The Humility of God

This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 01/25/25, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was: 1 Corinthians 1:10-31 and Matthew 4:12-23.

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It’s true what they say: When you’re 16 years old, you know everything. It’s all downhill from there.

I know it’s a joke, but it has felt increasingly true to me in the last decade. With every month that passes, I know a little bit less about how the world works. Things make a little bit less sense every day. I used to feel like I had a working mental model of the world and how things operated. I thought I had a sense of what I could expect going forward.

But as time goes by, I feel less and less grounded in that mental model. It feels less and less real. The future feels more and more like a mystery, like something that I can’t exert a lot of meaningful control over.

I was telling a good friend of mine recently that this sense of out-of-controlness, this lack of knowledge of what’s going to happen, feels very threatening. It does not feel good at all. Yet at the same time I’m seeing that this terrible ambiguity is offering me an opportunity for greater faith.

Back when I thought I knew everything – or at least back when I thought that, even if I didn’t know everything, I could exercise control over the future through my actions – it felt like everything was on my shoulders. I had to figure things out. And if things went badly, well, I must not have done a good enough job.

But something has shifted for me. I’m not feeling that way anymore. Lately, I’m feeling like there’s work for me to do, and I have to take responsibility for my own actions, but ultimately it’s not me who’s in control. There’s something bigger happening here. Something much bigger than me.

It’s in this context of my own personal feelings of powerlessness and limitation that I reflect on what it meant for God to become man in the person of Jesus. I consider the humility of God in becoming a human being just like you and me, with all of our limitations.

There’s an ancient heresy called docetism. Docetism says that Jesus just sort of looked like he was a human being. But, in fact, he wasn’t a man of flesh and blood at all. He was pure spirit and he never actually became truly human. I can see why this heresy has been appealing. Because it’s hard to imagine the infinite becoming finite, the ultimate power becoming a helpless child.

But, to me, that’s the exciting part. Perhaps the most astounding thing about the Christian faith is realizing that God really did become one of us. God really does understand. God is willing and able endure our limitations and our suffering in order to show us his love for us and bring about our redemption.

Throughout Jesus’s ministry, we see him accept limitations. One of the first times we see it is in the fact that he doesn’t rush forward in his ministry before its time. He waits. He waits until John the Baptist is imprisoned and his movement is shattered.

Even when Jesus does begin his ministry, he doesn’t start by doing something completely new. He incorporates John’s ministry into his own. He calls the people to repent, because the kingdom of God has drawn near. This was John’s message: The kingdom of God has drawn near; repent and change your whole way of seeing the world. Jesus carried this message forward.

When we think about the power of God, the things that God can do, it would be natural to assume that God can just do anything he wants. He doesn’t have to have any limitations. Anything he wants to? Do it. Wanna change the world? There’s nothing to it.

But this isn’t the path that God in Jesus chooses. During his time in the desert, the devil tries to tempt him in a variety of ways. He offers him luxury and religious authority and imperial power. The devil asks Jesus, essentially, “Why don’t you just take what you want? Why not bend the world to your will? Why don’t you just take control, Jesus? Things would be better that way.”

But Jesus rejects these temptations. Jesus chooses the path of limitation, humility and diminishment. Jesus chooses the path that will ultimately lead him to the cross, and to the resurrection.

It’s impossible to understand Jesus’s ministry and teachings without knowing that he was on a path to the cross. We can’t wrap our minds around what God is doing here among us without knowing that the power of God is found in weakness and the wisdom of God is found in foolishness.

As the Apostle Paul writes, “the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved is the power of God. … For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”

Jesus came in humility and weakness and limitation. Jesus came as God taking on human flesh and human nature. He became one of us and drank human suffering to the brim. The devil offered him power. The devil offered him control. The devil offered him recognition and fame and knowledge.

But Jesus chose a different way. Jesus chose the path of renunciation. Jesus opted for a life lived with the poor and the forgotten and the despised. Jesus took the rage of the storm trooper’s baton in his own body rather than wielding the weapon himself. Jesus chose as his best friends, fishermen, and zealots, and tax collectors. Wanna-be revolutionaries and traitors and small businessmen just trying to get by.

“God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing the things that are.” Jesus chose ordinary men and women who were living on the margins of a great empire. He chose people who were nobody important, known by nobody important, to be the catalyst for change that would transform the very nature of the cosmos and bring light to every people, tribe, and nation.

Jesus wants to be our friend too. Jesus is calling us from our fishing nets and our nine to five jobs. He’s calling us from our compulsions and obsessions and our addiction to the news cycle. He’s calling us from our fear of the terrible things that this modern-day empire might do to us if we step out of line. Jesus is calling us, not softly and tenderly, but boldly. He calls to us from the margins. He is calling us to become a people on the edge; people who know that we don’t have control over how things are going to be; people who know that we serve the one who holds the whole world in his hands.

Jesus is calling us out into the messiness and horror and violence of this world. Not to be afraid, not to be burdened and weighed down by it. He calls us, not to be dour, sour Quakers who obligingly do the right thing, but rather to be filled by the Spirit of God and sent into the world to be like Jesus. He calls us to bear the cross that he bore, so that we will be raised in glory just as he has been.

This is the promise. This is the salvation. This is the voice of Jesus calling us from our fishing boats to walk on dry land with him. To become fishers of people. To draw others into this kingdom, into this power, into this new life that transforms the desperate circumstances that we see before us in our world today.

So don’t be discouraged. Don’t look at your own weakness and limitations. Don’t look at all the ways that you fall short. Don’t look at all the things that you don’t know and all the things that you can’t control. Don’t look at the state of the world and despair. It’s not yours to fix.

Instead look at Jesus. Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Turn your eyes upon Jesus nailed to the cross. Look at the humble one who emptied himself and became a servant. Look at the Word Made Flesh who became the ultimate catalyst, the one who made God’s love actual, so that all of us can be transformed by it.

This is the power of God. You are the light of the world. You are a city on the hill that cannot be hid, if you’ll stand in him and walk in the path of his cross and his resurrection.

I don’t want you to misunderstand me. This is not a retreat from reality. I’m not telling you, “Don’t worry about how bad things are because you’ve got treasure and heaven. Don’t trouble your little head with all that darkness in the world; things will be good someday, somehow. We don’t know how we’ll get through this, but don’t worry.” That’s not what I’m saying.

What I’m telling you is that, in the words of Paul, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. I’m telling you that God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. God’s power lives in you, in me, in us. We can’t fix it, but God can. God wants to work through us.

This isn’t a burden we are forced to carry; this is a path we are invited to walk. Jesus will carry the burden for us. Jesus will work through us. Jesus will fill us with the Holy Spirit and anoint us with fire. He will make us the people that this moment demands, people that God has prepared for just such an occasion.

So be encouraged, brothers and sisters. Be encouraged, because God is choosing what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God is choosing what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God is choosing what is low and despised in the world, the things that are not, to reduce to nothing the things that are.

He will have the victory. His will be the glory. He wants to shine through us. He wants to act through us. And he will.