Those of us who confess Jesus as Lord should get tattoos that read “HUMILITY” on our forearms like Popeye’s anchors that always reminded him he was a sailor man. Just imagine us all walking around with “Humility” permanently emblazoned upon us. Talk about accountability. Humility. Easy to forget. Can I get an Amen?
Humility. That great virtue of God’s followers that cycles through Scripture as a constant refrain that culminates in the vision of the church in 1 Peter 5:6—“Humble yourselves, therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time.”
At points on the timeline of Christianity, humility was ignored all-too- conveniently. While we fought over certain words and catch-phrases and kitchens in the church building and mixed bathing (that’s a funny one to me because I hate taking baths with other people) and women not serving communion (because we know that’s not a “leadership” role, but you know, slipper slope and all that) and so on and so on—(hang on and let me catch my breath; this sentence is getting too long… Let’s just start over…)
While we were putting second things first, I cannot help but believe God was gently whispering, “If you will only humble yourselves before me, I will lift you up.” Put first things first: humility, love, and welcoming one another as Christ has welcomed us. How did we ever lose sight of such first things? Perhaps like Prometheus in his hubris who decided to steal fire from the gods, we made the one true and living God disposable and decided we would do the lifting up ourselves.
Okay, that’s the bad news. Or at least it is a harsh over-correction. Sorry. It’s tough going through detox after 25 years of self-centered churchianity. (I confess, O faithful bloggerland reader, that is not a criticism of the churches where I have worshipped during that time as much as it is a self-criticism of where I mistakenly placed my focus.)
But there’s good news. And it is good news, my dear brothers and sisters of our little cyber-congregation, it is very good news.
Let me tell you a story.
Andy Warhol was born August 6, 1928 and brought up in an immigrant Czech-Catholic family who walked six miles to mass every Sunday morning in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In their kitchen hung an obligatory print of Leonardo da Vinci’s, Last Supper. Andy was a weak and sickly child, a constant recipient of attention from his doting mother, Julia. They formed a bond that shaped him until his death in 1987.
Warhol today is remembered most for what critics have deemed his “pop” paintings. Campbell’s soup cans and such in the 1950s and 1960s. When he was shot in the late 60s by one of his denizens at his studio, The Factory, the trauma he survived sent him into an artistic period obsessed with death that lasted throughout the 1970s. But it was his painting of skulls in 1976 that led to his redemption. The skulls reminded him of his childhood, how fragile he was (and how fragile we all are), and mostly of his humanity that needed something more than his previous fixations on all things worldly.
The skulls gave way to crosses in the early 1980s. Like skulls, crosses represented death to Warhol, but now in a more redemptive way. Though not well known, his painting Crosses is a collection of twelve crosses, some might say for the twelve apostles. And toward the end of his life, that is who Andy most longed to be, which led back to the painting on the kitchen wall of his childhood.
In the mid-1980s, just a few short years before he died, his crosses gave way to massive reprints and reworkings of Leonardo da Vinci’s, Last Supper. It became his sole subject except for the occasional self-portrait, often superimposed over the images and colors of his Last Supper series. Like the meal represented in the painting of Jesus just before he died, Warhol knew his time was short. The table of the Lord was all that mattered to him. One of Andy’s last works is called, Sixty Last Suppers. It is literally sixty reprints with slight variations in shape and shade of da Vinci’s painting. It was Warhol’s final testimony: "Everyone is invited to the same table."
In fact, that was Warhol’s testimony from the beginning.
In the 1960s, Warhol loved painting Campbell’s Tomato Soup because he said it was the same no matter who opens it. Earlier, he painted Coca-Cola bottles for the same reason.
Personally, my favorite painting of Warhol’s is called 210 Coke Bottles. The painting is—as you may have already guessed—210 bottles of Coke, some full, some empty, some half-full. It was Warhol’s way of saying that everyone gets the same Coca-Cola. They do not make special rich people’s Coke. It is a great equalizer. He was saying the same thing when he painted crosses, and the same when he painted the table with Jesus and his disciples.
Upon further reflection, maybe Christians do not need to get tattoos that read “HUMILITY.” But what if we decorated our ubiquitous bulletin boards with soup cans and crosses and Last Supper paintings as constant reinforcements of humility, reminders that when it comes to God’s grace and shared holiness, no one has the upper hand. New Christians and burned out ex-churchgoers both need ongoing redemption; professors at seminaries and preachers in congregations both need continual salvation; rich and poor, slave and free, male and female are all one in Christ. (Galatians 3:28)
And I am trying to remember in humility that Andy Warhol and I have always been invited to the same table. We both need the bread, the wine, and the occasional bottle of Coca-Cola.
