What Humility Really Means
Sermon — September 29, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings
During the first week of my first college semester, I walked into my freshman seminar and met a guy named Phil. Phil was a really nice guy; also, he’d soon come to shatter my dearest hopes and dreams. That first day, after we’d all introduced ourselves, I turned to Phil and asked, “Are you a runner, Phil?” Now, I already knew Phil was a runner. He was a local legend; a kid from the next town over who’d won the D1 state championship in cross country our senior year in a literal photo finish. (2nd place was from Charlestown, I’m sorry to say.) Anyway, Phil was running for the college cross country team, and NCAA rules said that they could only have organized practices 6 days a week. So Phil and I started running together on that 7th day, and I soon discovered that he was just in a totally different league. Phil’s casual run with Greg on his day off was one of my most challenging workouts of the week. I’d loved running in high school; I was running with a track club at the time, in hopes of one day walking on to the college team. I soon discovered I just didn’t have what it takes. Thanks, Phil.
Have you ever had a moment like this, when you met someone who shared a passion for something you held dear, but was just way better at it than you were? Or a moment when you finally reached some new phase in your life you’d always dreamed of, and suddenly realized you had no idea what you were doing?
I’ve learned this lesson many times. I remember sitting one day in my New Testament lecture in seminary and hearing a student ask some question about the Gospel of Matthew, and hearing the professor respond “Well that’s a good question, and it raises an interesting parallel to a text that was discovered at Qumran in the Dead Sea Scrolls, 4QMMT, Miqsat Ma’aseh ha-Torah, …”) and realizing that—although I was doing very well in this intro class—I knew nothing about the Bible, in the bigger academic sense. A few years later, I had the most humbling experiencing of my life, which was being sent home from the hospital with a little baby, armed with nothing but a car seat and a little complimentary hat, and discovering that I was profoundly out of my depth. And parish ministry is full of this, on a small scale: the continual realization that the people around my far outpass my knowledge of music and architecture and financial administration; in their wisdom and compassion and in the depth of their prayer.
It’s my dearest ambition to be the best at everything that I do all the time, and it’s my daily experience that I’m really not. And this has been one of the greatest gifts of my life.
“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit,” reads the New Revised Standard Version’s translation of Philippians 2:3, “but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.” “Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory,” the King James Version says, “but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.” The New International Version translates that second part, “in humility value others above yourselves”; in the English Standard Version, it’s “count others more significant than yourselves.” The words of each translation vary, but they cluster around the same idea: to be humble means to think of others as better than, or more valuable than, or more significant than yourself.
And in the context of these poetic verses about the self-emptying humility of Christ, that makes sense. These translations point us away from the self-interested pursuit of our own ambitions, away from chasing after the kind of fame that gives us glory in the eyes of the world but leaves us empty inside. They point us toward the kind of self-sacrificing love shown by Jesus, who descended from the heights of heaven to the depths of pain and death, even the shameful death of the cross, not for any self-promoting good but to save humankind from the consequences of our own choices. According to these translations, Paul is asking us to translate that physical act of self-sacrifice into a mental disposition that values other people more highly than ourselves.
The translation that we actually read today is a little different. It isn’t one of the standard translations; it’s from a translation done this summer of parts of Philippians by our own Paul Tompros, as part of his study of ancient Greek. And this translation offers a helpful nuance or corrective to these other versions of the text. The beginning of the verse is the same, urging us to avoid “ambition or conceit.” But that second half offers a subtly different take on the text: “let each man humbly believe that others surpass him,” Paul says that Paul says. Do you hear the difference? This is an equally valid translation of the same original Greek text. But “humbly believe that others surpass you” doesn’t mean quite the same thing as “value others above yourselves.” That cluster of published translations interprets Paul’s words as being about other people’s value, their importance, your esteem for them. But this translates Paul’s words in a more specific sense; Paul is saying to believe that other people surpass you in some way, in knowledge or wisdom or skill. To believe humbly that someone has surpassed you doesn’t mean to think they’re worth more than you are. It doesn’t mean that they’re better than you; it means that they are better than you at some particular thing.
This is closer to what humility really means. Humility isn’t having low self-esteem, saying that other people are worth more than me. It isn’t self-deprecation, belittling my own achievements with humor while really thinking the world of myself. It isn’t the kind of exaggerated politeness you find in the lunch line at a clergy conference—you first; no, you first—as if “the last will be first” applies to the salad bar.
No, humility consists of having the courage to be honest about yourself and your own abilities and the willingness to learn from people who know things that you don’t. Humility consists precisely of that decision to believe that others surpass you—to recognize that you don’t know everything; that you can’t do everything; that not only the best and the brightest but in fact nearly everyone around you knows something that you don’t. The PhD in physics knows things about the cosmos that boggle the mind; the PCA changing bedpans in the hospital knows things about the human condition that few of us want to confront.
Humility is hard to learn. But in fact, this hard lesson can set you free. I’ve found it so helpful when I have to get my car repaired, or my furnace serviced, to be confident enough in my own ignorance to say, “I really have no idea how this is supposed to work. Could you explain it to me like I’m an idiot?”
But in the end, Paul’s not actually telling us how we should see ourselves, is he? He’s telling us how to think about the people around us. He doesn’t tell us to believe that we are surpassed; but to believe to others surpass us.
Most of the most impressive people I’ve ever met seem completely ordinary. (In fact, the most humble people I know have usually had the most to brag about. They are able to be so humble precisely because they are so secure in themselves.) The corollary to this is that some of the ordinary people you see around you are actually really impressive.
And in fact, that’s the point. All around you, there are people who surpass you in many different ways, from the ways that put you on the front cover to the ways that matter only to the people you love to the ways that are known only by God.
And this is what humility is: to empty ourselves of our own ambitions, our own conceit, our own beliefs that we know everything there is; to become curious, to seek to learn from other people, and to care for and serve them, believing that—in some ways we recognize, and some ways we don’t—their wisdom, or their goodness, or their talents far surpass our own. And to do this especially when we ourselves are believed to be among the great and the good; because there was none who was greater or better than Christ, and none who more fully emptied himself.
Surely this is one way for us to work out our own salvation “with fear and trembling,” as Paul says. (Phil. 2:12) Not because we’re afraid of divine punishment if we don’t. But because we’re filled with awe at the people around us, whose lives God has filled with experience and knowledge and wisdom that far surpass our own; and because that same God is the one who is working in us. (Phil. 2:13)
