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Humility
 

A sermon by Revd Mark Hatcher 

1st September 2019 - 11th Sunday after Trinity
 
Hebrews 13: 1-8, 15-16; Luke 14: 1, 7-14


 
“For all who exalt themselves will be humbled
And those who humble themselves will be exalted.” (Luke 14: 11)
 
Humility is the quality of being humble or of having a lowly opinion of oneself and one could be forgiven for thinking that among the political class right now humility is not in abundant supply. In a social context humility defines being of a low condition, rank or estate and it is in the context of such language that some Members of Parliament are calling for a “humble address” to be presented to the Queen in response to the Prime Minister’s decision to suspend Parliament to cut down the time parliamentarians have to legislate against a no-deal Brexit.
 
In whatever context it is considered, humility is seen as a virtue. It focuses on low pre-occupation with the self and that is what today’s Gospel is about which is our place in the Kingdom of God and how we discover that place because there is no table plan.
 
Our place in God’s scheme of things will describe our relationships with God, with Christ and others and it will say something, probably quite a lot, about the value we actually place on those relationships, and on our interests in relation to the interests of others.
 
Humility matters because it is about recognising limits, our own limits and those of others; it’s about acknowledging the limits of our knowledge and of our self-knowledge, and about the limits of our capacity for good and for evil which is important because our place in the Kingdom of God, by God’s grace, is not pre-ordained according to ‘rank, condition or estate’ nor according to what we think we deserve.
 
So let us join Jesus one Sabbath. The main meal took place after the morning service in the synagogue and, as was the custom, guests were often invited. Perhaps Jesus had been preaching and was invited afterwards. His presence in the house of a leading Pharisee was perfectly natural. Now there are several places in the New Testament Where Jesus explicitly criticises the lawyers and Pharisees for their tendency to seek the places of honour, because at any formal meal the seating at table was strictly governed according to seniority. But the lesson the lawyers needed to learn is one of universal application: ‘Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled.”[1] Recognition eludes those who demand it, and this is true at the deepest level in the matter of salvation. There, more than anywhere, the person who reckons that he qualifies will discover by this very fact that he does not. To claim God’s approval as a right, on the grounds of one’s position in the church, or one’s reputation in the community, or even one’s good reputation of oneself, is a positive disqualification. There is no entry to the Kingdom of God through the narrow door for the one who is laden with status symbols and of a sense of his or her own importance.
 
Perhaps it is our innate restlessness that makes us look for things to fill the gap or what is missing in our lives or our self-understanding. Tackling that missing element, we persuade ourselves, will settle things once and for all and make us realise that we have arrived and we’re safe. When we’ve attained that goal, acquired that thing or that person, we shall be whole. But the very idea that we could get to such a point is the fundamental error we human beings make. We can make it in e realm of the spiritual as much as in the realm of the material. 
We need to humble ourselves to accept that we cannot, by ourselves, tell the full story of our lives until we face our deepest vulnerabilities and we can do that supported by our faith in Christ, through whom God speaks the eternal truth. To receive this truth is neither to acquire a theory about the universe nor to escape from time into a reconciled eternity, but to embrace the struggle to be faithful within the limits of our humanity.[2]

We must learn therefore that our restlessness is part of what we are made for, that in the manic struggle to fill gaps in our lives which can lead to the exploitation or domination of others, we are never going to feel at one with ourselves, and that all desires are gratified. The more clearly we think we understand who God is, the more we know that we can’t possess or express what God is.
What we can do is to walk with Christ in the risky territory of this world, trusting in his gift and not our efforts, to keep us faithful. Instead of the urge to fill the gaps in our hearts, we can enable those gaps to become ways in which God’s love comes alive in us. We can start wanting what God wants. We can begin to see other human beings in the light of God, to long for their good as if it were ours. This is how the passion for justice grows out of love for God, as Alfege recognised when he was martyred here on this spot more than 800 years ago in the year 1012.

The liberation of pre-occupation with the self opens us up to communicating a love more like God’s. We become able to love people not as instruments for our own gratification but for what they truly are: created beings made in the image of God.

Out of this flows a vision of how love can work in the Church, of how in this Church, the body of Christ, this community of faith can demonstrate and practise service well-pleasing to God described by the writer to the Hebrews in our first reading and echoed in our reading from Luke in Jesus’ remarks to his host,[3] by offering hospitality to the stranger by being grateful for the gifts of this Church, and generous in sharing those gifts, and by being alongside the vulnerable and the marginalised. Knowing our limitations we can say with confidence: ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid.’[4]

As we seek to cultivate the virtue of humility, of knowing our limits, we will know what we don’t know and that there are some things we don’t know anything about, but it is just wonderful to learn that they exist. So if we are on the way to self-knowledge, we are continually discovering what we don’t know about ourselves and about others.

The more we know, the more we are aware that we don’t know, and that should keep us humble.

May we have the wisdom and humility to know God through experiencing the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness, and allow God to grow in us.
 
AMEN

[1]    Heb. 14: 11.
[2]    Williams, R. Luminaries: Twenty lives that illuminate the Christian way (2019) SPCK London, pp 16-19.
[3]    Luke 14: 12-14.
[4]    Heb. 13: 6.
 

Revd Mark Hatcher, 01/09/2019
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