PROUD TO BE HUMBLE John M, Buchanan
Luke 18:9-14 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
March 18, 1979 Columbus, Ohio

In his delightful and touching book, Brother to a Dragonfly, Will Campbell has
written about the South, his family, his religious experience and his involvement in
the Civil Rights Movement as a field representative of the National Council of
Churches, Near the end of the book a good friend of Campbell's is killed, Jonathan
Daniel, Episcopal Seminary student was arrested after registering black voters, The
day he was released from jail he was shot by a special sheriff's deputy as he Left
a small grocery store, ‘That night, Campbell, his brother and a friend who was a
skeptic about Christianity are talking. The friend has pressed Campbell to show how
his theology understood what happened, In that context Campbell experienced a kind
of conversion, Listen to his words:

"Conversion is at once a joyous and a painful experience,,,1, like
many other Southern liberals, had tried to deny our history, tc fkce
from it, to insulate myself from it in learning and action and
sophistication.,.Now there was a decided difference, Because from
that point om I came to understand the nature of tragedy. And one
who understands the nature of tragedy can never take sides, And I
had taken sides,,,Because we did not understand tragedy we learned
the latest jokes, learned to say ‘redneck’ with the same venomous
tones we had heard others, or ourselves, say ‘nigger’. We did not
understand that those we so vulgarhy called ‘redneck' were part of
the tragedy,"

CampbeLi discovered that in his moral outrage he had come to regard the per-
petrators of racism with the same sense of superiority as they regarded black people,
And while his middle class propriety prevented him from shooting them down or
lynching them, he already bore in his heart the moral rationale for shutting them
out of the human race, He said that the discovery taught him more about the Gospel
of Jesus Christ than anything that had ever happened to him.

More than three hundred years age the philosopher Pascal wrote: "Discourses on
humility are a source of pride in the vain,,,Few men speak humbly of humility,
chastely of chastity..." (Pensees, p.102, #377).

John Calvin believed so deeply in the unmerited grace,mercy, love and forgiveness
of God that he had a hand in arranging for a man who disagreed with him to be burned
at the stake,

One of the set pieces of modern theology is a Little document entitled simply
"Nein! - the German for "no", It is Karl Barth's response to the ideas on Natural
Theology of his fellow theologian Emil Brunner, I have iong forgetten the content.
What I remember is the way in which Barth, theclogian of grace, arrogantly dismisses
Brunner as an imbecile,

And I confess - not that even my sins belong in the same category as John
Calvin's and Karl Barth's - that nothing irritates me as quickly and cotally as
self-righteousness, In fact, I find it so offensive that I become pretty self-
righteous about it.

“So it goes" Kurt Vonnegut writes whenever he uncovers that kind of absurdity
in the human condition. You and I are versatile sinners. We have this relentless

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need to be better than somebody. We keep being told, however, that pride is bad,
humility is good, But when we try to be humble and succeed a little bit, we start
to feel good about it, and before you know it we're proud of our humility,

One time Jesus told a deceptively simple little story about pride and humility.
It is so simple a child can understand it, It is deceptive because it
forces us to think hard and finally to examine the whole matter of God's existence
and our relationship with Him,

Jesus drew a caricature of two figures everybody knew: Pharisee and Tax Collector,
They had both come to the Temple to pray, The Pharisee, a good man, a religious
official, a community leader - generous, patriotic, admirable in every way, The
Publican or Tax Collector was a study in contrasts: he had bought his position by
paying a "kick-back" to the government, who happened toa be the Romans; he made a
living by overcharging his fellow countrymen when they paid taxes, He was a traitor
and a crook, He was also, by the way, very rich - far wealthier than the Pharisee,

Their private prayers are embarassingly honest. The Pharisee tells God the evil
things he has avoided, and recites his virtues ~ real virtues, He thanks God for
them, and throws in an unflattering, but revealing reference to that Tax Collector
standing in the wings.

