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‘B’ // Advent 3 // 12-14-08 // Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian
Scriptures Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11 Psalm 126 John 1:6-8, 19-28
Humility: “Walk to the Light”
For years I have been smitten with the gospel anthem “Walk in the Light” – especially after hearing it sung many times by a multi-racial choir during my seminary internship in the South Tucson barrio. And last week, I thought: What a good time to have the choir sing this hymn! After all, Advent is a season for preparing for Jesus by lighting one more candle each Sunday to shine in our wintry darkness.
However, when I dove into the gospel passage for today, and Loren reproduced the full lyrics of this anthem over email for the choir’s eyes, I was caught short: If anything, “Walk in the Light” is not suitable for Advent.
For to give the biblical story its due: How can we walk in the light – the light of the world that is Jesus – while John the Baptizer is still testifying to it?
“He came as witness to testify to the light”, the gospel reading shares with us today. “He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.”
Not willing to ditch the anthem out-of-hand, however – after all, it was my brilliant idea (pun intended) – I considered for a moment asking the choir to change the title phrase to “Walk to the Light.” But let’s just say that the rest of the lyrics did not and do not cooperate with this change of preposition.
So, it was agreed: In consultation with a few of our more musically inclined sorts, we would not cancel the performance of “Walk in the Light” outright. We would simply postpone it – hopefully, for combined worship with St. Aidan’s on Epiphany Sunday, three short weeks away. Epiphany: When Jesus, per the visitation of the magi, is truly revealed as light to the world entire.
But for now, it’s Advent. A time when we are walking to the light. A wonderful antidote, I submit to you, to a world where too many powerful and popular and puffed-up people feel they are always walking in the light – no dark corners or crevices or cloud covers of doubt tolerated. Not unlike the Lone Ranger or Superman or – let us say it – our current President, who do not betray the slightest inclination or even capacity for self-reflection or internal contradiction … much less, repentance.1
Walking to the light, rather than in it, fits well with other Advent virtues – what the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart collectively dubbed “spirituality by subtraction”: Wait … Watch … Prepare … Hope. For walking to the light, rather than in the light, bespeaks yet another Advent virtue. A virtue I find ironically embodied by one of the wildest and woolliest of all prophets, John the Baptizer. A virtue called humility.
Humility: Teachability. Staying open; staying receptive, to our call. Realizing that (a) there is a God; (b) we ain’t God; and (c) for that: Thanks be to God!
For “the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem”, as we heard last Sunday,2 may have been flocking to John the Baptizer to be baptized in the Jordan for the forgiveness of sins. But this country preacher just won’t let it go to his head.
“Who are you?” the Jewish authorities ask him – twice! Mr. Popularity responds, “I am not the Messiah”; then, “I’m making straight his way.”
Difficult things to confess, when – as accounts of the day amply record – heads were being turned and swords were being drawn every time a Jewish charismatic appeared on the scene. Far and wide, the din of the chatter must have been dense: “This prophet John can lead us – God’s chosen people – to a violent overthrow of these Roman state terrorists!”
But John would have none of it. “I am not the Messiah”, he claimed – I am not the Anointed One. In Greek-speak: “I am not the Christ.”
For simply put: John was practicing humility. Giving himself to God by being receptive of God – so he could hear his true call.
Humility. A word derived from the Latin word humus: the soil, the earth. To paraphrase the Psalmist today: being accepting of that earthy place where our weeping bears the seed for sowing.
Humility. Knowing that we are not, nor ever can be, God. Nor – and here’s the kicker – are we to aspire to become more godly or more holy. Instead – as this baptizer of repentance teaches – we are to become more humane and more whole.
Humility. Though never in vogue among American exceptionalists or within our meritocracy, it’s a virtue that may be gaining some traction these days of great economic turmoil.
On Thursday, Brian forwarded to our Northside email list the following reflection from Sojourners magazine on our ongoing Motor City crisis:
Part of what scares us when we see a company like GM collapsing is that we can see our own vices writ large against the sky. When we hear that these companies have been producing not the best that they could, but only what would just get by, we think of our own failings. When credit freezes up and lenders do not trust borrowers or borrowers trust their lenders, we think of all the times that we have refused trust to others and the times that we’ve broken the trust that has been extended to us. When we watch the bubble burst, we see the futility of our own greed and our inability to say that enough is enough.
If we are honest with ourselves, we realize that the very mistakes the leadership of GM, Chrysler, and Ford have made are all too recognizable in ourselves—even if there are drastic differences of scale … Maybe we all need the chance to make a fresh start and begin to slowly dig our way out of this crisis.3
On the one hand, there’s the grandiosity: not only of the Big Three, but our angry reaction to its grandiosity, as well. At the core of which lies – as it always does – that deep, abiding sense of inferiority for which our grandiosity compensates.
