AU United Methodist Community

Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
October 24, 2004
Joel 2:23-32; Luke 18:9-14

Joel 2:23 ¶ O children of Zion, be glad and rejoice in the LORD your God; for he has given the early rain for your vindication, he has poured down for you abundant rain, the early and the later rain, as before. 24 The threshing floors shall be full of grain, the vats shall overflow with wine and oil.
25 ¶ I will repay you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent against you.
26 ¶ You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied, and praise the name of the LORD your God, who has dealt wondrously with you. And my people shall never again be put to shame. 27 You shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I, the LORD, am your God and there is no other. And my people shall never again be put to shame.
28 ¶ Then afterward I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. 29 Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I will pour out my spirit.
30 ¶ I will show portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke. 31 The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the LORD comes. 32 Then everyone who calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape, as the LORD has said, and among the survivors shall be those whom the LORD calls.

Luke 18:9 ¶ He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ 13 But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ 14 I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

I remember one of those conversations in college. I am sure you’ve already had them–even if you’re a freshman–and if you’re a senior, I know you’ve already had them. The kind where you stay up all night arguing over ridiculous things in the lounge, or the dormroom or wherever. And sometimes they’re conversations of great consequence arguing over fundamental religious truths, philosophies, or various political truths. And sometimes they’re over the pronunciation of the word “spinoccoli.”

I remember this argument that two neighbors of mine in the dorm were having over the pronunciation of the spinach and broccoli combination called spinoccoli. Sid was arguing that the pronunciation was spi-NOCK-uh-lee. Brenda was arguing that it was spi-nah-KOH-lee. And they were yelling back and forth at one another. I remember that Sid was turning beet red, screaming that the word was spi-NOCK-uh-lee, had always been and would always be. And I remember that I turned to him and said, “Sid, you’re right–but you don’t have to be a jerk about it.”

There is something about us that when we’re right, we want to make sure that people know we’re right. You dont’ want to back off on a claim that you are positive is right. It’s not enough to have the truth on our side. We want to make sure that other people have no doubt that we are on the side of truth. It’s something deep in our human nature, our need to fix on to things that are certain, so that when we find them, we beat other people over the head with our certainties–such is our need to be certain.

It’s something that we as Christians need to bear in mind all the time. We gather here all the time–not to exchange recipies, or to catch up with one another–but to explore truth. We gather here because we beleive that in the traditions of the Church and in the scriptures of the Church and in the revelations and messages that have come down to us, there is truth to be found. And it is that belief that brings us here and that sends us out into the world.

The question for us becomes: when we are so motivated by truth, how do we avoid beating other people over the head with it? That is, how do we avoid our righteousness turning into self-righteousness? How do we keep our eyes firmly fixed on something we believe to be true, and yet engage with the world in a way that is constructive? Because you might argue: if truth is truth, there’s no need for me to back off of it–truth is truth. And yet, as I witnessed between Sid and Brenda, the mere possession of truth and its forceful assertion is not necessarily the best solution.

I suppose part of it is that we all have to take a big step back and think: what is the truth that we would proclaim? It’s the question that Pilate asks Jesus at his trial and during their conversation at the Governor’s Palace: what is truth? Jesus gives a very enigmatic thing by just standing there. But it does lead us back to the question of how do we know what truth is?

In the old days, truth was whatever God revealed truth to be. Truth was known to us through revelation: through a resurrection experience, through stone tablets, through smoke and fire. God communicated truth through revelation. There got to be problems with that–no one could guarantee that they had the right revelation and other people didn’t. And in fact, an awful lot of people got killed because of competing views of truth. In Europe they fought a war for 30 years over whether the Protestants or the Catholics had received the truthful revlation. It’s hard for us in our modern day to imagine such bitter hatred between Protestant and Catholic, and we might not even know what the divisions are that should separate us to such a violent degree.

Because we stand on the other side of a major change in how people thought about the truth. Up until the end of the Thirty Years War, people assumed that truth was based on revelation, and even foreign policy wrapped that truth into it. And nations went to war with nations over issues of theological truth.

At the end of that war, when they looked at the carnage and the devastation, they said to themselves, ‘this isn’t working’. Thus begins what we consider to be the Enlightenment, when it was agreed that we would use reason to determine the truth. Empirical observation, testing, repeatable experimentation. Things that could be cataloged could be determined to be true. If you could prove it in a laboratory or in an experiment, through observation and chronicling, then it was arguably true. And so we entered into an age when absolute truth was what was reasonable. From revelation to reason.

