Humility

16 June 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

OPENING

What are we filled with, when we’re full of ourselves? we’re not filled with others; others are different and have different interests. we’re not filled with the world. And we’re not filled with life, for life is so much more unbounded. we’re not filled with things others are very interested in, as we discover when we can’t stop talking about ourselves.

Whatever we’re filled with when we’re full of ourselves, it doesn’t seem to be very satisfying in the long term, if the cries of loneliness and yearnings for authenticity we hear and feel around us are to be trusted.

However you would describe the trap of being stuck only inside of ourselves, how do we get out of it? What is the path that leads out of self-absorption and into a more satisfying kind of life?

These are among the ultimate questions of our day. We gather to pursue them, in the hope that there may be something of value to be found and felt, even here, even now. That is why we can say that

It is a sacred time, this

And a sacred place, this:

a place for questions more profound than answers,

vulnerability more powerful than strength,

and a peace that can pass all understanding.

It is a sacred time, this:

Let us begin it together in song.

CENTERING

I offer a prayer to those eyes in that “gaze of eternity” I spoke about a few weeks ago here. They are the imaginary eyes of all the noblest people who have ever lived, and all the best gods of the world’s many religions. They are the eyes under whose gaze we need to imagine ourselves living, to lift us from our smaller possibilities to our larger possibilities. I would speak to those people and those gods.

I would say:

Protect us from our exaggerated opinions of ourselves.

Protect us from the arrogance that isolates us from others, the arrogance that isolates us even from our own greater possibilities.

Help us find the honesty and courage to be humble.

Help us to become small parts of a larger world, rather than merely towering over a world scarcely bigger than ourselves.

Release us from the fears that bind us.

Help us grow toward our true calling, as children of God, sons and daughters of the universe, and the hope of the world.

Amen.

SERMON: Humility

When I was asked to do a sermon on humility, I thought long and hard about it. That’s a tough topic, I thought. Not many preachers, I think, could really do a very good job on it. Most of them are way too humble to begin with. And if you take a humble approach to preaching about humility – well, you”ll just bore people to tears.

No, it would require a remarkable set of gifts to do justice to this. The preacher would need, to be blunt, a fair amount of arrogance to pull this off. A hard job, demanding a rare combination of gifts and talents!

And this, then, raised the musical question “But where in the world is there, in the world, a man so extraordinaire?” The answer struck with the force of a revelation: c’est moi!

(NOTE: In the worship service, this song from the 1960’s musical “Camelot” was sung with piano accompaniment. These are the lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, with a few obvious modifications to change the referent from a knight to a preacher.)

c’est moi! c’est moi, I’m forced to admit!

’tis I, I humbly reply,

That mortal who these marvels can do,

c’est moi, c’est moi, ’tis I!

I’ve never lost a battle or game.

I’m simply the best by far.

When swords are crossed,

’tis always the same:

One blow and au revoir!

c’est moi! c’est moi, so admirably fit;

[I am] Prometheus unbound.

And here I stand with valor untold,

Exceptionally brave, amazingly bold

To serve at the pulpit round.

A preacher, you know, should always be invincible;

Succeed where a less fantastic man would fail;

With a will and a self-restraint

That’s the envy of every saint,

He could easily work a miracle or two!

No matter the pain he ought to be unwincable,

Impossible deeds should be his daily fare.

But where in the world is there in the world

A man so extraordinaire?

(You know!) c’est moi! c’est moi, I blush to disclose,

I’m far too noble to lie.

That man in whom these qualities bloom,

c’est moi, c’est moi, ’tis I.

I’ve never strayed from all I believe.

I’m blessed with an iron will.

Had I been made the partner of Eve,

We’d be in Eden still.

c’est moi! c’est moi, the angels have chose

To fight their battles below.

And here I stand as pure as a prayer,

Incredibly clean, with virtue to spare, (sigh)

The godliest man I know! c’est moi!