For if we believe deep down we are less worthy or even worthless – that we are not of the imago dei – we will find ourselves compelled to cover up our failures. To protect ourselves by what my mother would call “putting on airs”. Not recognizing, as Julia Roberts puts it beautifully in that Southern movie classic Steel Magnolias, that “an ounce of pretension is worth a pound of manure.”4
A devotional book I use describes this humiliating – versus humbling – grandiosity-inferiority two-step in this way:
Other people may be taken in for a while. But – sooner or later – our real feelings about ourselves will begin to show through, like an old painting that has been imperfectly covered over. Eventually we may begin to refuse … responsibility or “flunk out” of relationships. We can get to the point where we dare not take risks, for we know we will fail.
Humiliation. Rooted in shame. The very antithesis of true humility. Telling ourselves that, while we may not be much … we’re all we need to think about.
Cue our Advent messenger John, arriving last Sunday to proclaim a baptism of repentance – from our shameful core of inferiority, and our prideful cover of grandiosity. And cue him again today, humbly proclaiming to us that he is not the light – though he will certainly walk us toward it.
That’s humility: Staying open – staying receptive – to God’s call. Realizing that (a) there is a God; (b) we ain’t God; and (c) for that: Thanks be to God!
An Advent virtue found embedded as well in the prophet’s words today in the Book of Isaiah. Words that form the basis for Jesus’ inaugural address of his ministry in Luke’s gospel – words we say each Sunday as we are commissioned, sent forth, to serve in the world anew.
For this prophet understands that, once we align ourselves with those of humble station in this world, we come to discover it’s not so much how we stand on an issue that counts, as where and with whom we stand. Not so much how articulate or hubristic we can be in defending certain beliefs, but how faithful and humble we can be in standing with those who are oppressed by certain beliefs.
Not how far we can ascend into popularity with our faith witness, but how deep we dare to descend into solidarity.
Lesson learned from the prophet in Isaiah today: If we align ourselves with the humble – Christmas caroling at Huron Woods, the Jesse tree, serving and next month housing homeless men – then, in God’s eyes, we cannot possibly go wrong!
Humility. The Advent discipline of walking to the light – when our secular holiday world would rush us, or a sanctimonious church would delude us, into thinking that we are walking in it, all along.
Humility. A hard spiritual lesson to learn – and yet, a spiritual lesson to be had – for this highly academic community.
I have found that – especially in a town with a first-rate hospital – there exists a pronounced tendency to elevate medical professionals to a pseudo-messianic status. Our own Jim Sisson has served as a physician for over two generations in Ann Arbor. There’s a word his profession often uses that has always struck me as rather grandiose.
That word is idiopathic. Idiopathic means, “I don’t know.”
Now, let me ask the rest of you: When was the last time that a medical specialist you have looked to for healing – or for relief, at least – ever uttered to you those three words: “I don’t know”? Not often, I imagine. “Idiopathic”? Probably. “I don’t know?” Perhaps – but probably not.
But lest we smugly sit in judgment over the medical profession, let us admit: Perhaps it’s our general Ann Arbor fear of not being okay with not knowing that prevents many of us in this highly-educated faith community from participation in our own adult Christian education. Perhaps. I wonder …
Humility. High up in the Advent pantheon of virtues. Being okay with not knowing. Being teachable. Being open and receptive to God’s grace – in the humblest of our spaces, and the humblest of the world’s places – when we would rather be driven, and proactive, and big and smart and strong.
Advent – like Lent – is not popular. For Advent – like Lent – is a quieter, more reflective time. A time to practice the long Christian tradition of the via negativa – the downward path. The practice of waiting. The practice of hope. The practice … of humility.
A humility that does not answer the two “Who are you?” questions to John today with a response that points to self. But a humility that responds first with who we are not – “I am not the Messiah” – and then who we are called to be – preparers of the way.
The way to the light of the world that is to come. The way to the light of the world we are destined to walk.
To walk in it. But first, this Advent: Let us check the hubris of our certainty at the door and simply walk to it. Trusting that, midst the splurge-purge madness of Christmas glut coupled with economic recession, God guides us with candles along the way.
The way of humility and hope prepared before us by John the Baptizer today. For – with all apologies to the poet W. H. Auden – it’s always better to follow a candle along the journey, than to curse what we cannot yet see.
Whoever has ears to hear … let them hear.
1See Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992), p. 19.
2Mark 1:5a. From the Revised Common Lectionary gospel reading – Mark 1:1-8 – for Year B, Advent 2.
4Sony Pictures, 1989.
Benediction …
Let us remember: Our faith is actually a faith journey. For our faith has not given us the conceit of walking in the light – not most of the time, anyway. What it has given us is a spiritual direction. And we are led by God’s grace in that direction – that faith journey – to seek out the answers for ourselves.
Let us, the remainder of this Advent season, practice some simple humility, seeking out those answers by walking to the light – before we find ourselves in it.
And let us go out into the world in peace, to love and serve our servant Lord. | 
