“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit,
but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.”
–Philippians 2:3
Eight years ago, the congregation I was serving granted me a 12-week sabbatical. Over the span of that time away, I traveled extensively, including overseas visits to Armenia and Georgia, Kenya and South Africa. The theme for the sabbatical was one of exploring roots. Each of my destinations drew upon that concept as I explored places with a religious or personal connections with my life. The road trip with my mother to the churches my father served in mid 20th century that I wrote about recently occurred during that same sabbatical. Each of my international destinations had some sense of learning more about pieces that had shaped me and my journey, too.
The primary reason I traveled to South Africa was to learn more about the troubling period in its history known as apartheid. From 1948 until 1994, that nation enforced laws based upon race. At various times, statutes required persons to carry identification passbooks to be produced on demand and placed restrictions on where one could live and work, who could vote and whom one could marry. While in theory those laws applied to all races, they were mostly enforced on people who had black skin. I knew little about apartheid before preparing for that trip, yet the more I learned about it the more I came to see parallels with my own experience growing up in the South during the time of segregation.
A highlight of that trip was spending time with a friend named Elliott and his wife Catherine. They served as self-funded missionaries for a decade in Port Edward, a small community on the Indian Ocean. I was Elliott’s college hall counselor which means we first met when he was 18 and I was 20. The last time I had seen him before that trip was in 1980 and it’s fair to say that few on campus then would have guessed Elliott would one day be a missionary or that I would become a pastor. When the two of us talked in the year prior to my traveling to South Africa at one point Elliott said to me “I hope you don’t think that I’m the same person I was at 18.” I replied, “I hope neither one of us is!”
Knowing of my goal to learn more about apartheid, Elliott lined up a succession of people for me to meet, arranging a time to go to their respective homes. All of them were lifelong citizens of South Africa and represented a wide swath of races and experiences.
The first conversation was with Barry, a white man who is the owner of a banana plantation. As we sat, Elliot invited me to share with Barry a bit about what I was hoping to learn from our conversation. I began by telling our host that the more I learned of apartheid, the more I was struck by the parallels between that era and life in the American South of my childhood. I mentioned the separate water fountains and places to sit on a bus, segregated schools and racially-defined neighborhoods. I told him of laws that forbid interracial marriage and how, like him, all of those realities placed me in a favored category just because of my skin color. “Really,” he replied, “that happened in America, too?”
Barry spoke candidly about his experience of apartheid and present-day signs of reconciliation. I heard of his deep appreciation for Nelson Mandela and concerns for what had been happening in his country since Mandela’s presidency ended. An hour flew by before I asked my final question. “When Elliot first spoke to you about our having this conversation, what did you think I would ask that I didn’t?” Barry replied “I was all prepared to say ‘Who do you Americans think you are to criticize us in South Africa?’ but when I heard of your childhood experience, I knew that both of our lands have histories to overcome.”
His words ring true on a weekend our nation marks Juneteenth, but beyond that national reflection, his reaction points to an essential trait when difficult conversations arise. As it’s possible, maybe even our first instinct, to begin such moments with affirming what we know to be true and clear. Only in rare instances does such a starting point lead to better understanding and an acknowledgement of mis-steps by the speaker. Instead, it seems to me that when we begin from a defensive or all-knowing stance that it is far more likely the other person will resist what we have to say.
Perhaps it was the same awareness that led the Apostle Paul to write “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.” He moved forward in that letter to cite a beautiful first-century hymn or poem that spoke of how Jesus did not claim the authority that was rightly due him, but emptied himself and took on the form of a servant.
“Therefore” Paul concluded “God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name so that at the name of Jesus ever knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
While my own efforts to model that kind of humility are inconsistent, I give thanks that on one day in Port Edward, South Africa, God gave me the opening words that made all the difference. And if the Holy One can do that with me, I know he can do the same with you.
All-knowing One, give me a heart like Jesus that the words I speak might more closely model his. Amen.
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