Journey into Humility (Sermon)

"Journey into Humility”

Mark 9:30-37

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

9/20/15

        

Lonely places.

Introverts usually crave them.

Extroverts usually fear them.

In lonely places, flying solo with your thoughts and fears, you can either come to fresh new understandings and energies, or you can come undone. The irony is that sometimes, those fresh understandings and energies require a certain degree of undoing. Tribal elders, therapists, the Holy Spirit, and other teachers often guide individuals or small groups into lonely places for coming-undone experiences that lead to healing or transformation.

Jesus seems to know that when his disciples face their rabbi’s death, they will, in some way, come undone. As the embodiment of Wisdom, he keeps their journey through Galilee a secret. He shepherds them through private, lonely places because coming undone is much more effectively and healthfully accomplished beside still waters.

Jesus learns this for himself at his temptation. He goes into the wilderness alone and faces all the selfish possibilities lying at his feet. It takes everything he has to push through the allure of pride, and for the experience to become a beneficial undoing.

I think that when the disciples begin to imagine that Jesus may actually die, and when they try to imagine life after his death, they face temptations similar to those that Jesus overcomes.

“What were you arguing about on the way,” asks Jesus. An embarrassed silence tells all. Out in that lonely place, confronting the reality of life without Jesus and the hope he represents, the disciples begin trying to intimidate their way into dominance over each other. As Jesus leads his followers through the valley of the shadow of death, they turn this terrifyingly gracious, lonely-place-experience into a childish political primary.

One can almost see Jesus shaking his head as he says, Boys, boys, boys. True greatness is about humility. To lead well, serve well.

Then, in a move that feels as much like a crusty old coach mocking his losing ball club as it does a shrewd teacher illustrating his point, Jesus picks up a child and says, in effect, Here I am. How you welcome a child reflects how you welcome me – and how you welcome God who sent me.

This is a scandal, of course. Children represent women’s work. No self-respecting, first century man gets significantly involved in the lives of children. Jesus is leading his followers into yet another lonely place where accepted arrangements are breaking down. He gives them the chance to realize that the difference between being humiliated and being humbled is the grace to live intentionally and gratefully as cooperating equals with all people.

“For by the grace given to me,” writes Paul, “I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think…” (Romans 12:3) Paul goes on to say that we are all members of one body. Only in humility can we truly accept, appreciate, and love one another as uniquely vital members of the same body. To live humbly requires an often-painful transformation. Biblical literature uses the stark metaphor of death to describe that transformation. And virtually all deaths, metaphorical and literal, include some kind of lonely-place sojourn.

More primitive cultures created that lonely place. One day during my grandfather’s experience with terminal cancer, he told his daughter, my mother, “Now I understand why the Indians used to take their old people out into the wilderness and leave them.”

While those desperate words reveal the weight of one man’s physical suffering, they also reveal how burdensome good intentions can be on anyone suffering critical illness or acute grief.

We often surround those who suffer with food, trifling conversation, cut flowers, overly sentimental Hallmark cards, and expectations of a valiant fight against disease or despair. While we intend such things as expressions of love and offerings of grace, just as often they become attempts to control the situation. They become ways to argue with mortality about who is the greatest. Sometimes the most comforting presence in the face of a death is that friend who sits silently and patiently with us, that friend who resists the temptation to cloak suffering with layers of words, that gifted friend who, like the angels and wild beasts of Jesus’ temptation, simply wait on us. They wait on us while we, as the old spiritual declares, walk that lonesome valley by ourselves.

Any argument with mortality, like any argument about relative greatness, is the stomachache that follows a feast on the poisonous fruit of pride. Pride is the seminal offense from which all other sins arise. Think about it. Is there any transgression that does not germinate in one person’s assumption of superiority over other human beings, over the environment, or over God? The opposing virtue to pride is humility. So it makes sense for Jesus to take a child and tell a bunch of prideful men that to be truly great, one must first learn true humility.

In ravenously competitive cultures like ours, humility does not come easy. It requires a spiritual death. And nothing can bring pride to its knees, nothing can make pride come undone like loneliness, like the experience of absolute need for others.

In foretelling his death, Jesus prepares his disciples for an experience of dire poverty. They will need each other. And they will not be able to carry on Jesus’ work without humbly depending on fellow servants, whoever they may be.

It comes as no surprise that in the very next story in Mark’s gospel we see the disciples complain to Jesus that they have seen a stranger casting out demons in Jesus’ name.

We tried to stop him, they say. He wasn’t one of us.

And Jesus stuns them with a rebuke: Why in God’s name did you do that? Why are you still trying to argue about greatness? Whoever is not against us is for us! Welcome their help!

When confronting our limits as human beings, when realizing that we are not so great as we would like to think, the Spirit leads us into a lonely place to die a healing death. As often as we find ourselves striving for greatness, superiority, victorious “rightness” over one another, we need to die that death.

A journey into humble service reveals to us the indescribable value, the wholeness, and the purpose unique to ourselves, to the individuals around us, and to the communities which God creates through us.

May we all enter places of transforming loneliness.

And may we learn servant-hearted humility so that we follow Jesus, and live as grateful members of God’s one body of justice, kindness, and Love.