In the meantime the Tax Collector tells it like it is, Too embarassed even to
look up he prays, "God be merciful to this rotten sinner," When they leave, says
Jesus, one of them is right with God and it isn't the Pharisee,

I don't think that is quite as simple as it seems, In the first place the char~
acterizations are absurdly exaggerated, The Pharisees weren't bad people, They
probably weren't arrogant: certainly not ail of them were, They were generous, good,
salt of the earth, citizens, Likewise there is no way to make a Publican into a
hero - even a momentary hero, My assumption is that the people who heard this
parable in its original setting knew, by the very extravagance of the exaggerations,
that the point was a subtle one, In the second place, experience teaches us the
universality of the Pharisee's sin, We know that it is hard not to feel good about
being humble, In the Pharisee's defense we know the reality of reverse snobbism
and ite ubiguitousness, We know about the arrogance of the Publican which uses the
Phavisee's phoniness, artificiality, as a foil for its own morai failure, My ex-
perience is that there are more non-church members out there, waking themselves feel
good with unflattering comparisons with church members than vice versa, But here
comes that self-righteousness again!

In any event, I conclude that this parable is about humility only peripherally,
secondarily, Its real subject is God - His existence - our relationship with Hin,

Christian thinkers have always known that spiritual pride denies something
fundamental about our faith. They have also consistently suggested that its exist-
ence is universal, St, Augustine, Luther, Calvin - stand shoulder to shoulder in
diagnosing the human dilemma as pride, self-centeredness, The late Reinhold Niebuhr
in penetrating sequence observed that: "Moral pride makes ‘virtue the vehicle of sin,..
Even the most pious practices may be instruments of human pride," (Nature and
Destiny of Man, p.201),

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The theologians conclude that Christian faith and spiritual pride are incom
patible: that God's grace is blg enough to cover any sin, except the arrogance that
refuses to acknowledge any need in the first place,

The real trouble with humility, however, is not a philosophic one, It is
Simply that we live in a time which isn't much interested in it. Humility may be a
religious virtue, but in terms of the real world it is regarded as weakness, un-
certainty or atupidity, The pop psychology of the decade emphasizes over and over
again the need for ego strength, self-assertiveness, self-confidence, The key to
health and happiness, we are told, is to feel good about yourself - even if there is
nothing about yourself you can identify as good, In business the meek don't inherit
a thing: in basebail, nice guys finish last; in this world you"Win through Intimida-
tion", The chief executive's chair is always slightly higher than all the rest: the
name of the game is power, influence, prestige, Humility, in the words of one pop
psychologist is “an inferiority complex turned into a virtue,"

Christianity may have overdone its concern with human sinfulness at times, But
that doesn't negate a very old position worth re-examining; i.e., that you can't
feel good about yourself without being honest about yourself; that penitence is
strength, not weakness; that health is a matter of integrity, acknowledgement,
healing, not pretending there is nothing wrong with us,

A religious journalist has observed that - "Somewhere, someone started the idea
rolling that confession of sin is a sign of weakness, penitence belongs only to the
flabby personality whe cannot stand up to be counted,'' (Presbyterian Outlock,
Hoover Rupert, 5/20/74), That mentality, 1 believe, now dominates our public life.
Before our very eyes several years ago it took on demonic proportions, A Vice-
President, an Attorney General, a whole covey of aides and advisors, the President
of the United States, in face of indisputable, clear, damning evidence, refused to
acknowledge, with consistent arrogance, that wrong had been done, The ideology was
frighteningly clear: honesty is not as important as the appearance of strength:
meekness is weakness: humility is for losers: "being President means never having
to say you're sorry". I thought at the time, and continue to think, that this
nation would have been spared a lot of pain, that it might even have forgiven and
extended another chance had the President simpiy said “Halt, Stop,’ We made some
mistakes, We did bad things, We're sorry. We won't do it again."

