Sermon: Phoenix Affirmation 8
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Sermon: Phoenix Affirmation 8: O Lord, It's Hard to Be Humble
Date: February 25, 2007 Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church Phoenix Affirmation #8: Loving our neighbors includes walking humbly with God, acknowledging our own shortcomings while honestly seeking to understand and call forth the best in others, including those who consider us their enemies. Oh Lord it's hard to be humblewhen you're perfect in every way.I can't wait to look in the mirrorcause I get better looking each day.To know me is to love meI must be a hell of a man.Oh Lord it's hard to be humblebut I'm doing the best that I can. I guess you could say I'm a loner,a cowboy outlaw tough and proud.I could have lots of friends if I want tobut then I wouldn't stand out from the crowd.Some folks say that I'm egotistical.Hell, I don't even know what that means.I guess it has something to do with the way that Ifill out my skin tight blue jeans. (Refrain) Mac Davis—he of the curly hair, country twang, and skin-tight bell-bottom blue jeans—used to sing that song in the 70’s. John and I used to sing it with our youth groups when we led youth groups that would sing; this was a hot request along with “Lola.” It’s a great song to bellow out with self-conscious teenagers, especially the line about how “I can’t wait to look in the mirror…” It just works as a tongue-in-cheek anthem for kids with chronically low self-esteem, at that age when your imperfections just seem to shine out like glow-in-the-dark “Mr. Yuk” stickers. I enjoy Mac Davis’ song, but I guess I don’t know all that many people who find it hard to be humble in the way his over-the-top lyrics point. Most people don’t really believe they are perfect in every way. Just the opposite, in fact. Psalm 51:3, in the NRSV translation says, “For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.” In the quietness of our hearts, most of us don’t have to search very long and hard before we recall our character flaws or remember the many occasions when we have behaved badly. If we have a few moments in prayer time to confess, most of us don’t have to think too hard before we come up with something to name. Have you ever gotten faithfully engaged in a silent time of confession when the time is up suddenly and you find yourself thinking, “Wait a minute, I’m just getting started, I’m on a roll here!” “My sin is ever before me.” I couldn’t forget it if I wanted to. I can try to cover it up, sure; but I can’t forget it no matter how much I might long to do so. It’s actually kind of a relief to confess, isn’t it, especially when it’s just between you and God. It’s a relief to acknowledge our own shortcomings before the merciful God who knows all about them anyway, especially if we have been putting some energy into trying to look all put together for the public. Trying to look like we have got our act together does take a lot of psychic energy. Frederick Buechner wrote of creating a “highly edited version [of ourselves] which we put forth in the hope that world will find it more acceptable than the real thing.” I believe that is a natural impulse, to offer the public a highly edited version of ourselves, and it’s a mostly harmless impulse, unless we start to believe in the highly edited version, “perfect in every way.” That’s where confession comes in handy, a quiet time to drop the appearance of perfection and acknowledge our whole, flawed selves before the one who accepts us anyway, no matter what. A regular practice of confession keeps us from coming to believe in the highly edited version. Confession has an important role to play not only in human-God interaction but in relationships between humans as well. The dumbest movie line ever written was in “Love Story”: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Don’t you find that just the opposite is true—love means frequently having to say you’re sorry. Healthy relationships are made healthier when we humbly acknowledge our shortcomings to the people with whom we walk the way in families, friendships, and communities. That’s the way we walk humbly not just with God but with the neighbors who are on life’s journey with us. Most of us would rather acknowledge our shortcomings ourselves than have them acknowledged for us. One of my favorite themes in old Peanuts cartoons had to do with Lucy making up lists of Charlie Brown’s faults for him. Do you remember? There was one list which looked sort of manageable until she rolled it out, and it stretched out clear across the room; her tally of Charlie Brown’s faults, single spaced, in fine print. Charlie Browns sighs. We know how he feels. I’d rather acknowledge my own faults than have some helpful observer point them out for me any day. Even if I secretly happen to agree with someone who is pointing out my shortcomings, there something about having someone else