Sermon for the 11th Sunday after Trinity, 2020

Homily for Trinity 11, 2020

Fr. Tony Melton @ Christ the King Anglican

One of my favorite Bible stories as a kid was the parable of the man with a log in his eye. It’s hilarious if you think about it. A man with a log in his eye. I’m sure there is a doodle of that somewhere in my old notebooks. Children, after you finish your Bible worksheet this week, draw a picture of a man with a log coming out of his eye. Have your parents take a picture of it, and send it to me. I’ll post the winner of the church’s Facebook feed. In contemplating this parable last week, something hit me that I’d never seen before. For years, I understood this parable as pointing out the issue of focusing on other people’s problems before we’ve dealt with our own. No doubt, that message is there. But have you ever thought of what was causing the log-man to miss the fact that a beam was sticking out of his face? “Look in the mirror, bro!” How could he not see that? It is obvious when you think about it that the problem was not only that he had a judgmental spirit. Even prior to this, he could see himself accurately. His pride blinded him to his own sin. He lacked humility.

Humility is such an important topic. We receive a steady diet of validation from all the wrong places. “You be you.” So many pop songs about how “you are beautiful, no matter what they say.” The marketing strategies of have shifted to companies becoming fans of their customers. This is not a bad thing, but we need to be aware that we are constantly being bombarded with messages about how great we are, and not how great God is. In today’s world, a humble man is a rare bird.

Our subject this morning is Humility, and our texts will be the Propers for the 11th Sunday after Trinity found on page 205. Please turn there with me. The Propers are the Epistle and the Gospel for the day, this time out of 1 Corinthians 15 and Luke 18. First, we will use the Gospel reading to flesh out the definition and importance of humility. Then, we will walk through 1 Corinthians 15, taking St. Paul as a case-study in humility.

On page 205, take a look at the first sentence of the Gospel reading, and read it with me. “Jesus spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others…” Isn’t this a great definition of pride? Trusting in ourselves and despising others. Put another way, pride is an inaccurate vision of our own power and perfection. Just look at the Pharisee when he prays, “God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this Publican.  I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.” It makes you cringe to hear it. Does he not realize how he sounds? or see how he looks? Yet this is what pride does. It makes us blind. Like the man with the log in his eye, pride skews our vision so that we see ourselves as more powerful and perfect than we are, and others as more useless and flawed than they really are.

But humility is the accurate view of our own selves, our sin and our powerlessness. We see this in the Publican. “The Publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.” He nails it. He sees accurately. How? Is it because his sin was so much more obvious than the Pharisee’s? Perhaps. But more certain is that proper vision of our own sin and our own powerlessness comes from a proper vision of God’s holiness and His sovereignty. Our God is righteous and all-powerful. And if we lose sight of that, we can’t see a thing.

We see in the parable a picture of pride and humility, but we can’t move on before noticing God’s reaction. He justifies the Publican, but not the Pharisee. It wasn’t about the good works that they did, it was about the posture of their heart. “for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.” This is a dynamic that we see all throughout Scripture. God hates a prideful heart, but He “dwells with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit.” If you are too high on yourself, He will knock you down, and He will keep you down until you see who you really are, and who He really is. Then and only then will He lift you up—when you are humble.

Take a look at Joseph. Joseph was his father’s favorite son. He flaunted his coat of many colors as he hung around the house while his brothers worked. When he had a dream that all his brothers would someday bow down to him, he thought, “I should go tell my brothers, and I’ll bring my coat as well!” You know the story. His brothers throw him down in a hole. Then he is sold into slavery where eventually he is thrown down into a dungeon. We often tell the story about how God can take the brothers’ evil actions and turn them into good, but there was also a work in Joseph that was taking place in all this. God was bringing him low, so that He could exalt him.

Okay. Let’s take a look at St. Paul and ask why the Prayer Book give us 1 Corinthians 15 on a Sunday focused on the virtue of humility and the vice of vainglory. We will see as we walk through this passage that Paul gives us great insight into the path of humility.

First, Paul shows us in verses 1-3 that humility sees the glory of what has been received. “BRETHREN, I declare unto you the Gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand. [and skipping ahead a bit] For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received.” If anyone would have had a better spin on the Gospel, it would have been Paul. He knew the Law better than anyone in the Church, except for Jesus. Yet, he sees his ministry as merely passing along what was told to him. If only the liberal bishops of the 20th century would have had the humility of St. Paul, and not given in to chronological snobbery. Pride says that we can make the old better, but the humble man sees that God worked definitively in the past, and our job is to receive what has been handed down. This, by the way, is one of my favorite things about the Anglican tradition. At its best, it is humble. It seeks to receive the gifts of the Church of Old rather than trusting in ourselves to finally figure things out. Humility sees the glory of what has been received.

