Sermon, Sunday, October 24, 2010

“Humility- The Path of Spiritual Freedom”, A Sermon preached by The Rev Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, October 24, 2010 at Church of the Ascension, Rochester, New York

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt:… “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”(Luke 18:9, 14)

Last January, I had occasion to teach a doctor of ministry course at the divinity school. In my class I had four pastors from the Black Church tradition. As we discussed some of the challenges of preaching in our contemporary context, these pastors referred frequently to the popularity in many Black churches of what is known as the “prosperity gospel.” This is an approach to Christian life that is popular not only in the Black Church tradition, but also in many of the white evangelical megachurches that are so popular today like the church founded by Joel Osteen, an internet phenomenon. Basically, the prosperity gospel preachers offer a message that says that those who are right with God are those who are successful in this life, who achieve riches and power in their society. They preach that God wants you to be rich and that wealth is a sign of God’s favor upon you. Joel Osteen’s church, Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas draws 47,000 people to worship services every weekend. Worship is held in an arena, which packs in 16,000 per service. Osteen’s message is a very positive, upbeat, “God loves you and God wants you to be successful in this world” theme and it sells like hotcakes. Osteen tells his followers that God does not want them to be mediocre or average, God wants everyone to be extraordinary and wildly successful and the only impediment to that kind of success is one’s own negative thinking.

As my students struggled with how to square their understanding of the gospel with this “prosperity gospel” fad, they noted what seems to me to be obvious to anyone who actually reads the gospel. Think of the readings we’ve heard for the past couple of months in which Jesus consistently warns his followers about the potential danger of money and of their need to detach from concern about money or desire for it if they want to be disciples. Remember the line, “Give away all your possessions and follow me?” Then today we have this parable about the tax collector and the Pharisee, focusing on the virtue of humility, which is also completely at odds with the prosperity gospel movement. How does the Christian virtue of humility fit into this gospel of self improvement? Indeed, can it fit? Osteen says that God wants everyone to be successful, to become the best that they can be. His theology and his entire ministry is all about the power of positive thinking and being and becoming a perfect human being. Shortcomings are seen as things to overcome on the road to perfection. While on the one hand there is something offensive to me about the message of the prosperity gospel preachers and their way of promoting it, on the other hand I have to hand it to them – they reach thousands of people every week in their congregations and millions more through television and the internet. Something that they are selling is meeting a need among middle class American seekers.

Osteen’s “excel and succeed” message is completely in keeping with our modern, competitive American culture, which is probably why it attracts so many people. Jesus says “those who exalt themselves will be humbled and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” The humility that Jesus talks about in this parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector doesn’t fit easily into Osteen’s “become a better you” theology and on the whole it doesn’t particularly resonate with our contemporary tendency to believe that we deserve the good things that we have in life such as jobs, homes, education and the like. Nor does it fit well in the culture of uncivility that marks our contemporary discourse, as political rhetoric pits various constituencies against one another, polarizing groups of people on almost every political or social issue of importance. Humility, which according to Jesus is integral to discipleship, is a hard sell in our culture.

Humility is an ancient Christian virtue and one that is probably more misunderstood than any other. Joan Chittister, Roman Catholic Benedictine nun calls humility “the lost virtue.” I would argue that not only is it a lost virtue, it is a mostly misunderstood virtue as well, especially in our modern way of thinking about personal development and human psychology.

In the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, Jesus tries to teach us something about the virtue of humility. The characters in the parable are portrayed as two polar opposites and the challenge lies in figuring out with which character we are expected to identify. Pharisees have come down to modern day Christians with a “bad rap.” And yet, in many ways the Pharisee in this story is more like us than the tax collector. He is a good, upstanding citizen. He is morally upright, he tries to do the right thing by his family and his society. He worships regularly in the temple, he prays often and sincerely to God, he tithes to his church, he does good deeds of charity. He’s the kind of person we want living in our neighborhood, coming to our church, teaching our children. If he walked in here some Sunday morning, we’d be eager to recruit him as a new member of the church and in a couple of weeks he’d be on the vestry.

