You probably recognize the sermon title, even if only because you’ve looked at your change lately. The motto E pluribus unum—“Out of many, one”—comes from Pierre-Eugène du Simitière, a naturalist and painter who was an artistic consultant for the design of the Great Seal of the United States. His very first proposed design, submitted in 1776, included this motto, which was eventually included in the final design we know today—and on our money as well.
Now, I know very little about du Simitière, so I can’t say if he was a man of faith who knew the Scriptures or not; many among the Founders were, of course, and even those like Jefferson and Franklin who weren’t believers knew the Bible well. The degree to which the US was founded as a Christian nation has often been vastly overstated, distorting our understanding of our nation and its history; on the other hand, there are also many who vastly minimize the Christian character of this nation’s founding or deny it altogether, which is equally problematic.
I think Lincoln put it best, as he so often did, on February 21, 1861 when he told the New Jersey State Senate, “I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people.” As the historian William Lee Miller dryly observed, “God did not say to Israel, ‘You are almost my chosen people. I have nearly chosen you, from almost all the other peoples of the earth, to be unto me a somewhat special people.’” Lincoln neatly parses the reality that, on the one hand, the US is not God’s chosen nation in the way Israel was—with the coming of Jesus, God’s plan no longer subsists in a single nation or people group; that’s part of Paul’s point in this letter—but on the other, granted that God is at work in every tribe and nation and people and language, this nation does seem to have been a particular project of his across its history.
As such, it’s fair to point out that the vision du Simitière cast for the American project, whatever his own understanding of it may have been, was a Christian vision in character and an echo of the work God is doing in his church. The difference, at least potentially, is in the foundation. Paul begins this section of his letter with the word “Therefore”—and as the folk wisdom has it (I expect some of you have heard this before), when you see a “therefore,” you should always look to see what it’s there for. Here, this is really a threefold therefore, reaching back through the previous three chapters: because of what Christ has done for you; because of how God has called you; because of what Paul has prayed for you; because of all these things, live according to the calling you have received.
So then, what does that mean? Well, Paul begins by highlighting certain virtues which are necessary if we are to live in a way that fits with and expresses the call of God on our lives. The first is humility; and this is an ongoing point of friction between Christian faith and the world. The Greek word here was not a virtue in the ancient world, to Greeks or Romans, it ws an insult. The idea that humility is a good thing is one which the world resists—sometimes vehemently, as with the nihilist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who snarled that Christianity is “slave religion.” For any who would follow Jesus, it’s central. As the Québécois Catholic philosopher Fr. Ernest Fortin argued, humility is the highest and greatest Christian virtue and the one which is most characteristically Christian. (Before anyone asks, “What about love?” I believe we’ve erred significantly in classifying love as a virtue. Love is a whole other order of thing. Love is a verb.)
Now, one reason we have as much trouble as we do with humility is that we tend to mis-define it, and so we need to be clear about what humility is not. One, it’s not modesty. It’s not a matter of playing down your strengths, your accomplishments, and so on in order to avoid attracting attention or inspiring praise from others; it doesn’t mean not being too self-confident or giving other people the credit for something you did. Two, humility is not self-denigration. It’s not an exercise in putting yourself down or denying your accomplishments; it doesn’t mean denying the value of yourself or your work. Three, humility is not being a doormat. It’s not a commitment to let people walk all over you; it doesn’t mean believing you’re unimportant, that you have no right to stand up for yourself or want anything for yourself, or that you don’t deserve to be defended if someone attacks you.
Rather, humility means seeing ourselves clearly and truly, in both the good and the bad. It means seeing our goodness in the light of God’s holiness, of which we are at best a pale reflection. It means seeing the evil in us in the light of God’s grace, before which the darkness in our hearts cannot endure. And it means accepting what we see, rather than choosing to believe what we would prefer to be true. Along with this, humility means understanding that our value comes from God and God alone. Instead of finding our worth in how much we know, how much we own, what we’ve done, or what we know we can do, those who are truly humble in the Lord recognize that our value lies only and always in the fact that God made us and loves us. On the one hand, that means we can’t increase our value by anything we do. On the other, it means we can’t decrease our value by anything we do, either. Our worth is sure and certain because it is rooted in the goodness and love of God, which will never change. Taken together, then, as Fr. Fortin summed the matter up, to live in humility is “to understand that all is grace; that we have no right to claim anything as our own—not our life, not our gifts, not even our faith. We are at every moment God’s creation.”