Next, Paul shows us in verse 9 that a humble man places himself below others because of his faults. “For I am the least of the Apostles, that am not meet to be called an Apostle, because I persecuted the Church of God.” Now this is a tricky one. We are not to be defined by our past failures. Yet, remembering them can be of real use when we are tempted to exalt ourselves above others. Christ himself commands that we take the low seat, to jump at the most menial tasks. A humble man sees himself below others because of his faults.

Next, in verse 10, Paul shows us that a humble man claims his own position, identity, and success only by the grace of God. “But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all; yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.” In other words, Paul constantly carries around these two identities that together create humility. This is so important. You need to carry with you always these two identities. One identity is who he was in the past, and what he’d be capable of right now if God hadn’t got ahold of him. The other identity is who God says he is and who God has made him to be. Luther described this in his famous phrase, “simil justus et peccatur”—simultaneously a saint and a sinner, and we see this in our vestments that we wear. A sinner literally covered by the holiness of Christ. If I miss the mark, that’s my bad. If I hit the mark, it’s all God. A humble man claims his own position, identity, and success only by the grace of God.

And finally in verse 11, Paul shows us that a humble man sees himself as one part of the Body of Christ. “Therefore whether it were I or they, so we preach, and so ye believed.” He doesn’t care who gets the credit for the faith of the Corinthian church. And Paul doesn’t see the success of the Church as completely up to him. Paul knew that he was on a team, and Jesus was the MVP, not him. A humble man sees himself as one part of the Body of Christ.

I hope that the need for humility is apparent to you, but what is it so important for us at Christ the King right now? We have experienced quick growth, people are coming back to God, things are clicking. But we need to continually remember that it is God who gives the victory. Also, we are wealthy, healthy, loved, supported Christians. “What if the whole world was filled with people like me?” My mentor was a Dutchman, and the Dutch are known for thinking very highly of their culture. When someone would do something that cut against his sense of propriety, he would stop himself from playing the part of the Pharisee, and say, humbly and genuinely, “I am glad there are other people in the world who are not like me.” The third reason we need to hear this word on humility right now is that we are in planning mode. But planning mode and praying mode are often worlds apart. Hear the words from our Old Testament reading in Job 5, “He disappointeth the devices of the crafty, so that their hands cannot perform their enterprise. He taketh the wise in their own craftiness: and the counsel of the froward is carried headlong.” As we ramp up for Launch, and make all our plans, we need to devote ourselves to prayer more than ever that God would move in a might way. But the last reason why we need to hear this word on humility is because many of us have recently left other churches, and even when the move was for the sake of mission, not contention, it is still easy to look back and remember the conflicts and the hurt and to think that the problem was with them, to think “Thank you God that I am not like them over there.” But there are always things to repent of. Always. Focus on that, that joining the launch team might be an opportunity for sanctification and repentance, not avoidance and self-validation.

So what do we need to do? First, we must acquire the publican’s posture in prayer. Prayer should always be our first application. In fact, the publican’s prayer is perhaps the most repeated prayer in the history, the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus, have mercy on me, a sinner.” To approach God with a penitent and humble spirit is what He desires.

Second, you should go to whoever you have strife with because of your pride. In St. Benedict’s Rule, if any monk even suspected there was strife between him and another brother, he was to throw himself down at the other’s feet and beg forgiveness for whatever was between them. We are far too accustomed to strife in our churches, even more so in our families and marriages. In almost every conflict, there is something that you can confess and ask forgiveness for. Don’t mention what they’ve done. Humble yourself and ask their forgiveness. Often they will respond with their own apology. “But what if they think they’re blameless?” What have you got to lose, except your pride?

The way of humility is hard to find. The way of pride is everywhere. We all succumb to it! Third, we need to assess what is in our lives because of pride and divest ourselves of it. How many things about you are there because of pride? Why do we do the things we do? Why do we drive the cars we drive, work the jobs we work, wear the clothes we wear, buy the homes we buy, do our dos the way we do? Maybe it is because you actually need these things to accomplish the specific calling that God has given you. That’s not wrong. But maybe it is to justify that inaccurate vision of yourself, where you are justified in your own eyes, and before the world.

How do we know our motives for these things? If we are to see ourselves accurately, we need to see God more clearly. We must ask Him to show mercy on us, and show us these things. When is the last time you sat and considered the holiness and power of God, and let your image of yourself take shape in that light? We spend far more time thinking of what we should do, rather than of who God is. And that is why Holy Communion is so central to the Christian life. It is here that our identity is most clearly seen. We stand back back as a people and beat our chest, not lifting our eyes before a Holy God, but then we are absolved, and even more than absolved, invited, and invited closer than the publican could have ever dreamed—all the way up to the table of God. It is at the altar that we most clearly embody both identities of saint and sinner. It is at the altar that we clearly see ourselves as children of God, needing food, needing love. God sees you. There is nothing you have to prove to Him. He hates bravado, but He dines with the meek. So, church, let us seek the path of humility, and thereby, please God. Amen.