I’ve been thinking about one of my favorite Bible stories. Elijah, great prophet of the Hebrew Scriptures, is coming off a dramatic victory, winning a public contest with opponents. Evil King Ahab and Queen-of-mean Jezebel aren’t pleased. They vow revenge. Elijah freaks. He heads out to the wilderness where he has a major pity party, thinking he’s all alone in the cause of righteousness. (Sound familiar, clergy?) He’s ready to give up. Ready to give up life actually. He heads to Mt. Horeb, the mountain where revelations of God’s presence happen. In that holy place, the voice of God comes to Elijah in the form of a question repeated a couple times: What are you doing here? Whenever this story comes up in church, I’m struck with its relevance. I listen for where lectors place the emphasis: WHAT are you doing here? What ARE you doing here? What are YOU doing here? What are you DOING here? What are you doing HERE? We could spend a lifetime answering the questions. (Read the whole story in I Kings 19.)

Lent offers time to ask those kinds of questions. It’s a season for self-examination, a process underscored by our year-long experience of Lent brought on by Covid-19. It’s given us all a chance to think about who we are and where we are and where we’re headed. What are we doing in the place where we find ourselves?

For me, in Lent, in Covid-tide, asking these questions has brought a sense of both gratitude and wistfulness, recognizing extraordinary blessings that have come my way which exist side by side with regret, resentment and rethinking of ways I have been spouse, child, parent, priest, citizen. All of this has raised the challenge of acceptance. Accepting where I’ve been, where I am, where I’m headed.

To navigate that, I believe I have been graced with four statements that help me in my reflection on life, statements that reflect confession and contentment. Here are the four:

• I am who I am
• I am what I am
• I am where I am
• I am why I am

Several things occur to me in response to these statements.

First, like looking in a mirror, these statements are an honest assessment of the current situation, where I find myself these days. The good and the bad are encompassed in that view of self (as reflected in the poem by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the column on the left, a poem written in prison, where he might have asked: “What am I doing here?”). There’s much for which to be grateful in terms of where I find myself, for sure. But there are also things that call for repentance. It’s a mix, just like life.

Second, thinking about who, what, where and why I am brings me back to a focus on grace. However the questions are answered, the bottom line is that I am part of God’s good and blessed creation, that I am held in the arms of a loving, liberating, life-giving God, and there is nothing that can separate me from that.

Take this season to ask these questions. Hear God speak to you as he did to Elijah as he asks: What are you doing here? Ask the question that Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked of himself in the poem: Who am I? Consider the stewardship question: What am I doing with what I’ve been given? And allow all this self-examination to take place in the context of a love that will not let you go.

One of the challenges in thinking about humility: As soon as we become aware of it, or aspire to it, or hope to see it in ourselves, we’ve probably lost any chance of exhibiting it. We become proud of being humble. But let’s give it a go.

We’re learning in our work with churches that the spiritual vitality of congregations has a whole lot to do with the leader’s heart. We have often referred to the work of Jim Collins, who in 2005 wrote a monograph to accompany his book Good to Great. This text was intended for the social sector and non-profit organizations in particular. In it he highlights essential leadership qualities. Effective leaders in these organizations combine deep personal humility with intense professional will. So let’s focus on that deep personal humility piece.

Last week, Nicholas Kristof wrote a column about how we talk with people with whom we disagree. He too recognizes the need for humility by citing a new book by Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Wharton. The book, in Kristof’s words, is a paean to intellectual humility. He notes the ways we all come at life with our biases, including the “I’m not biased” bias, by which we believe we are more objective than others. Kristof says that left and right often see the world, indignantly, through a tidy moral prism. But the world is messier than that, which argues for intellectual humility. According to Dr. Grant, what wins people over is  “listening, asking questions and appealing to their values, not your own.”

Interesting stuff, but what does this have to do with discipleship?

In case you haven’t noticed, the world we live in is kind of divided, maybe more so than in the past. Those divisions can be found across the dinner table, in the next pew, in the residence down the hall or down the street , in the adjacent cubicle or window on our zoom conference call, in the halls of our nation’s capital. How do we faithfully move beyond “I’m right and you’re wrong?”

In his book, Jesus and the Disinherited (which I’m reading as part of our work with the impressive and unsettling Sacred Ground series created by the Presiding Bishop’s office), the author Howard Thurman speaks about how people respond to opposition and oppression. For the most part, they either resist (causing a big dust up), or they don’t resist (lapsing into toxic passivity). He says that there is a third way, the way of Jesus.

It is the way of love. It is the way of deep personal humility modeled by our Lord and Savior. It is Jesus listening to Nicodemus’ late-night questions. It is Jesus engaging in conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, someone he had no business being with. It is Jesus going to lunch with Zacchaeus, a crook and bit of a creep. It is Jesus saying and showing that true greatness comes in service. It is Jesus washing the feet of disciples. It is Jesus on the cross amidst an argument between thieves hanging on either side of him, speaking forgiveness to torturers and executioners. It is meant to be our way, too.

If Lent is a season for spiritual practice, how about this week practicing humility, especially in interaction with people who disagree with you, people you think are wrong? Listen to them. Pray for them. Throw in a prayer for yourself, that you might be freed from biases that cloud vision. Pray for a world broken in so many ways. Pray for the whole human family, using the prayer in the column on the left.

That is what all this talk about Jim Collins and Nicholas Kristof and Adam Grant and Howard Thurman has to do with discipleship. In a world in need of healing, where divisions are sharp, Jesus offers another way forward, thank God.