October 23,
2022
Today, I want
to talk about ‘humility’.
Humility is
one of those things we should all want but seldom have.
The root word
of ‘humility’ is the Greek ‘humus’, which means ‘the dirt’, ‘the earth’, the
ground we walk on.
Remember how
in Genesis God ‘forms’ or ‘molds’ Adam from the dust and breathes life into
him.
We are
created, according to that story, from the ‘humus’—so we should be full of ‘humility’.
And notice how
God ‘molded’ Adam, like a potter would mold his clay to make something—a pot, a
vase, a piece of art.
One way we
describe ‘humility’ is to say we are ‘down to earth’—down to the dirt, down to
the dust we were molded from.
(As an aside:
Eve was created from Adam’s rib, which means—though it’s often been forgotten
or ignored over the centuries—that she did not come from his skull, to lord it
over him, or from his feet, to be in subjection to him, but from his rib—to stand
beside him and be his equal. We should never forget that women and men are equal
in God’s creation.)
I was, in my
childhood, the youngest of 15 first cousins on my mother’s side. My
grandmother, Lina Manona Jones, used to tell us: “don’t get above your raisin’.”
I thought she
meant a dried grape until one of my cousins told me she meant ‘raising’—who you
were and who you came from.
Good advice
for those seeking humility—don’t get above you ‘raising’.
Don’t pretend
to be more important than you are, more than your gene pool, more than your
family heritage.
In today’s
Gospel, Jesus tells a parable about a Pharisee—the highest caste in Jewish hierarchy—and
a tax collector—someone who worked for the Romans and oppressed his fellow
Jews.
The Pharisee
prayed, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues,
adulterers, or even like this tax collector.”
But the tax
collector, his head bowed, beat his chest and prayed, “God, be merciful to me,
a sinner.”
“I tell you
this,” Jesus told the crowd, “this man went down to his home justified rather
than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who
humble themselves we be exalted.”
Which do we
want? To be humbled or exalted in God’s eyes?
Let us take a
few moments to ponder ‘humility’ and not getting above our raising….
Amen and amen.
