Humility is not an easy thing. The story is told of a bishop, a priest, and a peasant who go into a great cathedral. The bishop went up to the altar rail, beat on his chest and declared, "I am nothing! I am nothing!"
Then the priest went up to the altar rail, beat on his chest and declared, "I am nothing! I am nothing!"The peasant who saw all this was very impressed. So in all humility, he went to the altar rail, beat on his chest and declared, "I am nothing! I am nothing!"The bishop turned and hissed into the priest's ear, "Who does he think he is?"[i]
Humility is not an easy thing, but that’s exactly where Brother James takes us in the reading for today. We’ve been reading through the book of James over the last few weeks and we’ve been hearing some consistent themes. This is a book that is very concerned with the status that some members of the community are giving to the rich. They give them special treatment, special seats in worship. But James reminds them that God has a different order. In fact, in God’s order, it is the poor who have been chosen to be rich in faith. The community of Jesus is an upside-down community, not like the world.
“Keep yourself unstained by the world.” This is another of the messages that James has for the community he is writing to. The world has a corrupting influence on Christians because the world lies to us about who we are. Therefore, we need to be able to speak truth to one another…to recognize the danger that lies in the tongue and to use it only to build one another up.
The conflicts within the Christian community are also something that concern Brother James. He advises the people to be “quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to anger” [1:19] and he warns about speaking ill of one another. What we do and how we relate to one another needs to line up with what we say we believe.
So we get to chapter 4 and we’re back to the question of disagreements between Christians and the focus is about to go inward – right to the heart. “Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?” James has already warned us about being double-minded…about not giving ourselves fully to being God’s people instead of the world’s people. So now he sees that the conflicts we have with other people are really just outward signs of something deeper going on within us. We are at war with each other because we are really at war with ourselves.
“You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts.” Now I doubt that there was an epidemic of murder within the community, but James is saying that there might as well be. He’s already talked about murder when he talked about showing partiality to the rich. He’s trying to get to get our attention. We may not be killing people for things we want but don’t have, but we are doing devastating things because of our envy.
How many of us are living beyond our means, racking up the credit card debt, because we feel like we are depriving ourselves or depriving our families if we don’t. The word ‘Christmas’ is starting to pop up in conversations now as September draws to a close. It’s a scary word – partly because we know what the busy-ness will mean and partly because we know ourselves and know what we do to ourselves and to our budgets every year when Christmas comes. We can dress it up in other clothes, but it’s envy and it causes problems.
How many of us have let our possessions take on demonic meaning for us? We assume that they give us a certain amount of status and we think if we get more of a certain kind of stuff it will give us a more privileged status in the community. Dr. Seuss knew all about this. Do you remember the story of the star-bellied sneetches? In his book The Sneetches and Other Stories he tells about a group of sneetches who lived on the beach (conveniently since it rhymes with sneetch). Some of the sneetches have green stars on their bellies and others have no stars upon “thars.” This is a problem because to be a star-bellied sneetch was to have an elevated status and this led the plain-bellied sneetches to envy the star bellies.
Enter a marketer! Sylvester McMonkey McBean shows up and he has a wonderful machine (conveniently since it rhymes with McBean). This machine can put stars on the plain belly sneetches. So, of course, they eat this up. All the plain belly sneetches go through the machine and get green stars.
This totally upsets the prevailing order. The original star-bellies can’t distinguish themselves from the plain-bellies anymore and they lose their status. But McBean has another machine that will remove stars and thus give them a plain-belly. With the stars gone they can now be distinctive again and look down their noses at the new star-bellies.
Chaos ensues. Stars go and come. The Sneetches wear themselves out trying to achieve some higher status and the only one who makes any money is…you guessed it…Sylvester McMonkey McBean. But something wonderful happens as he leaves town.
