…then the martyrs and the saints will make you ever so humble. And in doing so, each and every day you will combat that sin of pride.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Please do take a seat.
In today’s gospel, the hard truth that Jesus speaks is a lesson in humility. Don’t put yourself to the front. You don’t know who else will come and you may be embarrassed.
It always reminds me of my grandmother, this gospel. My grandmother on my father’s side. Now, my grandmother on my mother’s side was a good churchwoman. She went to church every Sunday to evensong and we would sit and we would listen to the beautiful music and there would always be a mint humbug sat in the back row. If I was well behaved. It was very calm, it was very peaceful, it was very beautiful.
My grandmother on my father’s side, however, would go to whichever chapel had some good food that Sunday. So we would go around Brynmawr, to the Calvinists one week, to the Baptists the following week, to the Wesleyans the week after that, the Presbyterians the week after that. It just depended whoever had the best do that week. And my grandmother was amazing. She had this wonderful ability to walk into the room because you’d go to the service and there will be some important person there. That’s why the spread was on.
So the bishop would be visiting and you’d walk into the church hall afterwards. You’d walk into the family room afterwards and the tables would be laid out. The place of pride at the top of the room where the bishop and all of the important people from the church. The PCC and all of the important people and then progressively less important the further you were away from the chicken drumsticks.
My grandmother, though, would walk in and she would sit at the top table. It wasn’t even her church, she hardly knew anybody there, but she’d walk in and sit right next to the bishop and then she would dominate the conversation with the bishop for the entire meal. She would pop the pride of so many people in that room. And I used to be mortally embarrassed by it.
It was just, oh, gosh, Grandma, why do we have to do it? Just to be crushingly embarrassed. And it was only as I got older that I realised what it was she was doing. She was popping the pomposity and the pride of those in church. Her calling, her job was to make sure that nobody in church got above themselves. And she lived out to this gospel in a very practical way.
The assumption that you are the best and the most important is not just a lack of humility, but it is an overabundance of pride. And that’s the bubble that my grandmother was so efficient as popping, not just in the body of Christ in Brynmawr, but in our family as well. There are many stories I shall tell you, particularly about when I introduced Catherine to her for the first time.
Being prideful, especially of a sinful nature, or taking a sin and proclaiming that you are proud of it, rather than being humble enough to hear a hard truth.. That will result in a tough time in the final days.
Not being able to hear a hard truth about your sin now will lead to a tough time in the final days.
Turning your sin into something to be proud of and demanding to be at the head of the table is the very opposite of the humility that Jesus teaches.
That’s why he teaches humility, because it is only in humility that we can hear or we can see our own sin.
Because in humility, when we can see our own sin, we can then approach Jesus, ask for forgiveness and continue, as I described last week, our training for heaven in this life. Our training for heaven in this life starts with being humble, starts with being quiet, that you may hear the voice of Jesus.
How then do we stay humble? How do we ensure that we are not caught up in the pride of the world around us? To my mind, there are two ways of achieving this. The first is possibly the one that I struggle with most, which is why I preach on it. Be open to the fact that you don’t know everything.
Constantly remind yourself of this simple fact. I have in times past, put a postit note on my monitor in work saying you don’t know everything!
The second thing is to constantly compare yourself to the great examples of faith and humility that we have around us, the saints. The Church has given us a great suite, a great swathe of examples of real people, often very broken, very sinful people who have done extraordinary things in very humble ways. Consider St. Monica on your pew sheets today. Through her humble prayer to God her Father, she brought her son – a lifetime of prayer -she brought her son into Jesus Christ.
I tried to give you an example of a saint who will help you in your journey towards humility every week in the pew sheet. But you can also go and explore these wonderful saints yourselves as they appear in the calendar on the back of the pew sheet every week. You will find a list of each day and it will tell you the calendar each day will tell you which saint we’re celebrating on which day. So this week we have St. John the Baptist, actually, it’s a quiet week. We’ve got St. Gregory the Great. Have a read of this pew sheet every week. Take it home. Google those saints, take the example of their lives and try and mirror your life on this.
Constantly ask yourself, how do I compare to the saints in heaven?
When you read their amazing stories, when you read the stories of Christians around the world who proclaim their faith in the most amazing ways, who endure the most amazing hardship. Then the martyrs and the saints will make you ever so humble. And in doing so, each and every day you will combat that sin of pride.
You will be made smaller, that God may be made greater inside you.
Amen