Know Your Place

 

22^nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Cycle C

Sir 3:17-18,20, 28-29

Heb 12:18-19,22-24a

Lk 14:1,7-14

 

Know your place

 

Christopher West tells the story of an old usher, Mr. Xavier, who served for many years at his local parish church. He was always grumpy about something. He had been an usher for as long as anyone could remember, and he took great pride in pointing out to any other usher that he had seniority. It was his way or no way. And boy, could he pack the people into those pews. He also had the nasty habit of walking up to the family of a crying baby and escorting them outside if they weren’t moving fast enough. Or of  bluntly telling a teenager she wasn’t dressed appropriately.

 

One Sunday morning Mass was particularly crowded. Folks were squeezed in as tight as they could be, and some were even forced to stand around the perimeter of the church. Just about halfway through the homily the back door opened and a young man entered. He was obviously homeless. His clothes were filthy, his hair unkempt, and his shoes were practically disintegrating off his feet. Bathing was a forgotten memory for him, evidenced by the way peoples’ heads snapped around in dismay as he shuffled past them.

 

On he walked down the aisle. Every time he passed a pew that had a little bit of room left in it the people on the end would shift over, closer to the aisle, blocking him out. Sometimes it was subtle, sometimes not. Finally he came to the front row, where you know there’s always a seat left. He sat down.

 

Suddenly there was Mr. X, striding purposely down the center aisle. He’d spotted the guy. All eyes turned and followed his progress towards the front of the church. You could practically hear the people thinking, “Xavier’ll get him. Watch this. He’ll practically drag him out if he has to. Maybe he’ll even rap him on the head a bit.” Everyone, even the priest, was watching, wondering how this would turn out.

 

Xavier came to the first row, stopped beside the young man, and simply sat down next to him. That’s all he did. Just sat down next to him, and he remained there throughout the rest of the Mass. No scene was made, no comment was spoken. He just sat there as he would’ve next to any other parishioner. And in that moment of humble acceptance Mr. Xavier gave that young man back his dignity.

 

I wonder where Jesus sat.

 

When he arrived at the banquet, what did he do first? Where did he sit? He didn’t have expensive clothes. His sandals were probably filthy from tramping around Galilee all day. He probably had not bathed in a while. And his group of friends were not much better off. The other guests were watching him closely. Why? Was it because he was a famous rabbi they were all curious to see? Was it because the Pharisees were waiting to trip him up on some point of law, to humiliate him in public? Or was it because he didn’t look like he fit in with the crowd. Sort of  like that homeless young man.

 

Did his host lead him to a place at his side, or did he leave him there to fend for himself, to find out where he fit in on his own? Was the parable he told just a piece of wisdom he had heard, or had his own experience taught him about humility and humiliation?

 

To Americans, humility is often seen as weakness. We train our children to have good self-images. We build their self-esteem by praising them constantly. Rarely do we teach them to submit. Rarely do we teach them to live within themselves. Rarely do we allow them to fail. Perhaps we have given them a false sense of themselves, making them self-centered rather than humble. Perhaps so many marriages fail because we do not know how to be humble with each other. We have never learned to be obedient to each other. We have never learned how to submit to each other. We are always trying to be something we’re not, scrambling for the best place, the biggest house, the shiniest car, the best job. We tend to cover up our insecurities and weaknesses with boastfulness.

 

 

I see and hear all those commercials for those online dating services. Every one of the testimonials in the ads says something to the effect “He loves me for who I am”, or “I finally found someone who accepts me for who I really am”. That’s a bit arrogant, isn’t it?  Most of us assume that our true selves are lovable. Are we asking people to accept us when we are unacceptable? Do we really lack so much self awareness?

 

Psalm 139 tells us that viewing ourselves truthfully, with sober judgment, means seeing ourselves the way God sees us. That’s humility. A humble person makes a realistic assessment of himself or herself without illusion or pretense to be something he or she is not. The humble regard themselves neither smaller nor larger than they truly are. Humility is acceptance. It is submission. It is obedience.

Humility is knowing your place and being ok with it. Humility is knowing your limitations, repenting and seeking forgiveness. God knows your limitations, and he loves you just the same, but He still requires something from you.

 

The greatest act of humility is repentance. The master does not ask the servant for forgiveness. You cannot be arrogantly sorry. In order to ask for forgiveness you must subjugate yourself and your ego to the other. You have to dig deep within yourself and be truly honest in your assessment of your behavior. And once you see how you have hurt the other, you have to swallow your pride and ask for forgiveness, knowing full well that you may be rejected.

