Pride and Humility

            Pride and humility are opposites and we can have great difficulty when pride takes over.  It is important in our lives to be humble and not to trumpet what we do and are too strongly.   Humility is a necessary part of being Christian.  It is certainly essential if we are going to attract others into our family.  Jesus told a wonderful parable about humility when he went to the Pharisee’s house for dinner.  He told them:

           

                                When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet

                              do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more                                                 distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the

                              host who invited both of you may come and say to you, `Give

                              this person your place,' and then in disgrace you would start

                              to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit

                              down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may

                              say to you, `Friend, move up higher'; then you will be honored

                              in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who

                              exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble

                              themselves will be exalted.

            Part of our problem is that we are afraid if we “sit in the lowest place” that no host will come to tell us to “come up higher”; but that is a product of our pride.  When we are living in humility, we won’t even think about where it is that we are sitting.  When we are able to put ourselves in the place of the poor, the outcast, the lame and the blind, who Jesus tells us to invite to our dinners, sitting in the lowest place is the best thing that we can do. 

            This is a story that Jesus tells his followers to give them a style of living that will be attractive to everyone who watches.  Unfortunately, it isn’t the style that Christianity has often adopted.  Instead, we have become sometimes overly prideful and want to compete with each other to attract people to our churches.  That is certainly a human characteristic, but it isn’t a very attractive one.   

            I have been in worship services, where I felt very much out of place because the behavior of the people in the congregation made it clear that their way of worship was the only approved method.  My lack of comfort would have driven me away if it hadn’t been necessary for me to be present in those places because of my work.  I don’t feel that way anymore because our worship services have been made more comfortable and I don’t feel anymore that I am not welcome.  That is probably the most important thing that we are doing in our worship services.  It reflects the way that we live with each other.  Humility needs to be paramount if we are going to make people comfortable and attract them to our communities. 

            The essence of the Gospel is to bring it to those who have nothing.  That is why we are here.  The poor and the outcast are our place of mission and when we focus on their needs, we are doing everything that God wants us to do.  How we worship is less important than who we minister to; what hope we bring to those who have none.  That is what this church of ours was created to do.  We bless our Lord when we do it, and that is the only possible source of our pride.

How I Learned to Be a Priest

             I went to a wonderful seminary.  At Virginia Seminary, I was taught by excellent professors who understood the Old and New Testaments, who spoke Hebrew and Greek as well as English and who taught me the subtleties of theology.  I listened sometimes with awe to their lectures and at the end of it, understood a great deal about our religion.  In Church history, I heard about the conflicts that troubled us from the beginning and the way that we handled our work in the world.  I came to understand how difficult it was to talk about the Lord Jesus to a world that was always in the middle of pain and suffering, yet that was the audience to whom we were sent.  It troubles me that the church’s riches have accumulated over the centuries and the mission to those who are in trouble has seemed to diminish.  God has been with us in all of this and continues to stretch all of us to be servants to those who are impoverished and to those who are enamored of their wealth.  Both of these groups have a great need of God’s presence in their lives.  The poor need to know God’s love simply for sustenance and the rich because they are worshipping the wrong God.

            I finished seminary, was ordained to the priesthood and began my ministry.  It didn’t take me long to discover that while seminary had taught me theology, biblical studies, church history, and lots of other things, they neglected to teach me how to be a priest.  That was what I was taught by my parishes. The people of God taught me more than I ever learned in seminary.  God was with me through all of this.  If I thought that I was perfected in seminary, it soon became obvious to me that I wasn’t.  I needed to learn what my people stood ready to teach me.  And they did.  Through their pain and their conflicts, I came to understand the difficulties that life brings to every one of us.  I visited people in hospitals, saw families in crisis, began a long ministry in Western Penitentiary, did counseling with people who were sometimes overwhelmed by life.  And came to know God’s presence in all of this, working through me to help people make sense of what was going on around them, even when what was going on was extremely difficult.     

