A Chosen Virtue

August 7, 2018

Beloved:
            This morning’s prayer book wanted me to reflect on vulnerability, and the resistance in me was deep and wide.  I kept wanting to modify the topic to humility, as though humility is a virtue while vulnerability is a condition to be borne.
            Deep in me lies the assumption that vulnerability is a word that I apply to the poor and weak who are systematically vulnerable to many dangers, toils and snares that more privileged people like me easily avoid.
            Wide is my preference to use the word humility when thinking and speaking of the choice to be smaller rather than larger, quieter rather than louder, to take less instead of more, to give more instead of less.

            I’d laugh if it weren’t so sad – at how I’ve rearranged the language.  I’ve empowered humility to fit my own preferences of privilege.  Some days I can even reduce humility to an attitude, how I think about my life, rather than a walking, talking, breathing way of life.  
            But vulnerability as a chosen virtue is a brand-new thought for me.  To be at the mercy of this world’s treatment and opinion of me, without fear or hesita-tion, as my given state is not my favorite way to consider faith.  And yet, it seems much closer to what the Bible says about Jesus and humility.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God  
​as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form, he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.  
~ Philippians 2:5-8 [NRSV]

            Paul’s hymn, just like my Scottish prayer book, reads as if humble and vulnerable are far closer than my embedded definitions.  Vulnerability may be chosen by anyone who calls herself Christ’s own.

~peace & prayers, 
pastor annette