Humility

Readings:
Sirach 3:17-18, 20, 28-29
Hebrews 12:18-19, 22-24
Luke 14:1, 7-14

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I love those old Pink Panther movies, the ones with Inspector Clouseau. The joke is really the same, over and over again, right? Clouseau imagines himself to be this kind of 007-supercop, but he’s really kind of a bumbler, and he messes everything up – and that’s what makes it funny. It’s funny, because we all recognize that. We all have an intuitive grasp of the central idea of Clouseau. He’s this guy who thinks he’s fabulous, and he’s really not.

In the Gospel message for today, the key idea is that Jesus is teaching us about humility as a virtue. So that’s what I want to talk about today, humility. A virtue is what makes something good at what it is. This is true for all kinds of things. It’s also true for people. It’s even true for objects. The virtue of a knife is its sharpness, right? It’s what enables it to be good as a knife. We’re people. Why is humility a virtue for us? Let’s consider its opposite. When we’re grandiose, or conceited, were not putting God first. And this is something we all do.

In this instance, I’m reminded of myself. My wife, Susanne, will confirm this. She loves to watch police shows, and there are a couple she watches where the central character is a PhD. We’re watching those, and I say, I have a PhD, you know! She waves me off and goes, yeah, be quiet, I want to watch my TV show.

Humility is a virtue, because it gets us out of the way. And when we get us out of the way, then we can put God first. Then we, as people, can have a proper relationship with God. This is why humility is a virtue for a person. It’s what helps us to be in right relationship with God. In the Gospel message for today, it’s from Luke, chapter 14, Jesus is at the home of a leading Pharisee where He’s been invited to dinner. He starts to tell the people not to take a position of honor. He’s already reclining at the table. They’re all there. And it says, the people are watching Him carefully. So you can imagine, because we see Jesus’ interaction with the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the two principal sects in Judaism at that time, they were always challenging Him, trying to bring Him down, and so forth. Here He is, at this banquet at the home of Pharisee. He’s telling people, don’t take the position of honor at the table. He says, if you do that, you’re likely to have somebody else come in, who is it more honored by the host than you, and you’ll be told to move, and then you’ll be very embarrassed. So He says, don’t do that. Instead, take the lowest, least position, and if you’re asked to move, you’ll be asked to move to a higher one.

Everybody knows this passage, and it’s such a beautiful statement. “For every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” Let me loop back around to this idea of humility as a virtue. “The one who humbles himself, will be exalted.” If we have humility, we’ve gotten us out of the way. We’ve gotten ourselves and our ego out of the way, and then we’re in a position to be in a right relationship with God. So Jesus is telling us, don’t be like the one who thinks they’re great and discovers they’re not. Don’t be Clouseau. Instead, be humble. When you get yourself out of the way, there’s room for God. How do we do this? How do we go about being humble? Because, as I say – and we all know this – it’s not our nature to be humble. It’s not. We tend to put ourselves at the center of things. That’s part of the human experience. We see the world through our eyes. We see other people, and everything around us, through our own subjective experience and it’s very natural for us to make ourselves the center of things. But that’s what moves us away from God. So how do we become humble? Like so many things, it’s simple. It’s hard, but it’s not complicated. I think the answer is this: to learn humility, be grateful. That’s a practice that we can all do. When we are grateful for what we have, we will be humble. Because we’ll realize how much we do have. Then we can be humble and we realize how dependent we are on God. There’s a nice popular practice of writing down, each night, three things that we’re grateful for. If we do that every night, reflect on our day, that by itself is a good practice. But if we write down three things that we’re grateful for, then we’re learning humility when we do that. We won’t take for granted the things that God has given us. We’ll realize how dependent we are on God and how fortunate we are.

Doing this in prayer is another good way to do this. When we say our prayers, we can reflect on our day, we can think about where we could have done better, and we can be grateful for the things that God has given us. We can name them off, one, two, three. We can do that. The point is to make a practice of gratitude. When we make a practice of gratitude, we’ve moved ourselves out of the way – and then we can be in a right relationship with God as His grateful and loving children.

Amen.