Helmut Thielicke, German pastor and theolegian who was hounded by the Gestapo
during the war, has written the classic piece on this parable, In it I discovered
this moving observation:

“Wa Germans had some conception of our guilt after the collapse at
the end of the last war and many of us uttered the prayer of the
publican 'God be merciful to me, a sinner!' But then came one of
the most dreadful moments in the spiritual history of our nation
when suddenly we began to say, ‘Others are just as bad as we are',"

(The Waiting Father, p,134),

Ef we can't achieve humility by trying hard to be more humble than our
neighbor, what exactly does this parable want from us? First, it is asking the
strength to say, "I'm guilty", whenever that is true: "I'm sorry": the courage to
admit one's fallibility and culpability and humanity, And it is asking us to stop
looking down for standards by which to measure ourselves, That was the Pharisee's

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mistake: not that he had exaggerated his virtue, not even that he was claiming too
much merit, His error was in looking in the wrong direction for a standard by which
to measure himself, He locked down and discovered as we all have on occasion thac
there is always someone bad enough to make us look good,

What the Publican did right - in fact, the only thing he did right - was Look
up to discover a standard by which to measure himself, You can be sure that he
could have found someone than whom he was. better, had he tried, He didn't. He looked
up instead, The parable asks the same of us, The Late Carlile Marney used to
employ the unforgettable imagery of a house to discuss the human personality, We
have a basement, he used to say, It's where the ~Lumbing is; the garbage; it's dark
and slightly dirty down there! It's whera the darker, meaner sida of us dwells, We
also have a balcony: high, light, graceful, On the balcony are our saints: those
people who inspire us to be better than we are: the models of humanity at its best.
Marney's criticism of contemporary pop culture is that it asks us to spend too much
time stumbling around in the basement, His advice was colorful and unforgettable:
“Come on up ~ up into the light; up on to the balcony: look up and wave at the people
standing there on occasion, Better yet,shake their hands, get acquainted with them,"

The parable, finally, is profoundly theology and intensely personal. There is
a form of anonymous atheism which is simple human arrogance, At its heart our deep-
est pride is a sense of total self-sufficiency which has no need for God,

Jesus used this deceptively simple parable to invite His listeners to think
about it, He knew that the result would be humility, Sometimes science knows that
better than any of us, The centennial of Albert Einstein's birth was last Wednesday.
in retrospect we are discovering something fascinating about his mammoth intellect;
namely, that the further he probed the secrets of the universe, the more humble he
became, He wrote: "Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science
becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe ~ a spirit
vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest
powers must feel humble,"

The parable invites us to stand alone before the vastness of the cosmos: to
contemplate the incredible miracle of life in the universe: to be open to awe - as
the Psalmist put it centuries ago "When I look at the heavens - what is man that thou
art mindful of him?' Tt is an invitation to be alone with God, stripped of all
prestige and power and goods and status with which we surround ourselves... Thomas
Carlile wrote a magnificent fantasy of Louis XV before the judgment seat: "Yes,
poor Louis, death has found thee, No palace walls, or gorgeous tapestries could
keep him out. Time is done,,,the pale kingdoms yawn; there thou must enter naked,
all unkinged..," (The French Revolution, quoted by G,A, Buttrick, The Parables,

p, 88-89),

That's where our relationship with God begins - "naked, all unkinged." Humility,

And it proceeds, once begun, to help us see ~ perhaps for the first time - our
indebtedness; to acknowledge and embrace the simple fact that our being is a gift -
which we did nothing to deserve: that we were called into life by something other
than ourselves: that we were loved into life and borne into life by paia and nut-
tured into Life by patience and affection, It is to acknowledge that life is a

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gift: that, without exception our dearest possessions have been given to us: the
love of cur families, the friendship, esteem and caring extended by others,

And then, having been made humble by the simple truth - the existence of God
and the givenness of life, the teller of this parable bids us follow where He is
going - the road to a cross, where the very love of God was poured out for us, all
of us, cach of us; a cross where the secret heart of God is laid bare and we are
given a gift so priceless, so precious, there are no words to describe it, and in
the presence of which we cannot even raise our eyes,

That is the humility to which God calls us: which God gives us, The honest
humility which simply happens when we are alone beneath a cross; humility which
there becomes our joy, our crown; humility of which - in Jesus Christ our Lord,
We may be proud,

Amen,

Eternal God our Father, give us courage to be honest about ourselves, And
in our humility tell us again about the glory of Your Love, the victery of Your
kingdom and the exaltation of Your crucified Son, our Lord Jesus Christ,

Amen,