Honest Humility
By Charles Rush
February 24, 2002
Matthew 18: 1-4
t
me set the stage for this sermon with a few quotes
from some of our notable athletes:
-
Chicago Cubs outfielder Andre Dawson on being a role model: "I want all
the kids to do what I do, to look up to me. I want
them all to
copulate me."
-
Football commentator and former
player Joe Theismann 1996: "Nobody in
football should be called a genius. A genius is a
guy like Norman Einstein."
-
Senior basketball player at the University of
Pittsburgh: "I'm going to
graduate on time, no matter how long it takes."
-
Shaquille
O'Neal on whether he had visited the Parthenon during his
visit to Greece: "I can't really remember the
names of the clubs that we went to."
-
Lou Duva, veteran boxing
trainer, on the Spartan training regime of
heavyweight Andrew Golota: "He's a guy who gets
up at six o'clock in the
morning regardless of what time it is."
-
Pat Williams, Orlando Magic
general manager, on his team's 7-27 record
in 1992: "We can't win at home. We can't
win on the road. As general manager, I just can't figure out where else to
play."
-
Steve Spurrier, Florida
football coach, telling Gator fans that a fire
at Auburn's football dorm had destroyed 20 books:
But the real tragedy was that 15 hadn't been
colored in yet."
Little wonder that we have
the kind of ego problems that we have with professional athletes. These are the
same people that we are paying tens of millions of dollars, so that we
regularly get stories like that tragedy last week with Jason Williams, showing
off his collection of shot guns after considerable consumption of alcohol and
other drugs so that his limo driver was killed. Official cause of death-
horseplay. Sounds like my teenagers… because it is my teenagers with 35 million
dollars.
And
there are some people, the Masters of the Universe described by Tom Wolfe in
the late 80's that really think they are above the rules that confine ordinary
people. Remember Leona Helmsley, the wife of real estate magnate Harry
Helmsley, when she was indicted for tax fraud about 10 years ago. Said she,
‘only little people pay taxes.'
I
had a conversation many years ago with one of the underlings for the Oil
Minister of an OPEC country that was hiring Americans on off-shore oil rigs at
very attractive pay-scales, why they didn't have any of their countrymen
actually working on these operations? He explained to naïve young 20-year-old
me, that “My people own… You Americans just manage”. I must confess to a
certain glee when, years later, these same owners were begging us Americans to
come put out the fires on the oil rigs that were beneath them to operate. I
trust Red Adair and the boys stuck them with a whopping bill for management.
But
few of us, even in status conscious New York actually think in terms of
boundless hubris, despite our actions that appear to cry just that. I think
most of us that go over the edge are actually a lot more like the currency
trader John Rusnack who worked for Allfirst Financial, a subsidiary of Allied
Irish Banks. He made a series of bad calls and got farther and farther in debt.
Confused, anxious, worried to death, he defied SEC rules to hide the extent of
his losses, and proceeded to make another series of bad investments. Bad went
to worse and in a rash moment he made some big, risky, last-ditch trades only
to plunge the whole bank into indebtedness in the mean time.
Home has had
quite an impact down the generations as well as the impact he had across his
own generation. Indeed, the impact of Homer's work was far greater after he
died than when he was alive. That was true of Johann Sebastian Bach and so many
other authors, sculptors and painters. There is some sense in which their great
deeds outlive them.
But,
the Greeks were also concerned to understand how things really are, what the
world is really like, what our role is in it, and what makes for the excellent
life. They were in search of things eternal in the midst of breakdown and
change and for that they needed philosophy. The consensus opinion was that
riches and worldly success without any philosophical understanding of the world
was empty and a waste. As Socrates once said, “The Unexamined life is not worth
living.”
And
in the realm of morals, in the search for what the meaning of our lives should
be about, what makes for the excellent life, they agreed that we had to begin
with honesty. That was what humility really was. Humility is an honest
appraisal of yourself. It is an accurate knowledge of who you really are, what
your gifts really are, what your limitations are really about, what vices
hamper you from attaining your potential, what pleasures you overindulge, what characteristics
you reflexively exercise to their developed tone. Who are you really? The
humble person can describe themselves honestly.