confess on my behalf that just makes me defensive. I want to defend myself if someone else “confesses” what’s wrong with me. How about you? That tendency is exacerbated if someone wants to point out the faults of some group I’m a part of. I may be well acquainted with the sins and shortcomings of my family, for instance, but if I hear some outsider criticizing them or criticizing us as a unit, I get defensive. I may know something about the weaknesses of my church, but if some outsider points them out, I want to say, “Put up your dukes, Bub—those are people I love you’re talking about!” Let a man start telling me what’s wrong with women, and look out! And so on. Defensiveness can trump humility in a hurry. This leads me to examine how I might respond to someone who considers me their enemy. Isn’t it interesting the way the 8th Affirmation is written—it doesn’t call us to love our enemies but to seek to “understand and call forth the best in others, including those who consider us their enemies.” I think the writers of the Affirmations are onto something here. If they had just written about “our enemies” we could easily bleep over the spiritual challenge there by piously claiming that we don’t consider anyone our enemies. But we cannot deny that there are those in the world who do truly consider us their enemies; and the way we respond to them is a real test of our spiritual mettle. I’m going to leap right to the national level here. Although it may be painful, let’s look back to the days following the September 11, 2007 attacks. See if you can recall some of your feelings. We felt (if I may be permitted to speculate) a good deal of grief about those who were killed and their families; fury at the attackers; pride in the bravery of the rescue workers; fear about future attacks. And there was a good deal of just plain shock going around. It was a shocking event on so many levels. One of the expressions of public sentiment was shock that someone would consider the U.S. an enemy with the kind of intensity that would lead to a horrifying suicide attack like that. We asked ourselves “How this could happen to us?” and “Why do they hate us?” To launch an attack like that is a critique in the strongest possible form. It expresses hatred so deep that we can barely fathom it. We don’t think first in a case like 9/11 about our shortcomings—we might ask why they hate us, but we don’t really want an answer so much as we want to discover something hateful about them that might explain why they would be so depraved or misinformed as to consider us their enemy. In other words, what came out most strongly was not self-examination but defensiveness, and that spirit of defensiveness is still going strong, six years later. Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence analyzed the days following 9/11 in their book Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil. They quote our President, who, seeking to answer why this would have happened, focused on a list of national virtues that Osama bin Laden’s movement appeared to deny: “They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” His most reassuring answer, Jewett and Lawrence suggest, was that Americans are so good that they are intolerable to absolute evil. At his White House press conference one month after the attacks, he said, “I’m amazed that there’s such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. I am, like most Americans—I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are. And we’ve got to do a better job of explaining to the people of the Middle East, for example, that we don’t fight a war against Islam or Muslims. We don’t hold any religion accountable. We’re fighting evil.” Oh, Lord, it’s hard to be humble, when you’re the innocent victims fighting implacable evil. Although the President’s comments were not meant this way, they come out sounding like what the Pharisee said to God in the presence of the tax collector, “God, I thank thee that I am not like other men…” Jewett and Lawrence comment, “The ready acceptance of this framework of innocence, which has elicited broad and strong support from the American people, helps us to account for our surprise at being attacked. Unfortunately, it bespeaks a straitened imagination that cannot envision the perspective of others in the world who are extremely critical of America’s power.” Now, there was some discussion following 9/11 about why someone would consider us their enemy with such intensity. However, it quickly seemed that in public discourse and policy, “maintaining the border between explaining terrorism and justifying it was too difficult.” As a national body, as a family of Americans, we have been much more comfortable with defensiveness than with any whiff of confession. Yet if we are called by Jesus to love our enemies, or love those who consider us their enemies, we do need to honestly seek to understand them. What is it about