[McBean] laughed as he drove in his car up the beach, “They never will learn. No. You can’t Teach a Sneetch!”But McBean was quite wrong. I’m quite happy to say.That the Sneetches got really quite smart on that day.The day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches.And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches.That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars and whetherThey had one, or not, upon thars.[ii]
If the Sneetches can learn, why can’t we? Why do we believe that some new thing is going to give us what we want? Why do we believe that someone else has something better and if only we had it, we’d be better off? Why do we insist on looking at other people’s bellies when the real problem is in our heart?
How do we address this problem? James tells us to pray. James talks a lot about prayer. “You do not have, because you do not ask,” he says. “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.” Prayer can change things – most importantly, it can change us.
One time there was a church down the street from a notorious pool hall. Everybody in the neighborhood knew that the pool hall was a place where bad stuff was going on. Youth were being led astray. Drug dealers were hanging out there. So the church started to pray that God would burn the pool hall down. And one night it did. Lightning struck that building and it burnt all the way to the ground.
The neighborhood was happy. The church was pleased. Then the man who owned the pool hall sued the church. The case went to the court and the man said, “They prayed that my pool hall would burn down and it did.”
The church members said, “We can’t be held liable for this, your honor. He can’t sue us because of a lightning strike.”
The judge said, “Maybe not. But I think it’s really interesting that the owner of this pool hall believes in the power of prayer more than a church does.”
Prayer changes things and the most important thing it can change is the human heart. Because this is where James takes us. He doesn’t point us toward prayer so that we can get the status that we think we deserve or the things that we think we need. Prayer doesn’t help us get what we couldn’t get by other means. Prayer moves us toward humility, toward integrity, toward single-mindedness.
"’God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’ Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Lament and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into dejection. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.”
The gospel passage for today gives us some great examples of humility. First, in James and John who lack humility and who try to get a favored seat by Jesus’ side in the kingdom. Then, in the children, that Jesus welcomes to his side. Who does this upside-down kingdom belong to? Not to those who seek it for personal advantage, but to those whom no one else would suspect because they are so far from what the world considers cool or powerful or influential. The kingdom belongs to children.
This week Matthew Bailey got me thinking about humility. In a blogpost he talked about the difference between two people who were inducted into the basketball Hall of Fame last week. One of them, Michael Jordan, was flashy and photogenic and the best basketball player of his generation and he knew it. The other was David Robinson, a much quieter, less flashy guy who helped his team, the San Antonio Spurs, become a real team.
When Michael Jordan got up to give his acceptance speech he showed that he is still as competitive and driven as always, but he did that by calling out people who he felt had snubbed him or underestimated him through the years. He flew one of his old high-school friends to the awards ceremony, someone who had been kept on the high-school varsity team instead of Jordan. Jordan pointed out that he was not as great a player as he was and told his old high-school coach, “I wanted to make sure you understood: You made a mistake, dude.” It was funny, but in an uncomfortable way.
Robinson, on the other hand, was gracious. He acknowledged his teammates, his sons, his wife, his pastor! He talked about how his faith had helped him. He quoted the gospel story of the ten lepers who were healed by Jesus and only one returned to give thanks and he said he wanted to be that one who gave thanks for what God had given him. David Robinson had every reason to think of himself as the biggest man in the room that night, and not just because he’s seven feet tall. But David Robinson humbled himself.
Who are we in the end except people who have no room for boasting except in the life and death of Jesus? Who are we except vulnerable human beings who leave footprints in the sand that will eventually wash away? If there is anything enduring about life, it is because of the life we live as people of faith. We put all our trust in a God who can take the most unusual raw material and make it into something amazing. The way of humility is the way into the heart of God. And the way to get there is through prayer. Thanks be to God.
James 4:1-17 [NRSV]
Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.
Adulterers! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you suppose that it is for nothing that the scripture says, "God yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to dwell in us"? But he gives all the more grace; therefore it says, "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble."
Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Lament and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into dejection. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
Do not speak evil against one another, brothers and sisters. Whoever speaks evil against another or judges another, speaks evil against the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. So who, then, are you to judge your neighbor?
Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money." Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that." As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil.
Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.
