April 26, 2015: Prone to Wander

Year B, Easter 4                                                                         

John 10:11-18                                                                                    

            One of my joys in life is a small group of writers who meet a couple times a year.  When we meet we start with an exercise called “listening to God.”  In this exercise you start by asking God a question and then writing down what you hear in response.  You are not allowed to edit yourself.  You write down everything that pops into your head, whether it is relevant or not.  After you have written everything, you take turns reading it out loud.  You don’t have to read out loud, but with this group I do because I know it is safe place.  I have also realized that you can learn a lot from what other people write.

One of the most interesting revelations I’ve had is that God talks to each one of in our own voice.  For instance, when God talks to me, he’s a little sarcastic and likes to say: “Seriously?!?” a lot. At first I thought that must mean that I am not listening to God.  I am listening to myself.  But then my friends reminded me that of course God sounds like us.  This is in our heads. God’s words are being filtered by our personalities.  Of course God talks to us in a way that we would understand.  If God spoke to me in Hebrew, I would be in serious trouble. 

            I thought of that exercise as I read the Gospel today.  John writes: “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.”  In what is often referred to as the Good Shepherd Discourse, Jesus explains that the sheep follow the good shepherd because they know his voice.  They know his voice because they have heard it before. They know his voice because they have a relationship with this shepherd.

            You will find shepherd imagery throughout the Bible, especially in the Old Testament.  In the Old Testament the shepherd represents a powerful leader, a king and often the one true God of the Hebrew people.    Jesus is sharing the parable that we heard today with the Pharisees…the Pharisees who are already pretty ticked at him.  This parable isn’t just a nice comforting story; it sheds light on an earlier incident.  In this earlier incident Jesus healed a blind man on the Sabbath.  The Pharisees were so angry at this display of power and disrespect for their rules that they questioned the formerly blind man.  When the blind man did not tell them what they wanted to hear, they cast him out. When Jesus learned that this had happened, he went out and found the man and told the man who it was that healed him.  It was not just some run of the mill miracle worker, but the Son of Man.  In response the blind man worshipped him.  This all happened right in front of the Pharisees. 

It is after this that Jesus tells the good shepherd parable. Therefore we can assume that while he is talking to his disciples he is also talking to the Pharisees.  He is telling them that he is the good shepherd, that he is God.  They become so angry that they try to stone him.  While this seems like a nice comforting image to us now, it served a greater purpose than comfort.  It was a proclamation of the identity of God, but also the character of God.

            Our God is the kind of God who will not only heal the blind, but go out and search for the man who was cast out of his community.   Jesus is not just any old shepherd.  He is the good shepherd, the shepherd who leads, and is also willing to die for the people he is shepherding.  That is the part that makes him more than a shepherd.  It makes him the savior of the world.   

            Yet what interests me is not merely the character of God, but the character of the sheep of his flock.   Sheep are not exactly renowned for their intelligence or bravery.  They are anxious and afraid of almost everything.  They get lost and wander off to places that are unsafe.  Usually they cannot find their way back unless someone leads them.  Humans are much more intelligent than sheep, but we seem to share some of the same characteristics.  We are easily distracted and anxious.  We tend to wander off course in our life.  Sometimes we are able to find the path that leads back to God, but often we cannot. 

What we can do is listen to the voice of God.  According to this parable, that is what sheep are really good at, discerning the voice of the shepherd and then listening to that voice.  Because the reality of life is that we will veer of course…a lot. We will wander and get frightened.  When that happens we will do things that will lead us even farther from the path to God.  We can’t necessarily control that part of us.  Perhaps some can, but most cannot.  If we know that we are prone to wander, then we need to be prepared to listen for the voice of God.  And the best way to do that is to strengthen our relationship with God now.  We can do that through prayer and meditation.  We can do that through worship and singing.  We can do that with the help of a spiritual guide or others who are wandering the path with us.  But whatever option we choose to build a relationship with God, we have to start now.  We can’t wait until we veer off course. If we do that it will be harder to listen.  We can’t listen to a voice that we don’t recognize in the first place.  

