O Lord, It's Hard To Be Humble

Humility is not much valued in our culture.  We do appreciate it if a sports star or a CEO isn't too pretentious, but we know that they didn't get where they are simply by slogging away at their jobs.  Rarely do people achieve such status without some degree of self promotion, without getting people to "Look at me!"

"Look at me" is modeled for us all the time.  Watch the six o'clock news and you're likely to hear, "Only on News Channel 10..."  The entire advertising industry is about "Look at me!"  Voices all around us clamor constantly for our attention shouting, "Look at me, look at me!"

Churches get involved as well.  I just set up a Facebook page and Facebook group for this congregation.  Social media is an important way for churches to get their message out.  But in the process we may simply add our voice to that cacophony screaming, "Look at me!"

Today's epistle reading says, "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble."  I wonder if I really believe that.  I suppose I could just ignore this message.  After all is comes from a seldom read letter, one that sometimes seems out of touch with Jesus' core message.  ("Wives, submit to your husbands" is in here.)  Problem is,  "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble," resonates perfectly with Jesus' message.  It's not very different from Jesus' own, "So the last will be first, and the first will be last."  And Jesus also says, "For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted."

It seems to me that part of the difficulty embracing Jesus' way of thinking comes from the way we've pigeon-holed Christian faith into our way of doing things.  We've failed to recognize what a radical idea Jesus' "kingdom of God" is.  Or perhaps we have realized how radical it is and simply rejected it.  After all, we're reasonably convinced that success, power, privilege, prestige, wealth, and so on are things that we achieve by hard work, that we earn in some way.  But the Kingdom has all this socialist sounding talk of lifting up the lowly and dragging down the powerful.  Consider Mary's song in Luke.  "He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and set the rich away empty."  Sounds like "class warfare" to me.

The problem with grace is that you can't deserve it and you can't earn it.  It pays no attention to status and does not respond to "Look at me!"  Grace does not fit well into the rules that govern the world we live in, which is probably why Christian faith so often gets reduced to the issue of one's status after death.  I'll get into heaven by grace.  Everything else is up to me, except maybe God will bail me out of jam now and then if I'm a good little boy.

Today's gospel features John the Baptist saying, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near."(Employing typical Jewish deference, Matthew's gospel says "kingdom of heaven" rather than "of God.")  Jesus quotes John exactly when he begins his ministry.  Both the Baptist and Jesus insist that God's reign is coming, and we need to change our ways to fit its.  Nothing about going to heaven here.  It's about God's will being done on earth.  It's about our world starting to mirror heaven. 

But our world doesn't dare trust grace.  We know that "God helps those who help themselves." (Not from the Bible, by the way.)  And we don't really want our world to look like heaven.  Then we wouldn't get to run it anymore.

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