Sermon for Friends Congregational Church
“Were You Humiliated This Week?”
Delivered by Reverend Dan De Leon
Sunday, August, 26, 2007
Isaiah 58:9b-14 and Luke 13:10-17
Did you walk into the wrong bathroom this week? Did you write a personal email response to one person, but you accidentally hit ‘reply to all’ instead of just ‘reply’? Did you lock your keys in the car, run out of gas, leave the iron on, forget to put coffee grounds in the coffee maker before you hit ‘brew’? Did you miss an appointment, forget a lunch date? Did you hit the wrong name in your cell phone and have a five-minute conversation with this person before you realized that it was not the person you thought you’d called? Basically, what I’m asking is, “Were you humiliated this week?”
Before you answer that question for yourself, let’s understand the difference between humility and embarrassment. Stacy told me that when she was 2 years old and her brother was only three, she bumped her head on something in the house and she started bleeding. She cut her head. So she started crying, and she ran to her mother. Her mom heard Stacy crying, saw the blood on her head, and proceeded to faint. So, Stacy’s three-year-old brother was left with the task of holding a wet rag on his mom’s head while he used his other hand to dial 911. I don’t know whether he reported that his sister was bleeding or his mother had passed out. Pretty embarrassing for Mom, but not humiliating.
I saw a story on the news a couple of weeks ago where a newlywed couple were having a garage sale, and the wife found a ceramic turtle that belonged to the husband, and she thought, “This eyesore has got to go.” So, she put it with the items up for sale and it sold. What she didn’t know was that the cremated remains of her husband’s previous wife were in that ceramic turtle. Luckily, they tracked down the turtle with the remains intact at a local pawn shop, and the story made national headlines. Pretty embarrassing, but not humiliating.
The commonality between embarrassment and humiliation is exposure. When we’re embarrassed or humiliated, we’re exposed. The difference is that when we’re embarrassed, we’re exposed humorously. People see our misfortune, they laugh and think, “I’d hate to be that guy right now.” But when we’re humiliated, we’re exposed to others and to ourselves. Humiliation cuts to the core of our being. It reminds us of who we really are for better or worse. And humility, unlike playful embarrassment, is a call to change.
Humiliation is the method that God uses when God talks to the people in the Isaiah story this morning. And humiliation is the method that Jesus uses in the synagogue when he cuts to the core of everyone’s being by yelling out, “You hypocrites!”
Garrison Keillor reminded me Thursday morning on his radio spot that this week is the 7th anniversary of the airing of the finale of the first-ever Survivor TV show. It’s funny hearing Keillor talk about the show in his low, nasally voice, because when he talks about Survivor, you really can see how humiliating the whole thing was.
Survivor was a reality TV show about a group of men and women forced to literally survive in life-threatening situations. And at the end of every episode of Survivor, one of the cast members was voted off the program. The last one standing won a million dollars. In order to survive, the contestants on this show had to be crafty and resourceful, but they also had to be deceitful and treacherous towards each other—forming alliances with other cast members and then breaking that alliance to save one’s own skin. It was a back-stabbing show that heralded greed and selfishness. And all the while, these cast members are dirty, tired, frustrated and, yes, humiliated. Their best and their worst human attributes are exposed on TV for everyone to see.
But I wonder, “Who was more humiliated: the contestants who were exposed for who they really were on national TV, or the 51 million Americans who tuned in to watch this show?” Fifty-one million people gleefully watching this small group of people practically kill each other for money. Pretty humiliating.
I don’t think any of those 51 million people would say that it was humiliating for them to tune in to the season finale of Survivor, though. What’s so humiliating about doing something that’s normal? Where’s the humility in doing something that everybody’s doing?
We aren’t humiliated when we watch hours and hours of news about Lindsay Lohan’s rehab saga or Britney Spears’ custody battles over her children while real news about a third world country called New Orleans continues to go unnoticed. We aren’t humiliated when we eat fast food restaurants or purchase items from stores that exploit poor migrant workers and even laboring children, because that’s where everyone else eat and shops. What’s so humiliating about that? And in today’s reading from Isaiah, God’s people are not humiliated when they fast and recognize the Sabbath without paying any attention to the hungry or the oppressed. So, God has to come along and humiliate them.
These people are walking blindly through their own ritualistic darkness, going through the motions of fasting and Sabbath, just like we go through the motions of our daily lives. And God loves God’s people so much as to speak a word of humiliation to them, “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?”
It’s the same story with the people at the synagogue. Jesus heals a woman who’s been crippled for 18 years, but the synagogue ruler turns around and stirs up the crowd saying, “It’s not normal to heal someone on the Sabbath day, and today is the Sabbath, so this Jesus guy is abnormal—he’s out of line.” And Jesus loves the crowd so much that he calls them all hypocrites.
Doesn’t sound very loving, I know. But Christian love isn’t about hallmark cards and long-stemmed roses. Christian love is about humility, and it’s about practicing humility in such a way that we would be accountable to our neighbor—accountable to one another—and, therefore, accountable to God.