Then the priest went up to the altar rail, beat on his chest and declared, "I am nothing! I am nothing!"The peasant who saw all this was very impressed. So in all humility, he went to the altar rail, beat on his chest and declared, "I am nothing! I am nothing!"The bishop turned and hissed into the priest's ear, "Who does he think he is?"[i]
Humility is not an easy thing, but that’s exactly where Brother James takes us in the reading for today. We’ve been reading through the book of James over the last few weeks and we’ve been hearing some consistent themes. This is a book that is very concerned with the status that some members of the community are giving to the rich. They give them special treatment, special seats in worship. But James reminds them that God has a different order. In fact, in God’s order, it is the poor who have been chosen to be rich in faith. The community of Jesus is an upside-down community, not like the world.
“Keep yourself unstained by the world.” This is another of the messages that James has for the community he is writing to. The world has a corrupting influence on Christians because the world lies to us about who we are. Therefore, we need to be able to speak truth to one another…to recognize the danger that lies in the tongue and to use it only to build one another up.
The conflicts within the Christian community are also something that concern Brother James. He advises the people to be “quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to anger” [1:19] and he warns about speaking ill of one another. What we do and how we relate to one another needs to line up with what we say we believe.
So we get to chapter 4 and we’re back to the question of disagreements between Christians and the focus is about to go inward – right to the heart. “Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?” James has already warned us about being double-minded…about not giving ourselves fully to being God’s people instead of the world’s people. So now he sees that the conflicts we have with other people are really just outward signs of something deeper going on within us. We are at war with each other because we are really at war with ourselves.
“You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts.” Now I doubt that there was an epidemic of murder within the community, but James is saying that there might as well be. He’s already talked about murder when he talked about showing partiality to the rich. He’s trying to get to get our attention. We may not be killing people for things we want but don’t have, but we are doing devastating things because of our envy.
How many of us are living beyond our means, racking up the credit card debt, because we feel like we are depriving ourselves or depriving our families if we don’t. The word ‘Christmas’ is starting to pop up in conversations now as September draws to a close. It’s a scary word – partly because we know what the busy-ness will mean and partly because we know ourselves and know what we do to ourselves and to our budgets every year when Christmas comes. We can dress it up in other clothes, but it’s envy and it causes problems.
How many of us have let our possessions take on demonic meaning for us? We assume that they give us a certain amount of status and we think if we get more of a certain kind of stuff it will give us a more privileged status in the community. Dr. Seuss knew all about this. Do you remember the story of the star-bellied sneetches? In his book The Sneetches and Other Stories he tells about a group of sneetches who lived on the beach (conveniently since it rhymes with sneetch). Some of the sneetches have green stars on their bellies and others have no stars upon “thars.” This is a problem because to be a star-bellied sneetch was to have an elevated status and this led the plain-bellied sneetches to envy the star bellies.
Enter a marketer! Sylvester McMonkey McBean shows up and he has a wonderful machine (conveniently since it rhymes with McBean). This machine can put stars on the plain belly sneetches. So, of course, they eat this up. All the plain belly sneetches go through the machine and get green stars.
This totally upsets the prevailing order. The original star-bellies can’t distinguish themselves from the plain-bellies anymore and they lose their status. But McBean has another machine that will remove stars and thus give them a plain-belly. With the stars gone they can now be distinctive again and look down their noses at the new star-bellies.
Chaos ensues. Stars go and come. The Sneetches wear themselves out trying to achieve some higher status and the only one who makes any money is…you guessed it…Sylvester McMonkey McBean. But something wonderful happens as he leaves town.
[McBean] laughed as he drove in his car up the beach, “They never will learn. No. You can’t Teach a Sneetch!”But McBean was quite wrong. I’m quite happy to say.That the Sneetches got really quite smart on that day.The day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches.And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches.That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars and whetherThey had one, or not, upon thars.[ii]
If the Sneetches can learn, why can’t we? Why do we believe that some new thing is going to give us what we want? Why do we believe that someone else has something better and if only we had it, we’d be better off? Why do we insist on looking at other people’s bellies when the real problem is in our heart?
