September 2, 2007 Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 112; Sirach 10:12-18; Luke 14:1, 7-14
The Book of Sirach is part of the Wisdom Literature of the Bible, like the
book of Proverbs. Wisdom Literature tries to help people live truly good and right
lives, not only as individuals but as nations. To sum up a vast amount of writing,
the primary teaching of the Wisdom tradition can be seen in a few verses both in
Sirach and today’s Psalm.
The Psalm begins, “Happy are those who fear the Lord, who greatly delight
in his commandments. They rise in the darkness as a light.” This is the positive
side of the negative statement we heard in Sirach that said, “The beginning of
human pride is to forsake the Lord; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker. For
the beginning of pride is sin, and the one who clings to it pours out abominations.
Therefore the Lord brings upon them…calamities.”
The wisdom of the ages says that they are happy who have that love of God
that is like fear, a humble love full of awe and respect and longing, and a sense of
dependence of God’s mercy and power. Those who keep this reverent focus on
God and let nothing separate them from God tend to do what God leads them to
do, and so they rise in the darkness as a light. Such people are in touch with their
deepest, truest self—the truth that God is always present within us, ready to shine
through us.
On the other hand, Wisdom says, those who turn away from the source of
their life in God are ultimately miserable. “Sin” is a word for the condition of
being separated or withdrawn from God. It is a sign of human pride to try to live
by our power rather than God’s. Wisdom says that when our heart is focused on
something other than God, the works we produce are abominations, and calamity
comes of them.
To be focused on and trust in God is to be humble—rooted in the humble
truth. To focus on ourselves and trust in our own powers is to be proud and false,
as if any power we have did not come from God. Sirach said that the proud will
inevitably be thrown down and the humble lifted in their place. The Mahatma
Gandhi echoed this wisdom, saying that throughout human history the truth has
always been victorious in the end. Always.
Two hundred years after Sirach was written another Wisdom master had a
similar teaching. He said, “For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and
those who humble themselves will be exalted.” Jesus makes it sound so simple—
exalted humbled, humble exalted—and if we were all simply our true self rooted
in God, it would be simple, but because of human nature, because of the nature of
the human ego and false self, things can get terribly convoluted.
There is a well-known story about a rabbi who was praying in the
synagogue one afternoon. He was on his knees, dramatically pounding his chest
and wailing, “O Lord, I am nothing—nothing! Surely no one in the world is lower
than I am. I am lower than the worms in the ground. O Lord, have mercy on me!”
The cantor was so moved that she fell to her knees beside him and raised her
glorious voice singing out, “Lord, I am nothing-nothing! Have mercy on me!”
The sexton was sweeping the floor, and he was so impressed by their humility that
he dropped his broom and came running and knelt a humble distance away saying,
“O Lord, I, too, am nothing. Have mercy on me.” Then the rabbi leaned over and
whispered to the cantor with disdain, “Look who thinks he is nothing!”
The human ego hears Jesus say, “All who humble themselves will be
exalted,” and it says, “Fine, then lets get busy being humble so we can be exalted.”
But humility in the service of pride and ambition is a false humility, it is self-
exaltation dressed up in humility’s clothing. It is just another strategy of the false
self’s program for happiness on its own terms, separate from God.
Strangely, Jesus seems to be speaking in support of this ambitious, arrogant
humility. In his parable about the wedding banquet he says if we want to be
honored we need to go to the lower seat so that the host will come and find us and
move us higher. He makes it sound as if the point of his story is how to gain the
honored seat at parties, just as the follow-up teaching seems to be about how to get
a reward for the guests we invite to our feasts.
But since when has Jesus been concerned with worldly reward and success?
What he is always trying to teach us is how to live on earth as if we were already
in the realm of God. He is trying to help us shift away from a life focused on
ourselves and our ego’s exaltation to a life focused on God and God’s exaltation
within and around us.
The wedding banquet was a common symbol for the realm of God in
Jewish Wisdom teachings. In Jesus’ parable the host is God. If we go selfishly
competing for the honored seat in life, the nature of God and God’s realm is that
we will sooner or later sink lower. As Sirach says, abominations will come out of
us and calamities will come upon us. On the other hand, if we do not have our
self-interest at heart, our focus on God will allow God to lift us up. God will be
able to guide us to do what is right.
