A Sermon from First Church, Scarborough…
A sermon offered by the Rev. Ian F. “Jack” Steeves in the public worship of the First Congregational Church of Scarborough, Maine on Sunday, September 2, 2007. The principal reading was Luke 14:1-14.
“For all who exalt themselves will be humbled,
and those who humble themselves will be exalted” (14:11).
“Humble I Ain’t Yet”
William Barclay told the story of a school principal, by the name of Cairns. Cairns would never enter a classroom or any room first. He always said, “You first, I follow.” Once, as he came on to a platform to speak, there was a great burst of applause in welcome. He stood aside and let the man after him come first and began himself to applaud. He never dreamed that the applause was for him; he thought incorrectly that the applause must be for the other man. Barclay comments, “It is only the little man who is self important.”
In The Book of Common Prayer, long used by our Anglican and Episcopal brothers and sisters, the prayer (collect) for the Third Sunday of Lent addresses God “who sees that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.” It is a concise admission and beautiful confession of human weakness! Is it a prayer for us? We live at a great distance from the ancient believers who first spoke this prayer in the Sixth Century, A.D. After a thousand years, Roman law and Roman power were coming to an end. Back then, a world collapsed and there was no sure one to follow, to take its place. Everything that men and women had always taken for granted, as solid and supportive of peace and security, became fleeting, dream-like, and vanished. Why should they not have been led to declare, “…we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves”? Is it a prayer for us in our time and place?
For the ancient believers, the admission of weakness was not a matter of despair, for theirs was a faith that at the heart of creation and working through it everywhere was God and God’s power of reconciliation and compassion.
God was the power that had created the universe; God’s the power that had set up the interdependent web we call “life;” God’s the power that set humankind into relationships of cooperation and social cohesion. God’s was the persistent and healing power that closed the wounds of nature and restored the tempers of good men and women. God’s was the power.
It is to that same God that we, Christians, have always brought our anxieties to be calmed, our follies to be laid aside, and our sins to be forgiven. It is in the trust of God’s power that, having done our day’s work; we dare to lie down nightly to a peaceful sleep.
Awake or sleep, what are the qualities by which a Christian life ought to be distinguished or marked in the best and in the worst of times?
There should be at the center of life certain “calmness.” A worried Christian is a contradiction in terms. A Christian is, by definition, a person who has an inner strength that enables him or her to cope with anything that life can do to him or bring down upon her. There should be in the Christian a calm, quiet, unhurried and unworried strength that is the opposite of the feverish and fretful inefficiency of the world around us.
More, the Christian life should be characterized by what the older Bible translations called “charity.” Maybe the best contemporary equivalent is “kindness.” The Christian should be kind in his judgments; kind in her speech; and kind in both individual and collective actions. It is the characteristic of some people to think the worst and to put the worst interpretation on all human thought and action. It is the characteristic of some people to say only the cruel and cutting thing; it is the characteristic of some people to be so taken up with self that they have little or no time for simple acts of human kindness. The judgments, the words, and the deeds of a Christian are to be kind.
Still more, the Christian life should be characterized by “certainty,” as, for example, expressed by the Apostle Paul. Here I am thinking of our reaction to death as it invades our family and our church circle and lays its hands on those we love. When death comes, and it does, many people are lost in sorrow and are unable to find a way out; so many are left in a state of faith collapse; so many grow bitter and resentful; so many live the rest of their days as if all they have left are memories. The Christian is the one who in life’s bitterest hours and tumultuous moments is certain that nothing can separate us from those whom we love, and from the love of God in Christ Jesus (cf. Romans 8).
Still much more than any other quality, the Christian life should be characterized by “humility.” There are few things so common in human life as conceit, and there are very few of us who are not reasonably well pleased with ourselves. Humility is not a virtue to be practiced to achieve some reward. It is comes upon us as recognition of what we are and what we are not when the uncontrollable hits us. Humility is the admission that in some matters of life, love and death, we do, in fact, “have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.” Humility does not involve demeaning oneself, but in seeing clearly enough to know who we really are with all our faults and virtues in the context of our life in Christ.
Humility really means the reduction or, some would say, the extinction of self. It is only when self is at the very least controlled that one can learn. The first condition of learning is the admission of our own ignorance. It is only when self is controlled that one can really see the beauty and the necessity of human service, one to the other, and that one can finally discover that the essence of life is not in being served by others but, after manner of Christ, in serving others ourselves (cf. John 13).
I long remember the older, lay preacher who taught me something about humility. “Humble I ain’t, yet,” he would confess, “but God and my wife are working on it.” He was humble before God and God’s people. Some of us are humble only before impossible circumstances or embarrassing events. The old preacher’s concern was not that God should always be found on his side, but that he should always be found on God’s side. For this, he said, he had become a man who prayed constantly. And, he did! “A minister of Christ,” said St. Jerome, “should have his tongue, his heart, and his hand agree.”
True humility roots its deeds in the deepest of personal convictions. Personal whim and blatant prejudice, present in all of us, must give way to the greater good. The stiff neck and the tired back come not because “I am always right,” but because “the right is right, and will prevail.”
There is no real shame or defeat for true humility. The humble man and woman know that the victory always belongs to truth and righteousness, no matter how strong the forces standing against them.
Humble folk do endure hardships. The proud may bend their backs only in anger or just collapse in utter despair. The humble redeem “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” by making them the occasion for showing forth a valiant spirit.
You will recall, hanging nearly naked before his friends and enemies alike, one humble man cried out: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
There is a humility that stoops to wash a brother’s feet and bends low to dry a sister’s tears. The lower the humble one bends, the taller his or her true stature is among us. In the days ahead there will be ample need and opportunity for humble men and women everywhere. Such woman and men will one day, perhaps in our lifetimes, mend the brokenness of the world.
There are plenty of people, otherwise good folk, who want nothing so much as to dodge or escape from life. The world needs men and women whose one aim is to get on with the job of living this life and living it well.
“Christ can do without your works; what he wants is you. Yet if he really has you he will have all your works.” The words were penned by the Congregationalist Peter Taylor Forsyth.
God has given us the liberty to address ourselves to Almighty God. Chief of the powers God has given us is the strength to imitate God’s self-restraint of power and the willingness to be humble. And, when a humble prayer is made to God, God shows us how we may yet turn the very evil and suffering of life into the goodness and joy we have always wanted.
Let us pray: Almighty God, who sees that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the souls; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