That song wasn’t my idea, though it was my fault. When our church member Derek Howard bought the right to assign the topic for this sermon in our annual auction, and told me he wanted it to be on humility, my first crack was “Oh, I can do a hell of a job on that!” After that crack settled in, Donna, his wife, called back to request this song. I believe her thinking was “Well, if you”re going to be arrogant even about humility, you might as well do it to music!”

But I won’t take the rap for arrogance all alone. We live in an arrogant time. So I want to use the ideas of arrogance and humility to frame this sermon – and to finish the topic of liberal religion I didn’t quite finish last time (2 June 2002: “What, then, shall we believe?”).

Look at the magazines in grocery store checkout lines. Here are photos of the young, the pretty, the sexy on the covers, saying, “You want to know what success looks like? You want to know what a really attractive person looks like? You want to know what it means to be desirable, to be sexy? Look at me: c’est moi!”

Twenty years ago People magazine began focusing on personalities rather than character or content. But now “people,” in the remote 3rd person, isn’t self-absorbed enough. So now we have the magazines “Us” and “We.” That’s who we tend to think it’s all about today.

This has taken weird and unhealthy turns in many areas. Among liberal circles, for instance, there is the terribly narcissistic fad of what’s being called “identity politics.” This has infected many Unitarian church across the country, though thankfully not this one. Identity politics is the idea that people should be defined by their differences from others, rather than by their deeper similarities to them. Frankly, I think any church that can get seduced by this should close its doors and open a bagel shop. One of the basic teachings of nearly all religions is that focusing on our differences is the enemy of healthy religion, not its solution.

Still, it has become a minor plague, infecting many churches in several denominations, including ours. So much so, in fact, that at Ministry Day this week at General Assembly, the subject for the entire day is Identity Politics. I’m not going. If you want to starve unhealthy practices, for goodness” sake stop feeding them with attention! Identity politics is a series of small groups of people each singing c’est moi, taking turns shining the spotlight on one another – though the only group they”re really concerned about is ‘their kind” of people. Again, it’s a fundamental failure of religion, or even psychological health. Still, it’s here.

But we can back of and find the song sung in our wider culture, too. Take the stock market, one of my least favorite activities. We now live in a time when a healthy economy is defined as one in which stock prices rise.

Thirty years ago, a healthy economy was defined by how many regular working-class people could afford nice houses and good lifestyles on one salary, and could afford to send their kids to good colleges. Today, it’s defined by how much those who control the capital have creamed from the rest of society.

Among the reasons that stock prices rise are worker firings and downsizing, reduction in employee benefits, or moving entire manufacturing operations out of the country and giving the jobs to Mexican workers just south of the Texas border, workers who live in cardboard houses, work for less than a third of American workers, and take the jobs and the hopes away from American workers, in order to make greater profits for the owners. It’s the privileged bragging at the expense of the many, saying c’est moi, look at me!

Over the last two hundred twenty six years, our country’s economy has tilted dramatically toward favoring the very wealthy five times. Of those five times, we are living in the very worst, most brutal, most lopsided in our history. And the imbalance is getting worse daily.

If Congress votes to cancel the inheritance tax, it will probably remove close to a trillion dollars from our economy in the next decade. Add this to the half-trillion dollar budget deficit congress has already approved to shovel money into our new war, and there is a trillion and a half dollars – sure to increase as the was continues. That is money that will not and can not go into workers” benefits, social services, health care, or education.

Some authors credit Ronald Reagan’s economic advisors with perfecting this plan twenty years ago: creating such a huge deficit through increased spending and reduced taxes that the social net was removed from our poorest citizens and simply could not be replaced. Looking out for #1. Sitting on top of the world. That’s no place to be! I’ve flown over the top of the world. It’s frozen solid. Nobody can live there. No community, no companionship, no warmth.