A lot of things got wrapped up in reason. Progress was seen as the fruit of reason. In fact, in the Nineteenth Century, they believed that reason would carry humanity forward into the future on a relentless march of progress, of growth, of development, of cultural understanding and human relations–all of it guided by reason.

Until the First World War. When the world fell apart. When Europe–enlightened, reasonable Europe–was once more at war, nations at each other’s throats. Historians will say that after World War I, believe in reason–modernism–was no longer in effect in Europe. Something new had come along–something that would not come into the United States until 1963 with the Kennedy Assassination. It forced a lot of people to realize that the world did not make sense the way it used to, that it couldn’t always be explained by cause and effect. We wound up in this time period that historians and philosophers refer to as post-modernism.

Post-modernism tells us that there is no absolute truth. Everything is relative–we cannot ascertain truth. It makes it harder for people who dress like me to deal with a world like that because it relativizes everything. Now, there is of course, an irony here: the very claim that there is no absolute truth is a claim of absolute truth. You can’t really get around that. But, I think there’s something to what post-modernism says.

Post-modernism overreaches in its claim that there is no absolute truth. It makes a mistake in that overreach. Where I think that it is better in its claims is that we cannot know for certain what absolute truth is. I think that’s a reasonable claim. It is not a claim on whether truth exists or not–certainly we here all believe that it does. The claim rather comes back to how much can we know about that truth. What can we know about it?

I think that what post-modernism teaches us ultimately, is the same thing that Jesus teaches us in the scripture lesson we read earlier. The Pharisee was a righteous person–Jesus does not deny that the Pharisee was righteous. He tithes, he fasts, he keeps the commandments. Where Jesus has an issue with the Pharisee is not with regard to his righteousness, but with regard to his lack of humility. He believes that he has accomplished something, that he has become the truth he is trying to reflect.

The lowly tax collector–that person who beats his chest and says ‘God have mercy on me, a sinner.’–shows humility. He admits that he doesn’t know how to do everything right. He admits that he is lacking in serious ways. But what he is saying is: I know this one thing, that if I come before God and throw myself on God’s mercy, God will respond with forgiveness.

Humility for us is really the watchword of the Christian life. The importance of humility cannot be overestimated to us as Christians. I have conversations all the time with the Rabbi here on campus. He boasts all the time that he has awards in humility and that no one is more humble than he is. I think sometimes we all fall into the trap of the Rabbi’s joke.

Humility is a way of embracing a willingness to be wrong. A readiness to be wrong. To say: I believe this to be true, but I am humble enough to know that I might be wrong. It’s a very different conversation that my two friends might have had had one of them admitted that they might be wrong, but… Rather than screaming at one another about spi-NOCK-uh-lee and spin-uh-KOH-lee.

It’s a very different thing when humility guides your life. It’s amazing how much more you can get with humility. I have a friend who had an aunt who was a missionary in Turkey. In Turkey they had very strict rules about what Christian missionaries could do. She worked in a Christian school and one of the things she was never allowed to do was to mention Jesus Christ. You might think that being a missionary and not being able to mention Jesus Christ would be something of a drawback. And yet what my friend’s aunt told his was that it was the single most powerful missionary experience she’d ever had. She had to simply be Christian and live Christianity out, rather than talk about Christianity. Through humility–not even drawing attention to herself and her claims–she had to live out her faith. She found that that was so much more effective–that it reached so many more people.

Humility, then, is not simply a way of relating to one another. It’s a theological reality. When that tax collector gets down on his knees and beats his breast and can’t even look up to heaven, and says, “God forgive me, a sinner.” He is making a fundamental statement about humanity and its relationship to God. The Pharisee thinks that he has achieved something. What the tax collector knows is that you could never be good enough to be worthy of the love of God. We could never be good enough to have earned it. That is, to force God into this relationship because of our worthiness and wonderfulness.

What he remembers is that we are in relationship with a God who humbled himself. We are in relationship with a God who takes on our life, our pain, and our suffering, and humbles himself even to death on a cross, to extend mercy to us. Humility is a theological reality. We are low, and are loved by a God who brings herself low to be with us. That, my friends, is the truth we are tryihng to tell people.

The truth that we are trying to tell is not that God sits on a throne hurling lightning bolts at those who break his rules. But that God takes poor, broken fragile humanity, with open arms out of love and mercy, and out of a self-humility that opens the possibility of relationship with us. If God did not stoop to us we could not comprehend God. And so, when we are in relationship with others, if we wish to share a message of truth and love, we humble ourselves before them. It is our humility, which is out of necessity, is met my Christ’s humility, which is out of grace. It’s the truth we proclaim, the righteousness we have, that keeps us from all our self-righteousness.