Sermons

May 6, 2007
The Humblest Man on Earth

The Humblest Man On Earth
a sermon about humility by the Rev. Mark Worth

READINGS:
1. From His Holiness the Dalai Lama, The Path to Tranquility, Viking/Arkana, Penguin Putnam, New York, NY, 1999:
The very purpose of religion is to control yourself, not to criticize others. Rather, we must criticize ourselves. How much am I doing about my anger? About my attachment, about my hatred, about my pride, my jealousy? These are the things which we must check in daily life.

2. From Numbers 12: 3
Now the man Moses was very humble, more so than anyone else on the face of the earth.

THE SERMON
The Biblical Book of Numbers tells us that Moses was very humble, and in fact, Moses was the humblest man on earth! That’s humble!
This passage presents a little problem for those fundamentalists who insist that the first five books of the Bible were written by Moses. You see, Deuteronomy 31:9 says, “Then Moses wrote down this law, and gave it to the priests, the sons of Levi, who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and to all the elders of Israel.”
Now the word “law” here is the same as the word for “Torah,” and so although it doesn’t exactly say that Moses wrote the entire Torah, it does say that he wrote the law (torah), and most fundamentalists interpret that to mean that Moses wrote the whole Torah. That’s why the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, are sometimes called “The Five Books of Moses.”
Now, I said this is a problem for the fundamentalists. Why? Because the Torah says that Moses was the humblest man on earth. If Moses himself wrote that, he was bragging about being the humblest man on earth, something the humblest man on earth wouldn’t do!
A truly humble person doesn’t point out his/her humility. As Mary Waldrip writes, “When someone sings his own praises, he always gets the tune too high.”
And so, in the 1600s, Baruch Spinoza questioned Moses’ authorship of the Torah. He pointed out that the Torah gives an account of Moses’ death and burial (something Moses was unlikely to have described), said that Moses was the humblest man on earth, gave a list of Edomite kings who lived a long time after Moses, and referred to geographical locales with names that were not used until long after Moses’ day. It also says that “to this day” there has not been a prophet as great as Moses. This sounds like the words of someone who lived long after the time of Moses, had some experience with later prophets, and therefore could make a comparison. Perhaps, Spinoza said, Moses did not write those five books.
We UUs have sometimes been accused of believing whatever we want. But I think that it is the fundamentalists who believe whatever they want. In spite of clear evidence, most fundamentalists will insist that Moses wrote all five books of the Torah. They’ve made up their minds and they won’t let the facts confuse them.
This, I think, is an act of hubris. Fundamentalists take excessive pride in being right, a grandiosity that tells them that they have the right answers and the right faith, that they will be “saved” while the foolish liberals will burn in hell for not having listened. I think pride and grandiosity are important ingredients in all fundamentalisms – whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Hindu. And before we get too proud about not being fundamentalist, remember we, too, have our own fundamentalism sometimes, a fundamentalism of the left. We sometimes can be just as dogmatic and closed-minded as folks on the religious right. We all love to be right.

What is humility?
That’s why humility is a good topic for all of us.
If Moses truly was the most humble man on earth, he would not have displayed this kind of hubris, the pride shown so often in religion. Now, I’m going to set aside the question of whether or not Moses existed. We know that, outside of the Bible, there is no archeological or historical evidence for the existence of Moses or the Exodus. Did Moses exist or not? We don’t know. But whether or not he existed, he is part of Western literature. Like Oedipus or Hamlet, we can discuss Moses’ motives and character.
So how could it be that Moses, who according to the Bible spoke face-to-face with God, called plagues down on Egypt, commanded the Red Sea to split, and told the Israelites how to regulate their lives – how could this man be the humblest man on earth?
Rabbi Harold Kushner (in his book Overcoming Life’s Disappointments) says that we can understand Moses to be humble if we understand what humility really means. We should not think of humility as being the same as deferential or submissive. That’s not humility.
And readers of Dickens might consider the character Uriah Heep, who was always boasting of his humility. Again, if Moses proclaimed himself the most humble man on earth, he would be like Uriah Heep – self-contradictory, and not at all humble.
The person who acts humble could also be showing a false humility, a posture used to hide a large ego. There is a story about Sigmund Freud, that on Freud’s first visit to America he was introduced to a prominent leader of the American Jewish community. They were discussing the most important Jews in the world. The Jewish leader insisted that Freud’s name should be high on the list. Freud asked the man if he would include his own name on the list. “Oh, no, no, no. Certainly not me. Not at all.” Freud smiled, and said, “One no would have been sufficient.”
So we want to avoid false humility. But there is a healthier way of looking at humility, one that is not false modesty or self-effacement. Humility is the realization that everything in life is not about you. Things may work out well, but maybe you’re not the one who made it happen. Things may work out badly, but maybe you’re not to blame. The Red Sox didn’t win the World Series, but it’s not because you weren’t able to go to the game. Maybe it rained on your daughter’s wedding day, but it’s not a cosmic conspiracy against you. It’s just the weather.
Humility means that you know that you are not God and that the fate of the world doesn’t hang on your shoulders. The Iraq War is not your fault. The Battle of the Alamo wasn’t your fault, either.
Some people are glad to learn this. A few are very disappointed. Believe me, it is healthier to understand that it is not all about you. And it’s not all about me, either.
So to be humble is to be modest, and to be modest is to be teachable. If we have no humility we probably won’t learn from either our mistakes or from our successes.