the way we wield our power in the world that would inspire a hateful attack like the one on 9/11? We can ask that question in the spirit of understanding without justifying the act. Since then, we have engaged with a new enemy who is proving intractable. Why weren’t we welcomed as liberators in Iraq? Using the Golden Rule as a principle in our current situation, we might try to imagine what it would be like to have another nation that was worried about our arsenal of WMD’s preemptively attacking us, and soldiers going house to house looking for combatants and using the kind of interrogation techniques our side has used, here in our neighborhood. A simple exercise in walking-in-the-other-person’s shoes in our imaginations may help us toward understanding those who consider us their enemies. Such an imaginative exercise might well lead us to acknowledging our own shortcomings. That doesn’t mean that terrorist attacks were or are somehow justified—taking innocent lives is never justified. I want to be very clear about that. But as spiritually mature people we know that as individuals and as a nation that we do not altogether have clean hands and pure hearts. It is essential that we confess what we know, that we are not perfect, we are not entirely innocent, particularly as we pursue a war on two fronts that rises out of our national trauma and fear. Simply calling the others evil and ourselves good gets us nowhere, and leads to more and more inhumane destruction. I went to see The Ground Truth when our Quaker neighbors hosted a showing here in our Fellowship Hall. Let me share one of the stories told by an Iraq war veteran in the film. This retired Marine is suffering from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) after his experience in the war. The Iraq war is producing an enormous number of PTSD cases, in large part because the enemy combatants are not identified by wearing uniforms, so the soldiers are surrounded all the time by people in the streets who may or may not attack them. Our men and women end up killing people that they later conclude were not trying to harm them. This particular Marine was very troubled by his part in killing three civilians whose vehicle had approached a check point and did not respond to their orders (shouted in English) to slow down. A fourth passenger in the car approached the Marine sobbing and wailing and asking him repeatedly why he had killed his brother, that he was innocent, that they were all innocent. The Marine has been haunted, truly haunted by that memory, to the point that he felt he couldn’t live with himself and considered suicide. He went to seek help at the V.A. after he got home. When he told his story, the staff person assigned to him said, “Sir, I cannot help you.” He replied, “You can’t help me? Why not?” The therapist said, “I can’t treat a conscientious objector.” That just seems pathological to me. The system won’t offer him psychological treatment if he acknowledges the death of innocent people—as if there are no innocent people among our enemies. The system won’t offer him care if he feels grief and remorse about killing someone who ought not to have been killed. Pathology. On an institutional scale. What is the remedy for such pathology? Not to maintain a highly edited version of our national character and action, no matter what the human cost. Not to remain mired in defensiveness forever and a day. Instead, striving to embody the fruits of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—even in our relationships with those who consider us their enemies. Resolving to walk humbly with God, confessing our sin, asking God to heal our broken hearts, seeking truth, seeking a new and right spirit. I want to share with you an ancient Hindu scripture that spoke to my heart: (The “I” is God’s voice)I am justice: clear, impartial,favoring no one, hating no one.But in those who have cured themselves of Selfishness, I shine with brilliance. Even murderers and rapists,tyrants, the most cruel fanatics,ultimately know redemptionthrough my love, if they surrender To my harsh but healing graces.Passing through excruciating transformations, they find freedomand their hearts find peace within them. I am always with all beings;I abandon no one. Andhowever great your inner darkness,you are never separate from me. As we walk humbly with God, we come to understand that God favors no one and hates no one. May we surrender to God’s harsh but healing graces, and be transformed by love.
Davis, Mac “O Lord It’s Hard To Be Humble” http://www.asklyrics.com/display/Mac_Davis/Oh_Lord_It%60s_Hard_To_Be_Humble_Lyrics/73493.htm Jewett, Robert & Lawrence, John Shelton Captain America and the Crusade against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2003, p. 15 The Bhagavad Gita, quoted in The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry Stephen Mitchell, ed. New York: HarperPerennial, 1989, p. 19-20 |