Humility relates to authenticity in an appropriately subservient way. Living as a humble person requires lifelong learning of the most painful sort. But, humility itself is never the object of our quest. While it is a good thing to derive goals from the each of the three aspects of authenticity (Spiritual Passion, Mission, Community), being humble is something you don’t shoot for. You instead accept life’s lessons, realizing that your efforts to improve anything grind to a halt when you become self-serving.

            Paul’s famous chapter on love (I Corinthians 13) helps in understanding the contribution humility makes. Each quality that Paul uses to define love in vv. 4-8a, is also a behavior that we witness in the people we think humble. Love, like humility, “is not self-seeking.”

            Moving back then to verse 3, Paul says that even if we make great strides in our personal mission and that leads us to self-sacrifice and giving “all I possess to the poor,” still I won’t be authentic. Similarly in verses 1-2, Paul addresses the quest for spiritual passion by saying that even if I can speak in the tongues of angels, move mountains, and make profoundly deep prophesies, I am nothing without humble love. One could back up even further and see the entire 12^th chapter of I Corinthians as a warning against seeking to build community without at the same time cultivating humility.

            Contemporary (postmodern) culture gets the need for humility, but only rewards authenticity. Being a humble person won’t make people seek you out for advice. Authentic people, however, will always be valued, even if they have to humbly suffer the repercussions of the choices they make on behalf of their personal mission, commitment to community/family, and religious enthusiasm.

            Cultivating humility is never a matter of putting oneself down in order to appear meek or to tell self-deprecating jokes. The word ‘humility’ is rooted in the earth (humus) and reminds of how humanity was formed out of the ground (Genesis 2:7). Life is meant both to teach us the folly of being proud when we are but mud-balls and to help us remember the fact that we have been individually molded by the hands of God to be who we are meant to be. Humility alternately roots us in these two great truths: In ourselves we are nothing and in God we unconditionally loved. Everything that happens to us can either make us bitter and recalcitrant or lead us to embrace humility and become more authentic.

            What this means for the church is that we should accept the way postmodernism mocks our reliance on institutional authority. Today’s secular culture keeps us humble by persistently asking two questions:

1) If the church ceased to exist, what difference would it make in our lives?

2) What good has the church done recently?

I think that our interactions with contemporary culture will continue to humiliate us until we stop hiding behind our traditions and act with authenticity.