The Rev. Noah Van Niel
The Chapel of the Cross
September 27th, 2020
Proper 21 (A—Track 1): Exodus 17:1-7; Ps 78:1-4, 12-16; Philippians 2:1-13; Matthew 21:23-32
The year was 2011. I was 3 years out of the most prestigious college in the world, and I had just landed my first full-time job as…a dog walker. Don’t worry that wasn’t all I was doing. I was also picking up shifts as the towel boy at a hotel fitness center. And sometimes I would babysit for the son of a family friend. This was, needless to say, not the plan. After college, I had moved to Philadelphia to study at one of the best opera training schools in the country. But after three years, I was miserable. It just wasn’t right. I loved to sing but I did not, I was discovering, love being an opera singer. I informed the school I would not be returning for my fourth year. However, my wife, Melinda had one year left in her MBA program, so we were locked into Philly even though I was cut adrift from my main reason for being there. When asked what I was going to do instead of singing, I couldn’t give a good answer, because I didn’t know. I had no idea what other path I should be on, or, frankly, whether another path even existed. I had to find work, I knew that. But even with my degree, that proved somewhat difficult, since spending three years studying voice does not exactly bolster one’s professional resume. So, I ended up spending a year towel-folding, babysitting, and most of the time, walking dogs.
The job had its perks. It was good exercise and I got to play with a lot of dogs, which I enjoyed. But that was cold comfort when I was laden with bags of dog poop looking for the nearest city trash can, or crawling around on the floor of a stranger’s apartment trying to convince a reluctant pup to come and get her leash on, or when those cozy canines turned savage and attacked this unexpected intruder. There were many days I talked to more dogs than people. Days when I came home after biking around the city in the sweltering summer sun, sticky with sweat and the grime of engine exhaust, covered in dog hair, and looked in the mirror and asked, “What heck happened to you?”
It was hard to know it at the time, but my year of menial labor was perhaps the most important year of my life, because during that year I was served copious helpings of humble pie. And I couldn’t leave the table until I ate them. Humility is a virtue most of us don’t come by naturally. We must have it taught to us. And very often those lessons can be excruciating. But if we are to take St. Paul at his word in his letter to the Philippians, humility is one of the most indispensable aspects of the Christian life because it mirrors the very mind of Christ; the very nature of the Divine.
“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit,” Paul writes, “but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” This was, he argues, what Jesus did. After all, even though he “was in the form of God, [he] did not regard equality with God, as something to be exploited.” Instead he “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.” The incarnation, that is the act of God becoming human, was an act of supreme humility. God could have stayed comfortably where He was up in heaven. But no, He gave up all that to come close to us, to serve us, to love us in the person of Jesus Christ. And this humility was not just an existential event for Jesus, but also a way of being. As he lived and moved through the world, Jesus spoke repeatedly about not glorifying oneself but striving to be a servant. “For the greatest among you will be servant of all,” he says. That is what he tells the disciples when they are arguing about who is the best; it is what he modeled for them by washing their feet the night before he died, and it is how he understood himself and his mission. As he says in Matthew Chapter 20: “the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve.” In birth, in life, in death, Jesus was humility incarnate.
For those of us who may not come by humility naturally but who want to try and follow the example that Jesus set for us, there are two things we need to evaluate. The first, is how we see ourselves. And second, is how we see other people. Humility is misconstrued sometimes as self-deprecation, self-denigration, a feeling of unworthiness, and shame. “Oh I’m the worst. Please, don’t look at me, you go first.” That’s not humility. Humility is not the same as humiliation. In encouraging us to live humbly, Jesus never asks us to make ourselves feel worthless.
But what he does do is ask us to strip away all the false identities we convince ourselves are what gives us our worthiness, and instead build our sense of self-worth on something truer and more lasting. We tend to measure our existential worth using external metrics—awards, accolades, degrees, recognition, money, status. Humility calls those out for the flimsy constructions that they are and asks us instead to base our self-worth on the simple fact of our existence. We matter because we are, and we are because God made us so. In creating us, God has given us the only stamp of approval we will ever need. So, we can stop worrying so much about proving to other people, or perhaps more often proving to ourselves, that we are valuable.
