A Sermon on 2 Samuel 22:21-29 for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity. Delivered by Pastor Caleb Strutz.

In 2017, a research group from Harvard Business school asked college students how they would answer this common job interview question: “What is your greatest weakness?” Now, to the interviewee, that feels like a trick question, because you want to put forward the very best of yourself. So most of the responses didn’t really answer the question at all. 75% of students said that their greatest weakness was something like being a perfectionist, working too hard, being too nice or too honest. Now, those answers are phrased in such a way to respond to that question, there are some potential drawbacks to each of those. But it’s not really answering the question, it’s avoiding it, it’s using it as an opportunity to further emphasize your strengths and what you’re good at. This phenomenon is known as “humblebragging,” that’s actually in the title of the article, it’s using a false pretense of humility and self-deprecation as an excuse to brag about yourself.

The Eleventh Sunday after Trinity is all about humility so our Old Testament lesson seems a little bit out of place. It seems like David is bragging and boasting about his righteousness and his great deeds, without even the pretense of humility. What’s going on, how does this fit? When we take a closer look, we see how the humble Christian can brag, not by sinful self-righteousness, but by God-centered boasting.

I. Sinful Self-Righteousness

At first glance, David’s words here are off-putting, and rightfully so. “The Lord rewarded me according to my righteousness?” That seems like something the proud Pharisee would say, not the humble tax collector.

Especially as Lutherans, we’re very cautious about work-righteousness and self-righteousness. We know that we’re not saved by anything we do, but that really seems to be what he’s saying here, he emphasizes how he kept God’s ways and did not depart from his statutes and was blameless. How can he say that, was David secretly a Roman Catholic?

There’s a real challenge here. How do we uphold the plain reading of Scripture here while still holding to all the other things Scripture says about the proper role and place of works?

And on a lower-stakes level, if we’re supposed to be talking about humility and if humility is a virtue that we need to have and cultivate, where’s the humility in braggadocious display? How can we make sense of what David is saying?

We are rightfully sensitive to these issues, but I also think we have our own blind spots that need to be corrected.

When I was in fourth grade and we went over the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, our teacher asked us who we saw ourselves as in the parable. And when she said, “Raise your hand if you see yourself as the Pharisee,” almost every hand went up. Because that’s the right answer, right?

Yeah, we’re supposed to be the tax collector, we’re supposed to be humble, but if you say that, then you sound prideful. Even a bunch of nine-year-olds understood, “Well, if I say that I’m humble, that’s actually prideful, so the really humble thing is to confess my pride.” You see the hypocrisy there?

We feel uncomfortable with David’s boasting and the Pharisee’s self-righteousness, but then we make a self-righteous display out of not being self-righteous. By trying to avoid being like the Pharisee, we end up just like him!

Our humility is so often a false humility, a humblebrag, where we use this veneer of confessing our pride to try to show everyone how humble we really are.

Luther writes, “True humility … never knows that it is humble… for if it knew this, it would turn proud from contemplation of so fine a virtue” (LW 21:315). In trying to be humble, so often we expose our pride. We’re no better than the Pharisee. At least he’s straightforward with his pride, while we try to mask it under a false display of humility.

II. God-centered Boasting

Now, if that’s what we do (use a false humility to mask pride), what David’s doing here is actually the opposite. He’s using a false pride to mask his humility.

David’s words here, out of context, seem off-putting, but if you’ve read the rest of 2 Samuel, you know it doesn’t make any sense. David is writing this near the end of his reign, looking back at everything. So just look at all the rest of David’s life. He slept with Bathsheba and killed her husband, Uriah. David wasn’t blameless by any stretch of the word. And he’d be the first to admit that.

So see how David qualifies his language. He says, “I was also blameless before Him” and says “According to my cleanness in His eyes.” David isn’t speaking of his own righteousness, but of how he stands before God, how God sees him. And that’s a big difference.

When David was confronted by the prophet Nathan, he confessed his sin, “‘I have sinned against the Lord.’ And Nathan said to David, ‘The Lord also has put away your sin’” (2 Sam 12:13). That’s how David can claim to be righteous, because his sins are forgiven by God.

When we brag of our own righteousness or display false humility, we fall into the sin of pride. But we have another righteousness. That of Christ.

Jesus lived a perfect life of perfect humility, and He did it in your place. Jesus died on the cross to bear the punishment for our pride, so our sins are no more. And He rose from the dead, vindicated by God, to give you a new life.

When we stand before God, we are seen as righteous in His eyes. Not because of our own righteousness, but because we’re wrapped, enveloped in the righteousness of Christ, which covers up everything we’ve done wrong and makes us blameless, because our sins are washed away.

That’s something worth bragging about. That’s something in which we can boast. We have the righteousness of Christ, given to us in Baptism, reapplied with His Body and Blood in the Supper, made ours through faith in Him.

Now we see how David can speak the way he does. Now we see how we, too, can brag and boast, while still remaining humble.

David says, “You will save the humble people; But Your eyes are on the haughty, that You may bring them down.” Because we are God’s humble people, we have every reason to boast. Not of ourselves, but of God and what He has done.

Paul says the same thing in our Epistle. He can brag, “I labored more abundantly than they all,” than all the rest of the Apostles. Why? “Yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.”

We’ve seen from David and from Paul how we can and should boast and be proud. And not only of the great things God has done for us, by giving us the righteousness of Christ, but also of the great things God does through us.

Now, there’s a fine line between boasting of our works and boasting of the works that God does through us, but we still can and should boast in these things. David can say, “I have kept the ways of the Lord,” not that he’s done that perfectly, but that the grace of God is working in his life. That’s something to be proud of.

We can be proud of our good works! Sometimes I think we can over-emphasize “everyone’s a miserable sinner” to the point where there’s no real difference between the Christian and the unbeliever. But we have the righteousness of Christ. And that manifests itself in our lives. How we live is going to be different, it’s going to be better.

We can brag about what we do, as long as it’s not what we do, but what God does through us. We can boast in our righteousness, because the righteous works we do are empowered and enabled by the righteousness of Christ, which is freely given to us.

There’s one more interesting thing in the context of what David’s saying that really drives home this point. So this song comes at the end of 2 Samuel, near the end of David’s reign.

And just before this, he’s almost killed in battle, until he’s saved by one of his men. So his soldiers tell him that they’re not going to let him go out to battle anymore because they’re afraid he’s going to get killed. So this certainly can’t be David bragging of his own strength, he’s an old man near the end of his career.

But what’s really interesting is what his men tell him: “You shall go out no more with us to battle, lest you quench the lamp of Israel” (2 Sam 21:17). They all look up to David and praise him as the lamp of Israel. But what does David say? “You are my lamp, O Lord; The Lord shall enlighten my darkness.”

David didn’t let the compliments go to his head. As important as he was as king, he knew that the light that shone through him was not his. But that the Lord is his light and his lamp.

David concludes his song, “He delivers me from my enemies. You also lift me up above those who rise against me; You have delivered me from the violent man” (v. 49). David’s boast is in God who has rescued him from all danger. Our boast is in God who has saved and redeemed us. That Harvard Business school study found not only that humblebragging is really common but also that it doesn’t work. Employers see right through it. They were more likely to hire the people who were honest and open with their mistakes and can show that they’re self-aware and working on their problems. When we stand before God, our best move is to be honest. To fall on our knees, beat our breasts, and plead with the tax collector, “God, be merciful to me a sinner!” Because, as Jesus says, “he who humbles himself will be exalted.” We have been exalted, we have been given the perfect righteousness of Christ. As God’s humble people, we can brag of that righteousness which is not our own. Amen.

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