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.
