Sheltering Grace

Robert E. Hall
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

September 2, 2007

Text: Luke 14:1, 7-14

HUMILITY

St. Augustine wrote that there are three steps to heaven: “humility, humility, humility.” I don’t know about you, but these are three of the hardest steps for me. Humility sounds like weakness, or feigned meekness. You have heard the story of the rabbis who got into a discussion. One said that he was a humble man, to which the friend replied, “You think you’re humble, let me tell you about my life of humility!”

We do not hear much of humility. In our prevailing culture, it is not highly promoted. Self-assertion, self-promotion, power over others, competition with others for greatness----all of these are our daily fare. Besides, in a harsh world, we do not want to teach our young to be meek; we know they will need to stand up for themselves and show others what they can do in order to be successful.

This calls to mind Garrison Keillor’s story of the Lake Woebegone Whippets who were always losers because they had taken too much to heart Jesus’ teaching to turn the other cheek.

So, is Jesus telling us to go against our own best self-interest, our survival instinct, so deeply a part of human nature? Is Jesus advocating that we retreat from the hurly burly of life, passively accepting our places, whatever they are? Is Jesus telling us never to assert ourselves, or use power to make a difference? Or is Jesus trying to teach us some deeper wisdom about survival and being somebody?

We have to be careful at this point. For, in our sinfulness, we are prone to take the rough edges off Jesus’ message, and thereby rationalize our own egocentricity.

What Jesus seems to be getting at, however, is a deeper wisdom. Surely Jesus, by his own example, advocated self-assertion, not timidity or self-effacement. It is not a wisdom that we can latch on to as a new discipline and achieve by ourselves. But, by the mercy and grace of God, we can incorporate Jesus’ wisdom about humility into our own lives.

So what is Jesus getting at?

HOW TO AVOID EMBARRASSING SITUATIONS

As he so often did, Jesus began his teaching with a common experience of life.

Jesus was an honored guest in the home of a “ruler who belonged to the Pharisees….” Don’t imagine them as the enemies, or as bad people. In fact, they were very devout. They were faithful participants in the synagogue, they tithed or better; and they were examples to the community of how to live a faithful life. They were not perfect human beings, but they were respected and admired.

But Jesus noticed something about them, and, probably to their embarrassment, Jesus decides to speak up. They all like to sit in the honored positions. Etiquette, protocol----these were crucial. There were strict rules about such things. So Jesus, drawing from Proverbs, reminds them what they must have learned as young men from their teachers. (Since Proverbs is a compendium of advice to young men about being savvy and not being foolish, we can imagine that the Pharisees did not take kindly to being given this basic level lecture on wisdom!)  On social occasions, it is wiser to take the lower seats, Jesus said, instead of the best seats, to save oneself the embarrassment of possibly having to slink back to the cheap seats if someone more important arrives after you.

This is the kind of advice an experienced person would tell to a young man or woman about how to avoid humiliation.

I have been there. About ten years ago, I was invited to go with two minister friends, all of us graduates of SMU, to see SMU play A&M in the Alamodome. It was a inflating experience. Our seats were in a sky box right on the fifty yard. We had a special entrance gate, and the ticket checkers treated us like celebrities. We went right on up, met administrators from SMU, who welcomed us, and then took our place in the box next to them. Sandwiches and cold drinks were brought to us; we helped ourselves to a buffet. We had some of the best seats in the house!

Along about the middle of the first quarter, a woman hostess came sheepishly into our box. With sincere apologies, she told us that we were in the wrong box, and that there were these important people, trustees or such, who were supposed to be seated where we were. Would we mind moving down a little ways. So, with as much dignity as we could muster, we gathered up our drinks and snacks and made our way to seats several boxes down. We would have been wiser if we had taken the cheaper seats first! (SMU and A&M tied by the way, for this was a season before tie-breaker overtimes.)

But Jesus goes deeper than the issue of prudent behavior. The issue is not protocol or manners. For Jesus sees in the Pharisees’ covetousness of the best seats the desire for status, for self-importance, for being exalted. They have begun to rely on their own pecking order of moral purity, and to envision themselves as worth more in God’s sight than the less observant. And, by their attitudes, they are driving lost souls farther into isolation and despair, from coming home to God and to God’s people. They have emphasized rectitude to the neglect of mercy.

