The Days Are Coming … Humility is Expected 

“…love for one another and for all…”    -   I Thessalonians 3: 12

Frank Ziedler died last summer.  He was the mayor of Milwaukee during my grade and high school years in that city. 

My father spoke appreciatively of Mayor Ziedler.  I did not meet him until I returned  “home” as District Superintendent in the late 1980s.  He and I were together in projects of one kind or another almost every month.  Perhaps the best thing I did for new metro area pastors was to arrange a van tour of the city with Frank Ziedler narrating in person.  He knew the city and its people and he loved them.

It was not a surprise that, reading the Advent Thessalonians lection, Frank Ziedler’s face, voice, faith and values came alive.  The Journal Sentinel declared, “Ziedler continued to stick by his beliefs over the years.”

But, and here is the key to his lasting popularity, he not only stuck by his beliefs but he did so with a humility born of “…love for one another and for all…”  Apostle Paul prayed for that love to characterize the friends of Jesus. 

There is nothing wishy-washy about such love, such humility.  A milquetoast, Ziedler was not.  Said he, late in life, “I particularly picked socialism because of several things in its philosophy.  One was the brotherhood of people all over the world.  Another was its struggle for peace.  Another was the equal distribution of economic goods.  Another was the idea of cooperation.  A fifth was the idea of democratic planning in order to achieve your goals.  Those were pretty good ideas.”  Pretty good indeed!

Such ideas and humility, rightly understood, is a mark of the person of faith.  I understand humility to be seeking satisfaction in modeling a life of service.

Two sentences before Paul’s line, “…love for one another and for all…” he makes emphatic that there is always something “lacking in your faith.”   I believe that “something lacking,” these days, in this land, even among God’s people, is the quality of satisfaction in service born of a cultivated posture of humility – “love for one another and for all.”