How do we address this problem? James tells us to pray. James talks a lot about prayer. “You do not have, because you do not ask,” he says. “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.” Prayer can change things – most importantly, it can change us.
One time there was a church down the street from a notorious pool hall. Everybody in the neighborhood knew that the pool hall was a place where bad stuff was going on. Youth were being led astray. Drug dealers were hanging out there. So the church started to pray that God would burn the pool hall down. And one night it did. Lightning struck that building and it burnt all the way to the ground.
The neighborhood was happy. The church was pleased. Then the man who owned the pool hall sued the church. The case went to the court and the man said, “They prayed that my pool hall would burn down and it did.”
The church members said, “We can’t be held liable for this, your honor. He can’t sue us because of a lightning strike.”
The judge said, “Maybe not. But I think it’s really interesting that the owner of this pool hall believes in the power of prayer more than a church does.”
Prayer changes things and the most important thing it can change is the human heart. Because this is where James takes us. He doesn’t point us toward prayer so that we can get the status that we think we deserve or the things that we think we need. Prayer doesn’t help us get what we couldn’t get by other means. Prayer moves us toward humility, toward integrity, toward single-mindedness.
"’God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’ Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Lament and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into dejection. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.”
The gospel passage for today gives us some great examples of humility. First, in James and John who lack humility and who try to get a favored seat by Jesus’ side in the kingdom. Then, in the children, that Jesus welcomes to his side. Who does this upside-down kingdom belong to? Not to those who seek it for personal advantage, but to those whom no one else would suspect because they are so far from what the world considers cool or powerful or influential. The kingdom belongs to children.
This week Matthew Bailey got me thinking about humility. In a blogpost he talked about the difference between two people who were inducted into the basketball Hall of Fame last week. One of them, Michael Jordan, was flashy and photogenic and the best basketball player of his generation and he knew it. The other was David Robinson, a much quieter, less flashy guy who helped his team, the San Antonio Spurs, become a real team.
When Michael Jordan got up to give his acceptance speech he showed that he is still as competitive and driven as always, but he did that by calling out people who he felt had snubbed him or underestimated him through the years. He flew one of his old high-school friends to the awards ceremony, someone who had been kept on the high-school varsity team instead of Jordan. Jordan pointed out that he was not as great a player as he was and told his old high-school coach, “I wanted to make sure you understood: You made a mistake, dude.” It was funny, but in an uncomfortable way.
Robinson, on the other hand, was gracious. He acknowledged his teammates, his sons, his wife, his pastor! He talked about how his faith had helped him. He quoted the gospel story of the ten lepers who were healed by Jesus and only one returned to give thanks and he said he wanted to be that one who gave thanks for what God had given him. David Robinson had every reason to think of himself as the biggest man in the room that night, and not just because he’s seven feet tall. But David Robinson humbled himself.
Who are we in the end except people who have no room for boasting except in the life and death of Jesus? Who are we except vulnerable human beings who leave footprints in the sand that will eventually wash away? If there is anything enduring about life, it is because of the life we live as people of faith. We put all our trust in a God who can take the most unusual raw material and make it into something amazing. The way of humility is the way into the heart of God. And the way to get there is through prayer. Thanks be to God.
James 4:1-17 [NRSV]
Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.
Adulterers! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you suppose that it is for nothing that the scripture says, "God yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to dwell in us"? But he gives all the more grace; therefore it says, "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble."
Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Lament and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into dejection. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
Do not speak evil against one another, brothers and sisters. Whoever speaks evil against another or judges another, speaks evil against the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. So who, then, are you to judge your neighbor?
Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money." Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that." As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil.
Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.
[i] Adapted from the blog “Pratie Place,” http://pratie.blogspot.com/2005/11/humility.html.
[ii] Dr. Seuss, The Sneetches and Other Stories, Random House, 1961.
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1 comment:
Thank you so much for this message, Alex. Plus, I love the story of the Sneetches!
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