He who humbles
himself shall be exalted
The Sermons At Calvary
By The Reverend Rhonda Lee
Proper 26, Year A – Matthew
23:1-12, Micah 3:5-12
30 October 2005
“All who humble themselves will be exalted”
For a few weeks now, we have been
overhearing Jesus talking to – and arguing with – the religious leaders of his
day. Today, we Christians think of
Jesus with love and respect, and we worship the Christ as one person of the
Trinity, and so sometimes it’s hard for us to remember that in his day he was a
rabble-rouser who went around turning people’s ideas about reality
upside-down. Jesus was in good company:
his teachings echoed the words of prophets like Isaiah, Amos, and Micah. Generations before Jesus, Micah had
distilled the prophetic message down to a passage that is familiar to many of
us: “God has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require
of you, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your
God?” (Micah 6:8).
The ironic
thing is that prophets make religious people nervous. They question theology, ritual – all the things that one friend
of mine, a Reform Jew, calls the “trappings” of worship. But we get attached to those trappings, to
our ideas about God, to our religious objects.
I think that’s partly because they can help us to meet God. When I look at the icon of the nativity in
my office upstairs, I see Jesus, the eternal Word who mysteriously became
incarnate as a baby who couldn’t speak a single word. I see Mary, his mother and his first and most faithful disciple,
and I see Joseph, the man who put away his own pride to care for this child
who, in some strange and possibly scandalous way, was not even his. So my icon of the nativity can help me deepen
and discipline my faith. You may have a
picture at home or a cross you wear that does something similar for you, or you
may have a favourite window here at Calvary that brings home the gospel message
to you as you look at it from your pew.
And we Episcopalians gather here every Sunday – and Thursday, if we can
– to worship God in more or less the same way each time, believing that we
encounter the risen Christ in the prayers, the readings, and the Holy
Communion.
So
religious objects, traditions, and rituals can help us to meet God. They can
comfort us and challenge us, and so we get attached to them. But I think sometimes we get attached to our
rituals, our objects, our traditions, for a less healthy reason: because they
help us to avoid God, or at least to
avoid the subversive, messy side of God.
Sometimes we forget that God is messy, we forget that God surprises us,
and we mistake our own neat, tidy ideas about
God for the one, true, living God.
There was a time not long ago when our church did not ordain women as
priests, when it mistook male authority and human prejudice for the authority
and will of God. I, for one, am
grateful that the Holy Spirit led us into a new age on that question, and I
often smile when I stand in the sanctuary beside Ned, my brother clergy, and
our wonderful variety of lay ministers, younger and older, male and female, gay
and straight.
When we read today’s Gospel, at first we may nod our heads
at Jesus’ criticism of the religious leaders of his day. We may feel safe criticizing “them” because
they stand outside our own group, our own faith. But if we look closely, we notice that Jesus isn’t
speaking to the religious authorities in
this passage. He has stopped debating
with them and he has turned to speak to his disciples and to the crowds who
have gathered around. So I think this passage really tells us more about how
Jesus wanted his disciples to live – and how the evangelist Matthew thought the
church should live out the gospel – than about how he felt about any of the
Jewish leaders of his day.
Jesus
seems to be telling his followers to respect the religious authorities, but at
the same time he is warning against following them blindly. Jesus says, “do whatever they teach you and
follow it.” In other words, the
religious authorities will teach the Scripture, and the Scripture is worth
hearing. God’s word will benefit those
who study it and follow it, regardless of how faithful or unfaithful the human
teacher is. But remember: religious
leaders are fallible creatures and can set just as good or as bad an example as
anyone else, so Jesus warns, “do not do what they do, for they do not practice
what they teach. They tie up heavy
burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they
themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.” Jesus echoes Micah’s warning that God will
not uphold “the prophets who lead my people astray, who cry ‘Peace’ when they
have something to eat, but declare war against those who put nothing into their
mouths.”
We might
think that if everyone who professed the Christian faith today were truly
converted to Jesus’ way, we would embrace modern-day prophets with open
arms. But you and I know that we
don’t. Usually the people who live out
Jesus’ statement that “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who
humble themselves will be exalted” aren’t given the best seats – at the
banquets, the houses of worship, or anywhere else – and their prophesying can
be dangerous to their careers, or even to their health. Several examples come
to my mind. One is Archbishop Oscar
Romero of El Salvador. Today we
remember Oscar Romero as an advocate for the poor, but the main reason he was
elected archbishop in 1977 was that up until that moment he had never shown any
particular concern for the poor. His
brother bishops thought he wouldn’t rock the Church’s boat while their country
was at civil war. But shortly after his
election one of his priests was murdered for defending the right of peasants to
form farm co-operatives, and for speaking the simple truth that the landowners’
dogs ate better than the peasants’ children.
