Sunday
August 28
A Special Guest
By Marsh Chapel
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We have a special guest with us today. He has made his way into our midst, through a long and arduous journey. Our guest over a great expanse, has come our way. Because his presence has come at significant expense in time, labor and effort, and because his presence is precious to us, in ways both known and unknown, both speak-able and unspeakable, we pause to honor him.
Many thousands of miles separate us from his homeland. In fact to travel here, he travels over land and sea, over continent and sub-continent, over mountain and valley and hill and molehill. The very fact alone that we have him here is cause for delight, wonder, celebration, reverence, awe and joy. Many hundreds of years separate us from his family of origin, from the time and times of his time. To travel here he has to engage in a sort of time travel, like that involved in every day, in every hour, in every moment, in every memory and in every hope. Here is the future: ah, it has slipped into the present. Here is the present: ah, it has slipped into the past. Here is the past: ah, it has slipped into memory. Here is memory: ah, it has been lost, or reborn in hope.
Peer into his eyes for a moment, eyes aware of a numinous divine humility. Our visitor awaits your recognition.
For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.
Can one acquire humility without enduring humiliation? It is a serious question. Discomfort, we ignore. Pain, we obey.
Our visitor emerges from the strange world of the Bible. In these weeks, in case we might have tried to avoid the mysterium tremendum, in worship, we have had the lava flow of Hebrews to terrify us, the ringing prophetic voice like no other in Jeremiah to rivet us, the heart wringing prayer of David in the Psalms to stop us in our tracks. Our visitor emerges from this kind of strange world—Hebrews, Jeremiah, Psalms—the strange world of the Bible. Strange. The Bible is very different, up to and including its most distinctive different difference, the Gospel of John.
Yes, wee have a special guest with us today. He has made his way into our midst, through a long and arduous journey. Because his presence has come at significant expense in time, labor and effort, and because his presence is precious to us, in ways both known and unknown, both speak-able and unspeakable, we pause to honor him.
Our guest began life as a story told perhaps among shepherds and wanderers. His is the kind of story beloved of the poor, the maimed, the halt, and the lame. His is the kind of story beloved by you, at 3am, with troubles. His is the kind of story audible to the mortal, the sick, those in need, and those beyond help in need. Our guest brings a Sunday story. Six days shalt thou avoid your impending death and your ongoing fragility and your endless fault lines, but the seventh shall be a Sabbath unto the Lord.
Allow me to present him to you, if you will. You may greet him with a Methodist handshake. He already knows you, as the Bible knows us where and when we know ourselves not, as God knows us, though we were to know ourselves not at all—what sweet truth! That is, you need no introduction to you. He knows you. But allow me to present him to you, perhaps for the first time, but more likely for the first time in a long time. Isn’t it happy to have such a guest today?
In his younger days, he was a story told along the highways and byways of life. It may be that he was a Palestinian. The fifty by one hundred and fifty mile rectangle of ancient Judea was probably his home in his growing up days, though as for that, we cannot be entirely sure. As a story goes, he is an old one, from the time of his youth until today. Remember we piped to you but you did not dance, we wailed to you but you did not weep? That account earlier in the gospel of children playing games in the marketplace, one group wanting to play the game called ‘weddings’ the other wanting to play the game called ‘funerals’? Pipes? Wails? Of course life is much more than weddings and funerals, isn’t it? Or is it? Our guest was in the mix of these sorts of stories and games and reposts and conversations and imaginative utterances.
As a Palestinian, spoken in Aramaic, our guest found his way to Jesus, or to someone close to Jesus, or to Luke, or to someone close to Luke (by then translated if that is the case, into simple—koine—Greek). You see he has quite a pedigree (Lk 11:43, 20:46). What an honor for us to have him here. (Note: if I were presenting to you a human guest who is 2000 years old, who has traveled from the ancient Middle East to us in our modern experience of the ongoing middleeastification of American life, who has consorted with Jesus and Luke and all, who has been a compinche, compadre, companion to Teresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich and Georgia Harkness and Mother Teresa and Mother Olga and your Momma and mine, who has been spoken and spoken of since before Polycarp was a pup—would you not be astounded?) We venerate the venerable, in worship: ringing out for us are sturdy words, millennia old.
Greet him please. Our guest is our Gospel reading, an ancient manuscript. We rightly stand, at his reading in the service, to honor him. In worship, he stands among us, VERBUM DEI, the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, St Luke, Chapter 14, vss. 7-11, though before his life in ministry he was simply an ordinary businessman, walking the dusty trails of Bethlehem and Nazareth and Capernaum and Jerusalem. He is the everlasting account of a wedding banquet, which, like all social moments, is one full of both treasure and treachery, a feast to which you—YOU!!!—have been invited.
Peer into his eyes for a moment. Our visitor awaits your recognition.
For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.
Can one acquire humility without enduring humiliation? It is a serious question. Discomfort, we ignore. Pain, we obey. The preaching of the gospel is the utterance of the word of faith in the hope, and in the trust, that such a word may become, by God’s grace, an intervening word, a saving word, a word that enters and changes the course of life. Can humility so conveyed and so acquired protect us from humiliation, learning the hard way, learning from experience?