The rest of the virtues named in verse 2, I want to take together; you’ll see why in a minute. I want to begin by noting there are multiple Greek words which we translate “patience,” but two main ones. One is hupomone, which actually began as a military term meaning to stand firm and hold your position in the face of attack. This one is also translated by words like “steadfastness” and “endurance.” That’s not the word we have here. The word in this passage is makrothumia, which most basically means to withhold one’s anger. In the main Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, this is the word used in, for instance, Exodus 34:6, where God declares himself to be “slow to anger.” The King James translators often grabbed the word “longsuffering” to render makrothumia.
Now, why did I begin there? Because the word the ESV translates “gentleness” here is the word traditionally translated “meekness” in, for example, Matthew 5:5, the third Beatitude: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land.” I can understand the impulse to avoid that word—after all, what sort of word is “meek,” anyway? It sounds like a mouse with its tail caught in a trap: “meek, meek, meek.” With a lower-case “m,” it looks rather like a mouse, too. It rhymes with words like “weak,” “squeak,” and “eek.” Look it up in the dictionary, you find such phrases as “overly submissive or compliant,” “spineless or spiritless,” “deficient in spirit and courage,” “easily imposed on,” “lacking in self-assertion,” and “docile under provocation from others.” So . . . blessed are the wimps?
Put simply: no. The Greek word here is praǘtēs; it’s one I’ve spent a fair bit of time with since I started my ongoing project on the Sermon on the Mount. It’s one of the virtues Aristotle discusses in the Nicomachean Ethics, where he defines meekness as keeping anger in balance and in harness. A person who is meek, according to Aristotle, is one “who is angry at the right things and towards the right people, and also in the right way, at the right time and for the right length of time.” So, patience and gentleness, which we could also translate longsuffering and meekness, have to do with anger. The goal is to keep our anger pure so that, one, we can act rightly, in a controlled and measured fashion, for a good purpose; and two, if justice for others doesn’t require us to act, we can hold back our anger to give people opportunity to repent.
Paul underscores this with the clause “bearing with one another in love.” It’s easy to write people off; it’s easy to say, “I’m not putting up with this person anymore.” There are times when it’s appropriate to sever relationships, to cut ties with others; there are times when it’s necessary to do so. Thing is, our judgment is deeply corrupted by self-interest, so left to our own devices we’ll generally bear with someone only as long and as far as it serves us to do so. If we’re motivated by the love of God, everything changes. Humility reminds us Jesus has to bear with us, too—in fact, he bore us all the way to the cross. Meekness trains us to submit our anger and its strength to God and let him harness it to his work, not ours. Longsuffering reminds us God could have blasted us to flinders ages ago and didn’t: he withheld his anger to give us time and space to repent and turn back to him, and so out of love for him we should do the same for others unless there is injustice being done which must be addressed. As part of this—and this is a huge issue in our culture these days—we need to set aside our self-assumed right to attribute the worst possible motives to those who disagree with or oppose us. Even if it’s only Hanlon’s Razor—never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence—we need to commit ourselves to giving others credit for good motives until they prove us wrong.
So, then, God has called us, and Paul urges us to practice these virtues in order to live in a way which is worthy of God’s call—why? Because God wants us to behave better? (Or Paul does?) That’s not wrong, exactly, but it’s too small and not to the main point. If you listened to the Scripture reading, or were here the last couple weeks, or simply paid attention to the sermon title up there on the screens, you know why: so we who are many, in many different ways, would be truly one in the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, united in God’s shalom—the restoration of his perfect harmony, in tune with his good will, with all that is broken made whole once more. We don’t see it fully in this world, but that is what binds us together.
Verses 4-6 are the equivalent of Paul taking this, pulling out a red marker, and underlining everything three times. There is one body, one Holy Spirit, one hope to which you were called, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is above all and through all and in all. Our calling is to build up one another so we may carry out together the mission of the church, and so Paul hammers it home: we need to major in the majors and not let secondary differences divide us. The theologian and apologist Graham Ortlund, whom I’ve quoted before, calls this “theological triage.” It’s not that we all agree on everything, or should; it’s not that we don’t have different congregations and governing structures; it’s not that we all do things the same way. Those are differences which are real and meaningful but which should not be divisions between believers who have submitted ourselves to the one God and Father of all.
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