Sometimes
I long for the good old Puritan days when I could read scripture like this, do
my fire and brimstone sermon about your selfish ambition and conceit, and then
return to my seat and sing “Amazing Grace.” That would be so easy. Lift up Paul
saying “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” and let that sit
in your stomach and see how well you do with it. The only problem with the
straightforward, law-heavy approach to this scripture is that Paul ends this
rambling exhortation to good behavior by saying “it is God who is at work in you,
enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure,” which is kind of
frustrating, because it means that, in spite of all the advice Paul is
giving you, the only good you will ever do is not because you’ll be able to
observe the law, but because God sees fit to actually do good with you. So,
you’re all sinners that will never measure up without the grace of God—yay! (I
love my job)
But this is what
humility is. In a world of self-sufficiency it's so backwards that we don’t
quite know what to do with it. True humility—the kind that takes no credit and
honestly expects nothing in return—is beyond us most of the time, even if it’s
the kind of thing we hope for our children. It goes beyond the don’ts: Don’t
brag. Don’t talk only about yourself. Don’t rub it in when you win. Don’t blame
others when you lose. The
problem for Scandinavian Lutherans is that we tend to think that since we follow
the don’ts we have this one covered. We don’t brag or rub it in; we don’t often
talk ourselves up or others down. Sure, we might occasional forget all this at
sporting events, but for the most part we’ve got Minnesota nice covered… and
Minnesota nice must pretty much be close to humble, right?
Every one of us has
a prideful side. If you’re married, and you don’t know where your particular
prideful points are, then ask your spouse. They’ll tell you. Or, failing that,
ask your parents. They know. Or ask the people you have drinks with after a
long day of work. The temptation is to think that because we don’t brag about
the thing we do best we are not prideful at all, but that’s not how it works.
Often the thing we understand the least is the thing that makes us the most
stubborn. This is why everybody is an expert at economics and politics.
Humility
is absolutely not the smug
righteousness of refraining from comment until after a person with whom you
disagree is gone. That’s not humility; that’s more like deceit. Humility is
also not believing yourself right but
telling nobody. That’s closer to arrogance. True humility is actually very
hard, and it requires a good deal of wisdom, because true humility is encountering
something disagreeable and not just refraining from comment (or punching that
person in the face) but instead seeing the humanity in what aggravates you.
Humility
is not passivity—that’s how Scandinavians tend to act: retreat to a safe
distance and with safe, familiar people, then let out of all the grievances. But neither does humility mean that you can’t have an opinion and believe what you believe. Instead, the humble life suggests that true power comes not from being the loudest voice but from being the one who quietly goes about demonstrating the love of God
in the most mundane of ways. Jesus was humble not because he refrained from
saying things. He said many things, among which were such classics as “I and
the Father are one” and “no one comes through the Father except through me”;
phrases which would not rank high on the humility meter. But what made him our
example of humility was that he oriented his life not toward the powers of this
world that claim that the person with the most toys wins or that life is about pleasure, instead orienting his life toward the cross, which is absolute foolishness
to a prideful world.
Modern
American Christians have a problem living out a humble faith—we just do. One of
the concerning trends in American Christianity is how many Christians feel they
are becoming more persecuted for their faith. It's startling that Christians are more preoccupied with their own persecution than the
persecutions of their neighbors who often have far less power and nobody to
speak up for them. If there comes a time where a woman, or a person of color,
is more likely to be persecuted for her Christian faith than for her gender or
race then we can start talking about the persecution of Christians in America but, boy,
are we not there yet! And it makes me ashamed to hear Christians circle the
wagons around their religious rights when the very act of that right being
violated is precisely where we have the opportunity to demonstrate how the
Christian faith works: it bears love in persecution; not defensiveness.
We
try to wear our Christianity around our necks with little crosses or WWJD
bracelets, but it doesn’t work like that. We wear the Christian faith in our
self-sacrifice, but even how we think about self-sacrifice has been diluted. We tend
to think of self-sacrifice as giving somebody a big tip, talking with a person
who needs a friend (even though we’d rather be somewhere else), or raking
somebody’s lawn. But humility is much more than doing things we dislike; true humility is taking
up our crosses and following Jesus toward death—the death of our pride and even the the bodily death of our whole self.
Andy Root, in his
fantastic book, The Promise of Despair:
The Way of the Cross as the Way of the Church, says that we tend to make
discipleship about “not lying to get a better price, not drinking or having sex
in high school, claiming that you go to church in a secular environment, or
hanging a piece of Christian symbolism in your work cubicle. This, we imagine,
is carrying our cross; this is discipleship. But this is not discipleship. This is benign at best, and obnoxious at worst,
Christian moralism. To be a disciple is to be one who follows Jesus Christ. And
Jesus Christ can only be found in death, working life and possibility out of
its impossibility.”
We tend to hear
that kind of language as hyperbole—as if Jesus is the divine football coach, pumping
us up before a game—but this is not how it is meant—not by Christ, not by Paul,
or Luther who picked this up, and certainly not by Bonhoeffer who opens his
famous book on The Cost of Discipleship
with the line, “When Jesus Christ calls a person, he calls them to come and
die.” We cheapen the gravity of what Bonhoeffer is saying, writing those words
in a concentration camp in Germany,
when we think this is mere spiritual death; just as we cheapen the grace of God
when we believe that our baptism is merely a spiritual death (Root). No, we
quite literally die in baptism. Then, we are raised from death into new life. And
you will be called down that path toward death again once more when your days
on earth are over.
Humility, then, is
the only way of living that admits that we are going to die and accepts it as a
necessary part of living. That’s a not-very-sexy slogan, but let me tell you:
In weeks like the one I’ve just had—and many of you have had, too—this is the only
outlook on life that offers anything worth saying. It’s the only worldview that
doesn’t resort to cheap phrases like, “It’ll all be alright in the end.” To
practice true humility is to say, “No, my path in life is not concerned with whether
things will be alright. My path is
toward the cross, which means I will die to my ego and pride, I will probably
suffer, and I will maybe even come to an end much too soon.”
It’s not an easy
road to walk—in fact, Paul reminds us that it will be God alone that pushes us
down that path—but one way or another humility is the only defining trait worth
practicing, because it is the only road that ends with love. All others turn us
in ourselves. Only in admitting our own inadequacy, taking up our crosses and
following, will we discover love. It’s why the life of Jesus is so attractive
to us, because—at the end of the day—we want to believe it’s not all about us,
because we know how inadequate we are. And if humility does win in the end and
grace is true, then all this worry we have can begin to dissolve. So, maybe the
Puritans were missing something after all. Maybe the love of God is found not
in the harshness of the law, but in the humility of admitting we aren’t so special—not
on our own. Thanks be to God for that!
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