I’ve mentioned this before, but my favorite bumper sticker of all time was the one that read, “Hire a teenager while he still knows everything.”

When I came out of seminary, I vowed to change the church and the world. I knew what was right and good, and I wrote authoritatively about my convictions, and some of those opinions actually found their way into print. When I look back at some of that stuff today I shudder and hope and pray that it won’t ever again see the light of day. Also some of my later writings contain certain convictions about which since I have changed my mind. Like Augustine, the late 4th and early 5th century Bishop of Hippo, who toward the end of his career wrote a book he called his Retractions, I may have to write my own retractions.

Humility is the hardest thing for Christians to learn. Too many of us are like cocky juveniles who know just enough to be dangerous. Christians are especially prone to this, because after all, it is the truth that has been revealed to us. Yet, true belief always comes with the temptation to self-righteousness. The two always seem to go together.

Today the church is declining in overall esteem. Some complaints directed against it are frivolus and can display an amazing arrogance and ignorance. Other complaints are richly deserved, the charge of self-righteousness perhaps chief among them. Self-righteousness is a problem and a threat, not only to others but also to the church in its inner life and structure, because as we all know and as the saying righly goes, “knowledge is power.” Or as Paul says, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Cor. 8:1). Self-righteousness leads to intolerance that leads to power-brokering and power-grabbing. Those who are convinced that they are right may eventually find ways to impose their will so as to make their claims stick.

In Mark’s gospel the disciples argue about who is the greatest. Jesus talks to the twelve, seated, meaning that his words will carry the full authority of his “office”: “’Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.’ Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’”

Jesus had just taught them that “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” Jesus teaches the disciples plainly the harsh reality of discipleship; still “they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.” The disciples are given the hard truth, and precisely because they did not understand it, or did not want to understand it, or indeed because at that time they simply could not understand it, they immediately began vieing with one another for control and authority. It was their lack of understanding and their delusions of gradure that led them to invent their own interpretation of Jesus’ words that they mistakenly took to be the truth, which in turn prompted them to contend with one another for power. Knowledge is power and presumption leads to tyranny.

While the disciples struggle like unruly youngsters to see who will be in charge of the sandbox, Jesus wants to apply to them an even more basic truth about children, namely, that children are just beginning their journey through life. The disciples also must start from scratch, relearn everything, abandon their preconceived notions, and open themselves up to a new reality and a new identity as heralds of God’s kingdom and as servants of each other. Jesus’ message is similar to what he says in John’s gospel where Jesus insists that one must be reborn.

A famous 20th century theologian [Barth] put it this way: “As a ‘new creation’ (2 Cor. 5:17) the Christian begins his life as one who is quite different, who starts over again from the very first, who is in fact a child in this sense. This is the meaning when…replying to the…disciples about [who is] the greatest…Jesus sets a little child in the midst of them….This has nothing whatever to do with a childlike mind and character, with childlike simplicity and innocence, as sentimentally suggested by many expositors. ‘As little children’ means in the abosolute novitiate which characterizes the existence of children. In Mk 10:15 and Lk. 18:17 the saying…is proceded by the positive statement: ‘Of such…is the kingdom of God.’ As newborn babes Christians are to drink the rational or unadulterated milk (of the word of the Lord preached to them, 1 Pet. 1:25), that they may grow thereby to their future salvation (1 Pet. 2:2).”

The more we learn, the more we realize what we don’t know. This is a commonplace among the educated; but it is the essence of a faith that for Jesus’ disciples is confident about the future the outcome of which is certain though the path toward it is filled with mystery.

I began my ministry as an associate at a Lutheran church located near VCU in Richmond. The senior pastor had become acquainted with a married couple teaching there who had co-authored a book on what then was called “futurism.” The pastor took an interest, first because they were Lutherans from Minnesota, and because of their academic interest in “futurism,” which austensibly should have had some connection to the Bible’s persistent stress on the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promises. The pastor assumed that the couple would be attracted by the dialogue he was suggesting, but sadly was mistaken, for the couple promptly informed him that as far as the church was concerned, they had moved on to what they called “higher things.” These “higher things”were but sophisticated speculations and projections based on trends from past experience. The “future” they envisisioned was an extrapolation of what already was dead and gone. From their “higher” vantage point they predicted a future that looked like a prettied-up version of the past. The Bible, on the other hand, considers the past from vantage point of God’s promised future. It is the future that determines the past, not the other way around. When today we look back at what these futurists had predicted, we see a quaint product of a particular time and place, an example and a description of a specific point in time where there are no real surprizes. The gospel, however, rooted in hope and faith, is all about surprizes, because while we know whose love and life determines the future, we do not know exactly how we are going to get there or what we shall encounter along the way, except that it will be determined by Jesus’ resurrection, his victory over death that is the very embodiment of God’s love that will embrace the whole creation.

We must never forget that the 20th century was replete with futurist movements and utopian experiments and in the end proved itself to be one of the bloodiest and most brutal centuries in human history.

Unless we are reborn children of our heavenly Father and are thus given a new understanding of ourselves, the world and God; unless we become like children entering our novitiate so that we can re-learn from Christ our brother what it means to be truly human; unless we open ourselves to a future that while unknown and surprizing promises abundant new life in the Spirit; unless we fix our hope on a future that will be suffused with a love that defeats even death; then in our arrogance and self-righteousness we shall only find ourselves vieing with each other for an empty kind of power that will spend itself in vain and useless pursuits that wind up ultimately in the grave.

Faith trumps our arrogance whenever it clings to the psalmist’s hope, “God is my helper; it is the Lord who sustains my life.” Apart from the Lord’s help and sustenance we have no life. This realization is the first step toward a true humility before the God who loves us all the way to the cross, and thereby initiates the necessary breaking down our self-destructive will to power.

-Amen-