You have heard him a thousand times in the TV commercial, warbling away in that gravelly voice with an accent I hear only when I go back to Kentucky. He is singing in the shower and flaunting his huge schnozz at the camera. "0 Lord, it's hard to be humble, when you're perfect in every way".
And we laugh at the obvious bragging in his little ditty, but the truth is that a good many of us are right there with him. "O Lord, it's hard to be humble, when you're perfect in every way."
Now I don't suppose I do know anybody who would seriously insist that he or she is perfect in every way. Most of us realize that that claims too much, that even if you believe that about yourself, you'll never get anybody to agree to it. No, we might not join Vern in his anthem, "Perfect in every way." But we do sing it, many of us, in one way or another. It's a disease, you know; it's a disease that is so rampant it ought to be included as an epidemic by the Centers for Disease Control. It's the disease I call elderbrotheritis.
Elderbrotheritis may not be found in your medical books, and I suppose it isn't in the dictionary, but believe me, it is real. There is an epidemic of elderbrotheritis, affecting saint and sinner, church member and professional atheist, Americans of all descriptions.
Elderbrotheritis is in my heart, for example, when I look at somebody on the street and say, "I'm so glad I'm not like that guy."
Elderbrotheritis is in my neighborhood when as a community we say, "Yes, I know you have to have a halfway house someplace, but not in my backyard; it will run down property values to have those people here."
Elderbrotheritis is in my church when my church prays, "Lord, if … if …by any chance, we may have committed a sin or two this past week, we ask you to overlook it."
And elderbrotheritis affects my country when my nation forgets its revolutionary roots and says, "Keep your Cubans and your Haitians, keep your radicals and your illiterate; there’s only enough for those of us who have worked hard to build America."
Elderbrotherisitis: a heart disease that they cannot treat in the cardiac ward, a disease whose principal symptom is that it becomes hard, exceedingly hard to be humble, because lurking down deep there is the assumption that we are perfect, or at least close enough, in every way.
The most important case of elderbrotheritis on record in the medical journals is recorded for us by Dr. Luke in his gospel. Dr. Luke reports his case rather fully and describes for us rather graphically the symptoms of this dread and sometimes fatal illness. Dr. Luke is very careful in just a short space of words to picture for us what it is like for a person or a church or a nation to find it terribly hard to be humble, because they have a galloping case of elderbrotheritis.
Listen: "Lo, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command." I never disobeyed your command. "Lord, it's hard to be humble when you're perfect in every way." Do you know about the fellow who was given a medal for humility? The trouble is that when he wore it out on the street, they took it away!
Spiritual arrogance may take many forms, but at the basis of each one of them there is always the assumption that sin is not really my problem, it's always your problem. I never disobeyed your command, or if I did, Lord, it wasn't a big one. It wasn't very important. Lord, I never killed anybody, I never stole any money, I didn't run around with somebody else's wife; Lord, I never disobeyed anything important.
But our God says, "You have elderbrotheritis, and it is blinding you." For our God says, the commandments begin, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." The commandments include, "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain." The commandments insist, "Thou shalt not covet." And if we say that we have not disobeyed these, and disobeyed them every day, then we are blind. We are sadly misinformed. And it's hard to be humble when you have elderbrotheritis.
Churches get this disease too, you know. Churches and denominations begin to sound off about how God has blessed us and has judged everybody else. And there is a blindness that keeps us from seeing how far we are from our God’s intentions.
And nations get blindness. Nations get elderbrotheritis. This nation of ours celebrates its birthday with fireworks and se1f-congratulations, and not too many years ago taught its children in schools that we had never fought an unjust war, never oppressed anybody, never violated the rights of minorities … a galloping case of elderbrotheritis, hard to be humble. We are always in danger of being blind to our shortcomings.
II
The second item on the symptomatology of elderbrotheritis is a kind of brain dead thing, a lack of alertness, a loss of awareness. When you have elderbrotheritis, you become unaware that you are the recipient of grace. The disease I'm speaking of includes a dead spot; we just plain forget that we are the recipients of grace, and that we didn't do anything to deserve it. It just comes to us. It's hard to be humble if you forget that without the sheer, undeserved gifts of God you wouldn't be here at all.
Listen again: "Lo, these many years I served you." That is to say, now I've worked hard and I deserve something. Lo, these many years I served you, and yet you never gave me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends. Lord God, when do I get mine? I've played this game, I've been in church, I have even coughed up my tithe right on schedule, and hey, what have I got to show for it?
