The Many Faces of God

Propers: The Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 30), AD 2022 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.

One night a pastor, working late, finds himself overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task set before him: that is, to express the self-revelation of the infinite God to a reluctant and largely apathetic people. On the brink of despair, having come to his wits’ end, he stumbles out of his office, into the sanctuary, and throws himself down before the altar, beating his breast and crying aloud in anguish, “O Lord, I am nothing! Nothing!”

The cantor, who had come to the sanctuary that evening in order to practice the liturgy, is herself now overcome by the pastor’s pious display of self-abasement, and she too throws herself before the altar, crying out, “O Lord, I am nothing! Nothing!”

The sexton, then, dutifully cleaning the church building and emptying the wastepaper baskets, witnesses this pair of august personages hurling themselves before the chancel and, swept up in the moment, he likewise rushes in, prostrates himself alongside them, and calls out, “O Lord, I am nothing! Nothing!”

At which point the pastor stops, elbows the cantor, and points to the sexton. “Get a load of this guy,” he says. “Look who thinks he’s nothing all of a sudden.”

Piety and humility are tricky things, often imitated, never duplicated. Like butterfly wings, once you touch them, they cannot fly. I’m reminded of the infamous words of Margaret Thatcher. “Being powerful,” she said, “is like being a lady. If you have to tell someone you are, you aren’t.” So it is with humility. Once you think you’re humble, you aren’t anymore. Unless of course you’re Moses, who famously wrote that Moses was the humblest of men.

Jesus railed against nothing so strongly as self-righteousness in religion. It was a problem in His day just as it is in our own. Religious people are supposed to be generous, selfless, humble, brave, just, merciful, peaceable, and above all things loving. Yet in practice those who boast most full-throatedly of their faith tend to be duplicitous, scheming, money-grubbing, judgmental, hateful, hypocritical, and violent.

And yes, it’s true that any and all human communities inevitably produce their zealots and fundamentalists. Just check out modern fandoms or political parties. But it’s especially destructive coming from purportedly religious people. Faithful folk are held to a higher standard—indeed, to the highest standard. Trust me on this; I’m a pastor. People project their perceptions of religion onto me all of the time. I am every Christian who has ever been a jerk to you.

Now, if this were a uniquely religious phenomenon, if we could shed hypocrisy simply by shedding religion, that would be one thing. But hypocrisy is inescapably human. Some of the worst fundamentalists are atheist. For that matter, religion is inescapably human. It’s a universal norm. There’s no such thing as an irreligious species of humanity.

We’re always going to long for the transcendent, for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. We’re always going to believe in some absolute standard of right and wrong. We’re always going to have a sense of the sacred and the profane. But most importantly, we’re always going to have a summum bonum, some greatest good that gets us out of bed in the morning, that we fear, love, and trust above all else. And whatever that something happens to be, that is our god.

All humans have religion—and here I mean religion in the old sense, as a virtue, not as a specific system of belief. So we have to be on our guard. We have to watch out, that the universal vice of hypocrisy does not infect the universal virtue of religion. And the way to do this, the only way to do this, is to embrace humility. Humility, of course, does not mean that we think less of ourselves, but that we think of ourselves less. We put others first.

There is pain in this, yes, the sacrifice of self-giving. But there is also joy, the bliss of selflessness. And it takes exercise, takes practice. Humility is not some inborn trait, nor is it merely an emotion. Humility is an act of the will. We choose to recognize the truth of our own shortcomings, our own insufficiencies, our own sins. In Greek the word for sin, hamartia, means to miss the mark, to fall short. And which of us hasn’t done that on a daily basis?

But a sin is not the same as a vice. A vice is a bad habit, a habitual sin. And virtue, likewise, is not once-and-done, any more than going to the gym can be once-and-done. A virtue is a good habit, a regular practice, an athletic approach to morality. We work at it. We get stronger. We lift little weights regularly in order that we might lift large ones when it counts. We find, in other words, that he who is faithful in a little will be faithful also in much—which indeed is just what Jesus said.

And if all this talk of humility being a virtue, being a sacrifice, being athletic, sounds familiar to you, it well should. Because this is how Christians speak of love. Love is not an emotion, right? Love is not the same thing as feeling in love. I say that a lot. Love is a choice, an act of the will, to put the good of another before our own: to love our neighbors as ourselves, and thereby honor God.

So, if you should think to yourself, “Well, I’m not humble,” you’re on the right track; for humility is not something that you are, but something that you do. You want to be humble? Love your neighbor. Love your neighbor as Jesus first loves us. Say to yourself, “I am a sinner. I am a servant. I am a child of God. And if I want to know God best, to know God as my Father, then I must love as Jesus loves, even if my own feeble efforts are but a dim reflection of His own.”

For God is merciful and loving and forgiving. And He does not ask these things of us in order to test us or to force us to earn a salvation already freely given to all from the Cross. Rather, He tells us these things, teaches us these things, in order that we might be free, that we might know our salvation here and now, and be that salvation for others, be little Christs for the world. That is Christianity.

Because here’s the deal: the self that we are called to deny is not the real self. The person whom you think you are, the list of your accomplishments and experiences and abilities and desires and shame—that’s not really you. That’s your idea of you. And that’s the you that’s going to die. Right? But beneath all that is your true self, the Holy Spirit within you, the Image of God within you, the Body and Blood and Breath of Jesus Christ our Lord. That’s who you really are, that inner holy fire.

And the more we get out of His way, the better we can set aside our ego in order to let Christ shine through us, to let Him live and work and speak through us, the more truly human we shall be. Every one of us is a part of Him, part of the God-Man. And to lose ourselves in that, to lose our sense of self to the universal love of Christ, into the infinite ocean of His Spirit, is not to die or to disappear but to live fully for the first time; to become who we truly are, and were meant to be all along.

I like how Dante thinks of it. In Dante’s Paradiso, his poetic imagining of Heaven, God is a central point of infinitely bright light. And the hosts of Heaven, the saints and angels of every age and of every world, surround Him as a vast cloud of witnesses, innumerable satellites circling a divine sun. And every one of them, every individual in Heaven, reflects the light and love of God in such a way that everyone else can only see that particular perspective of God in that unique individual. Each new person is like a new god, a new heaven.

You reflect an aspect of God that could only ever be seen in you. Without you, the rest of us would all be blind to a vision of the Lord we otherwise never would know.

Thus there is elation in Heaven at every person who enters into the presence of God. It’s not that God gets bigger, but that there’s always more of Him to discover: more love, more beauty, more goodness, more truth. And we find Him in others. He reveals Himself to everyone in every other individual, so that we are all true reflections of the One True God in Jesus Christ, yet each of us utterly unique, each of us an individual at last.

In other words: the face of your neighbor is the face of God. And if we can’t see that yet, we will, on the last day, when all is finally revealed. That’s the basis of humility. That’s the basis of love: that everything in all of Creation becomes a face of God. Including you. And everyone you love. And all of the people whom you cannot stand. God at the last will be all in all. And we are called to witness this truth today.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.