Jesus said in Matthew, “Strive first for the realm of God and God’s
righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well.” The humble are
those who know themselves to be dependent entirely on the source of their being.
The humble are those who make God’s realm and God’s right ways the first and
constant focus or their lives.
The proud who turn from God in their hearts and serve their own self-
exaltation will find themselves humbled by life until finally they become truly
humble and acknowledge the rock bottom truth of their life being dependent on
God. When at last they turn back and hand their life and will over to God’s care,
where it has truly been all along, they will be raised. This is a piece of wisdom
affirmed by every member of every 12 Step Group like Alcoholics Anonymous in
the world.
Remember what the stakes are here. This is not just an academic
theological point. It has practical consequences for all of us. At stake is happiness
versus misery, actions that rise in the darkness like a light versus actions that are
abominations, a nation of peace and security versus a nation brought down by its
own violence, pride and greed.
Let’s say, to adapt Jesus’ parable, that all life is a big party that we have
been invited to—we as individuals and we as nations. And let’s assume that
everyone at the party wants to be happy or at least content, and everyone wants to
be considered worthy of respect. The difference between the guests is only in how
they go about seeking those good things.
Here comes a guest. She is anxious about herself. She wants to be happy
and honored but she is fearful that she will find the party to be a cold, judgmental
place. So she has a plan. She has a program for happiness. Her plan is to make
everyone admire her. She gets dressed up. She walks in with a winning smile and
makes a witty remark, and she notices the looks of approval on the faces around
her. Whew! She feels relief. She feels happy—until the next moment when the
next cluster of people comes into view and her anxiety rises again to impress
them.
Here comes another guest. He, too, has a plan for gaining happiness and
honor. The key to his feeling secure is to stay in control, to keep proving his own
powers by manipulating the situation to go well and reflect well on him. He
strides into the party and immediately approaches the most important person there
and guides the conversation to a topic on which he has some special information to
share at length, and when he has scored that point he quickly moves on to score as
many more as he can with other people, delivering one authoritative monologue
after another. If his insecurity gets too strong, he moves into a corner and
watches.
A third guest, meanwhile, has another strategy. Hers is to look down on
everyone else in order to make herself feel exalted. She goes around whispering
catty remarks about what others are wearing or saying or doing.
A fourth guest is stealing the silverware, slipping it into his pockets when
the host isn’t looking.
All these guests at the party have in common that they feel they need
something that they do not have in order to be happy. That feeling drives them to
do selfish things that are not truly worthy of respect. Sooner or later the host is
going to see the negative impact their selfishness is having and will intervene in
order to save the party.
Even when these kinds of strategies seem to work, they do not bring lasting
happiness because these people need to keep getting more and more of what they
seek in every new situation. They may be exalted by racing to the honored seat,
but they are then brought low again by their own fear or desires. If they are
individuals, they become slaves of their own programs for happiness. If they are
nations, they neglect their own poor and through wars or abuses of power they
exploit other weaker nations until they collapse from the rot within and the attack
of enemies without.
There are many self-serving strategies that lead to being brought low, but
there is one basic strategy that Wisdom teaches us that leads to true exaltation. It
really is simple in the end—simple, but not easy. The strategy is to learn how to
turn away from our self-concern over and over and over again, to keep reshifting
our focus a hundred or a thousand times a day, moving from seeking rewards,
comforts and pleasures for ourselves to seeking God. The Wisdom way to
exaltation is to open our hands and let go of whatever we are clutching in our
striving for happiness, to surrender our self-will and trust in God, to open our
hearts in total receptivity to the Spirit’s guidance and power.
Such a guest will want to notice others at the party more that to be noticed,
will want to listen more than talk, will want to build others up rather than lord it
over them, will want to serve the host out of gratitude rather than steal the
silverware out of greed.
Happiness and honor at this party depend on our learning how to be
humble, meaning how to live the truth of our situation, living out the truth of our
complete dependence on God in whom we live and move and have our being,
living completely connected to God without our false self or ego or self-concern
getting in the way, so that God’s light can shine through us and be exalted.
If you want to learn how to do this, the Prayer of the Heart is one place
where we work on it every week, and I am always available for spiritual direction.
But every time we pray seeking God with our whole heart we are working toward
being truly humble and truly exalted. So let us pray in silence now, seeking to
connect to God’s presence in the silence within us…
Sermon 09/02/2007