Humility and the great faiths
Most religious faiths value humility and see it as an essential attitude for success in the spiritual life. In Judaism, the Mishna says, “Be of an exceedingly humble spirit, for the end of man is the worm.”
Christianity encourages its adherents to have a modest estimate of their own worth. Jesus is quoted as having said, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
Islam encourages believers to be humble in their prayers. Muslims typically will say, “I will do such-and-such tomorrow, God willing.” The success of our efforts depends on God’s favor.
In Buddhism, humility is an important ingredient in the desire to be liberated from the suffering that is central to existence. Humility can also result from achieving enlightenment. Buddhism encourages its adherents to find the emptiness of non-self. Humility, compassion and wisdom characterize this form of enlightenment.
Humility is an important virtue in Taoism. The Tao te Ching (Dao de Jing) says, “A wise person acts without claiming the results as his; she achieves her merit and does not rest arrogantly in it; he does not wish to display his superiority.”
Mahatma Gandhi said that attempting to sustain truth without humility results in only a caricature of the truth.
On the other hand, Nietzsche saw humility as a weakness, a false virtue that concealed the weakness and crookedness in its holder. He idealized the ubermensch, the “superman” who would roam unfettered by humility, proud of his stature and power. In the twentieth century the Nazi party saw this philosophy as an excuse to engage in the excesses of arrogance and hubris. We all know what happened.

It’s not all about you/me
So now that we’ve seen examples of what humility is and is not, we ask again, how could Moses, the leader of the Exodus, the leader of the Israelites, have been humble? Moses was able to remain humble because he saw something greater than himself in the Exodus from Egypt. It was not all about Moses. It was about serving the people. It was about building a nation. It was about following God.
God may be a part of your belief system, or not. Many thinking people have rejected the idea of an old man in the sky. Yet many of us use the term “God” to describe the mystery of life, the creative process of the universe, the spark of the divine in every person, or the quest for an ethical life. Whether we speak of “God” or not, most of us believe that there is something greater than ourselves, whatever we might call it. If we think that there is nothing greater than ourselves, we will never achieve humility!
We begin life believing that we are the entire universe. A newborn infant in the first months of life has not yet learned to distinguish itself from the world around it. Then, after a few months, when the infant has come to recognize that yes, there is a world around it, it believes that it is the center of the universe and the cause of everything that happens. The child is wet and all she has to do is cry, and someone will come and change her diaper. He is hungry, and cries, and someone feeds him. She wakes up from a nap, and cries, and someone comes to fuss over her. The world seems to exist for no other purpose than to serve his or her needs.
Even as an eleven or twelve-year-old, I fantasized that the whole world might be an illusion created to confound and manipulate me. At that age I still considered the possibility that I might literally be the center of the universe.
But with the passage of time we reluctantly leave that notion behind. The child will learn to share toys, wait for meals, do unwelcome schoolwork, and go to bed when she would rather stay up late. He will trade the fantasy of omnipotence for the satisfaction of living in community with others.
Unfortunately, some of us never learn that lesson, and to a greater or lesser degree, most of us never learn the lesson entirely. Small amounts of that infantile outlook remain hidden in our souls, and emerge from time to time. The greatest struggles of my adult life have been to learn to get over my selfishness, my anger at not getting my way, my manipulation and criticism of others. Those faults all have their origins in that deep-seated notion that I am the center of the universe. And I am sure I am not the only one who, deep down inside, wants to be the center of the universe, too.
Harold Kushner tells of having breakfast with a man who had spent much of his adult life in prison , finally straightened his life out, and was now running a half-way house for convicts being released from prison. Kushner asked the man, “Why did you do the things you did, knowing that you would almost certainly get caught, go to prison, and shame your family?” He answered Rabbi Kushner with the self-awareness of a man who had found the courage to look at himself without illusions. “When something is missing inside you,” he said, “there is something exhilarating about deciding that you’re above the law, that the rules don’t apply to you.”
That would go far toward explaining the teenager who shoplifts even though she could afford to purchase the object she is stealing. It could help explain the sex addict who manipulates others, and risks his own reputation, to satisfy his whims. It might explain the corporation executive who manipulates the price of stock and engages in insider trading, in order to gain what for him is really an insignificant amount of money. Grandiosity, the opposite of humility, tells us that we are special, that the rules and prohibitions that apply to others do not apply to us.
Humility is the cure for these faults, the way to rise above them by lowering ourselves. The essence of humility is found in Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
When a child learns that she or he is not the center of the universe, we sometimes call that “a loss of innocence.” Perhaps we should call it “the beginning of wisdom,” the understanding that life may not always be fair, but that it has all sorts of possibilities and compensations. To be humble, to know that we are not the center of the universe, is to be teachable.

PRAYER/MEDITATION
The purpose of every religious path is to help us to be able to examine ourselves, to become teachable. Therefore, we can all benefit from some humility. We come to realize that when something bad happens to us, we will get over it. When something good happens, it too will pass. We may or may not have deserved it. We may or may not have earned it. It doesn’t matter. Let us show gratitude for all that life brings. Let our humility connect us with others who may be hurting, who may be in need, and that is just about everyone. Amen.