Humble Like a Child – Br. Lain Wilson

SSJE Sermons

In my first-grade art class, I remember molding and painting a very rough purplish-gray dinosaur. I was very proud of that dinosaur. It’s still on display a shelf in my childhood bathroom.

I’d like to invite you to remember your own experience of creating something as a child—smudging paint on a piece of paper, building a sandcastle, drawing your family with crayons, or something else. How did it feel?

And what did you do with your creation? Did you keep it to yourself? Or did you run to your friends or parents and show them what you had made, or give it to them as a gift? What did you feel in this sharing or giving?

We as Christians and monks talk about humility a lot. We talk about it as a central virtue, as an antidote to pride, as a way of relating to others as fellow children of God. We talk of humble status, of humble actions, of building or cultivating habits of humility. And all the while, so many of the expectations we face and the performance that is required of us pushes back against that ideal, requiring us to compete against others, to distinguish ourselves. It can be a demoralizing juggling act.

Now, recall your childhood creation. In these memories of creating and sharing and giving, in feelings of joy and contentment and, yes, even pride, I think we can capture not just something of what it means to be a child but also what it feels like to be free in our acts of creation and generosity. What it feels like to be free of the learned limits of expectation and performance.

And, perhaps, what it feels like to be humble like a child. The humility of a child is not about carefully cultivated habits or low status. Rather, a child’s humility is about how it feels to revel in messy finger painting, to dig through drawers for that one perfect but forgotten toy, to go from fighting to playing with a classmate in the playground in the blink of an eye.

A child’s humility is a sharing in God’s own freedom. How, in other words, it feels to bear God’s image in the world—rejoicing in acts of creation, valuing the lost and forgotten, and forgiving again and again and again—unrestricted by expectations or performance or anything other than a desire simply to be God’s image.

In being called to be humble like a child, we are being called to shed so much of what we have learned to feel is valued in the world, and what we have found to be sources of constraint and limit. We are called to recover a childlike freedom, and, in doing so, to discover that we might find there our true being as children of God. And to be proud of that. As proud, even, as we were of our own purplish-gray dinosaurs.

Amen.