T.S. Eliot wrote:

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm---but the harm does not interest them, or they do not see it, or they justify it, because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” (“The Cocktail Party”)

These religious leaders had not caught on to the message which Jesus was proclaiming and demonstrating in his behavior. In the Kingdom of God, our worth and meaning in life come from God. We are all “sinners of the Lord’s redeeming.” This includes the Pharisees and the tax collectors and sinners. Living in this awareness brings us to the interior attitude commensurate with wisdom. “Do not think too highly of yourself,” the apostle Paul writes, but have a “sober estimate” of your abilities.

One man has put it this way. “There are two humilities: that which bows and that which soars: the humility of a servant who looks down and the humility of a son [or daughter] who looks up.” (Ernest Dowden, quoted in Word and Witness, August 28, 1983)

We have a built in desire for recognition, for importance, for being somebody. I do not think we are asked by Jesus to suppress this desire, or to be dishonest by denying it. What Jesus says is this: in the presence of God, we are all offered the deepest and most lasting recognition of all, the recognition of our loving heavenly Father. In the security offered by God’s love, we can begin a process of being saved from slavery to others’ opinions of our worth and dignity. We find that “sheltering grace,” which grounds us for lives of purposeful self-investment. (“Saranam, Saranam (Refuge),” United Methodist Hymnal, #523)

Jesus is an example as well as a Savior. Jesus practiced humility but he was strong and courageous. His closeness to the one he called “Abba” was the key to both. So it can be for us.

HOSPITALITY

Along with this soaring humility, the humility that looks up to God instead of down at our failures, we are being freed to practice radical hospitality. “Do not neglect to practice hospitality, for by so doing, some have entertained angels without being aware that they were.” (See Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16)

Usually, our hospitality is extended only to those who are our friends and family. But Jesus says, once you profoundly know yourself to be a sinner saved by grace, then you will invite into your circle of caring those who cannot repay you the favor.

The list would have been shocking to the Pharisees: the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind----all people who, it was believed at the times, must have done something terrible and were being punished for their sins.

This is one of Jesus’ “more than” sayings. It is as if Jesus is saying, “Any of us are glad to have friends and family around us; you don’t have to be a follower of mine to enjoy such fellowship. Nothing wrong with that. But in the kingdom of God---- which is here and which is coming---- all people are welcome to dinner. If you begin to follow me, you will learn to expand your table fellowship to include those who can’t reciprocate. God will recognize such radical hospitality at the resurrection.”

John Wesley used to tell the Methodists not only to deliver food to the hungry, but to eat with the hungry. Such a practice would be more like Jesus’ ministry, who did not keep at an arm’s distance from the “needy” but shared the good news of acceptance, for which they were hungry, too.

I know that Mother Teresa has been in the news again lately. They have discovered that she was a struggling believer after all. Thank goodness! Her example and pithy sayings still inspire. She said one time, to people who were praising her, “I am one small pencil through which God scratches a mark on the world.” She is well-known for her radical hospitality and her humility. She was such a powerful person in both respects.

There is great strength in a soaring humility. “God’s power is made perfect in our weakness,” Paul wrote. We are given power to live strong as a being-redeemed child of God. Mother Teresa lived humbly and hospitably in her way; so we are called to do so in our own ways.

There is great blessing to be found in radical hospitality. We may experience at times God’s very messengers (angels) to us. And, as Jesus told us, when we do what is right for the prisoners, the hungry, the naked, the mourning, we are ministering to him.

Jesus does not simply lay upon us more virtues we “ought” to practice. (“Now, go out and be humble, that’s an order!”) That which God demands, God also make possible. Jesus will work in us and move us along toward freedom from the puffed-upness which entices us to foolish ideas of self-glorification, and from the insecurity which wraps us up in a protective self-hugging. Being so freed, new possibilities begin to appear, new opportunities for the joyful obedience and the demonstration of redeeming love.

“Come sinners to the gospel feast, let every soul be Jesus’ guest; you need not one be left behind, for God hath bidden all humankind.”(United Methodist Hymnal)