This process of being in relationship with God is not easy, even when we are trying.  Perhaps we might even think that we are too far gone.  We have waited too long.  I can assure you that is not the case.  It is never too late to get to know God and learn the voice of God.  God knows that we will wander.  That’s why Jesus compares us to sheep.  If we know that we will wander, we can work on casting out the other voices in our heads, the voices that say we are not good enough to hear God, the voices that say we are crazy to even try, the voices that say that God would never sound like our voice.  None of that is true. 

What we can rely on is the fact that God’s voice will always be the voice of love and truth.  It will often be the voice that tells us what we do not want to hear.  Let us get to know the voice of God now, as individuals and as a community.  There will come a point when we will need God to rescue us.  We will call out and God will respond.  The question is, will be able to recognize the voice of that response? 

April 19, 2015: Who am I?

1 John 3:1-7, Luke 24:36b-48           
Year B, Easter 3                                                 

            I went to an Indigo Girls concert Friday night.  They played with the Virginia Symphony which was beautiful but far different from the various venues where they typically play.  As I sat there listening to them with the symphony accompanying them, I remembered the first time I saw them live. It was an outdoor festival that featured a ton of female artists.  I was in college with my best friends from high school.  It was a perfect day full of music and friends except for the torrential downpour.  I barely remember the music because I just wanted the music to end so we could go home and put on dry clothes.  Since then I have seen them four different times, each time spread out over a couple of years.  I saw them right after college, then in seminary, then just a couple of years ago.  Each time it was with an entirely different group of people.  It made me realize that no matter how much things change, there are constants in life.  The Indigo Girls have been this rather bizarre constant following me from place to place…meeting me at completely different points in my life.

            That said, the Indigo Girls, or any group, person or place is an artificial constant.  They change just as the rest of the world changes.  In college, sitting there in the mud with 1000s of people, had you told me I would be watching them play with a symphony in a quite dignified setting, I would have told you that you were crazy. I would imagine that we all have these artificial constants in our life.  They might be a place or a person.  It might even be the church.  When I say artificial, I don’t mean these constants are inauthentic or fake.  That is far from the truth.  But they are not true constants.  No person, no band, no place lasts forever.  It is only God, the one true God who lasts forever.  God is our only true constant.

            That’s all fine and good, but sometimes God seems to be more of an elusive mystery than a constant.  A lot of the people writing the Bible had personal encounters with God.  Either that or they knew people who had those very personal encounters.  I imagine that I would be a much more credible source if I could tell you that I had seen Jesus in the flesh.  It would be even better if I could tell you that I sat down and ate a meal with the resurrected Jesus.  That is what all these resurrection accounts that we have been hearing are emphasizing…that this really happened. 

Last week, Thomas touched the scars of the resurrected Jesus.  This week, Jesus appears to the disciples and eats with them.  It seems an odd detail to mention the broiled fish.  I mean, who really cares what they were eating or how it was made.  But it did matter because it puts Jesus (Jesus back from the dead) in the real world where people cook and eat.  Not only that, but he ate the food.  He sat down and picked up pieces of the fish.  He spat out the little bones on the ground beside him.  Afterward his hands smelled a bit like fish.  It all happened. 

            But I wasn’t there.  I didn’t sit down and eat a meal with Jesus and neither did any of you (at least not that I know of).  That may make it difficult for God or even the love of God to be a constant for us.  Even if we are able to summon the faith to believe in a God who we have not seen or touched…is that faith enough to make Jesus a real constant in our lives?  A constant is more than just a memory or an emotional touchstone, it is something that defines who we are.  Is Jesus then real enough to take precedence over our friends, our family and our jobs…those things that seem to define us? 

             That’s really up to you.  If I could define each one of us I would define us as children of God.  I know that has become a little trite.  When John wrote this in his letters, it was anything but trite.  In that time period the world was all oriented around the human father.  The father was who defined you.  I have a father who I love and respect, but even I would not choose to be defined exclusively by my father.  In that time it had even more confining ramifications because it relegated women to 2^nd class citizens. If they were not defined by their father, they were defined by their husband or brother.  And if God forbid they did not have a man in their life, then they were nobody.   So when we are proclaimed children of God, we are given a new identity, an identity that frees us from narrow expectations about who we must be. 