 

And just as we are called to repentance, we are called even more to forgive. I tell young parents that the most important thing they can do for their children is to forgive them. From the very beginning, forgive them. If only once do they come to you and say they’re sorry and you hesitate, or you offer some condition, or say, “I forgive you…but”, you have lost their trust. They need to trust that no matter what they do, you will accept them back. They must trust if they are to repent. They must trust in your forgiveness if they are to ever have hope. If they can’t trust in your forgiveness, how can they trust in their future spouse’s or even God’s? We all want to trust that we will be forgiven. Why wouldn’t we want others to trust in our forgiveness?

 

We act with humility when we forgive, just as it takes an act of humility to ask for forgiveness. Have you ever thought about how Jesus practiced humility? How could the all powerful God himself be humble? He did it by forgiving. He called everyone to repentance and then when they came to him he forgave them. Unconditionally. Even from the cross.

 

We have the example of what it means to be truly human in Jesus Christ. He was no pushover. He was not weak. He never needed praise to raise his self-esteem. The term “self-esteem” is found nowhere in scripture. But nowhere in history can we find someone so comfortable in his own skin. He was God, yet he chose to be obedient. He chose to submit to the will of the Father, and he handed himself over to lesser beings. He put himself in their control. St. Paul says that Jesus emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, ...who humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. For us.

 

That’s what it means to be truly human. His self-imposed humility led to Jesus’ submission to the Father’s will, which led to his obedience to the Father’s plan, which led to his death, which led to his glory, and ours.

 

Humbling, isn’t it?

Is It All in Vain?

 

18^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Cycle C

Ecc 1:2; 2:21-23

Col 3:1-5, 9-11

Lk 12:13-21

 

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

 

All you do here on earth is really in vain. All your hard work for nothing. You work and work for success and in the end everything will just go to someone who hadn’t done anything to earn it. That’s a pretty fatalistic attitude old Qoheleth has today. It’s pretty short sighted, and yet, he raises one of the most fundamental questions we all have to ask ourselves eventually. Is it all worth it? What’s truly important and how should we be living our lives? Jesus says to store up the things that matter to God, but what does that mean?

 

I recently had some conversations with a gentleman that really made me think about these questions. Craig, a friend of a friend of mine, was a highly successful lawyer in Salt Lake City who was dying of brain cancer. He had spent his entire life as an active member of another faith, and he was scared. He found himself at the very end of his life questioning every tenant of his faith, even if there is an afterlife and whether or not he would go there. He had been raised to believe that heaven was something a person could earn, and he felt that he had fallen so short in how he had lived up to the Christian ideal. He felt his life – and death – had no real purpose. Everything seemed in vain to him.

 

We sat for several hours and talked about all these things in detail. We landed on the doctrine of grace – that ultimately whatever we do in life our invitation into heaven is up to God alone, that we cannot earn our way there. It is pure gift. And we delved into the concept of mercy. Once he was able to accept that his sense of purpose was established. Nothing in life is in vain if we understand the gift and love the giver.

 

Whenever someone we love is dying, especially if it is a long, slow, painful process, we struggle to retain their, and our, dignity amongst all the medications and equipment and medical personnel and dirty linens and family squabbles and tears of joy and pain. But most of all we are forced to see our loved ones as fragile and weak and helpless. And we feel useless and the whole process seems to be in vain as we wrestle with our conflicting feelings. Like Craig, we may wonder what the purpose of our lives has been, and what is the purpose of the suffering we all go through. We wonder if it is all worth it, and we are humbled by the sight of what our loved ones have been reduced to.

 

But in the middle of the night, when we sit in vigil around the bedside, we are confronted by our thoughts and get ourselves focused on what is truly important in our lives, and it’s not all the things we thought were important before. All the peripheral stuff does seem to be vanity. It is our relationships that last. It is our relationships that give our lives meaning.

 

Not all material things in life are vanity, and all things we possess are not empty and worthless. We all have possessions. The thing is not what we possess, but what possesses us. Jesus didn’t say that possessions are bad, he said we shouldn’t make them the focus of our lives. He was talking about greed. We should avoid things that hurt our relationships and that take our eyes off the Kingdom of God. We can and do use our possessions and success for good, but we shouldn’t let them worry us.

