Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost-the Rev. Melanie Lemburg
12th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 17C
August 28, 2022
“Blame it all on my roots, I showed up
in boots/And ruined your black-tie affair…”
Whenever I hear the first line of Garth Brooks’ hit “I’ve got friends in
low places,” I’m immediately transported to a summer in high school when I’d
drive back and forth to basketball camp with a car-load of my teammates. Whoever was driving was obsessed with the
song, and she would blast the song over and over again (which required rewinding
the cassette tape to get back to the start every time). My teammates would belt the song our with
gusto every time through; but I’ll confess that I never really understood the
appeal; I actually thought it was a somewhat depressing song about humiliation
set to a raucous chorus, but in the throes of the euphoria of teenaged freedom,
I would often join in.
Y’all know this song? It’s all about how the narrator shows up
underdressed (and maybe uninvited?) to a fancy party that his ex is throwing;
he recognizes that he comes from a different sort of social status as his ex,
but he doesn’t let it bother him as he makes plans to blow off his humiliation
and go party with his “friends in low places.”
One
music critic writes, "Friends in Low Places" was as effective as pop
music ever gets: It's a depressing song that makes you feel better. Singing
along with that song was like …laughing at a rich person and knowing that you
were right ... Garth told stories about blue-collar people who felt good about
what their bad life symbolized ...”[i]
The genesis of the song is also
interesting. One of the two songwriters
was hosting a lunch at a restaurant, entertaining other songwriters, when he
realized that he had left his money at home.
He told his songwriting buddies, “Don’t worry. I have friends in low places. I know the
cook."[ii] The songwriters realized what a good line it
was and wrote the song from there.
It’s interesting to me because it’s a
song about how a person can take a humiliating experience and embrace it.
In our gospel reading for today, Jesus
is at a dinner party, and he tells a parable that is all about how a person can
learn humility to avoid humiliating situations and also about how a humiliating
situation can teach us about the unexpected ways that God shows up for us both
when we are humiliated and when we embrace humility.
On Wednesday at our weekly healing
service, I asked the congregation to think about times when they had been
humiliated and also asked them to think about ways that formed them toward
humility. We re-discovered that a
universally humiliating experience in our modern context is located in the
games that we play as children at P.E. or recess; you know the ones: musical chairs, Red rover, the process of
picking teams, and of course the ultimate humiliating experience that is known
as dodge ball. But as we talked about
these early humiliations, some people shared about how humiliations turned into
opportunities for prayer and God’s healing response; they talked about how
bumping up against other people from time to time serves as a reminder of who
they are and how they wanted to live their life and their faith. They talked about how hard and how
humiliating it is to ask for help, and they also talked about how it feels when
they offer someone help and it is rejected.
Friends,
our readings for today offer us both good and challenging news. The good news is that God has given each one
of us all good things for no good reason.
None of us has earned anything that we have ever been given from God;
God has given and continues to give because God loves—extravagantly, abundantly,
unreasonably. When we get glimpses of
that reality—whether it’s in our day to day lives or when we are kneeling at
that altar with hands outstretched--it humbles us.
And the challenging news in this passage
is that God wants us to treat each other the same way; God invites us to do the
same for others: giving to others only
good things for no good reason, wanting the best for others regardless of how
that may seem to affect us, and even working toward that reality. It may actually feel like a humiliation when others
are lifted up; and if it does, then we need to pay attention to that, and become
more curious because God may show up unexpectedly there, and because Jesus tells
us, again and again, that that is what the Kingdom of God looks like.
This week, on the Pray as You Go
podcast, one of the prompts had to do with humility. I’ve been pondering it all week. “The gift of humility is an excellent
foundation for recognizing the unexpected God.
It means my ego, my concerns, don’t get in the way. Do you find yourself drawn to this kind of
humility?” [iii] The true answer is that actually, I don’t
find myself drawn to that kind of humility.
It like my ego and my concerns, thank you very much. And that has shown me, this week, that this
is what I need to be praying for, as frightening as that is for me.
This
week, I invite you to reflect on humility and humiliation. Can you think of a time when you were humiliated
that moved you toward embracing a deeper call to humility or to deepen your
trust in God? Or perhaps, can you think
of a time when God lifted up the lowly and that felt threatening or unsettling
to you? Look more closely at your own
discomfort and see what God might be revealing to you in that? Or perhaps you need to spend some time with
the awareness that God wants to give you only good things, loving you
abundantly, extravagantly, un-earnedly. And
God calls you to do the same for others.
[i] From
the Wikipedia entry on the song. From an
essay by Chuck Closterman: Klosterman,
Chuck (2009). Eating the Dinosaur. New York, NY: Scribner. p. 107. ISBN
978-1-4165-4421-0.
[ii]
Ibid. Collins, Ace (1996). The Stories
Behind Country Music's All-Time Greatest 100 Songs. New York: Boulevard. p.
276. ISBN 1-57297-072-3.
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