Scripture: Luke 18:9-14
I’m returning to the lectionary for my scripture today. I almost didn’t, because when I read the lectionary scripture for today, the direction it led me in was very similar to where I was two weeks ago when I was talking about the bad messages the Christian church has sometimes sent to human beings in general and sometimes to specific groups of human beings about their general worthlessness and our need to resist that message in any of its many forms, our need to resist sending it, hearing it, believing it, or tolerating it, but at the same time to resist defending our worth-ful-ness by falling into self-satisfaction or self-congratulation.
The kind of thing I was saying two weeks ago I could just as easily say again today in connection with this scripture, because it seems to present those two alternatives to us in rather a rather stark and exaggerated way in the form of a parable Jesus told. On the one hand we have the Pharisee, who is the very epitome of self-satisfaction, self-congratulation, and self-righteousness, a man who is pointedly described as standing off by himself and offering a kind of prayer, if you can call it that, a prayer of thanksgiving that he is not like other people who do miserable things and in fact that he is better than most because of all the good things he does. He is so clearly an arrogant so-and-so that it is awfully easy to fall into the trap of saying to ourselves, “Whew, thank God I am not like that Pharisee.” I don’t know if Jesus set that trap for us intentionally; I sort of half think so. It may be that we don’t want to set ourselves arrogantly above the Pharisee the way he sets himself above others, but that also emphasizes the point that this is not someone to be emulated.
Then there is the picture Jesus gives us of the tax collector, a person not well-regarded in his society to say the least, who stands far off, couldn’t look God in the eye, probably couldn’t look other people in the eye, maybe couldn’t look himself in the mirror, beating his breast, asking for God to have mercy on him, a sinner. And for me this raises the same kinds of issues I talked about in connection with the person referred to as a “worthless servant” a couple of weeks ago. I am not so sure that thinking of ourselves as worthless or having our identity all wrapped up in being sinful is good for any of us. It is especially not good for those who have had humility forced on them or for those who have been taught to think poorly of themselves. Self-deprecation is not always and clearly a good thing. Self-loathing is almost always a bad thing. The image Jesus gives us of this tax collector is of a person who, to say the least, is not feeling very good about himself, and to me that is also not someone to be emulated.
Those issues, at least in my own mind, were what I was dealing with a couple of weeks ago, and so, as I say, I was hesitant to preach on this passage since it seemed to trigger many of the same kinds of responses as I was involved with then. At the same time I know that I didn’t go very far down that road. How do we avoid both the arrogance and the self-loathing, the self-congratulation and the gnawing sense of no-goodness, the thinking too highly of ourselves and the thinking too little of ourselves. It occurred to me that one way to pursue that a little further would be to ask myself the question: what does it mean to walk humbly with God. As you know, I use that verse from Micah quite often; it is one of my favorites: “What does the Lord require but that we do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God?” So what about that? What does it mean to walk humbly with God? That should point us to the third way that is neither arrogance nor destructive self-denial. And humility is the issue in the last verse of the passage that says, “for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.”
This leads, however, to another reason to avoid preaching on this passage, because humility is one of those things that it would probably be better not to talk about. People who are truly humble just are; they don’t intend to be. They don’t try to be. Because of course the harder someone tries to be humble the harder it is for them actually to be humble. I’m sorry to quibble with the wording of scripture, but if you know that by being humble you will be exalted, then it’s not really humility we’re talking about. If it is a good thing to be humble, then we will know deep down in our hearts that as we become more and more humble, we are really becoming better and better people, and we can take pride in that. In other words there is really no way to win this game. In fact, I remember reading some place the comment that it would take a really arrogant person to think that he (or she) could preach a sermon on humility. And I understand why someone would make that comment. And it makes me a little hesitant to take up the task. In the end though, even if it is arrogant or indeed impossible, that’s where I’ve been led this morning, so for the remainder of this sermon here are a few humble thoughts on humility.
Just a few thoughts. On a human level, it seems to me humility must have something to do with a recognition and confession of our neediness as human beings, my neediness as a human being, not mine especially, but definitely my neediness, not our neediness in sort of a broad, general, abstract sense which recognizes human beings as being needy creatures and therefore as a technicality recognizes my own neediness since I am a human being, but truly my neediness. The way we use the English language encourages us to talk and think about “the needy” as someone else. The language of faith ought to encourage us to talk and think about “the needy” as ourselves, about the needy one as me, first of all, and then the neediness of all of us that I share in because I have first recognized my own.
