"MYSTERY AND MANNERS"
2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a; Ephesians 4:1-16

Flannery O'Connor wrote a book about writing one time
that I think could also describe the life
that you and I are called to lead.
It was called Mystery and Manners.
"The mystery, she said,
is the mystery of our position on earth."
How is it that we're here?
And who put us here?
The manners, then,
"are those convictions which reveal that central mystery."
Another way to say that
is to say that what we do
has everything to say about who we believe we are
and how we came to be here.
Another way to say that
is to say this:
"Lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called."

You and I believe ourselves to be followers of Jesus Christ,
who we believe to be the Son of God.
That's the mystery part.
The manners part
is not about etiquette.
It's about what we do with our lives
because of that belief.
What you do //
reveals how you perceive the worth of your calling.
The mystery
of which we believe ourselves to be a part in this hour
reveals the manner in which we live
in the other one hundred and sixty-seven hours each week.
It's about the whole of life.

Paul was writing these words to the church in Ephesus.
It wasn't quite the hotbed of diversity as was Corinth,
which we talked about last week.
But it was a church that needed encouraging
and a reminder about how to live.
Earlier in the letter,
he talked to them about the mystery:
about things like prayer,
and salvation,
and unity.
When we meet up with him today,
it's time for manners.
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So Paul tells them,
"Lead a life worthy of the calling
to which you have been called."
He gives quite a list of ways in which they can do so,
but the first word off his pen
is "humility."
To a lot of us,
humility is a mystery!
It's not exactly the suit with which we would prefer to lead.
Humility is not among the top ten things
which gets covered in assertiveness training courses.
But according to Ted Foote and Alex Thornburg,
humility is "the first essential indicator
of being a disciple of Jesus Christ."
It's a developed quality, they say,
which means it does not come instinctively and naturally to us.
We have to choose to acquire it.
And when we do so, they say,
humility "believes and demonstrates in relationships
that every person's foundation for personhood
is grace and only grace,
(whether any person recognizes [it] or not)."
Lead a life worthy of the calling to which we have been called,
with an intentionally chosen and lived quality
that puts us and everyone on equal footing.

So why is it, I wonder,
that today's reading from Ephesians
gets paired up with the story of King David
and the results of his less-than-humble actions?
I guess that's back to the mystery again!

King David was not exactly in the dictionary
under "humility."
Things had always gone his way -
he was the fair-haired boy,
hand-picked by God, 
who slayed a giant with only five smooth stones,
understudied King Saul,
the most powerful leader in David's known world,
married Saul's daughter,
and eventually became king himself.
He had it all -
except for one thing.

This story of David and Bathsheba
is not the sweet love story
that many of us have come to believe over the years.
It is far less a story of "I love"
than "I can, so I will."
These days, we call that "abuse of power."
David thought that because he was king,
he was king of everything.
And since God had hand-picked him for this,
well, like his ancestors Adam and Eve,
he assumed he could have his pick of any tree in the garden.
The heady aroma of power
reduced David to the level of a kindergartener:
"If I see it, it's mine."
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How easy it is
to slip away from the mystery and lose our manners.
A driver who lets her attention drift on the road
can end up in a ditch before she knows it.
She didn't mean to,
it just happened.
Someone who likes to play Solitaire on the computer
can sit down to a couple of rounds,
and before he knows it,
the day is gone
and nothing else has gotten done.
He didn't mean to,
it just happened.
A sheep can follow his nose in the pasture,
eating blade after blade of tasty green grass.
But sheep who focus too much on the grass in front of them
lose sight of the rest of the flock
and of the good shepherd,
and end up lost in the wilderness.
The sheep didn't mean to,
it just happened.
How easy it is.

You and I lose touch with that cultivated notion of humility
when we lose our focus on God
and begin to focus more inwardly
on our own rights,
on our power,
on the fact that it's our turn to go first.
When we get focused on grabbing,
and pushing,
and insisting that everything go our way,
we have lost our focus
on living lives that are worthy
of the calling to which we have been called.
When we are more intent on building up our own agenda,
however significant we believe it to be,
we have ceased building up the body of Christ.

I think that Foote and Thornburg are right.
The apostle Paul is right.
Humility is the baseline place where we have to start
in order to lead lives that are worthy of our calling
as children of God.
The word "humility"
comes from the same root
which gives us two other words:
"human," and "humus."
Soil.
That mysterious, gritty substance
which we till and tend to bring forth life.
Earth to earth, ashes to ashes,
dust to dust.
God created the least of us and the best of us
from the soil of the earth,
and it is to that same soil we all return.
Humus is no respecter of persons.
Realizing that each of us is made of the same stuff as all of us
is the great equalizer.
And when we are able
to put aside anything which would differentiate
or compete with others who are just like us,
we remember that we share one Lord,
one faith, one baptism, one God of all.
We remember
that whether we are apostles or pastors or teachers,
our common call is to build up the body of Christ.
We remember our manners
and focus once again on the mystery.
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What you do
reveals how you perceive the worth of your calling.
Given that,
what did you do this past week
to live a life worthy of the calling
to which we have been called?
Did you respond to others
with humility?
Gentleness?
Patience?
Did you and someone else bear with one another in love?
Did you make at least some effort
to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace?
Did you speak the truth in love?
These are not rhetorical questions;
they're tough.
You have to answer them for yourself,
and so do I.
And as a church,
so do we.

It's not just some random act of kindness.
We have to be intentional
about living with humility
and treating other children of God
with the respect they deserve.
The problems start to crop up
when we skew out by ourselves //
and discover that there's no one's company that we enjoy
quite as much as our own.
We can't rely on the world
to get us back on track;
that's not in the world's best interest.
We need each other
so that all of us can stay the course.
That's what Paul is trying to say this morning.
When we have the humility
to not be threatened by other people
who may see things differently from us,
we can begin to see them
as the gifts that they are.
And then each of us
can contribute our God-given gifts to the whole,
so that the end product will be grander and more stable
than anything we could have cooked up on our own.

We can't let up.
Paul says that we keep building the body of Christ
until all of us have reached maturity:
the measure of the full stature of Christ.
We don't have to look very far
to know that we're not even close yet.
We've still got a long way to go.
But the trip will go faster if we keep each other company.
So let's mind our manners
as we together pursue the mystery.
Let's live lives that are worthy
of the calling to which we have been called,
in all humility,
in order to build up the body of Christ.

Amen.
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Flannery O'Connor's book is Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961); the quote is on page 124.
Foote & Thornburg's comments on humility can be found in their book Being Disciples of Jesus in a Dot.Com world (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), page 43.