One of the hallmark qualities of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was a strong and powerful humility. No one can fault the sacrifice of one giving his life for all humankind, to renew and reaffirm God’s covenant with God’s children. Punitive and arbitrary Law was replaced by a divine and universal love and grace. Jesus reinforced that the actions of individuals were insignificant in comparison with how we treat others. Sin, the condition of losing focus on the will of God had been bastardized as sins, the failings and faults of individuals on a case-by-case basis. Jesus, and subsequently Paul, let us all know that God acknowledged our human weaknesses and limitations. We needed a Savior who could do for us what we could not do for ourselves. Both Jesus and Paul taught, unequivocally, that judging the shortcomings of others was a greater sin than any sin we judged. Our mandate was to love, to love unconditionally, to forgive, with the very unmerited grace of God, and to extend invitation and welcome to all God’s beloved children. 

While modern psychological theories were not known or understood by most people in the first century, Jesus revealed an incredible wisdom of the things it took centuries for us to learn. Ego, or rather egotism, was the antithesis to authentic Christian discipleship. Egotism placed self as the gravitational center of the spiritual life, leaving God as a satellite, occasionally shining light into the darkness of self-centered thinking, believing, and behaving. When God truly functioned as the true center of the believer’s life, the outward and visible sign was humility. 

Our modern American culture not only denies humility as a Christian virtue, but it also views it as a weakness and a liability. Along with virtues such as mercy, compassion, kindness, patience, and respect, humility has come to be cast in a negative light in our business, our politics, our education, and our religion. By extension, we see Jesus as a weak and irrelevant model for living in our modern world. This was painfully apparent in the recent split of The United Methodist Church, where both conservatives and progressives took to aggressive, dismissive, disrespectful, insulting, and arrogant behaviors to try to win their argument against the other. Jesus, and living in the fruit of God’s Holy Spirit, had nothing to do with our so-called negotiations.

There was no display of humility, no care for dignity, no Christian compassion or kindness, no overt action for understanding, no patience, no true consideration, and definitely no respect for our Christian brothers, sisters, and siblings in our model to the world how the church is different from secular disputes. If anything, we were worse in our disagreements that most of our secular parallels. We failed God miserably in our disagreements. We clearly communicated to the world, the church is no different, no better, than any other social club or organization. When we disagree, we throw a tantrum and take our ball and go home. We reject the Holy Spirit, because we obviously know better than God, and selfishly demand our own way to the detriment and damage of our beloved siblings. If we prostitute our core values and tell the world our faith is innocuous, it is a small sacrifice as long as we get our way and can do what we want to. The deciding factors are power and control, not gospel and salvation. Who really cares what Jesus would do anyway. He didn’t regard equality with God as something to be exploited. We have no such compunction, especially when we know that God agrees completely with our selfish and short-sighted priorities.

The Christian faith is doomed to irrelevancy if we cannot reclaim humility as the foundational value of true discipleship. In a cultural climate that normalizes greed, arrogance, disrespect, selfishness, privilege, and power as the driving values for our lives, Christianity cannot afford to assimilate and accommodate such petty and destructive values. The current rhetoric and focus of evangelicals on sovereignty, entitlement, wealth, power, and prejudice must be challenged and confronted. When “evangelical Christianity” became a political cult instead of a religious and spiritual communion, it effectively ceased to be Christian in any meaningful way. And the fact that it has misled so many people in our country to abandon a gospel-based Christianity fulfills Jesus’ warning to beware the false prophets. Evangelicalism has insulated itself by pointing to any and all who disagree with it as “false prophets” and “anti-Christs,” but it refuses to look either in the Bible or in the mirror.

Humility moves us out of the way so that Christ can be front and center in our lives. We live in the gentle glow of the prayerful phrase, “not my will be done, but thine O Lord.” Neither the progressives nor the conservatives, the liberals nor the traditionalists, remembered that through our recent journey, a journey that should have been taken together hand in hand, rather than at one another’s throats.

Next time: Less Than Amazing Grace