How
rare that happens in the world in which we live. An investment Banker in town,
who has worked on Wall Street for twenty something years now, was describing
for me the way that reviews go at the end of the year, when the Bank is
dividing up the all important bonuses. Here, at that dicey time of year, when
wheat is supposed to be separated from chaff, excellence rewarded and
sluggishness sent away empty- like that wonderful New Yorker cartoon,
that shows a man waiting for his bonus and his boss says, “Smithers, you made
me laugh, you made me cry, but you didn't make me any money.” Ugh!
This
investment Banker was telling me that practically every review of every
employee he has ever witnessed across two decades begins like this. “Rush, he's
a great guy.” “Thompson, he's a great guy.” We're all great guys, some of us
with more money, some of us with less, but great guys. We do manners well, we
do manipulation well, we do brokering well, but truth be told, we aren't so
great on honesty.
And
because of that, some of us can go by for years without having anyone tell us
what is really up. This is particularly true if we are successful. We can find
ourselves surrounded by sychophants, manipulators, and people who have learned
to tell us what we want to hear… Next thing you know, it is several years since
anyone has told you the truth. And one day, usually because of something really
stupid that we have done with our spouse or our kids, somebody close to you
actually attempts to tell you the truth- at least part of the truth about
something you've been doing for years that you thought was okay and it is not
okay- and a major fall out happens. It is like a betrayal or something... but
it is not a betrayal. It is like an assault… but it is not an assault. It is
someone telling you the truth and it comes as a shock because everyone around
you has been evading the truth for so long, and you have been evading the truth
with yourself… that it is not pleasant.
That
is why we need Lent in our lives. We need to take stock from time to time. We
need to be honest with ourselves. And it is not just about dealing with our
problems. We need to claim our gifts too.
But
let me stay on dealing with our problems for just a moment. Because the Church
has not done this well in the past. They don't do it well in the present. And I
have two observations about that.
The
first has to do with actual sin, when we have screwed up. For centuries, the
Church said, if you sin, come to Confession, admit it in the anonymous confines
of the confessional, do your penance, take the sacrament, you will be okay.
And
that fostered a climate of evasion. We stopped dealing directly with our wrongs
in two ways. We stopped feeling the need to admit them to anyone except the
Priest. And we stopped making amends for our errors to the people that we
wronged. We thought that by going through some religious hoops, that was no
longer necessary. The institution of the Church became a false place
spiritually. We could come here to be inspired, to participate, but we would
never really be honest or open with other people in the Church. And that is
spiritually false.
That
is one thing I found so disarmingly refreshing about Alcoholics Anonymous. I
think it is step number 4 out of the 12. “Take a fearless moral inventory of
yourself and #5 admit to one other person the exact nature of your wrongs. And
#6 Make a list of people that you have wronged and seek to make amends with
them.
What
a healthy spiritual environment, especially in our culture, for men. There is
nothing like a group of 15 men talking honestly about some of the stupid things
that they have done- and some of these stories are so fantastic, you can't make
this stuff up. There is nothing like seeing grown, burly men, making amends.
Nothing quite like seeing them hold each other accountable, not letting them
get away with their tricks to set themselves up to take another drink. The
first time I saw that I realized that so many men are starved for that kind of
real interaction, real community, real fraternity.
Someone
asked me what I thought about it later. I didn't really answer them. The real
answer was, I felt like I went to Church- real Church. And I think part of that
is that people were free to talk about what was really on their minds.
And
the second thing is just that. We have not been good institutionally about
creating a climate where people can really be honest about what is on their
hearts. Ideally, the Church should be the one place where people can say, “I'm
lonely”, “I'm hurting”, “I'm afraid”. Often, we don't feel any more secure
admitting these things in Church than we would at the Club and that is also false.
Probably
the Church won't ever be a whole lot better than the society in which it
operates, at least not the Institutional Church. But hopefully, the
institutional Church can spawn smaller circles of sharing, smaller groups,
where the Spirit can really move. Because honest humility is not only being
graced with others who care enough about us to tell us what is wrong with us,
it is also being graced with others who will bless us and lift us up. People
who will encourage us to live out of our higher selves and develop our
potential and not compromise when we really shouldn't.
The
real Church meets when the Spirit really moves and we can be honest and
supportive in love. And that kind of honesty is vulnerable without being
threatening, intimate without being mushy, transparent with boundaries. It can
happen. It does happen. And it we are lucky enough, we just might be part of
it.
Amen.
© 2002 .
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