This was one of the main things I had to learn from my year working invisible jobs for minimum wage. Being stripped of all “significance” meant that if I was going to have any sense of self-worth it wasn’t going to come from the affirmation and adulation of other people. It needed to come from somewhere more fundamental. The stripping away process was painful, I’m not going to lie. But it also forced me back to ground level, to what was real and true about who I was and why I mattered. The root of the word humility is the Latin humus which means the ground floor, the earth, the soil. It’s the same root as the word for human—from the earth. Dust thou art but divine dust; the stuff of stars. Not for any reason but my creation did I have value. It didn’t matter what college I went to, or how much applause I got, or the amount of money I was making. I mattered because I existed.
A couple weeks ago, as we got the program year underway, we had a virtual retreat to dive a little deeper into our parish theme for the year “Love Dwells Here.” In the course of our conversation I was explaining one of the ways to conceive of love in the Christian sense was by breaking it down into three parts—God’s love for us, our love for God, and our love for other people. I then asked people to consider which of these three avenues of love they came by most easily, most naturally, and which was the hardest to grasp. And something fascinating emerged from our brief discussion. For a surprising majority of people, the hardest piece of that trinity of loves for them to really feel and know was God’s love for them.
I hope you know that you are loved and valued by the one who created you for no other reason than that He created you. And I hope you can learn that without having to scrape by, by scraping poop off the sidewalk. Because if you can, something remarkable happens. When you don’t have to be so consumed by proving your own intrinsic value but instead ground it in the unchanging and unchallengeable fact of your blessed existence, then all of a sudden you are free to let go of all those anxieties. Gone is the pressure to make other people like and admire you, gone is the endless cycle of trying to escape your own insecurities. You are free! And even more importantly, when you can see yourself that way—as valuable, worthy, beloved—suddenly you are free enough to see others that way as well.
Because if you know yourself to be worthy, that means they are worthy too. And what you start to realize when you get outside yourself and really look around is that people are just incredible—in so many ways they are just amazing creatures with gifts and talents and beauty and intelligence and hopes and dreams all their own. And suddenly the world around you bursts into bloom for each person you encounter is seen and celebrated for the marvel that they are. From this vantage point humility flows freely for you realize that while you are no better than anyone else, that does not mean you are worse than them. Our blessedness is not a zero-sum game; a divinely orchestrated seesaw where for another to be lifted up we must be brought low. With that assurance in mind, you don’t need to celebrate yourself, you want to celebrate them because you want them to know how magnificent, and fascinating and remarkable they are. You want them to know the beauty and value that they radiate. So, you look to their interests, not your own because you are secure enough in your own self-worth that you realize glorifying someone else does not mean denigrating yourself. The servitude that we are called to then is not a negation of our value, but a sharing of our blessedness so that all might know, fundamentally, that they are beautiful, beloved children of God.
That is how I understand what Paul calls “the mind of Christ.” The purpose of stooping low to be among us was not so God could be humiliated. The purpose was to get low enough to lift us up with the good news of God’s love for us. After all, why would God even come into the world if not to teach us a message we were not getting any other way: that He cares about us. Not because of who we are but because we are. Now, Jesus did have to stoop way down to get that message across, but for his pains he too was lifted-up, not left in the depths of death and despair. And so too for us. We need to place ourselves in a position of servitude, not to humiliate ourselves and make ourselves miserable, but so that we can help lift others up to that same plane of blessedness.
As my year of dog walking and towel folding drew on, this sense of how one ought to be oriented to others began to sink in. Freed from measuring my value by my accomplishments I began to believe, almost as if for the first time, that a life spent in the service of celebrating others not in “selfish ambition or conceit” could be a worthwhile way to spend one’s time on this earth. It was around this time that a new path emerged from the darkness of my quarter-life crisis, a path that has led me here, today, with you. After that year, I officially began discerning my call to the priesthood. Which does not mean I have humility figured out—I struggle to live humbly and cultivate the mind of Christ, as much as the next person, probably even more if I’m being honest. But having been thrown down to the ground floor, and yet having found there a truer source of self-worth, I had a desire to help others discover and know that same truth: that God values and loves them unequivocally and unconditionally. And having transmit that blessed assurance, I wanted to encourage them to turn outwards and help make sure everyone knows that same thing and is convinced of that same fact. That is the way I understand the work we are called to as co-ministers within this community of Christ the work of discovering and sharing our blessedness. And it is work that I am so very glad to be doing with you. Because I truly believe it is the best, most holy work we can do. Amen.