            While that gives us freedom, it also gives us responsibility.  One of the things that John was frustrated about was that the Christians in his community were not acting like Christians.  They weren’t even trying.  They were satisfied with being Christian.  It gave them a way to access and worship God.  But it did not affect the way they lived.  In his letter, John wrote, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.”  That is both comforting and frustrating.  It is great that we are God’s children now, but what about our identity tomorrow?  Where is the constant?  How can we know that we can depend on God when what we will be is not yet revealed?  John goes on to say, “What we know is this; when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”   That means that our identity is in God, the God who created us, the God who loves us, the God who demands that we love him back and in doing so that we love our neighbors.    

            Seeing the Indigo Girls made me realize how much I have changed and how much I have stayed exactly the same.  I was about the same age as our celebrities when I first heard their music.  We talk about you becoming women and men, and you are in that process of moving from childhood to adulthood.  Yet I worry that sometimes the way we talk makes it seem like you don’t have an identity yet, as though you can’t possibly know who you are at this age.   I bet people have told you that. I know people told me that.  But if you have God as your constant, then you have an identity.  You have an identity that will carry you the rest of your life.  Your friends will change.  Your school will change.  Your relationship with your parents will change.  You will change! Some of that change will be heart breaking.  When you go through that, I hope you will depend on God as your constant.  Never forget that with that gift comes responsibility.  That is true for all of us.  We are all children of God now.  If we are to one day be like God as John says we will be, then we need to start acting like that…now.  That is how we claim the identity that has been given to us. 

April 12, 2015: Beginnings and Endings

Year B, Easter 2           John 20:19-31, Acts 4:32-35, 1 John 1:1-2:2                         

            In 2001, there was a grassroots movement to include Jedi as an option for religion in the census of all English speaking countries.  In England and Whales, 330,000 people (that is almost 1% of the total population) listed Jedi as their religion.  Obviously it was a joke- although no one is quite sure who the joke was directed to.   While the Jedi phenomenon never gained traction in the US, there have been growing a number of people who have listed “none” when asked what religion they are.  This strikes fear in the hearts of clergy and all people who are concerned about the future of the church.  Some people are proclaiming that we are in a post-Christian era and that the church is dying.  People will give you statistics to prove this.  If you have been to any diocesesan church council in the last 5 years, you will have heard these statistics and then theories about what we can do about them.  It’s pretty depressing.

            We have not given up but we are unsure about how to move forward.  Much of the dialogue regarding the future of the church focuses on the past.  I am not talking about the 1960’s when the Sunday school was overflowing and businesses were still closed on Sundays.  What we as a church are talking about is the very beginning of the church which is reflected in parts of the New Testament.  We see it especially in Acts.   Today’s reading from the Book of Acts depicts a beatific view of the early church.  “Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul…”   Everyone shared and helped one another.  There were no needy people among them.  The apostles provided their testimony with great power.  It sounds positively magical.  If only we could go back to that happy time when no one bothered gathering census data and no one talked about a dying church.  However if you continue to read just a couple of verses later in Acts, you will see that life in this new Christian community was not perfect bliss. There was dissension because not everyone agreed.

            It is not only Acts that reports such dissension.  All five chapters of First John are about division in the community.  People had left because they had different ideas about who Jesus was.  In this letter, John was trying to reaffirm the correct beliefs while also maintaining the importance of forgiveness in the community of believers.  Just because people had come to believe in Jesus Christ does not mean that they had stopped sinning.  It meant that they now had someone in their lives who had the power to forgive.  They were no longer a prisoner to their sins.  Jesus had freed them from that prison.  John was reminding them of that.

            If dissension in the church started as soon as the church was formed, what hope do we have?  How can we possibly keep the church from fracturing and inevitably dying off?  We need to go back to the words and actions of Jesus.  Even Jesus’ little community (his disciples) had a bit of infighting and dissension.  Judas completely abandoned the group and betrayed Jesus.  That was their first major split.  Another more subtle rebellion was Thomas.  After Judas left there were 11 disciples remaining, not including the small group of women.  These 11 disciples were their own community.  Yet it was a community living in fear.  This was the first dying community…until Jesus appeared to them.  Jesus brought them out of that little room they were trapped in.  They were witnesses to the resurrection.  Not only that, but Jesus gave them the Holy Spirit, which means that they shared in the resurrection.  They too had new life.

