Sermon: The Nature of True Humility

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The Nature of True Humility

By Charles Rush

March 12, 2000

colleague called this week to ask what I was preaching on, I told him 'humility'. There was a long pause. He said, "I hope you're not planning to speak from personal experience... It could be a very short sermon."

It calls to mind Ted Turner's self-reflection. He said, "If I only had humility, I'd be perfect."

And then there is the other form of arrogant pride that enough of us suffer from, the accident of history that we were born into outlandish opportunity and assumed that it was somehow reflective of our virtue. It was recently said of George Bush, "he was born on third base and he thinks he hit a triple."

We play to people's vanity too, don't we? Particularly when they are of a certain level of power and status, particularly if we need them. Eleanor Chaffee once said that "Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves". I know people who are where they are in the largest part because they are experts at this one skill.

Pride is the slowly developed vice of those who are gifted enough or fortunate enough to be able to set the world revolving around them. In some ways, it is an accidental by-product of our success. It is not something we aspire to but it is there nevertheless. Too many of us, at some point in our successful careers, can resonate with Jane Austen's comment, "I've been a selfish being all my life, in practice , though not in principle."

If Pride is the besetting problem, the virtue is true humility. But what is that? First, let's be clear about what it is not. Humility is not humiliation. We have that association in English because the root word is Latin "humus" which means earth, or "humilis" which does mean humiliation. In it's profoundest sense, humiliation is what the Brooklyn police officers visited upon Abner Louima.

We have a calendar in the office that notes some less notorious occasions of humiliation and bonehead ness. On April 2, 1931, in an exhibition baseball game in Chattanooga, Tennessee a teenage girl struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. On March 9^th , several years ago, Vice President Al Gore told an interviewer on CNN "I took the initiative in creating the Internet." This list of humiliating gaffes is long.

True humility is a central pre-condition for spiritual wholeness. Aristotle once said that it is the crown of virtue, suggesting that it also makes the other virtues shine more eloquently. Both observations are right.

In Book IV, section three, of the Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle says that the humility is the via media between those who think of themselves inordinately and those who lack self-respect. The Greek word is saphronsyne. The only English word we have for it is magnanimous. Sometimes, it gets translated by the phrase "high-minded."

The point of his excursus on the subject is to suggest that true humility has an accurate self-appraisal. It implies a certain confidence. It implies a certain self-acceptance. It implies a character that is at home with one's self. It is the ability to be able to state the skills you have to the degree you have them. On the one hand, you can claim your gifts and you can appreciate the good that has come from their deployment.

On the other hand, it is a knowledge of your limits. It is not claiming credit for things you didn't have any effect over. The original virtue comes from two fields, the military and politics. Things happen in the middle of battle, unforeseen events and consequences. "High minded" soldiers accept the accolades of their peers for heroism in battle. And they also refuse to claim credit for turns in battle that just happened on their watch.

It is obvious why pride is such a constant temptation in these two arenas, since success depends on defeating an enemy or an opponent and reputation has so much to do with being perceived as a winner, a leader in victory.

I once heard a famous psychologist lecture at Columbia on Male Identity and Leadership. After the lecture, in a casual setting, I remarked that the sin of Pride was extensively developed in the history of Christian theology, particularly in the West and asked for their comment. They explained that it was because Christianity pretty quickly became the religion of the Empire and men in power need to hear a lot about claiming more credit than they deserve and using others in the pursuit of their goals.

I asked why that was, psychologically. They responded "short version or long?" I said, "short version."

"Because evolution has pre-programmed men to have sex with most anything they can hold still and to view everything else as something to kill."

I responded, "I here you saying that conquest has brought it's own set of issues."

"Yes."

I mention that because issues around conquest are always in the background in the Bible as well. Pride or Vanity is lifted up in a particular way in the Old Testament. It presumes that it is addressing the Macho excess of military/political leaders in their day, who act in such a way as to put themselves on the throne in tyrannical manner, manipulating not only the economy but also religion to buttress and extend their own power. It is addressed to men in power.

Humility, in that context, is a proper recognition of your creaturely limits. It is learning to give thanks to God for the many blessings that have put you in this position of leadership that have nothing to do with yourself, and it is learning to use your position to extend the welfare of everyone around you towards a just peace, and not simply nakedly manipulate the system for self-gratification. It usually comes with a reminder that the reins of power are assumed only briefly in the broad scope of history. It usually comes with the observation that you tend to be taken down the same way you ascended. It usually comes with a prediction that you will be held accountable by God, ultimately for your actions, so don't make light of your responsibility to create prosperity for all.

These admonitions have their place. But, they obviously have their limits. The presume that your self-esteem is intact. They see the primary issue as over-confidence and misuse of power. The danger is the injustice that results from arrogance- whether that is a temper-tantrum that squashes the little people (in the process), indifference to the plight of the have nots, or an ego that is only alive when it is crushing something else.

But there is another side to humility. It is properly claiming your gifts. This may be more important in this regard. There are a whole lot more of us out there who are fearful, who lack the self-confidence to achieve our potential, who live with a nagging self-doubt.

One of the most profound themes in the teaching of Jesus is that we are all children of God. He preached that to a bunch of people who found it hard to believe. Why? They were mainly women, mainly peasants without power, mainly people who were sick, some who were slaves, some who were viewed as hopelessly compromised with the Roman authorities. None of them had good self-image; probably most were underachievers as a result. The message of the gospel, as it came to them was one of empowerment, taking themselves seriously, claiming their dignity and their rights. And that is important too.

