All Saints’ Sunday, November 5, 2017 | 8:00 a.m.

Humble Yourselves

“Always Reforming”
A Sermon Series Marking the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 107:1–8, 33–38
Matthew 23:1–12

Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less.

Rick Warren

“Do what they say, not what they do.” So Jesus taught about the Scribes and Pharisees. “Follow their teachings, but don’t behave like they do. They don’t ‘walk the talk.’ They do all their deeds to be seen by others.”

At first glance, it looks like the issue Jesus was addressing is not our issue. The scribes and Pharisees were making their phylacteries broad. We don’t even know what phylacteries are, unless we have hung around Orthodox or Conservative Jewish men who wore them—two small black leather cubes with Scripture verses inside, one strapped to the left arm and the other to the forehead during weekday morning prayers.

They wore their fringe long, the knotted fringe on the four corners of their prayer shawls. Most of us don’t even feel comfortable praying out loud privately with other Christians, let alone making our faith more public by what we wear. We don’t go around parading our religious righteousness for all to see. If anything, we may be embarrassed about our religion.

At first glance, their issues don’t seem to be ours. But if we focus more closely, we see the essence of Jesus’ critique is that these pious religious leaders did what they did, not to honor God, but in order to be seen by others. They loved the seats of honor at dinner events and the best seats in the synagogue. They cherished being respected by others and called rabbi while in the marketplace. In other words, they loved the attention and admiration they could earn from others. It became “all about them.” Perhaps this is starting to feel more familiar. Do we not also fall into the temptation to act as though it is all about us? Don’t we already think we are the humblest people we know?

One of the hallmarks of Fourth Presbyterian Church is excellence. We strive for glorious music and quality preaching in worship. We maintain a beautiful building whose architecture draws crowds. In our ministry and mission we seek to be “a light in the city” from whom others can learn and which seeks to influence life in Chicago. Most of our members are highly educated, professional people with meaningful work. Excellence is highly valued.

I believe this striving for excellence is rooted in a good thing—we want to honor God with our very best. But this striving can have negative side effects. We may start focusing on our “success,” measured by numbers and wealth, rather than focusing on whether we are being faithful. We may rely on our own intellect and resources to achieve and be productive, rather than turn to God and wait for guidance and strength. We may suffer from what’s called the “tyranny of goodness”—idolizing our goodness so much that we cannot, or are unwilling to, see how we are complicit in the brokenness of the world. We may manifest an aspect of white privilege, which is to come into a complex situation as “the great white savior” with quick solutions to rescue people of color from their plight. We may send off signals that the people who are most wanted here are those who can afford to buy their own dark suit or nice dress; not to mention who have access to and take a shower every day.

This past summer, a newcomer worshiped with us on a Sunday morning. She was staying in Chicago while the fires were raging near her home in Oregon because the smoke was too much for her. She is also unable to work full-time. After attending our worship service, she was found by one of our pastors in a dark hallway near Anderson Hall crying. She was in tears because she felt so out of place here. She sensed that everyone else in the congregation, and the pastors, really had their life put together, which just underscored how much her own life was in chaos.

Now many of us who sit in this sanctuary know inside that our lives are not perfect. We struggle with fears, with anger, with disappointments, with health or marital challenges, with unemployment, or addictions. We wrestle with feelings of worthlessness if we don’t produce or perform at a certain level. Or we may have had career success but our lives feel empty. We believe in God’s grace, but act as though we need to earn God’s favor and our salvation. But how much are we willing to reveal any of this? Showing our vulnerability to one another, and acknowledging how much we need God’s help, are not hallmarks of our community. We want to look good and strong. We want to point to our effectiveness and results. We want others to respect and admire us.

It is so easy for something we initially do—with good intentions to honor God—to turn into a focus on how well we are doing it, our own success and worth.

Of course, this doesn’t just happen in church. Our U.S. culture is very oriented toward success, and measuring that success with how much money one has, how many degrees one has or how many promotions one gets. Celebrities can be famous not for anything they have done that is admirable, but just because they have gotten the attention of the media. Even talking about whether you have “made it” in life reveals how much our sense of self-worth is based on the ways others see us.

The problem with success is that we internalize it as the measure of our worth. We crave the affirmation and respect of others. We do that which will advance us or draw attention to ourselves. We forget, if we ever knew, that what Christ calls us to be is not more of a success than others, but a servant of others.

As long as one is playing within the framework of success, the focus remains on oneself. That is true for failure as well. Sam Wells, the former Dean of Duke Chapel, says this about failure:

[Failure] is the sense that if you were a better person or if you’d tried harder or if you were a more charismatic or skilled leader, then things would have turned out fine and dandy. The reassuring thing about failure is that it allows you to preserve your narcissism, your deep-lying pride that says this is really all fundamentally about you, and that if it went wrong, it was because you got it wrong—all of which preserves the underlying conviction that you can get it right and that, if and when you do, it’ll be because of your brilliance. (Sam Wells, “Shaking the Dust,” Faith and Leadership, www.faithandleadership.com)

Jesus urges us to approach life as students, as beginners. Humble beginners. Humble servants. Our focus should not be on ourselves and how good we are, how religious we are, how successful we are, how much attention and admiration we draw. Rather we are to focus on God and our neighbors, loving and serving them. When we think of ourselves, we are to think first of being servants.

In the 1970s, Robert Greenleaf coined the idea of the servant-leader. This idea grew out of his reading Hermann Hesse’s story, Journey to the East, which focuses on a band of men who are on a mythical journey. The central figure of the story is Leo who accompanies the party as the servant who does their menial chores. Leo’s life is one of quiet service. Leo also sustains the group of men with his spirit and his song. He is a person of extraordinary presence, a person so winning and natural that everyone—including animals—loves him. All goes well on the journey until Leo disappears. Then the group falls into disarray. Unable to settle on a common path or pursuit, the heart of the group is broken and it falls apart. The journey is abandoned. They cannot make it without the servant Leo. The narrator of the story, one of the men in the party, after some years of wandering, finds Leo and is taken into the Order that had sponsored the journey. There he discovers that Leo, whom he had known first as servant, was in fact the titular head of the Order, its guiding spirit, a great and noble leader.

For Robert Greenleaf, this story clearly says that the great leader is seen as servant first, and that simple fact is the key to his greatness. Leo was actually the leader all of the time, but he was servant first because that was what he was, deep down inside. His servant nature was the real man, not bestowed, not assumed, and not to be taken away. He was servant first. Any use of power by such a leader is through kindness and service rather than dominance and control.

Greenleaf defined the servant-leader this way:

The servant-leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions. The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. . . .

The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test . . . is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived? (Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership, p. 13)

If there is a single characteristic of the servant-leader that stands out in Greenleaf’s essay, it is the desire to serve. It is not about being servile, it is about wanting to help others. It is about identifying and meeting the needs of colleagues, customers, and communities. Other important characteristics include listening and understanding; acceptance and empathy; foresight; awareness and perception; persuasion; conceptualization; self-healing; and rebuilding community. Notice that all this takes a spirit of humility and a willingness to be a beginner.

It is a challenge for us to reorient ourselves away from pursuing success and toward servanthood. It goes against the grain to focus on what God is doing instead of on our own results and productivity. I have found it helpful to read, many times, these words of Thomas Merton:

The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.

You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and your witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will not come from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. Think of this more, and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.

The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do [God’s] will, we will be helping in this process. (Thomas Merton, “About Results”)

Our hope will grow as we are servants first. May we all humble ourselves to allow our servant-hearts to grow. Amen.