                I am touched by Jeremiah’s prophecy when God says:  Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you. God has a mission for Jeremiah, even before he was born.  God had a reason for creating him.  There was a message that God wanted to be sent.  Jeremiah was to be a “prophet to the nations”.  I feel a kinship with Jeremiah.  I know that God has been a part of my life since my birth.  God always had a plan for me, even when I rejected any part of it.  I was constantly led and nourished, particularly when I had no comprehension of what it was that I was supposed to do.  God brought me back to it over and over again.  God has a plan for all of us.  God’s presence has been with us from our beginning and we need always to remember that.  When we lose our way, we need to rely on God to get us back on track.

            Jesus, in Luke’s Gospel is described as teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath when a crippled woman comes before him.  Jesus has compassion for her, lays on his hands and he heals her.  She stands up straight and began to praise God.  But the leader of the synagogue is outraged by this.  “You have six days to do this kind of work,” he tells Jesus, “but you can’t do this on the Sabbath day.”  Jesus responds to the synagogue leader by calling him a hypocrite and talking about how people tend to their animals on the Sabbath when that is needed.  “Why can’t I also heal on the Sabbath?” he asks.  Rules!  We impose rules to keep us all straight.  The only problem with this is that the rules sometimes contradict our mission. 

            We need always to be straight about what it is that we are trying to do.  Our mission is to bring the Word of God to people who need it very much.  Who these people are has already been defined for us: to take care of the poor and the outcast and those without hope.  That is about as clear as God can make it.  It is what Jesus did, and was doing in this Gospel passage.  It is why we are here, and why God led me through seminary, through the learning in my parishes and why I am here today.  May God continue to bless us as we get on with this work.

Our Curious Problem with Religion

           I’ve never liked certainty.  I’ve discovered that when I am the most certain, it is probably when I am the most wrong.  All around us we have certain people, and this country seems to be getting more so every day.  It is the reason that politics is so disrupted, that congress can’t seem to get anything at all done; and that our religion seems to be more and more engaged in who is right about issues that none of us can prove. 

            The Westboro Baptist church near Topeka, Kansas seems to have all of the answers about what is wrong with this country and how God is visiting all kinds of wrath on us about our behavior, mostly about sexuality.  Somehow they have appointed themselves the judges of all of us and are God’s designated rulers who will straighten us all out and get us to their own certain conclusions.  They aren’t the only ones.  We have recently had our own bouts of certainty in this diocese with a split of congregations that was really unseemly.  Certain Anglicans formed their own parishes apart from the rest of us and consigned the legitimate diocese of Pittsburgh to what they believed to be hell.  It was a terrible time for all of us, but I believe that we have come through it a bit bruised, but still solid, and able to move forward with our Lord and to continue to be the servants of the Gospel that we have all been called to be.

            These kinds of battles have been going on since the beginnings of Christianity.  Since Roman emperor Constantine proclaimed Christianity a valid religion in 325 AD, the cross has been marching at the front of armies.  We have imposed our faith on many numbers of people who had no other choice other than death at our hands.  Our history is certainly not something that I would hold up as a wonderful example of what God has in mind for humanity.  As a matter of fact, a close inspection produces the opposite opinion.  When I look at the inquisition and the crusades, the horror of the way that we have used God’s Word to get our own way in so many instances, the wonder is that God has not simply swept us all away and started over again.  Many Christians use the word “conversion” to speak about our mission to other people.  I wonder about that.  Why are we converting people who possibly have answers at least as good as our own?

            All of our denominational lines are moments when we kicked each other out of our churches and started over again.  We celebrate our identities as Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists or Baptists, and we love to proclaim the tenets of our faith to each other, mostly to point out how those other people are wrong and we are right.  But when we do that, we mostly tell the world that we are the ones who have it all backwards.  We even keep out Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews and every other religion; even though every one of them has truths to tell us that would benefit our lives.

            In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells the crowds:

             “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son, and son against father, mother against daughter, and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."

                Those are words of prediction that have certainly proved true.  We have taken Jesus’ words of hope and twisted them into doctrine that is so rigid that it is almost impossible to love our neighbor as a person like ourselves. 

            The curious thing is that Jesus never intended to start a religion.  His mission was to bring the Love of God to everyone.  To show us by his life the incredible grace that God wanted for every person in creation.  That is exactly what Jesus did.  It was the rest of us who made a religion out of it and began the process of excluding others from our circle.  That is where the problem lies. 

