Sunday 28 May 2017

The Little Way (1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:11-16)



(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on May 28, 2017, Easter VII)

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Odd Advice

“Humble yourselves.” So suggests 1 Peter to a persecuted community of Christ-followers. It strikes me as rather odd advice. When we stand face to face with a bully or an enemy, humility is probably the last option that presents itself. Our instinct, instead, is fight or flight. With our ego pricked and our heart racing, we must decide between standing up for ourselves or saving ourselves: either fight then and there, or live to fight another day.

If 1 Peter were alone in recommending humility in the face of the enemy, then we might write his words off as the suggestion of a lofty visionary, someone living in the impractical world of ideals rather than in the knitty-gritty world of flesh and blood. But 1 Peter is not alone. The letter of James also recommends humility in very similar terms. Humility, according to them both, is how you resist evil (cf. James 4:6-7, 10).

The Enemy Is Within

And they weren’t alone. For many early Christ-followers, resisting evil meant neither self-defense nor self-preservation. It meant self-denial. We see this odd idea lived out in the lives of the desert fathers, a rather odd bunch themselves, a gaggle of early Christ-followers who went into the desert to practice their faith in monastic communities. Reading about the desert fathers always puts me on the edge of my seat. I approach them as you might a crazy uncle—expecting something both irreverent and eye-opening. I imagine them sometimes as a group of grumpy old men, both crotchety and wise.

Take, for instance, this story about Father Macarius. One day, a young man asks him, “How do I become a holy man?” Father Macarius responds, “Go to the cemetery. I want you to abuse the dead for all you’re worth. Throw sticks and stones at them, curse at them, call them names—anything you can think of.” The young man can hardly believe his ears, but he does as he’s told. When he returns, Father Macarius asks, “What did the dead people say?” The young man responds that they said nothing. They were dead. “Isn’t that interesting?” Father Macarius muses. “I want you to go back tomorrow, and this time spend the day saying everything nice about these people. Call them righteous men and women, compliment them, say everything wonderful you can imagine.” The young man again does as he’s told. When he returns, Father Macarius asks how the dead responded this time. The young man responds that, again, they did not say a word. “Ah, they must be holy people indeed,” says Father Macarius. “You insulted them, and they did not reply. You praised them, and they did not speak. Go and do likewise, my friend, taking no account of either the scorn of men and women or their praises. And you too will be a holy man.”[1]

In tradition and folklore, it is said that the desert fathers fought great spiritual battles against the devil and his host of demons. But as this story hints at, the demonic forces are not some concrete, external reality. The enemy is not without: the enemy is within. The only battle the young man must wage is with the self, the ego, this thing that we call “I” or “me” formed by the constellation of our desires and achievements and what others think of us. As Father Macarius suggests, resisting evil means making ourselves little, or losing ourselves.

We see this more clearly in a simple story about Father Antony, the founder of the desert fathers. Antony says, “I saw all the snares that the enemy spread over the world, and I said, groaning, ‘What can get me through such snares?’ Then I heard a voice saying to me, ‘Humility.’”[2]

Humility Is Resistance

Humility may be a virtue, but in our modern world it has become a rather distasteful idea—and with good reason. In our world, humility is often shorthand for passive submission. For many folks today, to be humble means to surrender yourself uncritically to the world around you. Humility is little more than a white flag. It’s equivalent to saying, “Do to me what you will, I won’t resist.” 

If the writer of 1 Peter were confronted with this idea of humility, though, I’m fairly certain that he would raise his eyebrows. A humility that just submits to the status quo? A humility that doesn’t resist? That’s entirely the opposite of what he and the early Christ-followers had in mind. For them, humility is the very root of resistance. In the same breath, the writer of 1 Peter tells his audience to “humble themselves” and to “resist” the devil. The two instructions are one and the same.