The tax collector is another matter entirely. In first century Palestine, the tax collectors were Jews who had sold out on their own people by agreeing to collect taxes levied by the oppressive Roman government from their own people who did not in fact benefit from the tax monies collected by the Romans. These tax collectors were often extortionists and thieves, out to protect their own hides with respect to the Roman government and taking money from Roman authorities in exchange for their services of hounding their own people. They were truly outcasts, because their own people regarded them as traitors and the Romans regarded them with contempt. They were useful to the Roman authorities, but certainly not respected.

So Jesus tells this story about the two of them praying. The good guy and the bad guy are both in church, both praying. Who’s got it right? Who’s prayer is heard with approval by God? The way this story is set up we’ve got human beings who don’t get along, who have significant differences with one another and distinct attitudes and opinions about one another both placing themselves before God and Jesus renders an opinion about who is more “justified” than whom. In the context of our modern day struggles within the Anglican Communion and the conflicts that persist between and among different kinds of Christians, not to mention tensions between people of different religious traditions, this story has a strange resonance. What is true humility and what does it look like? Is it much in evidence among modern day Christians?

John Claypool, Episcopal author and preacher suggests that we need to look deeply at this story so as not to allow the tax collector’s humility to become the moral standard by which we live. He notes, “there is something quite upsetting, to be sure, about making an admission of mediocrity into a virtue, about saying, in effect, ‘I do not live by any high moral code, but neither does anyone else, so at least I’m not a hypocrite.’” (Claypool, p.129) He notes that the tax collector’s prayer could have been as far off the mark as the Pharisee’s if what he was really praying was something to the effect, “I thank thee God, that I am not as proud of myself as that Pharisee…Let your angels sing ‘Alleluia’ over a sinner who is at least as honest as I am, willing to admit he is a dirty dog, and not trying to hide behind some kind of pretension like the Pharisee.” (Claypool, p.129).

Here’s where it gets tricky. Jesus says that those who humble themselves will be exalted and those who exalt themselves will be humbled. Exactly what it is to be humble becomes the core question in this story. Is the tax collector humble because he admits to being a sinner? Is the Pharisee not humble because he admits to having virtues and to being proud of them? Canon Dr. Joseph Cassidy, of St. Chad’s College at Durham University in England gave a brilliant lecture some years ago entitled “Humility, Grace and Freedom.” In that talk he addressed the conflicts in the Anglican Communion and he outlined beautifully what a truly humble approach to these differences would look like. In brief he argues that humility is found where there is an openness to change, a willingness to be surprised by God’s Holy Spirit and a profound respect for those with whom one disagrees. That respect is grounded in the fundamental understanding that all of us fall short of the glory of God and none can claim more virtue than the other, particularly when controversies become heated as they have been for some years now.

Humility is a tough spiritual virtue to nourish in Christian life. It pushes us to the boundaries of our own personalities because it is lived out in the context of human relationships. You can’t be humble all by yourself. It is a virtue that can only be experienced in relationship and in community as we bump up against folks who annoy and confound us. Dr. Cassidy reminds us, “None of us is worthy. None of us is infallible. None of us can afford to assume moral superiority. And that’s especially difficult when everyone knows that he or she is right….I do wonder whether the Gospel…is constantly challenging all of us to be spiritually free enough to hear something unexpected from God, to be spiritually free enough to be open to a more profound, costly level of discipleship. …Spiritual freedom is… a measure of whether I would be willing to change my mind if God required it of me.”

“Humility is reality to the full,” says Joan Chittister. It is the result of what she terms “unwilled change” which is a hallmark of human life. Benedictine teaching about humility holds that it is a process of continuing conversion wherein a person comes to truly understand his or her place in the universe. It does not mean humiliation. It does not mean that a person thinks of herself as a miserable, wretched no-good loser. It also does not mean being satisfied with oneself just as one is with the result that no further growth or development is sought or desired. Somehow, the truly humble person is the one who is keenly aware, both of her giftedness and beauty in the eyes of God, and of the extent to which she falls short of the full stature of Christ. A truly humble person, therefore, is actually a combination of the Pharisee, minus the arrogance, and the tax collector, minus any overblown or hyperbolic wailing about his sinfulness. Humility may be an old fashioned religious virtue, but it is one sorely needed in our conflicted and violent contemporary world. Amen.