However, at least one disciple was missing when Jesus appeared to them.  It was Thomas.  He refused to believe that they had seen the risen Lord.  In many ways, this was the first dissension in the newly resurrected community of believers.  But they did not kick him out.  They continued to include him in their community and he stayed, even though he wasn’t quite on board with what they believed.  Not only did the community refuse to push Thomas out.  Jesus refused to cut Thomas out.  He returned so that Thomas could see what the other disciples had already seen.  He went so far as to let Thomas touch his scars.  That was an amazing gift that Jesus gave to the first church dissenter.  Thomas received the gift because he was there to receive the gift, because he stayed.

            Yes, our church began in dissension.  It began in dissension because we are sinners.  We are flawed. We get into arguments and our feelings get hurt.  I am not saying that is fair or right, but it is the reality that people face in communities made up of real people.  Christian communities are no different than other communities in the sense that we have infighting.  And sometimes we act in ways that we should not.  What makes Christian communities unique (what makes us Christian) is that we find the humility to call it what it is, sin.  Then once we have found the courage to name our sin, we will discover the joy in forgiving one another and ourselves.  During all of that process, we stick together. We remain a community. 

            I don’t think we are in a post Christian era.  I believe that we are in a post label era.  People don’t want to be labelled.  They don’t want to be put in a box.  In the church, we love labels.  High Church, Low Church, Anglo Catholic, Conservative, Orthodox, Liberal, Progressive, Open, Inclusive, Traditional, Contemporary.  Those are just the labels we use in the Episcopal Church.  They are not doing us any good. They are dividing the community; not bringing us together.  We can rise above the labels.  We can rise above dissension.  We don’t need to be boxed in.  Jesus opened the door for the disciples and he opens the doors for us as well.

            What kept the disciples together, even when they were scared and fractured, was their belief in the love of Jesus Christ.  There was some confusion and doubt, but it was not around the love of Christ.  There is one label that is important that we maintain, that is Christian.  That is the title that we are given in the Bible. One of the things we have to work hard at is making sure that people don’t associate Christians with division, but with love, humility, forgiveness and community.

            In the 2011 census, the amount of people who called themselves Jedi decreased by half.  The number of Christians decreased as well, although thankfully not by half.  We could look at these declining numbers and say we are dying.  Or we could stop trying so hard to maintain the box that we have built.  We could die to labels, division and pride.  We could hang those things on the cross and then rise again to a new way of being church…or perhaps a very old way…back to 30AD.  Jesus could have looked at those 11 disciples who denied him, abandoned him and doubted him.  He could have said, “This is the group I am supposed to start a church with?”  But he didn’t. He didn’t see sin and failure.  He saw an opportunity for new life. 

            What is it that we see when we look at the state of the church?  Do we see boxes or do we see opportunity…do we see Jesus opening our doors?  We have been given something greater than any worldly powers, even greater than the force. We have the Holy Spirit.  That means that even if we die, we always have the power to rise again.  And if any church knows that, it’s St. John’s, a church that has literally risen from the ashes.   

Easter: Finish the Story.....April 5, 2015

Year B, Easter                                                            
Mark 16                                                                                              

            I have always really appreciated the Gospel of Mark.  For one thing, it is the shortest.  If you only have a limited amount of time to experience the story of Jesus, read Mark.  I also have this feeling as though I know Mark.  He was the guy who wasn’t concerned with what people wanted to hear.  He wasn’t worried about making the disciples look good or making the church appear to be triumphant and successful.  His prose was not particularly formal or pretty.  He did not need to impress the people who might be hearing his words.  There were no good transitions between stories.  His only real transition tool was to use the word “and” or “immediately.”  Everything always happened immediately.  There is urgency in his writing that was not emphasized in the other Gospels.  It probably never occurred to him that we would still be reading his words today.  Since his was the first Gospel that was written, he did not have to compare his writing to anything.   He was not trying to be anyone else.  He was writing the truth, from his perspective.  For that reason, some people believe that Mark’s Gospel might be the one that is closest to the real story.

