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"Facing Humility"
We have chosen a theme for our midweek Lenten services that I
hope will grab hold of you and bring you back each week between
here and Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter
Sunday.
The theme is this: Facing Christ. The idea behind it is that
for next six weeks you will come face to face with God as we
follow Him in person of Jesus Christ to cross. Meeting God
face to face is the most powerful and profound thing that
can happen to a person. It will change you, forever. You
can’t stay the same after such an encounter.
There will be six confrontations with God between here and
the cross and the empty tomb. Each week we will face God in
Christ from a different context or perspective of life. We
will seek to meet God face to face today in humility, next
week, in service, then in temptation, betrayal, suffering
and finally in death. For each encounter we have chosen an
artist who offers a glimpse of God in the face of Christ
through his work.
Today’s work is called “The Head of Christ” by Correggio
(there’s a brief description of him and his work in the
service folder) and it leads us into our text to face God
in Christ as we face humility in our everyday lives.
The words of our gospel are a portion of Jesus’ Sermon on
the Mount where he speaks to the way we are to live if in
fact we have seen God face to face. In a word Jesus calls
for humility. “Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’
before men, to be seen by them.” When you give don’t announce
it with trumpets. When you pray don’t stand in the synagogue
or the street corner and draw attention to yourself. When you
fast don’t make a spectacle of yourself so that others know
you are fasting.
Maybe the best illustration of what Jesus is talking about
is a story he told on another occasion recorded in Luke 18.
To some who were confident of their own righteousness and
looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable:
"Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and
the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed
about himself: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other
men--robbers, evildoers, adulterers--or even like this tax
collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I
get.' "But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would
not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said,
'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.' "I tell you that this man,
rather than the other, went home justified before God. For
everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles
himself will be exalted."
It is hard for us sitting here in the 21st century to grasp
how radically backwards all of this is. Measured by any
standard ancient or modern, the Pharisee was a religious
and moral success and the tax collector was a man who had
sold his soul to get rich. Let me put it this way, if both
of these men were running for public office today, I
guarantee you that you would do your best to elect the
Pharisee. If the tax collector got in, you would be certain
that corruption had invaded our society. If both of these
fellows were dating your sister, you’d be pleased to have
the Pharisee as a brother-in-law and be wringing your hands
over the tax collector.
In other words, it’s not so simple to figure out why Jesus
commends the person we would most certainly condemn and
condemns the one we would commend. To do so will require
us to come face to face with humility.
It seems pretty obvious at first. As we listen to the
prayer of the Pharisee we see the problem. This man is
conceited. He is full of himself. In the variety of sins
that men and women commit, one of the sins we don’t like
(at least not in other people) is the sin of conceit. We
like our heroes modest, and conceit has a way of putting
us off. When the back runs 70 yards, scores a touchdown,
and then is interviewed on television, we like him to say
he made the long run because of the good line in front of
him. We don’t like him to say, “I’m the best runner in
the NFL.”
Or let’s say I play golf with you and you beat me by 10
strokes (which wouldn’t be difficult if you play any sort
of golf). What I don’t want to hear is, “Arp, you need
to take some lessons and I’d rather not waste another
afternoon with you until you do.” I’m willing to admit
I’m not a great golfer, but I’d prefer not to have you
make that judgment. It would be better for me if you said
something like, “You hit some good shots today. I can’t
believe how well I hit the ball today. I don’t usually
put it all together like that.” Conceit just rubs us the
wrong way.
Or if you get a test back and got a big fat "C –" on it
and you ask the person next to you “what did you get?” He
says, “Oh, I got an A. That was an easy test. It didn’t
even study for it. You didn’t have any trouble with it
did you?” You’d be willing to admit the other person’s
a better student than you; it’s obvious to the professor.
What you don’t like is to have him say it. You don’t like
conceit. It puts you down. It rubs you the wrong way.
If you and I were going to give the Pharisee advice we’d
urge him to be more modest. We’d say, “Look what you pray
is true, but you ought not pray it in public. It sounds bad,
conceited. You ought to be careful how you pray.”
But my friends conceit is not the real problem and modesty
is not the solution. The trouble with the Pharisees was not
conceit. The trouble with the Pharisee and with us is pride.
Facing God in Christ requires facing humility.
Pride is the insanity that seeks to measure life by
comparison to others. Pope Gregory the Great said of
this Pharisee that he was like a man who had killed
an elephant, but who was killed by the elephant’s
fall. The stench, he said, the smell that comes out
of this passage – the horrible aroma that has about
it the brimstone of hell – is the smell of grace
gone sour.
Here was a man with great benefits: he knew the Scripture,
he was brought up in a good environment, his religious
life was in order, but he came to rely on those things
as the source of his value and worth before God. It’s
as if he is saying to God, “Lord, you have made good
soup, but you couldn’t have done it without good
ingredients like me.” That is the smell of grace
gone putrid.
It is one of the ugliest things about church people still
today. We have all the advantages of prosperity and
success and good upbringing and a solid church with a
good school and Sunday school and midweek classes and
rock solid commitment to the Bible as the Word of God
and the purity of our teaching and preaching and we
start to feel like God is pretty darn lucky to have
St. Luke's Lutheran Church and School.
Pride is the insanity that seeks to measure life by
comparison to others. Facing God in Christ requires
facing humility.
But now look carefully. It is not just a matter of being
a poor miserable sinner that makes the tax collector acceptable
to God. You can be a poor miserable sinner and be proud of
that too! Like the Sunday school teacher who after teaching
this story, said, “Now boys and girls, let’s bow our heads
and thank God we’re not like that nasty Pharisee.” The tax
collector could have stood in the Temple and said, “O God,
I thank you that I’m not as other men are. I especially
thank you I’m not like that Pharisee. I don’t pray long
prayers in public. I don’t pray like a religious type.
I know I’ve sinned, but at least you know I’m not a
hypocrite.”
Pride is the insanity that seeks to measure life by
comparison to others. Facing God in Christ requires
facing humility.
Facing humility begins when you see yourself the way
God sees you and when you see yourself the way God sees
you, you cry out to Him for grace and forgiveness and
you receive it. Facing humility you are always more
aware of your own need for God than your success and
advantages. Facing humility you are always more aware
of how far you have to go than how far you have come.
If you come face to face with God in Christ this Lenten
season you will see how far you have to go and be amazed
and awed and overwhelmed to hear God say from the cross,
“Father forgive them for they don’t know what they are doing.”
The more you look on Jesus’ face suffering and dying on
that cross the more aware of your own sin you become the
more you will long for his grace and forgiveness the more
precious the words: I forgive you all your sins in the
name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Facing Christ the insanity of our pride is exposed. The
secret of humility is this – not looking inward at your
own deficiencies and weaknesses, not looking outward at
other people, comparing ourselves with them. Humility
comes from looking upward into the face of Jesus Christ
and seeing God face to face – suffering and dying to
forgive us and give us the ability to live with a genuine
desire to please Him.
Now here is the last twist. Having come face to face
with God in worship today, having received again the
forgiveness of all our sins, we are changed. We leave
here bearing his likeness to live in such a way that
others might come face to face with Jesus through us.
We bear the face of Christ to a very sick and dying
world. We cannot stand idly by thanking God that we’re
not like the rest of the world. Nor can we condemn
the world saying “look at how much better we are
than you.”
We go boldly into the world, living our faith in confidence
and humility, reflecting Christ so that all may know Him
and be saved.
Amen.
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