When Romero saw the body of that priest, and the old man and child who
were killed along with him, he was transformed. Like Jesus, he turned and followed the path that would lead to
his death, and like Jesus, his ministry lasted only three years.
Romero could easily have chosen a
different path. Certainly his fellow
bishops encouraged him to; all but one of them signed a collective letter to
the Vatican complaining about him being too political. When Romero asked the U.S. government to
stop sending military aid to El Salvador – at the rate of $1.5 million a day
for 12 years – he was ignored. Romero
could have been proud of himself for taking the side of the peasants, but he
always thought he hadn’t done enough. In 1978 he said, “Authority in the church
is not command, but service....To my shame, as a pastor, I beg forgiveness from
you, my community, that I have not been able to carry out as your servant my
role as bishop. I am not a master, I am not a boss...I want to be God’s
servant, and yours.” Archbishop Romero
knew that even if he was powerless to stop the violence in his country, he was
not powerless to denounce it. He dared
to take sides, and to point out the Gospel truth that God also takes the side
of the people who don’t eat as well as some other people’s dogs. His reward for speaking the truth was that
he was shot to death as he was presiding at a Eucharist in March of 1980. He isn’t on the path to sainthood in the
Roman Catholic Church yet, but many people already consider him a saint.
“The
greatest among you will be your servant.
All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves
will be exalted.”
El
Salvador might seem a long way from Kentucky, so we might look around for our
own examples of humble leadership right here.
One that leaps to my mind, and may leap to many of yours, is the late
Rt. Rev. C. Gresham Marmion. I never
had the opportunity to meet Bishop Marmion in person, since I moved to Louisville
just before he died. But I’ve heard
many Episcopalians, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews talk about him with great
affection. Like Archbishop Romero,
Bishop Marmion spoke out against violence that he was powerless to stop. As a young priest in Texas in 1935, he faced
a lynch mob that had taken two young African-American men from the jail where
they were being held before trial, and he tried to stop the lynching. He was only one man in a crowd eager for
blood, and so he was pushed aside and forced to witness the murder that he had
tried to stop.
Throughout
his career, Bishop Marmion was a voice for civil rights. He supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 at
a time when many white clergy across the South were working hard to keep the
tradition of racial segregation alive, and he also spoke out for the Poor
People’s Campaign in 1968. In the
summer of 1964 Bishop Marmion sent a pastoral letter to all members of the
diocese of Kentucky. Some of you may
remember getting that letter. In it, he
supported the Civil Rights Act but he pointed out that laws could only go so
far: we also need a true conversion of our hearts and our lives to the Gospel
of Christ. He said, in part: “...we
Christian people are called by our Lord who died for all mankind, to turn our
hearts toward our brothers, to witness to our neighbor that God made of one
blood all nations. God often
communicates His love for all mankind through us, and if we turn our backs on
our fellowmen, we deny His love both for them and for us.....” Bishop Marmion knew that to lead was to
serve, and he was a faithful servant even after his retirement until the end of
his life. Not only did he keep
preaching and teaching, he spent many hours making pastoral calls. Our current bishop, Ted Gulick, tells me
that he visited Bishop Marmion shortly before he died and that Bishop Marmion
told him something like this: “I don’t know if I’ve been a very good bishop,
and I don’t know if I’ve been a very good priest, but I think I’ve been a
pretty good deacon.”
“The
greatest among you will be your servant.
All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves
will be exalted.”
In
today’s reading, Jesus says, “call no one your father on earth.” Don’t call religious leaders father, teacher,
instructor – none of those titles. But
I’m sure many people called Archbishop Romero “padre,” and many people called
Bishop Marmion “father.” What about
other courageous leaders, other modern-day prophets? I doubt anyone called The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“father” except maybe his own children, but people did call him “pastor,” which
is sort of like teacher. One prophet
who died this week, Mrs. Rosa Parks, was probably never called “mother” since
she wasn’t ordained and didn’t have any children. Many people lovingly called her “Ms. Rosa” or “Sister Rosa,” and
other people more formally called her “Mrs. Parks.” Bishop Marmion and Mrs. Parks died in their old age of natural
causes, while Archbishop Romero and Dr. King were murdered in middle age. Three of these prophets exercised the
authority of the ordained, and one simply acted on the authority of her baptism
as a minister of the gospel. The
“trappings” of religion weren’t what mattered to them. Regardless of what people called them, what
order of ministry they exercised, which communion of Christ’s one holy,
catholic, and apostolic church they belonged to, all of them were living,
breathing icons of the gospel. Thanks
be to God for their powerful humility.
May their names and their memory always be exalted.