All I have done is to give and work and work and give, and now you want to use the church property for some kind of social service program? Why would you bring mental patients and juvenile offenders and street people into my church? When do I get to enjoy it?
I’ve paid my taxes and I’ve fought in the army and I’ve voted each year, and we've made this nation great. Now you tell me have to accept Haitians and Cubans and refugees and illiterates? When do I get to enjoy the country? Why not America for Americans?
But the Father says, "Son … child … you are always with me, and all that I have is yours." This has nothing to do with what you deserve; it's all grace, all of it. Don't feel cheated just because someone else gets more than he seems to deserve; so did you, so did I. And we are the heirs of the Father, let's not forget it. We have been blessed as a people. If we fail to remember grace, gift, sheer gift, we will die of elderbrotheritis.
III
There is a third symptom of this dread disease. Elderbrotheritis not only involves blindness, blindness to our own sin; and elderbrotheritis not only includes forgetfulness, a certain fuzziness about how much grace we have received. There is a third symptom. And that is that elderbrotheritis cancels out relationships. It stamps out brotherhood and it destroys relationship.
Listen again: "When this son of yours came …" "When this son of yours came …" Isn’t that fascinating? Elder brother cannot bring himself to say, "When my brother came home…" He cannot acknowledge that he is or ever has been close to the prodigal; he manages to accuse his father of love. The very way he says it makes the father's love sound like some sort of crime. This son of yours …
Oh how we need to see that when pride gets in our way we the first thing we lose is our sense of connectedness with all humanity. When you get a serious case of elderbrotheritis you lose the common touch and you cancel out authentic, brother-to-brother relationships.
It happens in churches that adopt, as I am afraid many do, the stance that the pastor is out, here, up here, somewhere, and that the role of everybody else is to pay, pray, and obey. The pastor becomes a kind of elder brother, removed from his people, and loses touch with reality, loses touch with his brothering them.
It happens in a nation that forgets that once we were, as Emma Lazarus’ poem on the Statute of Liberty says, "huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of the teeming shore." I sometimes enjoy reminding my English-born wife that she is a part of that wretched refuse; but then so am I. So are most of us. Even if our ancestors came on slave ships and endured centuries of oppression, still this land provided opportunity untold and possibilities unforeseen, and we today have no room to stand tall and to pretend that the rest of the world are not our brothers. When I hear somebody grumble about the cost of foreign aid, which is after all only a tiny pittance compared with what we spend on arms, looking proud; when I hear someone fret about opening our borders to more refugees, when this land has miraculously been able to absorb wave after wave of immigrants; then I know I hear a bad case of elderbrotheritis. And I know that we have forgotten our own beginnings, I know that we have canceled out our revolutionary roots, and I fear that we are losing touch with what it is to be a brother to the world.
This son of yours … ah, yes, the needy and the infirm of this world, the sinners of this world, are sons and daughters of his. But the father reminds us that we are too, and you cannot be sons and daughters of this father without being brothers and sisters to his world. No one, says the Bible, no one can say I love God and hate his brother.
Oh, yes, it is hard to be humble, when you are infected with the virulent disease of elderbrotheritis. It is hard to be humble if we are tempted to think we are perfect, or maybe slightly short, but close.
It is hard to be humble, that is, unless, you feast at the father's table. Hard to be humble until you plant your feet under the same table as the prodigal and feast on the father’s bounty.
"Bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry … for this your brother was dead and is alive, was lost and is found."
It's hard to be humble if you are infected with considering how good you are. But I tell you it is not hard to be humble when you come to the father's table and discover there that the lamb has been slain for you too.
It is not hard to be humble when the father so graciously invites you to share in his bounty and to acknowledge his brokenness, knowing down deep that we do need forgiveness, we do need his grace.
It is not hard to be humble if you taste his pain and know that he is pained for the prodigal, but he is pained too for us religious folk, for us elder brother types, for us American patriots, for those of us who take pride in too many things we have not earned.
It is not hard to be humble if our tongues taste the bitterness of his shed blood and we hear him say, "Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours ... it was and is fitting that we make merry and be glad, for this your brother, your brother and your sister was dead and is alive, was lost and is found." And, fellow elder brother, this medicine, this bread and this wine, it will cure us.