One of the other things that makes Mark so unique is the ending of the Gospel, the text that I read today.   There is no resurrected Jesus.  Jesus never appears to the women or Peter or the beloved disciple.  He never walks through a door or eats fish with his disciples; nor does he give a final speech and then ascend into the clouds as his disciples watch on.   In Mark, Jesus’ last words were, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The last time anyone saw him, he was dead.  Sure, he had told them that he would be resurrected and return after three days.  He told them that several times, but they really did not understand him and can we blame them?  It might seem obvious to us now because we know the end of the story; but they didn’t.  All they knew was that their friend who they had come to believe was the Son of God, was dead.  Not only that, but not one of the 12 disciples remained with him until his last breath.  There were only a few faithful women who watched from a distance.

It was these same women who returned to the tomb.  They were there so that they could anoint the body.  This is normally something that you do before the body is wrapped and placed in a tomb, but this was not a normal death nor was Jesus an ordinary man.  So the women returned three days later.  When they were walking there, they were not contemplating the possibility that he might be alive.  It never seemed to occur to them.  They were concerned about the details.  How would they get into the tomb with a huge stone blocking it?  That was their concern…how to move the stone. 

As soon as they arrived they realized that the stone was no longer their main concern.  The stone was moved and a strange man sat at the side of the tomb.  As you can imagine, they were a little freaked out.  They did not know this strange man and all of a sudden he was telling them not to worry….that Jesus, the man they were looking for, had risen.  The tomb was empty. The strange man then told them to go tell the disciples that Jesus is not in the tomb, but is going ahead to Galilee to meet them.  Then the man added, “just as he told you.”  Just in case they were confused, he reminded them that Jesus already told them that all of this was going to happen.  When Jesus says he is going to do something, it happens.

If Mark was like the other three Gospels, or any good movie, then the women would have leapt with joy and run as fast as they could to spread the good news that Jesus is alive…just like he told them he would be.  But according to Mark, that is not what happened. The very last line is, “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”   That is a horrible ending.   It’s like a bad movie where you get to the last 3 minutes and it looks like it will all wrap up the way you expected…but before that can happen, the credits roll.  It is over and there is no closure.

This is not how it should have ended.  These are the women who stayed with Jesus until the end.  They were not supposed to run away.  They were supposed to return to the disciples and tell them all that Jesus was back from the dead and they needed to get to Galilee immediately because that was where he was headed. Then they were meant to tell everyone so that 2000 years later we at St. John’s would remain grateful with the knowledge that we know about the resurrection because these women believed and shared that belief with others.  But that is not how the story ends.  It ends in terror and silence.

This ending of Mark made people so uncomfortable that they added alternate endings later on that sounded more like the other Gospels.  In these alternate endings, the women told the disciples just like they were asked.  Jesus appeared to them and eventually ascended into heaven.   But Mark did not end it that way.  He left the story open.  He left us, the readers, hanging.  We assume that these women must have shared and Jesus must have fulfilled his promise and appeared to his disciples. Otherwise, how would we know?  But that was not how Mark ended it.  Mark ended his Gospel with a challenge, a challenge for each one of us. 

You can do what these women did.  You can go home and eat a big meal.  You can talk about how pretty the flowers were and how nice the music was, which is all true.  And then you can take a couple of Sundays off because you know, Easter is over.  And that’s ok.  No one will get hurt.  Life will remain just as it is.  But that also means that the message never leaves this building.  It means that your faith, your relationship with God is an unfinished story.   If this is it… if we don’t keep working on our faith, committing ourselves to prayer, worship and a community of faith…the story never gets out.  Finish the story.  Don’t let it end here today.  It’s a beautiful story.  It’s more than any one of us can hope for. 

That is why as a community of faith, we live the story together.  While it is beautiful, it is challenging.  It is terrifying at times because we do not always get the closure we want.  It does not always make sense.  But we keep praying.  We keep studying, talking and praising God. Then one day when our personal story (our life) comes to an end, we will find that it has really just begun.  You see, there is a twist at the end.  Just when we think it is over, it starts again.

Year B, Maundy Thursday April 2, 2015

Humiliation Galore

John 13:1-17, 31b-35                                                             

            I was reading a book recently and the author (Richard Rohr) said that he prays to God for one humiliation every day.  I enjoyed most of the book and it   was not an easy book to enjoy. It was about suffering and what we can learn from suffering.  When I got to the part about humiliation, I started to struggle with the book a little more.  I understand that humility is a wonderful trait to have and it is certainly one that is important to have as Christians, but humiliation?  The author’s perspective was that humiliation is an opportunity to learn something about who we are, deep down underneath it all—underneath the veneer that we hope other people will see.  The way that we respond to humiliation can say a lot about who we are.  We can respond by getting angry and lashing out at people.  We can shut down and give up. Or we can take a step back and ask ourselves why that thing humiliated us and what it means for us as followers of Christ. 