 

I know some very successful people who make a lot of money who wake up in a cold sweat at night worrying about this deal or that, what the market is doing, or some detail they missed at work. They have more than enough money to live comfortably for the rest of their lives, and yet they are never at peace. I think the main reason is that they feel they must be self-reliant, that their success is all their own doing and responsibility. It may not even be greed; it may be the stress they put on themselves to provide a good life for their family. It may be the sense of purpose they get out of success, or the thrill of the win or to be number one. I think all those things are vanity. And they place their reliance in the wrong place. It shouldn’t be on themselves and their own abilities and responsibilities, but on humbly realizing that it is God who is the one who gives them everything they have and who has given them the talents and strengths to achieve so much. And that we are called to do everything in our lives for the glory of God.

 

Remember the gospel from last week? Rabbi, teach us to pray. Jesus said that the Father wants us to ask him for everything we need. Give us each day our daily bread. Just enough for today, Lord. Tomorrow will take care of itself. And if we who are wicked know how to give our children good things, how much more will our Heavenly Father give to those who ask him? Why won’t we ask? Why can’t we trust?

 

It can be so easy to receive the gifts but not the hand that offers them. Once I was visiting one of my little ladies at the nursing home, and we were discussing how much things had changed for her since she had fallen and broken her hip. She no longer could do things for herself but needed help with even the simplest tasks. It was forcing her daughter to spend more and more time with her, and she felt guilty that she was taking her away from her family so much.

 

I asked her to think of when her children were little, of all she and her husband had sacrificed for them. I asked her to remember all the long nights sitting with them when they were scared or sick. I told her to recall all the times it was difficult to be parents, of all the joy and pain her children had given her. Was she ever resentful of those times? Did she love her children less because of them or did her sacrifice actually strengthen her love? Did she ever regret any time she was there to pick them up when they needed help? Of course not. Those times are often the ones she cherished the most. Why should she deny her daughter the same experience now?

 

Now her sacrifice for her children is to accept their help. Maybe the sacrifice we need to make is to submit to the fact that we need God and we need other people. We will all need to rely on our relationships at some time or other, when we are stripped of all the trappings of life and all we have is ourselves and those who love us. And we need to accept their help with humility and grace. Because they also have the need to help us. It’s not payback for all the times we helped them. We all have the deep seated need to sacrifice for those we love. Because we love them. We need to give and we need to receive with the same grace.

 

Someday it will be us in that bed and our families will be gathered around us in vigil. How we react to that situation will determine how well we die. In that way the gift and the reception of the gift are sacrament, and our death bed an altar. That is what I had tried to tell my friend Craig and what he had such a hard time accepting.

 

I once read a book, Evidence of the Afterlife, written by Jeffrey Long, a medical doctor who claims to be an atheist. While in medical school he was struck by the fact that there had been no formal research done on near death experiences, and so he performed a ten year study on over six thousand people of all nations, races, ages and cultures who claimed to have had near death experiences and out-of-body experiences. One of his findings stood out to me. Virtually all the people who had what were considered true dying experiences, you know the white light, the tunnel, etc., also had an experience of a “judgment”. What they all had in common was that they saw their entire lives flash before their eyes in an instant, and what they saw was how all their actions and their inactions had affected other people. Even people who they didn’t really know very well were affected positively or negatively by what they themselves had done. It stunned many of them to see just how important other people were in their lives and how important they were in the lives of others.

 

I shared that story and gave that book to Craig a month before he died, and he said that simple revelation gave him more comfort and peace than 70 years following his religion. He saw his purpose and it allowed him to die in peace.

 

We will be judged on our relationships. How we have treated other people, not on what we have accomplished nor on the legacies we have left behind. Jesus said so.  It is not all in vain. Jesus said so. We all touch other people in ways we never even realize. We are all building storage facilities for the stuff that really matters, whether we are aware of it or not. Those storage facilities are the hearts of those we touch.

 

What is in your storehouses? Are they filled with pretty baubles and toys, thinking that’s what will be your legacy? If so, maybe you need to tear them down every once in a while and start over. Fill them with all those little things that affect others. The gentle smiles, the small hugs, the thoughtful cards, the simple kindnesses we do along with the great sacrifices we make that we may not realize mean the world to others.

 

It would be a shame for us to live our lives without ever storing up the things that  build up relationships. But it would also be a shame for us to never stop and realize that we are doing it. We need to step back and take the time to examine our lives every once in a while to acknowledge the good we have done and see the deficiencies. And see the hope in our lives.

 

It may be easier to give up like the fatalist Qoheleth, to see everything as shallow vanity. To live just for the moment’s pleasure. Or to see no purpose to life or death. I choose not to.