Are You an Illuminator or a Diminisher?

This post is the first in what I hope is a series of ‘Guest Posts’ from friends whom I deeply respect who have a great impact on the common good in York County and beyond. My hope in introducing guests is to add voices to the important conversation about our common good and to expose my audience to other thought leaders.

Today’s post is from a friend and colleague whom I love and deeply respect, Aaron Kunce. Aaron serves as Pastor of Congregational Life at Living Word Community Church, is a deep thinker, voracious reader, and lover of people. He is married to Kristen, has eight adult children, and is blessed with several grandchildren. Aaron embodies the traits he writes about in this post in that he is a tremendous listener and a loving pastor.

Perhaps most importantly, he helps dignify the name ‘Aaron’ where others continually drag it down :)

You can find a link to the sermon Aaron references here.

Last week, my new next-door neighbors had two large propane tanks installed outside their home, just a foot or two from my fence and property line. My immediate thought was to get a cost estimate for privacy fencing so I wouldn’t have to look at those giant white tanks every day. 

As I walked outside to get a closer look, my new neighbor warmly greeted me and said: “I hope you don’t mind these eye-sores; they’re just a temporary solution to keep us warm until we get a new natural gas heater, which are on serious backorder. We’ve had to use space heaters and it’s been quite cold; I hope you don’t mind.” 

I wanted to hug him. And I felt more than a little stunned by how my mind had gone immediately to building better fences instead of engaging with him in a more neighborly way. 

The famous final line of Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” is: Good fences make good neighbors. But I wonder if we can do better than invest in fences.  

The sermon I delivered on Sunday was all about encountering Jesus together (which is the three-word mission statement of Living Word Community Church). I wanted the congregation to see that when we encounter the God we know in the person of Jesus Christ, we encounter the God who both sees us and knows us. 

The biblical texts we explored together in the Gospel of John (John 1:43-51) and in the Psalms (Psalm 139) seem to suggest that, in Jesus, we encounter One who sees us and knows us, and yet loves us completely.  

We looked, too, at the story in John 4 of the woman at the well in Samaria. Through his interaction with this woman, Jesus transforms her identity. As a result, she believes that he knows her. When you become convinced you are known and loved by Jesus, it unlocks everything else. Everything.  

What does it mean to encounter Jesus? In Jesus, we encounter the God who sees us and knows us. 

These Gospel texts are captivating, compelling, and speak for themselves. In these texts, we see Jesus as the One who knows our sin and struggle, but even more astonishingly, knows our humanity, our unique giftedness, and our potential and promise. 

A friend sent me a short video this week featuring David Brooks, a New York Times opinion columnist. In the video, David talked very powerfully about the difference between what he called Diminishers and Illuminators. These ideas found their way into the closing of my sermon. 

Brooks said he sometimes leaves a party and realizes no one asked him a question. He said only 30% of people ask questions of the people around them and are persistently curious about others. They are Illuminators. The other 70% might be perfectly nice people, but they don’t ask questions. They are Diminishers. 

He went on to say that Diminishers tend to stereotype, ignore people, and strikingly, don’t ask questions. Illuminators, on the other hand, are curious about others and make people feel special.  

Brooks said there was a novelist who lived about 100 years ago. The novelist’s biographer said: “To speak to him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.”

Brooks concluded his remarks with the question: “Who wouldn’t want to bring that out in other people?” 

I’m excited for the opportunity to be an Illuminator. To be curious in the best sense of the word. To be present among my neighbors in the same way and spirit of how Christ has shown up for me—as a loving listener, a kind questioner, and one who endeavors to see and know the people around me. 

And, perhaps in the future, I’ll depend less on fences and more on the surprising and illuminating power of a simple question.