There is a particular poignant sadness to people who are damaged with low self-esteem. I was talking with a teacher recently about this phenomenon, as it relates to women of a certain age. In class, the teacher said that sometimes the women would say that they couldn't master the skill that the teacher was trying to get them to accomplish. The teacher used encouragement, praise. It was obvious that the women had plenty of native talent but it was like there was something inside of them that was telling them that it was just beyond them. It is so sad at moments like this to hear someone who is frustrated just give up, "I can't". There is so much spiritual/emotional stuff packed into that curt summary. Who knows where this negative self-image comes from... our culture? Our families? Our spouses? Somehow too many women, no matter how accomplished they are, how talented they are, just don't believe in themselves at the end of the day. They are afraid to be all that they can be.

I like to think things are changing on that front but I'm not sure. At least there are small victories. I knew we had turned a corner several years ago in our family, thanks in no small part to the quiet persistence of my wife. One of my daughters gave some evidence of a positive self-image as a woman when she was a toddler. Small but important victory. She had just returned from a visit to the park, where she had been birding with Mom. They saw some ducks. She said to me, "the one's with the brown heads were the females and the ones with the green heads were the other kind- the unfemales." Female is the norm. I am the norm. You go girl.

It is important to feel like you are the norm for healthy self-esteem. One of my colleagues, an African-American Minister in the area told me that one of the first things he did when he moved here was to go to the police station and introduce himself to the Cops. He wanted them to see him and his car for future reference. When he told me that story, I thought "it would never occur to me in a million years to go introduce myself to the Cops but then I've never had that experience of driving home from a party late at night and being pulled over and treated like a criminal before I ever open my mouth." Low self-esteem is corrosive. If you feel less than, not quite up to, not quite as good as, not deserving... it is oppressive, mangling of the human spirit.

It is an important word to hear that you are a child of God. That image has inspired people for centuries to take themselves seriously. It inspired our rag-tag colonists to challenge the power of the British Empire, to leave behind a centuries old tradition of feudalism and aristocracy in order that they might form a more perfect union. It inspired them to pen what is perhaps the most profound line in all-political history "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." When the power of that one line was internalized, so many people have said, "We are endowed too"- women, former slaves, religious minorities, gays and lesbians, the list is long and it will grow in the next century.

Bill Coffin was fond of saying that our job as Christians is to afflict the comfortable and give comfort to the afflicted. We might paraphrase him, to say, we are to humble the powerful and empower to the humiliated.

Jesus taught us that we should see ourselves in light of the Divine Spirit, which animates and inspires us. He taught us to orient our lives as citizens of the Kingdom of God. He encouraged us to become conduits, letting the Spirit of God flow through us to other people. What does that look like? On one level, it looks like Jesus in this sense. Theologians say that the will of Jesus was one with the will of God. Jesus, you might say, was perfectly in tune with the Divine Spirit. He radiated or manifested God's Spirit- in his teaching, in his actions of compassion and healing, even in the midst of suffering and death.

So in Christian piety, when people are on the advanced end of spiritual wholeness, you hear people talk about how they become transparent. Thomas Merton, the contemplative Monk, who has written so much on this subject, once said, "The humble man receives praise the way a clean window takes the light of the sun. The truer and more intense the light, the less you see of the glass." On the advanced spiritual plane, people just manifest qualities of peace, love, mercy, understanding, compassion, courage in suffering. They are full of grace, meaning that they recognize that they neither generate these values, nor are they entirely responsible for them, but that God has manifested these values in and through them.

What about our every day lives, living as we do, in a world full of compromise and secularity? What does humility look like there? Quite obviously, we are surrounded by people as full of ego. In many professions, it seems to be part of the job description: Professional athletes, Clothes Designers, Surgeons. It is just built-in to the power brokering that infuses the whole culture of Banking and financial services. No question, we all know, work with, work for small men with big jobs.

But I have also had the privilege of meeting some people, and you have too, that are truly accomplished in their fields, have made an enormous contribution and gained considerable reputation and have been rewarded to boot. And they have this feeling, when you ask them about it without the cameras and the lights going, when they actually talk about their lives, they have this feeling that whatever greatness they have comes from outside of them. John Ruskin once said, "The test of a truly great man or woman is their humility. I do not mean by humility, doubt of their own power. But really great people have a curious feeling that the greatness is not in them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other person and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful."

The very best leaders in our world, no matter where they happen to be serving, are not successful because they imprint their will on those beneath them. They are great because they inspire people around them to actualize their resident potential. They empower those around them with a vision of the Common Good that makes people want to work together. They keep the focus on what everyone is accomplishing together and bring various talents and energies together in such a way that people in the team bring out the best in one another.

The focus is not on themselves because their focus is not on themselves. You want to be around them because of the spirit they bring out in you, the quality person that you become in association with them. Henry Kaiser said, "when your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt." Surely, he was thinking of small, vain egos. But on another level, that is also the type of person we want to become, a person whose work simply speaks for itself, whose life simply speaks for itself.

Brothers and sisters, take yourself as seriously as God takes you and live out of that greatness.

Amen.