Sermon preached at Evensong on the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity 2024

Imagine something which could provide significant benefits for us as individuals, as organisations, including churches, as societies, even as a species. Something that facilitates happiness, soothes fragility; acts as an antidote to shame and blame, which opens up knowledge, increases our ease with self and others, spurs healthy ambition, inspires purpose and enables us to face and shape reality. What if there was such a thing…?

Some of us would pay a lot for this, right? Maybe we’d set up conferences and workshops; politicians, business and organisational leaders, and well-being services would promote it…

There is indeed such a valuable thing—the virtue we call ‘humility’.

But when was the last time you read an article, heard a podcast or went to a conference about humility? How much do you think election candidates in the many global elections this year will consider humility to be their winning ticket?

In many circles, humility has had a bad rap. Maybe I once glimpsed why:

As attendees gathered for a meeting, one grown woman sat slightly apart, settling on a low child’s stool, remaining physically, strikingly, deferentially, folded in upon herself. Afterwards, intrigued I sought her out. She was, she said, adopting an attitude of humble smallness as a Lenten practice.

Smallness. Is this what humility is about? I’m not so sure.

Today, whilst the pursuit of humility, as a secular as well as religious virtue, has traction, it comes with a health warning. Understandably, when for too long some, women, people of colour and others, have been kept small, silenced.

So, it’s important to understand that this, humility, is not that, passivity and humiliation.

Rather, God’s questions to Job in our first reading, invited Job to understand himself accurately, in relation to God and the vastness of the universe.

Perhaps then the grace of humility is an invitation to take up our rightful space as children of the Living God; our rightful space, neither too great, nor too small; not too much nor too little. And significantly, to create such rightful space for others. Taking our rightful place means finding the Goldilocks portion; not self-despising (never warranted in those beloved of God) nor arrogance.

Such grounded-ness exposes the linguistic link between humility and ‘humus’, ‘soil’, ‘earth’. It roots us in the origin story of our faith, as mythical Adam is both taken from the earth and made in the wondrous image of God. Humility involves our struggle and privilege to be fully human; of the earth yet bearing the image of the Divine. Inhabiting our rightful space and place means attending to our human limitations and failings, and our greatness and possibilities.

Certainly, being human we all experience one degree of limitation or another:

We are subject to forces beyond our control, sometimes beyond our understanding, a medical diagnosis, the prevarications of the markets, the reaction of another person;

We are fallible, vulnerable to error and our own limited experience or understanding. Within an awe-inspiring universe we are faced with the truth; that there is always so much more than we can know.

We are morally frail, our imperfections and battles with weakness painfully evident.

And yet, individually, collectively, we have achieved so much and are rightly ambitious to accomplish so much more.

So, playing small, simply won’t do. But maybe right humility will.

For fostering a right assessment of ourselves may free us from the tyranny of comparison and bitter envy, from arrogance and the sense of entitlement which might lead us to suspect or simply believe that we deserve more than others.

Humility has the power to promote openness to new possibilities, to appreciation, gratitude, respect and healthy ambition. Imagine being freed from haunting unhealthy insecurity—free to dare, to seek for excellence, to try even when failure is possible, maybe even likely. Precisely because under its tutelage we accept our finitude, humility enables us to be open to new ideas, to build with others and to learn, especially from our mistakes. From this place we may press forward to greater heights—for a purpose not merely a position.

For people of faith this is perhaps best understood within the Humility of God. Most profoundly revealed in Jesus; God at once most High and most Humble.

God, infinite truth, power, beauty and goodness, through whom all things came to be and in whom all things hold together, become ‘contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man’ as Charles Wesley wrote.

The astonishing humility of God—choosing in Jesus to take up the space of one human life; mundane and wonderful. For Jesus, this would mean living in obedience and relationship.

Neither cowed nor oppressive. Not for self but to serve. Always about purpose not position. God showing us what it is to take up rightful space.

Obedient to the Father and understanding his purpose when tempted in the wilderness Jesus knew that his was this kind of power, not that.

His entry into Jerusalem involved this kind of rag-tag pilgrim procession not that kind of ego-driven display of might and domination.

Before Pilate, Jesus knew that he was this kind of king not that.

Comfortable inhabiting his space Jesus never needed to elbow his way in, to stretch out to dominate, insist…instead he knelt beside a woman in the dust and before his friends as he washed their feet, the servant of all.

Jesus had the humility to learn, be persuaded, even directed; he did not presume but asked ‘what is it you would have me do for you?’

In unguarded moments we can experience our needs and interests as the most pressing, and our values, beliefs and commitments as most worthy. At other times we give away or despise our dignity. Neither will do.

Jesus knew that humility feeds key elements of our humanity and relationship such as curiosity and compassion, challenging us to move beyond our self-centric view of the world.

How different our conflicts might be if we could see ourselves rightly—harbouring neither entitled superiority nor inferiority. If we might see one another rightly—building connection, curiosity and compassion.

For if we ever needed the grace of humility—the gift of right perception and appropriate space—we need it now. We need the collective humility to understand our connectedness, to take our rightful space and no more, to ensure that others, have their share of the space we have been gifted.

It is no small task. And neither our self-aggrandisement, nor playing small will do.

But our right humility, under God, just might.