            On my first Christmas as a deacon, I read the Gospel for the first time.  I had practiced…a lot.  I said the word Quirinius (Governor of Syria) about 100 times.  I was ready.  But for some reason I could not get my microphone to work.  I spoke as loud as I could but I was convinced that no one heard me, which meant no one heard the Gospel.  I was sure I had ruined Christmas and the rector would hold this against me forever.  I know it does not sound humiliating, but it was for me. That was all I could think of for the rest of the service.  As you can imagine, it turned out fine.  I was loud enough and Christmas was not ruined. 

            In some ways, knowing that it was not a big deal hurt my pride more.  My big moment and it did not make a difference to anyone whether the mic was on or not.  In the end, it was an important lesson for me as an ordained person.  It reminded me that it is not about the person speaking; it is about the words and who those words come from.  I could give you any number of examples of little humiliations that I have learned from…but definitely not one a day.  That seems extreme.

            When we talk about Jesus, especially in the washing of the feet, we talk about humility.  We don’t normally talk about humiliation, perhaps because that word has such negative connotations.   He was and is the most powerful entity in the world and he constantly had to defend himself and explain his motivation and his actions.  He had to let other people tell him what to do.  He let his own disciples deny, betray and abandon him.  For most important and powerful people, any one of those things would be a huge blow to their ego.  It did not seem to faze Jesus, at least not in terms of his pride.  In fact, it was as if he welcomed these opportunities for humiliation.  For him, they were not humiliations. They were opportunities to display love, a love that was sacrificial, a love that was not about what he would receive in return. 

            I have often pondered what the difference between humility and humiliation is.  Even when you look it up, you get different interpretations from different sources.  Most people would say that humility is a good thing while humiliation is almost entirely bad. What I find interesting, is that they have the same Latin root. The meanings are not really that different.

            The Gospel of John is unique in many ways.  In the scene describing the Last Supper, Jesus does not take bread and tell the disciples that this is his body.  He does not take the wine and tell them that this is his blood.  Instead, he used an entirely different representation of love. He took off his outer robe and tied a towel around his waist.  Then he washed his disciple’s feet.  This in and of itself, is humiliating enough.  Servants were the ones who were supposed to wash feet.  But here he was, God in human form, washing the feet of his disciples.  What made it worse was that he was washing the feet of Peter who he knew would deny him.  He was washing the feet of Judas who would betray him in a matter of minutes.  He knew exactly what was going to happen.  He knew that all of these people would turn their backs on him.  He chose to wash their feet.  Was that humility or humiliation?  In retrospect it was an act of humility.  Yet most people, had they been in that time and place and known the circumstances, would have perceived it as humiliation.  What kind of God kneels before peasants and washes their grimy feet? It was also humiliating for the disciples.  This was a man who they respected and admired and now he was touching their feet.  In doing so, it was as if he was seeing through the veneer.  He saw the unclean parts of their soul.  I know this discomfort can’t be that hard to imagine for those of you here tonight.  Very few people come up to have their feet washed.  It’s embarrassing. It’s uncomfortable. I get it.

            Yet for Jesus, this was such an important act, that he asked his disciples to wash one another’s feet.  “For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.  Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them.  If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.”  This is what Jesus told his disciples.  He did not ask them to drink wine and eat bread.  He asked them to wash one another’s feet.  It was not enough to understand the idea of love or humility.  “…you are blessed if you do them.”

            What liturgy allows us to do is to experience parts of our faith in a more tangible way.  We don’t just say things.  We do them.  So you can ponder humility, humiliation and love, or you can wash someone’s feet or have your own feet washed.  And if you are just not going to do it, think of another way you can humiliate yourself in the next 24 hours.  Don’t just think about it.  Do it.  Then learn from that humiliation and remember that our Lord Jesus Christ died in one of the most humiliating ways a person could die. Most other things seem pretty small in comparison.