There is, of course, a big difference between neediness and worthlessness. I don’t know whether Jesus in describing the tax collector meant to give us a picture of someone who thought of himself as rotten to the core, but I am pretty sure that his point was not that it is good to have a low opinion of oneself, and the lower the better, or that beating up on yourself, which this man was doing literally, beating his breast, is somehow good for the soul. I am not usually one for going into the fine points of scripture and attaching deep significance to this word or that. But one of the commentaries on this passage made a point I found suggestive. It said that the more accurate translation of what Jesus had the man saying is, “God be merciful to me, the sinner”, not a sinner. Which might have the connotation more of his referring to himself as the one who is considered as the sinner, the one who has no real place in the world—“God be merciful to me, the despised one, the outsider. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between the awful ideas about who we are that others impose on us and the ones we impose on ourselves.
In any case, the point here is not how awful human beings are or ought to think of themselves as being. The point is that God draws near most of all to those who are needy, to those who are vulnerable, to those who are broken-hearted. Or, to put it another way, those who are most aware of God’s nearness are those whose hearts or spirits have been broken open enough to make a place for the spirit of God. It is not the man’s awfulness, real or pretended, that is at stake here. It is his, and our, brokenheartedness.
And we are, aren’t we? In one way or another needy, or vulnerable, or broken, or brokenhearted, some of the above, all of the above. From our most intimate, inner, personal needs for love, our needs for loving, for having people to love, quite as much and probably more than our needs for being loved, which God knows are also very real, and then consequent feelings of loss or loneliness that attend our needs for love—from that very deeply personal neediness to the more universal but also very real brokenness and brokenheartedness that goes with allowing ourselves to feel the pain of the world we live in—there is nowhere to turn where we are not vulnerable. And if the good that we legitimately try to do and are capable of doing, if that good comes from the places of our brokenness, if we are not doing it so much because it is “the good thing to do” or “the right thing to do” or because it is our duty or our obligation or because it is important (which of course would make us important for doing it) or because it is needed or because others need us—if the good that we would do comes from our own places of brokenness, our own need to be made whole, our own need to live in a just and peaceful world, our own need to have broken hearts, including our own, comforted, then there is a chance that those good deeds will have some humility in them.
That’s all mostly on the human level. As far as walking humbly with God, well I do think what I’ve been talking about so far does have to do broadly with walking humbly with God, but I do have just a few brief thoughts that might seem more specifically related to walking humbly with God. When Penny Norford joins the church just a few minutes from now, she will be implicitly affirming the statement that appears every week on the back cover of our bulletin. It is not quite as official as the church covenant we say out loud when someone joins, nor the mission statement which is a little too long to print or repeat together, but both of which appear in our constitution. The statement I’m referring to is an interpretation of our name, and it says: “’Sojourner’ connotes movement, fluidity, pilgrimage, inclusion of those who do not want set answers or rigid systems, but who, instead, want to be in a moving, changing relationship with God, and with each other. We are a community of faith, called to be on a journey together with other sojourners, always open to God’s call to move on.”
With or without that statement in print, I think most of us would recognize those words as being true to the spirit of Sojourners, not wanting set answers or rigid systems, being in kind of a questing mode, seeing ourselves as pilgrims, recognizing the partial truths that grow out of each person’s experience and reflection and that we have to offer each other even when they don’t seem very much like truths, not insisting on particular words or formulas or formulations, seeing our questions as expressions of our faith and understanding questions to be as important, or more important, than answers.
To be in a questing and questioning relationship with God would seem to be one good way to try to walk humbly with God. Certainly presuming to have the answers, even generously offering your answers to other people who need them, none of that seems exactly humble. So if you want to be a Sojourner, or understand yourself to be a sojourner, or want to walk humbly with God, then having a comfort level with questions is probably a good thing. But I think that’s not quite all there is to be said.
Just as we do not gain humility by being too eager and self-conscious in our pursuit of it and being too sure that it will make us a better person, so we do not walk humbly with God by being too eager to embrace our questions and being too sure that that will make us a better Christian. It is possible to be attached to our questions as rigidly as if they were answers. It is possible to be attached to our doubts as rigidly as if they were beliefs. Sometimes we need to give up the pride of thinking we have the answers to the most profound questions of faith and living. Sometimes we need to give up the pride of thinking there are no answers and thinking that our questions are all there is. A humble walk with God does not fasten on the questions any more than it does on the answers. Sometimes we need to open ourselves to something else—call it trust, or blessing, or grace—that goes beyond questions or answers.
And always to walk humbly with God means to walk also with other people. For our faith too is broken and needs the faith of others—their partial and tentative answers, their questions, and their experiences of trust and blessing—we need the faith of others to make ours whole. In that spirit we will soon welcome Penny as a new sister pilgrim, sister Sojourner. In that spirit we will continue to embrace one another as we try together to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God. Amen.
Jim Bundy
October 24, 2004