The Tyranny of Niceness
Today we’re going to talk about the difference between being nice and being good.
I’m here to tell you today that God is good, but God does not particularly care about being nice.
Jesus in the gospels is radiant with goodness, but he is not always nice.
And the surprising thing is that while we too are called to be good, we need to get in touch with the reality that this may sometimes call us to sacrifice being nice.
Why does that thought strike fear into our hearts?
And why is the church the place of ultimate niceness?
I’m going to make the case to you that our Christian community suffers from a toxic epidemic of niceness that limits our ability to be in true, deep, committed relationship with one another.
We need to find a way to break through our niceness façade and actually love one another with integrity and depth.
And if we practice this discipline in our Christian community, we are much more likely to be able to fulfill Jesus’ command to love our enemies.
Let’s start from scratch. Why is being nice the strongest moral imperative at church?
Well, niceness is a sort of social lubricant.
Being polite and pleasant with one another is certainly a lovely thing, and I’m not advocating that we go out and be blunt and rude at every opportunity.
At church, we encounter really deep, important things, in scripture and theology and doctrine, and also in our lives.
We talk about ethics and social responsibility and war and poverty.
And we get married and entrust our children to baptism and have our funerals.
What happens in church is quite literally life and death, and we are scrupulously nice in order to ease and smooth over the emotional intensity of that reality.
But the problem with the tyranny of niceness is that it papers over real problems. Continue reading