And our very contrived war. I’ll keep saying what I’ve been saying since last September. This is not a war on terrorism, it’s a war about oil, about imperialistic control of other countries, about a country whose economic and military policies are working to turn the world into a two-tier economy of the very rich and the very desperate, and who are enlisting our armies to do it. This war also, like all wars, is increasing the gap between the rich and the rest. Workers” pay and benefits are not being increased, due to the national need to prepare for war. For the owners, however, profits are absolutely soaring.

These are not the actions of a noble country acting in noble ways. They are the actions of a country concerned only with its own interests, narrowly conceived, a country singing “c’est moi” to a world that knows better, as many of the newspapers in other countries are saying clearly. So this great Lerner and Loewe song “c’est moi” isn’t just sung in Camelot. In many ways, it has become the theme song of our times.

It’s too small. And it makes us small.

I learned something interesting about koi a few years ago – those decorative carp the Japanese have cultivated for centuries. And recently I’ve heard the same thing is true of crocodiles. They grow only to fit the size of their pond. If their pond is small, they will be small. If it’s a little bigger, they can grow to be a little bigger. They can only grow to full size in a very large pond. The same is true of us.

And the message of every religion I know of, at its best, has always been that being smug and arrogant makes it impossible for us to grow to our full size.

I spoke last time of the Danish existentialist S”ren Kierkegaard and the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, who turned some of Kierkegaard’s insights into dramatic scenes in his plays. I talked a little about the play “Peer Gynt,” and it’s worth revisiting that play. It’s a play about the difference between authentic and inauthentic people. Ibsen used Trolls to represent inauthentic people. He said the two races live by different mottoes, and you can tell whether someone is a human or a troll by the motto they”re living by. Trolls live by the motto ‘to thyself be sufficient.” Humans live by the motto ‘to thyself be true.”

we’re living in an age of Trolls. That’s what the motto means, “looking out for number One, being on top of the world, being ‘the Man”,” being absorbed in our own interests, narrowly conceived. c’est moi. These are the mottoes of Trolls.

The human motto, ‘to thyself be true,” is much bigger and much harder. It means being true to our greatest calling, to the most and best we can become, not something less. It means seeing ourselves as small parts of a much bigger world. Our world needs to be much bigger so we will be able to grow into our full size. Because like the koi and the crocodiles, we don’t grow much bigger than the world of which we think ourselves an organic part.

But how do you do it? How do you become most fully human and authentic? How do we outgrow the smallness that we can slide into so easily?

The door that leads to outgrowing a small past is the humility to acknowledge that we were wrong, that we were too smug and too small.

I think of arrogance as a soul that has collapsed in on itself. Arrogance is the sound of people growing smaller while shouting “c’est moi!”

It usually takes a powerful shock to our ego to get our attention and wake us up, because narcissism is very seductive and comfortable, as long as we can get away with it. In religious language, we can call this shock an epiphany, a revelation, even a conversion experience. In real life, it’s usually dramatic and always memorable. We never forget those moments when we were rudely awakened from a smaller existence into the possibility of a larger one.

That was what Derek’s four-minute confession was about earlier. [Derek Howard, the lay leader for this service, had spoken about the type of person who he was during the Vietnam War and how a visit to the memorial tempered his arrogance] That’s what happened to him when he visited the Vietnam War Memorial in 1984. He had been a war protestor who was absolutely certain of his position, untainted by doubts. Then he stood in front of that memorial and those tens of thousands of names of men who had given their lives for it humbled him. He didn’t change his opinion of the war, but he changed his opinion of those who had fought and died for it. As he said, he never saw the police officer again who had grabbed him in a choke hold and arrested him during that 1972 demonstration right here in downtown Austin. But after his epiphany, he knew the cop wasn’t, as he’d formerly thought, a pig. He was a man.

Thirty years ago, Derek and I would probably not have had much to say to each other. I served in the Vietnam War, and was proud of my service. The bravest people I ever saw were soldiers in that war, some of whom died there. My own reassessment of the war came much later, when I had the emotional distance to learn enough about it finally to realize that we had no business there.

