Saturday, September 03, 2016
Pentecost 15, Year C, Proper 17 August 28, 2016
Sermon for The Fifteenth
Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, Proper 17 ~ August
28, 2016
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Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
…go and sit down at the lowest place…
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided
Trinity
For some reason, I found myself driving around the San
Fernando Valley with an old friend, a priest who is a native. We passed a great
big Roman Catholic Church – about the size of our Cathedral, beautifully ornate
Byzantine/Romanesque pile, and we noticed that across the architrave, chiseled
in massive letters was the single word: HUMILITAS. We found this somehow ironic. And that is
always the problem, isn’t it? The chief
cleric always enters at the end of the procession, because the last shall be
first and vice-versa, but then the whole procession gets ordered according to
rank so that the first are the lowest-ranking and so on. You can still always
tell who is the most important!
Today’s observation about banquet-seating has a humorous
tone, in my opinion. On the surface level of meaning, anyway. But possibly our
Lord’s advice is not simply the suggestion of strategy for preferment at
important peoples’ parties! Maybe it has to do with our own inner lives and the
dangers of imagining that we are more advanced than we really are. For the
awful paradox is that if we appear to ourselves to be making progress, we are
probably not; while the more progress we actually make, the more lowly we
appear to ourselves! Better to occupy the lowest place in our own estimation
and possibly to be called up higher. The trick is to contemplate one’s own
spiritual lowliness without undue worry or despair, relying entirely on God’s
grace.
With that introduction to tie it to today’s Gospel, I want to
read to you a passage from one of my favorite ancient fathers, Dorotheos of
Gaza (late 6th Century). His writings also contain more than a
little humor, mixed in with profound spiritual wisdom. Here is his advice about
receiving unjust criticism, and turning it to one’s spiritual advantage…
[There you are sitting peacefully, minding your own business, and a brother comes up and makes a disparaging remark, and you get angry. Instead of thanking him for revealing to you yourown latent anger, you send it back to him.]
Dorotheos has a point, of course. No one can make me feel emotions. I have a choice
to permit myself to be disturbed or not.
But what about unjust criticism or worse abuse? Well. I don’t think
Dorotheos is advising us to be complete doormats. If the critical brother came
every day to bully and abuse, it would be a matter for the Abbot. On the other hand, if the accused brother is
really on top of it, he can accept undeserved criticism dispassionately –
however unfair – seeking to learn from it.
None of us is in a position to evaluate ourselves. The critical brother
may be out of his tree, on the other hand, there may be more to the feedback
than one would like to think.
In any case, such unpleasant experiences may give us a chance
to take the lower place at the banquet, a difficult thing to do. And not for
the obvious reason that it is unpleasant to let injustice go. There is also the
problem of letting it go with self-conscious humility, which is not humility at
all, but rather like the inscription on the church. It would probably be better
to get mad and oppose the injustice openly than to pretend to humility that one
doesn’t actually have. The last shall be first and the first last. But if I
take the lower place in order to try to get the higher one, it is hardly
humility. Maybe if I want to be really humble, I should take the higher place
so that I will be humiliated! And on and on: the same old problem of infinite
regress.
Anyway, I think the riddle is good to bear in mind when I
think about my own inner, spiritual life. The side of me that is overly
self-critical needs to be acknowledged, but not reacted against. I need to tell
myself – OK, accuser-self (the translation of the word, satan, by the way!), you are probably right, and I will sit at the
lowest place, because I am not very advanced. But hey! What the hell? God is my
judge, no one else, not even you, that is not even myself! I might be pleasantly surprised! Probably
best not to count on it, but you never know. It seems to me that is nearer the
mark of genuine humility – the kind that is not proclaimed in two-foot-high
lettering, chiseled in stone.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
