Luke 14; 7-11, 12, 13

What keeps us from humility?

Some passages are very complicated, but the readings for today seem very straightforward.   Jesus talks about humility.  “When you are invited to a banquet, do not sit in the place of honor.” He says.  In the verses following (our verses of the week) he says:” oh and by the way don’t just invite your friends to your banquet.”  In other words, be truly hospitable, don’t be hospitable with a hidden agenda.  Or we could say: don’t honor yourself, but give others the chance to honor you and invite those who bring you no honor.  When we boil it down we get the following: “denying yourself is good and calculated selfishness is bad.”  Not only is this a theologically good message, it is a spiritually good message, it is a morally good message and it is a culturally good message, because many cultures would see this as a positive value.   Of course, it is not politically smart.  If you are a politician you want to be seen and you want to make sure you have your friends on your side.

So, friends, the main message of this passage is pretty clear now.  So maybe I should just say amen and move you on to the social hall.  Or I could give you some examples of famous people who had all the fame they needed and who had a few moments of humility that we then make way too much off

But wait a minute, and let’s look behind the passage and what Jesus might be aiming at.   What is it that makes us less than humble and selfish in our social life?   Are we just bad people.  I don’t think so.   Chances are it has a lot to do with our survival as a group or as a species even.

We talked earlier about the book “The Shadow of the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.  The father who was a ruthless magnate and the son who pursued his desires at all costs had a lot in common in the end, even though the father would not even stop at murder.  They were marked by their own selfishness and lack of humility.  Because the son was a struggling writer, we tend to forgive him.  There is one great line in the book where the author writes: “we are the puppets of our own thoughtlessness.”  That is line that is certainly true about the father and the son in the book.   They are victims of their own selfishness.  Or as a friend of ours paraphrased it: “selfishness makes you stupid.” That’s another great line.  Lack of humility too makes us stupid.  You know I am a pretty progressive guy, but sometimes I think we have been too hard on Richard Nixon. Yes, he broke the law and yes, he wasn’t a very nice person and that he wasn’t honest.  But I think that perhaps he was more a puppet of his own thoughtlessness than an evil man as he is often portrayed.  Nixon was a guy who grew up working in his parents’ grocery story and resenting the customers and developed quite a sense of inferiority, a sense of inferiority he spent his life trying to get rid of.  So you could say he was driven by his own woundedness in such a way that humility was out of the question and selfishness was inevitable.  The singer James Taylor has a song called “line ‘em up” in which he has  Richard Nixon lining up the employees of the White House and wiping away a “tiny” tear.  He talks of them as little people. In a way Nixon was never able to get the little person out of himself.  That is perhaps true of all of us, friends, we have trouble getting the wounded little person out of ourselves.  Our selfishness and lack of humility are related.  We want to be seen, we want to be heard, we want to be noticed, we want people to acknowledge that we were here, that we are here.  If nothing happened to us during the earlier part of our lives that was in any way unpleasant, we might not act that way or act that way less.  Because of our woundedness, things happen or do we happen more so that way.  In the book “Shadow of the Wind,” the young man goes to the “Cemetery of Forgotten Books” and he ‘rescues’ the one remaining copy of the book “The Shadow of the Wind” and becomes completely obsessed with the mysterious life of the author behind it.  His life starts looking a lot like the life of that writer.   But the beauty of the story is that someone cared enough to preserve the book and read it and to care about the life of the person behind that book.  That is the beautiful part.  It is a lost and found story.  It is deep down inside the story of the Bible.  People get lost and they are found.   But this is our fear, to become that book that nobody reads, that nobody pays attention to.  To be the book everyone tosses aside.  That is what drives us to stick our head above the crowd, to want to be important in the eyes of others, but we forget that God is obsessed with us, God wants to read -and help write- the book of our lives.  Friends, the only way we can ever overcome our lack of humility and our selfishness is by truly grasping that God loves us and our story passionately. Thanks be to God.