Humility is resistance because it addresses evil at its very birthplace: the heart. Whereas the world believes that evil is outside and change begins only when we fix what is outside us, faith proclaims that evil is within and real change only happens when we disarm our egos and welcome the spirit of God. According to our scripture today, humility is about a change of hands. Humility, 1 Peter says, places us in “the mighty hand of God,” who “will himself restore, support, strengthen and establish” us (1 Pet 5:6, 10). If we rely only on ourselves, we’ll only ever get what we’ve already got. We need something new, something from outside ourselves. Change comes not from us, but from God. The Protestant reformers called God’s righteousness an “alien righteousness” for good reason. It is not our own. It is alien: it comes from outside us.

Humility does not immobilize us, as the world fears. It does the opposite. It mobilizes us—in a fuller, richer, stronger way than we could ourselves. By making ourselves little, by losing ourselves, we open ourselves up. We become fertile soil for God. When we open our ears, we can listen to others—and perhaps we will hear God. When we open our hands, we can accept help from others—and perhaps from God. When we open our minds, we see beyond reality into possibilities—and perhaps possibilities from God. Humility, I think, is the truth of what Paul meant when he said, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20).

In this sense, humility means getting out of our own way so that Christ can get in. Being humble is like dancing: only when we let the music enter inside us—and overtake us—can we dance in rhythm. Being humble is like playing jazz: only once the bass line has us on its leash can we improvise gracefully.

Little Zeros

In the last quarter of the 19th century, there lived and died in Lisieux, France a girl named Thérèse. Even when she lay on her deathbed as a twenty-four year-old, people were already calling her a saint. She, however, responded: “I am no saint….I am quite a little soul upon whom the good God has heaped graces.”[3] It was perhaps her favorite word: “Little.” She once explained, “To remain little means recognizing one’s nothingness, expecting everything from the good God, as a little child expects everything from his father.”[4] Or as she puts it more colorfully: “I of course can do very little, absolutely nothing, in fact, alone….Zero by itself has no value, but, put alongside one, it becomes potent.”[5] Thérèse saw that she alone had no claim to anything good; goodness came from God. She could only be its helper.

I have a hunch that the desert fathers and Jesus and the writer of 1 Peter would all agree. The way to God is the little way. The self—this thing we call “I”—is full of itself. Full of concerns, plans, hurts, achievements, failures. Sometimes there is too much noise to hear the music of God, to hear that buoyant bass line. But if we cast these anxieties onto God, as 1 Peter advises (1 Pet 5:7); if we make ourselves humble and small as the desert fathers and Thérèse both recommend; if we lose ourselves, as Jesus invites us to do—then we open ourselves to the alien spirit of God, the divine tune that draws us into the dance of reconciliation and restoration (cf. 1 Pet 5:10). We make ourselves zeros, powerless by the world’s math, but potent in the math of God’s love.

The Little Way to Greatness

Our scripture today concludes by dreaming of glory in the great by and by, when we will be restored and exalted (cf. 4:12, 5:10). My guess is that when most folks read this, they dream of themselves, only bigger and better. But I wonder if the point of humility is that it’s never just our glory or greatness. Perhaps glory and greatness will come only when we make ourselves little, small and light enough to be caught and lifted up in the gusts and winds of the Spirit. The glory and greatness will not be ours alone, but God’s and all creation’s.

Prayer

Humble Christ,
Whose little way
Of losing self
Turns heavy anxieties
Into graceful blessings,
And suffering
Into hope:
Teach us 
How to listen 
For the music of God
In our lives, 
And remind us to dance, too.
Amen.


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[1] Adapted from the paraphrase found in Belden Lane, “Antony and the Desert Fathers: Christian History Interview—Discovering the Desert Paradox,” http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-64/antony-and-desert-fathers-christian-history-interview.html, accessed on May 24, 2107. 

[2] Roberta C. Bondi, To Love as God Loves: Conversations with the Early Church (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 42. 

[3] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Two Sisters in the Spirit: Thérèse of Lisieux & Elizabeth of the Trinity (trans. Donald Nichols, Anne Englund Nash, and Dennis Martin; San Francisco: Ignatius, 1992), 49. 

[4] Balthasar, 297. 

[5] Balthasar, 296-297.

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