Reflection of the week by Rev. Mees Teilens, Curate

On Tuesday, I was on BART heading to San Francisco. I take BART a lot and it’s usually fine, but because of a medical emergency at the Civic Center station, the Red Line wasn’t running and everything else was being single tracked—so there were big delays, full trains, and lots of waiting in place for the train ahead of us to go. Lots of people who were clearly going to be late to wherever they were going, me included. People were surprisingly chill about it, though.

But then a young man vomited. He had clearly been doing his best prevent this exact thing from happening, but, well, I’ll spare you the details, but it wasn’t pretty.

I’ll be honest, I braced myself at that point, sure that someone was going to lose their cool. But no one did. People dug through their bags and found him napkins and tissues to clean up with, reassured him it wasn’t his fault, made sure he had some water, gave him a place to sit. It was quite heartening to see people choose to be kind when they really could’ve gone the other way, instead, or even just had left the kid to his own devices instead of trying to help.

And it feels like a small thing, to choose to be kind when you don’t have to, when you’re frustrated or tired or grossed out. And does it really matter when the world is on fire, being kind to a kid throwing up on BART?

Well, yes. Because it’s what Jesus would do. And I don’t even mean that in a trite Jesus-was-always-nice-to-everyone kind of way, I mean that the Gospels are full of stories of Jesus approaching people one at a time with love and compassion. He heals the blind man, he talks to Nicodemus at length, he calls Zacchaeus out of the tree by name. It is, when you come down to it, a singularly inefficient way of proclaiming the Gospel. And yet it’s what Jesus models for us.

And so if we want to “seek first the kingdom of God” (Matthew 6:33), if we want to “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with [our] God” (Micah 6:8), it starts with the small things. It starts with providing what little comfort you can to a young man stuck on a BART train while clearly not feeling well—or at least choosing to not add to his misery. Because I think there’s actually something important at stake here: at its core, when we choose to be kind rather than cruel, we’re choosing to recognize the other person’s humanity. And that matters now more than ever, when polarizing political rhetoric tries to pit us against one another. Resist the temptation to give into it, and instead, do as Jesus did: love your neighbor as yourself. Vomit and all.