These epiphanies are precious moments, even sacred moments. They are the times that we were shown a much bigger world, and are invited into it. It doesn’t happen very often in life. we’re terribly lucky when it does.

I don’t want to go into a lot more details or more examples of this, because I think all of you have been through it in your own life on some scale. Instead, I’ll use this to segue back to the subject of my last sermon, the development of liberal theology over the past two thousand years. I didn’t quite finish it last time, but you”ll see that humility plays its role here too.

I ended last time talking about Paul Tillich. I still think he was the best Christian theologian of the 20th century was. Partly because he was so frank about theology being closely related to depth psychology – something he learned from Kierkegaard as so many of the rest of us have.

But it was also Tillich’s insistence on honesty, on bringing all manner of questions to religion. Throughout his career, those who knew him, and many of us who read him, felt that he was torn between two allegiances. One was his desire to follow his insights to their logical conclusions, which would have led him beyond Christianity and beyond theism. He may have been the only religious thinker with a mind powerful enough to do this, so many of us wish he had done so. But his other allegiance was to the Christian tradition. He felt he was one of its ablest defenders, and felt compelled to defend it in an age of growing skepticism.

But in his last two years, he met Mircea Eliade, the great scholar of world religions at Chicago. And when these two great minds met, it was the younger Eliade who changed the older Tillich, and gave him the chance to grow beyond both Christianity and theism.

In a paper delivered only twelve days before he died, Tillich finally acknowledged the step he could have taken decades earlier.

After learning more about the way the same deep human questions are pursued through all world religions, he said that if he had it to do again, he would not have written his theology from within Christianity. He would have written it from within the broader field of world religions.

Even theologians who know Tillich’s work don’t seem to understand or discuss what this meant. But it was revolutionary. He was saying in 1965 that all the gods in all the world’s religions were created by their people, rather than the other way around. And they were created by their ancient storytellers as local and transient vehicles for our permanent human questions.

So the logical conclusion of liberal theology, and the legitimate heir to the gods, comes when we will take the step of owning our questions and pursuing the wisdom we need wherever it can be found. At their best, the gods are our resources and teachers, the projected personifications of some of our species’ highest hopes and most sacred values.

In some ways, this has been the message of liberal theology for over two thousand years. Two weeks ago I talked about Origen, the early 3rd century Christian. He taught that religious writings must be taken symbolically, not literally, because literal readings of scripture, he said, aren’t religious. He also said we need two things from religion. We need to find those things that are useful to us and worthy of God, worthy of the very highest that we can grasp. I’m still not sure that can be put better or more concisely.

Today, when we can learn so easily about so many religions and mythologies, we have a wide array of gods. Each one, created by the people who then came to worship it, has been a kind of collecting point for their collective wisdom. We can learn from all religions and mythologies.

If we’re smart, we’re still looking for what’s useful to us and worthy of the highest values, worthy of the gods.

We come to church because we need a community of people who will be serious about life’s serious questions, where we can pursue them in good company. It’s so hard to do alone.

What is it that’s hard to do alone? It’s hard to grow into the kind of life that’s useful to us and worthy of the highest.

As you can hear, this opens the scope of liberal religion onto an almost infinite scene. All religions, all gods, as well as all great poetry, drama, and all the humanities are food for our spiritual journey. That’s good news, it means there will still be plenty to talk about when I resume my regular sermons here in two months.

But you know, some day we’re going to hear some important questions we need to know how to answer.

They’ll be questions about a person who really did it. A person who really lived the way we want to live. Someone who tried the best they could to be the best they could. Someone who had moral courage, strength of character, whose life was a blessing to themselves and to others. Someone who was authentic, who was true to themselves in the best way, someone who really did it.

Then a voice from somewhere will ask, “Do you know that person?”

And more than anything, we want to be able to say “Yes. Yes, of course I know that person:

“C’est moi.”