You may be curious about our guest’s features, temperament, personality, and resume. His extended family includes a hero from Proverbs: Claim not honor in the presence of the King, Nor stand in the place of great men; it is better for you to be told, ‘Come up hither’, than to be humbled before a noble (25:6). The question of whether you are seated ‘below the salt’ or not abides. His face is present also in Luke 18: 14 (everyone who…) and Matthew 23: 12 (everyone who…) and James 4: 6 (God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble). He has a second cousin or two in Luke’ ‘sermon on the plain’ (Lk. 6). His is a familiar face, one you recognize even though you cannot place it immediately: Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled and he who humbles himself will be exalted. Our guest has many colleagues in traditional Jewish wisdom literature, and shares its characteristics of artistic language, hyperbole, paradox, metaphor, and (here) similitude. Our guest is not really a parable, though Luke kindly affirms him so. He is a simple tale, with a proverbially twist. The story he tells warns about humility, in the mode of a wedding feast. The twist, at the end, announces a turning in the world, from high to low and low to high. And here, he shows his true colors. He is an introduction to the Christ of God. Luke 14: 7 intimates, whispers, a reverence for the divine humility, the hiddenness, silence, absence of God.
Luke has included, here, a wisdom saying fit to the voice of Jesus. To honor others, to count others in higher esteem, to give credit where credit is due, to develop a capacity for wonder and vulnerability and self-mockery, to take ourselves lightly that we may fly like the angels, to acquire a capacity for humility—such a process of development in life, here, in this wisdom saying, fit to the voice of Jesus, is offered us as a way of life, of health, of salvation, of peace.
Peer into his eyes for a moment. Our visitor awaits your recognition.
For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.
Can one acquire humility without enduring humiliation? (repeat) It is a serious question. Discomfort, we ignore. Pain, we obey.
For us, as part of a national culture now careening toward and into an apotheosis of hubris, the similitude of Luke 14 hits home. The way of the long future is along the path of humility. But we get tired of humility, because it is a tiring and tiresome talent to hone. We get tired, and if we get scared when we get tired, if a portion of fear is laden into a potion, poisonous potion, of pride, and if that fear potion is potent enough to carry us, we forget who we are. We forget Emma Lazarus and prefer demagoguery. We forget Lincoln and support nativism. We forget King and accept narcissism. We forget Jesus the crucified and cleave to the cry of triumphalism, out of fear and out of exhaustion and out of amnesia. We forget the advice of the author of Hebrews: Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured. We turn aside from the prophetic voice of Jeremiah, Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for something that does not profit. Can we acquire a modicum of humility, that measure we will minimally need as a people, without enduring humiliation? Can we learn without learning the hard way? Can we see the pending consequences through the lenses of humility, without needing, in order to learn, a full experience of humiliation? Or, as so often in history, will we need to drink the bitter cup of full cultural and national humiliation, in order for humility to return? I would like to be optimistic… Sometimes people just have to learn the hard way. To learn what? Pride goeth before a fall.
For us as individuals, who have known more than our share, as our guest reminds us, more than our share of elbowing our way to the head of the table, the similitude of Luke 14 hits home. Narrow is the gate and straight is the way that leads to life, and few there be who go therein. We all, one way or another, get born on third base and think we hit a triple. We all see a turtle on top of a fence post and think he got there by climbing. We all preach our version of the sermon, Humility and How I Achieved It. We all have one set of arithmetic for our own deeds and misdeeds and another for others, one abacus for our own intentions and another for those of others. We all can stand a little and more than a little house cleaning when it comes to the rooms marked off by what we think we did when we didn’t and what we think we didn’t when we did. There is, that is, still a place in the pilgrim faithful heart, for the quiet Yankee voice of self-criticism. There is still a value in the teacher who began every class bowing to the students, not knowing what range of genius might already be present. H R Niebuhr in the evening hunted up a student whom he had chastised in the morning, asking forgiveness. Can we learn without learning the hard way? Can we see the pending consequences through the lenses of humility, without needing, in order to learn, a full experience of humiliation? Or, as so often in history, will we need to drink the bitter cup of full personal humiliation, in order for humility to return? I would like to be optimistic… Sometimes people just have to learn the hard way. To learn what? Pride goeth before a fall.
Mahatma Ghandi, whose favorite Christian hymn we have just sung, in sandals and Sari, walked four miles a day, among all his people. He knew the English court, the banks of the Thames, the style and rhythms of British life, but went home. Ghandi reminded us that for the hungry God will present, if at all, in bread. To listen to the hurt in others, to pause before the hidden courage of others, to accept the grace to celebrate the good in others, to spot the one thing needful in the need of others—herein, behold, a humility, a divine humility—today’s special guest. Shakespeare: There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will. (He) ‘who came not to be served but to serve’…who today occupies the supreme place in history…to whom has been given the name that is above every name’. (So E F Tittle, Commentary on Luke 155).
Lead kindly light amid the encircling gloom
Lead Thou me on
The night is dark and I am far from home
Lead Thou me on
Keep Thou my feet, I do not ask to see
The distant scene, one step enough for me
So long thy power hath blessed me, sure it still
Will lead me on
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent till
The night is gone
And with the morn, those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost a while
Sursum Corda: Lift up your hearts! Great this Lord’s Day a Special Guest, Luke 14: 7, and shake his hand: For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.
– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.
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