This reading from the Gospel of Luke is a curious one. It looks like a combination of Machiavelli and B. F. Skinner. Skinner, of course, was a great behaviourist psychologist. It sounds like Machiavelli, because you get this devious, duplicitous strategy for self-promotion: Do the humble act and then, by God, you will be pushed forward and can cash in. And you have to remember that this was spoken in a society where the honour/shame polarity was of enormous importance, unlike our own society. That is clearly Machiavelli. Of course Skinner was very interested, in order to make his behaviourist theories work, in creating what we call the capacity for delayed gratification. So, the thing to do is to have a little misery right now and then, the pay-off comes later!

I wonder, when I think about these texts, whether Jesus was smiling while he said all of this...presumably this goes back to the historical Jesus. There is a clear sense of irony, because neither Machiavelli's vision of how life should be put together, nor Skinner's, can accommodate the rest of the Gospel of Luke, or any of the rest of the New Testament for that matter. Therefore, we have to look at this business of humility a little more closely, because that is clearly what the people who put these readings together had in mind.

I think that we live in a society where it is very difficult to talk about humility, because Andy Warhol was right, everybody is supposed to have their fifteen minutes of fame. And we all go around salivating for that. And if we can parlay that fifteen minutes into half an hour, or better yet, a lifetime, we are ahead of the game. In other words today, as one book title has it, we are suffering from The Frenzy of Renown. To be is to be seen, and to be seen, of course, in the best possible way. That is why public relations is a growth industry. The Pope is coming to St. Louis and so they hired the same group that did publicity for the Rolling Stones tour. We celebrate is the Cult of Celebrity. For example, this is the first-year anniversary of Diana's death and the television is going to be filled with it all week. This lady was killed. She was a nice enough lady, but still...... What does that say about us? To be is to be seen and to be seen in the most glorious kind of way because that gives us our sense of who we are, that gives us our sense of reality. The problems with this, therefore, are multiple. First of all, it is not real and it is not true. But today, to a degree never before in the history of the world, we have the means for manufacturing reality through the media. Humility becomes even more remote and more distant and harder to take seriously.

But what we are talking about when we speak of humility is the real self. Today's society says the real self is whoever your public relations agent can mould you into! And we all have public relations agents, whether we pay them thousands and thousands of dollars or whether we act as our own agents putting our best foot forward. Public relations are more important than the truth. What Jesus comes and does is to say, "No, folks, who you are is what is between you and God". If there is any appetite for some kind of authenticity for some reality of who one is then that is where it is to be constituted, out of this dialogue with this mysterious other who cannot be tabulated on popularity polls, whose presence is not palpable and whose presence is certainly not marketable. Which, of course, is what drives us today. Is it marketable? Will it sell? But prayer is supposed to be the effort to disencumber myself of my own illusions about myself, to disencumber myself of the social self that I either intentionally or unintentionally constitute, in order to come to who I really am. And who I really am, of course, is who I am before God, with God. The self is always a dialogical self and this is why the public relations people have it so right in so many ways. They create an audience to which I can play. Their sense of the self is, from the Biblical point of view, authentic, in that it is a dialogical self. But their sense of the self is all a matter of artifice and contrivance. Prayer is the attempt to escape that. Prayer is the attempt to disencumber oneself, not with a view to impoverishing oneself, but to finding the truth.

And that is why the Church is so crucial. The Church ought to be the place where I can precisely discover who I am because it ought to be the place where we do not pretend to be other than who we are. If God is present here among us in this room at this moment then we should be able to be who we are here too. So all this is not about some kind of little private compact that I make with God. This is supposed to be able to be articulated in the human reality of this particular gathering of human beings.

The problems, as I said, of coming to terms with this, of taking this stuff seriously, are enormous. They are the problems of a society with this insatiable appetite for the sensational, with this apparently insatiable craving to be other than who I really know myself to be. So the difficulties are enormous and I do not think that most of us even take account of those most of the time, so much are they a part of the fibre of our lives.

But then the problem is excacerbated by the activity of the Church too. I mean, I just discovered that the Christian brothers in Australia are now being sued, probably out of existence, because of the sexual and physical abuse of  English children who were sent there to be relocated. And of course how long does it take the Christian brothers to admit that? This is what I am getting at. How long has it taken us in the Roman Church as the archdiocese of Dallas is sued for $119,000,000 after a whole series of denials of the activity of this one priest? We have Mount Cashel. We have the resignation of the archbishop of Halifax in this country. For another example: we have Pope-mobiles. In fact we have two Pope-mobiles. (I just read that if one of the Pope's Mercedes Benz Pope-mobiles breaks down there is another one to take over). Does the vicar of  Christ need a Mercedes Benz Pope-mobile? And what is the Pope-mobile saying to the world? Security? Eminence? What are we saying to the world? Who are we? Are we any different from General Motors or the Bank of Montreal? Is humility our stock-in-trade or is it rather this other business? Is the Church itself as an institution afraid to say: We are a sinful people.

You see there are two absolutely central problems here. Without humility love is impossible. Without truth a genuine community is impossible. We are not talking about humility for the sense of self-denigration, we are talking about people able to touch each other in their own reality! Without that honesty love is impossible and all of this talk about love and everything else is so much eyewash, dust in the air, and hypocrisy, as it so often is for all of us. And love is, of course, supposed to be the great sign to the world: By this sign will all people  know you are my disciples: that you truly love one another. You do not love an image, for God's sake! We attempt to love the reality. So that is one of the most important problems that underlies this whole business of humility.