be an act of resistance to so many things we hear these days

Copyright 2007, Thomas Disrud. All rights reserved.