            We need to hear the lesson that we are provided for by the writer of the letter to the Hebrews which is speaking about all of the saints who have laid down their lives that the Word of God could change the way that humans interact:

            Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us… 

            That is our heritage and it has nothing to do with religion.  It has everything to do with faith and the way that we orient our lives to following the Word that we have been given by our Lord.  To love one another the way that He loved us.

God's Unexpected Presence

           When God makes promises, they always seem to come at a time of impossibility.  Abraham was without progeny, his heir as described in the Genesis account was Eliezer of Damascus and he had no hope of children because Sarah was barren.  God took Abraham outside, told him to look at the sky and told him that his progeny would be as many as the stars in the sky.  Abraham believed God and eventually Isaac was born.

            Of course that isn’t all to the story of Isaac’s birth.  When the three men came to Abraham with this promise, Sarah hid behind a curtain in their home and laughed.  She denied that she was laughing, but when Isaac was finally born, he was given his name, Isaac, because the name means laughter.  That is a great story and it is on one level a mocking of our doubt that God can indeed fulfill outrageous promises. 

            Abraham’s progeny have certainly numbered as many as the stars in the sky.  Here in the middle of the season of Pentecost, we are again reminded of the truth of the promises of God and what they mean for our own lives.

            I have been given remarkable gifts by my Lord.  But these gifts came at a price.   I grew up in the Episcopal Church, sang in the choir, was an acolyte and was very much involved in the youth program at my church.  When I was eighteen, I was at Penn State hoping for a career as a forester.  I had completed a year at Mont Alto, which was at that time the Penn State Forestry School.    When I got to the Penn State main campus, instead of getting into my studies and completing the work that would have sent me into a forestry career, I discovered the beer parties at the fraternity houses on campus and instead of forestry, I majored in carousing.  After a semester of this, Penn State had enough of me and suggested that I find another place to get an education.  My father came to State College and pleaded with my advisor, but the advisor was certainly right and I left State College, and my forestry career.   

            One Saturday morning, after I had been home for a while, my father was cooking breakfast in the kitchen and invited me to come and to help him.  In the process of this, he asked me what I planned to do.  I told him that I would probably get a job and see what I could make of myself.  He then asked me a devastating question:  “Great, where are you going to live?”  All of a sudden it came to me that this was a dividing line.  I needed to get on with my own life and be responsible for myself.  I couldn’t continue to depend on my parents for everything.  I left that kitchen with a much different attitude than I had had before.

            What I did was take a course in radio broadcasting that a great man named George Heid was offering in Pittsburgh and then get a job in Indiana, PA with a small radio station and begin a twenty year career in radio and television broadcasting.  I eventually wound up in Johnstown, PA working for Channel Six, where I did the weather, then I became the program director of a small station in town that was trying to do what Ted Turner did in Atlanta, by creating a station that would have a great presence on satellite television.  This didn’t work out very well and the whole thing went bankrupt.   While I was in Johnstown, I had gone back to school at the University of Pittsburgh.  So when my job evaporated, I talked to my rector about the possibility of entering the priesthood.  My church background came to the fore.  I talked to my bishop, Robert Appleyard and that fall, I entered Virginia Seminary to begin my preparation.  My career has been wonderful.  I had a great job as the rector of Christ Church, North Hills, and would do it again if my age hadn’t caught up with me.  I continue to love to preach at places like Redeemer and I know what a remarkable gift I have been given by my Lord out of the impossibility that I created for myself in the idiotic way that I pursued my original education in forestry.  God never gave up on me, but instead led and directed me in the way that I have gone. 

            Jesus’ instruction to his disciples is to live lives of expectation; to keep their lamps lit in expectation of the gifts that God would lavish on them.  He told them to sell their     belongings and give it all away; to store up for themselves possessions in heaven where nothing can take them away, and to trust in the promises of God to give them the Kingdom.  It isn’t always easy to do this.  We become enamored of our possessions and want to have more.  It is easy to lose sight of why we are here, why we are followers of the Christ and what it is that God expects of his followers.  Like Abraham, we are asked to continue to exist in the impossibility that seems to be what our faith requires, and to trust in the great Grace of our God to get us through.