See, when we’re humiliated, we are forced to look at the core of our being, and what we learn from that humility is what strengthens our faith. Jesus humiliates the synagogue ruler and everyone in the crowd when he calls them hypocrites. “You loose your ox from its stall and lead it out to give it water on the Sabbath. Can’t I loose this woman from the shackles of her infirmity on the Sabbath?” God would certainly call that a true Sabbath.
But the synagogue ruler and the crowd internalize this humility and turn it into rage. They forget to ever take a look at themselves and how they might be wrong, and instead they get angry. And that lack of humility and that rage are what come to a head in Jerusalem and nail Jesus of Nazareth to a cross.
Why did Cain kill Abel? You could say that it was because of jealousy. That sounds about right. But you could also say that Cain was humiliated before his parents, his brother and his God because God preferred Abel’s offerings and sacrifices over Cain’s. So, instead of learning from that humility—learning how to better serve his God, how to be a better steward of God’s creation, how to be a better brother to Abel—he gets mad and he can’t help himself. He kills his brother, and we see this sin repeated over and over again throughout the history of God’s people, throughout the history of Christianity, and even now in our civilized post-modern days of the 21st century.
You’ve heard me talk about a church I once served where there was a woman named Mary who had attended that church for nearly 15 years. Mary was gay, and she and her partner were active church members in every way for about 10 of those 15 years together. Mary had finished attending seminary and she wanted to continue answering God’s call to ministry. So, she requested of our church that she be ordained. Suddenly the fact that she was a lesbian became an issue in our church family. The congregation was divided right down the middle as to whether we should grant her ordination or not. Who was more humiliated: the gay woman who wanted to be ordained, or her church family who was on the fence about whether to grant her request? I would say that the congregation should have been humiliated. Some of them were, but not all of them.
I was serving as the youth minister of that church at the time, and I received a phone call from a congregant that I knew pretty well one day. She said to me, “Dan, I don’t know what Mary’s life is like. I don’t know what she and her partner do together and I don’t want to know.” This woman was saying things to me that I would never have assumed before could come out of her mouth. I was torn between being angry with her and embarrassed for her.
But then she said, “I just wanted you to know, since we’re friends and all, that there are people in this church who are watching you. People are talking about our kids and they want to know what you’re teaching them, you know, about this stuff.” She never could come out and say exactly what it was that she and “people in the church” were concerned about, but I got the gist.
She should have been humiliated. She and so many like her in the Church should be humiliated, and it is my constant prayer that they would be, because she and so many like her are the stereotypical identity and voice of the Church in America in this 21st century.
I wonder if she and those who share her passive aggressive concerns have really asked themselves, “What does it mean to be Christian?” Now, I know what most folks would say. To be Christian one must profess Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, and believe in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But dig deeper! What does that mean? It takes humility to ask tough questions like that: “What does it mean to profess Jesus as Lord and Savior,” and, “What does it mean to believe in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit?” Asking those questions of yourself cuts to the core of your being.
There are a lot of people, both Christian and non-Christian, who assume that in order to be Christian, you must ostracize gay and lesbian peoples—not have anything to do with them, be pro-life in the voting booth, and champion the exclusive model of a family as being one man, one woman and some kids. Well, that’s easy. I can do that. And you know what, I don’t have to believe in God to do that. I don’t have to have a relationship with Christ to do that.
Anyone can do that. But to believe in God means that we cherish doing justice, that we love mercy and that we walk humbly with our Creator. To believe in God means that we defend the orphan and the widow and the poor. To believe in God means that we are about peace and holding one another accountable to establish peace between all peoples of this earth. To believe in God means that we look at this gift of life as a chance to make this world as much like the Garden of Eden as we possibly can for the sake of future generations, not just for us. To believe in God means that we, as people of faith, long for the day when every valley will be exalted, every mountain and hill made low, the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain, and the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all humankind together will see it.
And to follow Jesus Christ—to profess that Jesus is Lord—means that we listen when Jesus of Nazareth says to an indifferent world, “The Spirit us upon me to bring good news to the poor.” To profess that Jesus is Lord means that we are devoted to the dreams of our children and that we prioritize the little ones in our midst. To profess that Jesus is Lord means that we are devoted to liberating anyone in this world from the chains of cultural and social oppression. To proclaim that Jesus is Lord means that we treat this gift from Jesus called Church as a precious resource that can never be monopolized by doctrinal absolutes. To proclaim that Jesus is Lord means that we do away with judging others for the sake of our own moral purity, and we start loving and serving others for the sake of Christian community. And to proclaim that Jesus is Lord means that when we pray for God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, we mean it.
Friends, to pray for humility is one of the most Christian things we can do. When we pray for humility, we are humbling ourselves before God so that our faith can be strengthened. And in that humility, we can notice those dark areas of our lives and we can learn and change for the better and shine in that darkness. And that light of our lives that shines in the darkness like a resurrection from an empty tomb will unite us with God. And God will lead us every step of the way. See, without humility we cannot be led by God. And it’s easy to stay in the same spot forever. Anyone can do that.
So, let’s ask that question again: Have you been humiliated this week?