A Sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity
September 22, 2024 at Holy Communion
Psalm 131, Ephesians 4:1–6
“I still my soul and make it quiet, like a child upon its mother’s breast” (Psalm 131:3). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.
One of my friends seriously considered becoming a monk in the Orthodox Church. He lived with the brothers as a novice, but withdrew from the process as he discerned that he was called to another vocation. He told me that the most difficult thing to adjust to when he returned to ordinary life was the return to “opinion.”
Every day, we wade through a flood of opinions—our own no less than other people’s. We have opinions about how best to do our hair. We have opinions about effectively the person next to us in the pew did her hair. We have opinions about conflicts in foreign countries. We have opinions about conflicts between our neighbour and their spouses. We have opinions about how to pray. We have opinions about food.
In fact, we go about our almost as if life’s whole purpose was to encounter the world and encounter other people so that we could form opinions about them, and share them—usually politely. Forming opinions is so basic to our way of life that we hardly notice that it doesn’t have to be this way.
You don’t have to be monk to begin finding your way out of the swamp of opinion. You may, in fact, already have something in your experience which can point you in the right direction. For me, I think about the first year of marriage. Until I was married, I never realized how many opinions I had about the correct way to do the dishes. It took a lot of humility to realize that what I struggled with was not really how Katy did the dishes—I was struggling with an addiction to my way of doing things. I was addicted to my opinions.
“Humility” is the key word for what it takes to begin inching away from a life built on opinion. Holding tight to opinions is a form of pride, and humility is its opposite.
But we have a stereotype about humility which we need to get out of the way. We think of a humble person as one who we would expect to inhabit a certain amount of dignity, who nevertheless gives up that dignity to put himself in a place of service. For example, it of course made the news some weeks ago when the premier of Manitoba pulled over on the highway to help someone change a tire.
Something like that could be done from a spirit of humility, but it could also come from humility’s evil twin, “magnanimity.” When someone is magnanimous, he exercises humility and generosity, but always in a way that lets you know that he is doing something below his station. If there is even a twinge of condescension, a mere suggestion of the dignity which has been given up to help another person, it is not humility pure and simple. There is a leftover crumb of pride.
But our Gradual Psalm today gives us a purer image of humility: “I still my soul and make it quiet, like a child upon its mother’s breast” (Psalm 131:3). An infant, a quiet child at rest, is the image of humility. A child has no pretentions, no ego to stroke, only a peaceful and unassuming presence.
But the infant also has no opinions. An “infant” is literally an “in-fans,” a “non-speaker.” And this is the specific point that our short psalm makes. The psalmist prays, “O LORD, I am not proud; I have no haughty looks. I do not occupy myself with great matters, or with things that are too hard for me” (v 1–2), and then he compares himself to an infant. Like a small child, he doesn’t form opinions about a world full of wonder which he understands very little. He keeps his soul quiet.
In our Epistle, Paul is also interested in humility. He commends “gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love,” and being “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:2–3). He reminds us that we have “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God” (v 5–6).
St Paul doesn’t use the word “opinion” here, but it is very much his concern. Part of the trouble with opinion is how it divides people from one another. Holding an opinion is about puffing up what “I think” as compared with what some other person might think. Groups can have opinions together, which define what “we think” as opposed to what “they” think. Laying down our opinions, and laying down our subscription to the opinions of people we like, “our party,” is the humility necessary for maintaining the bond of peace.
In several places in his writings (e.g. Philippians 2:2, 1 Corinthians 1:10), and in language reminiscent of Paul saying here that we are “one in faith,” Paul encourages the church to “be of one mind.” But this doesn’t mean that we have to work through all of our differences opinion; that would be sharing opinions, not moving past opinion. Nor does being of one mind mean that we need to “agree to disagree”; that would be leaving all of our opinions intact and just pretending that we didn’t disagree.
Instead, Paul’s prescription is that we renounce opinion entirely, and live together in the mind of Christ (e.g. 1 Corinthians 2:16). We cast of the shackles of opinion, and rise into the clear light of day where everything we need to know is given to our understanding by God’s Spirit (1 Corinthians 2:6–16).
This means giving ourselves in humility to believe the scriptures which the Spirit of God breathed out for our instruction, and prayerfully applying them to our circumstances. It means trusting the wisdom of the body of Christ, recorded down the centuries by teachers of the faith, more than we trust today’s pundits. But at the root, it means exercising in the fear of God our capacity for discernment, our intuition about what is right and true. It means making no judgements except the truths we perceive with clarity and wholeness.
This way of knowing will not make us wise in the eyes of the world—it will tell us nothing us about how we should dress or which political party to vote for—but we will have the discernment to stay on the path of truth and health in the humble company of our fellow-pilgrims.
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