Tuning Ourselves to the Truth
A Sermon for the Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost
We are often off tune and out of sync, our pitches wandering from the melodies of our lives, so that discord erupts. We need a key, a note to which we can align the voice of our soul, that wholeness of mind and body and spirit that is meant to always dwell in the chorus of God’s love. The practice of getting in key with that love, of returning again to the tune of our truest selves, is the practice of humble prayer and that is the subject of our Gospel reading this morning.
Some religious people had come to hear Jesus. They were disciplined people, moral people, good clean folks any of us would have liked to have had as our neighbors. These were self-sufficient citizens; the kind that would never come knocking except to drop off some cookies or a fresh baked loaf of bread. These faithful Jews followed the religious rules of Torah and they were certain that because of all of this they had secured a place in the community of God. These were people who, as the gospel puts it, “trusted in themselves that they were righteous.” And so, by definition, they had no understanding of what being righteous means.
To help them see their error, Jesus told them a story about someone who was moral but proud and someone who was immoral but humble. It was a gentle kind of instruction that didn’t call anyone out by name but was clear in its implication--they weren’t as righteous as they thought, in fact, a dishonest, money grubbing sellout was more justified than they.
To understand what’s happening in this Gospel we need to understand what righteousness meant for first century Jews and what humility has to do with prayer. They are both words that are often used by religious folks and yet we rarely get into the center of their meaning, meaning that is at the heart of the gospel.
Righteousness, or being justified in the biblical sense, is not about some abstract virtue or Victorian morality. To be righteous is to be in right relationship with God and neighbor, to be in tune with the choir of God’s love. It requires a certain submission, a willingness to listen and watch and adjust to the music. To be assured of one’s own righteousness is to be like a person who is confident in their voice, which may well be strong and good, but is of no use if it is not submitted to the direction of the choir master, if it is not in tune with the other singers. To be a good choir member requires a certain humility, a clear understanding of one’s dependence.
The word humility is even stranger to us than righteousness. Humility, as the philosopher Iris Murdoch has defined it, is a “selfless respect for reality.” Or, as St. Bernard of Clairvaux puts it, “humility is living in the truth.” This reality and truth inevitably mean that those who are humble will see themselves as they are--limited, dependent, lacking. This is not a dour assessment, or a damaging valuation of our self-worth. It is, instead, an honest statement of the truth of all creaturely life. Our value is a gift given by God that can never be substituted with the counterfeit currency of our own justification. To enter into this truth is the path toward our liberation, a liberation that Jesus desires even for those who are convinced of their own righteousness.
“In humility is the greatest freedom,” Thomas Merton once wrote. “As soon as you begin to take yourself seriously and imagine that your virtues are important because they are yours, you become the prisoner of your own vanity and even your best works will blind and deceive you. Then, in order to defend yourself, you will begin to see sins and faults everywhere in the actions of other[s].” That is the situation of the Pharisee, it is the situation of all of us when we look around and see our neighbors as less than ourselves.
The remedy to self-righteousness is a humility that helps us tune ourselves to the loving heart of God and join in the chorus of creation. This humility begins, as it does with the prayer of the tax collector, with a petition for God’s mercy in the face of our sins.
This is something that the early Christian monastics knew well. Through the practice of silence and solitude and stillness they sought to move their lives into God’s life. To do that they had to know who this self was that would find its wholeness in God. They soon found that to know themselves was to encounter darkness, to recognize within the destructive desires that are bent against what is good and whole and healthy. These monks were sinners and the admission of that fact was the beginning of their becoming saints.
These same monastics, for all their concern over sin, were remarkably forgiving of others. One famous Desert Father, Abba Moses, had been a notorious highway robber before his conversion. He was well known for his gentleness and forgiving spirit toward the brothers who committed various faults. To explain how he did this to the younger monks he said, “If you are occupied with your own faults, you have not time to see those of your neighbor.”
Such consciousness of our faults, such admission of our limits and dependencies and sins, does not mean that we should let these dominate our lives. Instead, when we admit our sins, praying for God’s mercy as the tax collector does, we can let them go to God who will enable our path toward freedom. Humility, which carries us beyond self-righteousness, leads us toward an openness that requires no defense. In fact defensiveness or manipulation of how others see us can be a sure sign that we are not living into the path of humility and are thereby blocked from joining into the chorus of God’s love.
In a little book called How to Become a Saint, the late Jack Bernard offers a wonderful practice for learning humility that I want to leave you with today. Bernard says that if you want to be humble, you must “Stop trying to manipulate how people think of you. Speak and act to please God, and trust him to deal with the way other people evaluate you. This is not to imply that God is going to make everyone think you are wonderful if you just trust him to take care of it. He most likely won’t. Your being held in high esteem is probably not relevant to the purposes of God...As a spiritual exercise, refusing to manipulate how people think of you will produce important fruit because it is acting truthfully—that is, humbly. God is pleased when we do things with him as the sole intended audience.”
This is the practice of the tax collector; it is the practice Jesus recommends to us. Let us live truthfully and honestly toward God and neighbor. Let us pray for God’s mercy, admitting our faults and sins, and recognizing that we are powerless to overcome them without God’s gift of grace. That is how we will begin to move our souls into tune with God, joining in the music of his love that resonates at the heart of all creation. Amen.