The Cost of Kindness
Rev. Douglas Taylor
October 18, 2026
Sermon Video: https://youtu.be/7LIM-p5rNCU
It costs you nothing to hold the door for the next person, right? The simple kindnesses we can offer one another do not have a fee attached. There are small kindnesses that will cost money – buying a coffee for someone or a meal – sure. But a moment of thoughtfulness is fee-free. We can return an extra shopping cart or greet a retail worker by the name they have on their name tag. We can shovel a snowy walk for a neighbor or offer a compliment for a stranger’s cool hat. These things take time and effort, attention; but generally are not connected to the grand capitalist scheme at play. Such actions do not add or subtract from anyone bottom line. It costs you nothing to be kind.
And yet, kindness is noteworthy. Kindness is noticed. Kindness stands out against the backdrop of all the other interactions we have in a day. Kindness can sometimes feel scarce. There is so much cruelty and meanness on display, so much self-serving and exploitative behavior that kindness seems a little lost.
To be fair, we don’t always call these behaviors “kindness.” We don’t always think of them that way. What I am calling kindness, the behaviors of being kind to others, may feel more like something else for you. Kindness is about doing something positive or good for someone else in a way that is not transactional.
You many call such behaviors civility or basic human decency – “all people deserve the same respect I want from the world. That’s just how we make society work.” Or you may think of such actions as good character or personal integrity – “I am treating others this way because of who I am as a person.” What I am calling kindness, you may think of as compassion or generosity or helpfulness or even justice – “I will treat the vulnerable the way I would want to be treated if I were in their shoes.”
You may even think of it theologically – there is a whole branch of theology in existentialism that distinguishes between two types of relationship – “I-It” and “I-thou” relationships. Basically, we can treat other people like objects or like people. Think again about the cashier from your last visit to the grocery store … and we have a whole theology that says, ‘maybe we treat that person like a person instead of as an object that happens to be in our path.’
Kindness is not only a mindset, a way of thinking. Kindness is essentially a behavior. It is a behavior that does not benefit you directly. And, I’m arguing, does not cost you anything to do. Granted, there is a whole mess of examples in which kindness does literally cost you something – buying a gift or paying someone’s parking fee and so on. Yes – that version of kindness has a financial component. My point is not that there is zero money involved. My point is that there doesn’t have to be. People are not being unkind because they can’t afford to be kind.
And on the flip side of it, they are not choosing to be kind for the financial benefits, for the pay off. Here I will pause for a brief tangent and admit there are studies that show some benefits to the person who is offering kindness.
Studies show that being kind is good for your heart, it boosts your immune system, lowers anxiety, and even slows the effects of aging. There are several studies about something that has been called the “kindness feedback loop” which essentially reveals that being kind increases our happiness; and when we are happier, we tend to be more kind – the results suggest kindness and happiness are entangled.
So, being kind is good for you, being good to other people is good for your health and happiness. In case you needed a selfish reason to behave unselfishly.
And now I want to take a bit of a leap and maybe you’re willing to come with me. What if it did cost you something to be kind. What if there was a cost, would you pay it? We used poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s excellent poem on Kindness as our opening words, with the reminder that “Before you can know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow is the other deepest thing.” What if you made choices to be kind that followed the deep sorrows you experience in the world? What if that were the cost?
This has me thinking about one of my granddaughter’s favorite kid’s shows: Ms. Rachel’s Songs for Littles. Ms. Rachel, if you don’t know, is an educator Youtuber, and activist. She started making videos for infants and toddlers, and her work blossomed during the pandemic. People have likened her to Mr. Rogers both in style and impact.
Lately Ms. Rachel has been speaking out against the harm children are suffering in Gaza and in our American immigration detention centers. She wants children to live free and to grow, to be able to eat and be healthy. She is an incredibly kind and generous person. And she has a deep sorrow for the suffering of children. “Before you can know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow is the other deepest thing.”
She has gotten a lot of support and a lot of accusations. About a year and a half ago, she posted on social media about a group calling her evil. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/stop-antisemitism-ms-rachel-doj-investigation
“They called for me to be investigated by the DOJ because I care about Palestinian children, along with all children.
It’s lead to me getting threats, needing security & they tried to ruin my career. It’s been incredibly painful.
But the pain doesn’t compare in the slightest to what the children of Gaza experience. And my dedication to children & their human rights is stronger than any of it.”
Ms. Rachel – or Rachel Griffin Accurso if you want to be specific – is advocating that the hungry children in Gaza deserve food, they deserve to not be targeted, they deserve to not be bombed. And she says all children deserve the same. Israeli children deserve the same. She says this. And people react saying she should stick to her kid’s show, she should be quiet, she should die.
I’ve brought up the example of Ms. Rachel to highlight how her sorrow for the suffering of children has led her to kindness on behalf of children. Her example highlights something of the cost of kindness.
And along the way, Ms. Rachel’s example highlights a second way kindness can have a cost. Be mindful to whom you are kind because that’s the part that may get you in trouble. Kindness itself is not radial. But who you are kind too may make it radical. Kindness can become a radical behavior if you choose to be kind to certain people whom society has deemed unacceptable.
Everyone will love it if you buy a coffee for the next person in line behind you are the coffee shop because that person, while random, is likely to be comfortably part of society still. But if you start buying coffees for the homeless – watch out. Everyone will love you if you hold the door open for someone with mobility struggles, but if your kindness leads you to advocate for better systems to support folks with disabilities, the praise may be mixed with accusations.
Dom Hélder Câmara, a Brazilian Catholic archbishop and champion of human rights who died a quarter of a century ago once said it quite clearly: “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist.” Who you are kind too is where we often discover a cost.
But that is exactly our work, is it not? Jesus called people to love their neighbors as themselves. When asked to clarify who counted as a neighbor – the question of who we should be kind to is an old question – when asked to clarify, Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan. And even with this parable resonating so centrally in Christian belief, it is still hard for people to be kind to those society deems unworthy. And there will be a cost.
And we can remember what Rev. Debus told us in the reading this morning (“Kindness over Niceness.”) “Kindness doesn’t calculate the return on investment or the risk to reputation or the fear of comments.” Kindness calls us to behave in ways that may have a cost – but we don’t look to the cost to know if we should do it or not.
You and I are not celebrities and will likely not experience the costs incurred by folks like Ms. Rachel. But we can act with kindness toward all people, toward who ever happens to be near us, toward particular people who are vulnerable and in need. We can call those behaviors kind, or we can say we are just offering basic human decency. Or call it love, because love changes everything, and Love Is Resistance, and ‘love is patient, love is … (kind).’
But here’s the thing: We are offering our attention and our actions in the service of making things better. We are acting with kindness. There may be a cost, a cost of acknowledging the sorrow we feel for the plight of others. There may be a cost to reputation or some threat from those who don’t like us being kind to those people.
But still, we act with kindness. We offer our kindness not for praise or reward, but because it is the thing to do in a hurting world. And we do not count the cost. We hold the door for the next person, we treat others as humans instead of object, we cry out with the sorrow we see and experience in the world, and then we help the next person and do the next kind thing. Because that’s how we make the world better. It’s just what we do.
In a world without end,
May it be so.
