Sometimes what people deem the least likely to be important or significant becomes the most influential and seminal of all.  Outside of Mexico City, in a city called Teotihuacan, sits a temple with a fascinating story about the gods who were considered to inhabit it.  Many years ago, the tale goes, at a point where the world had completed another of its cycles (per Aztec tradition) of birth and destruction , the gods conferred as to what they should do to "restart" the creation.  Two gods came forth.  One was a warrior god, the other a humble and self-effacing one.  After additional discussion, the gathered gods determined that a fire should be made and one of these two gods should cast himself upon it as a sacrifice, a selfless sacrifice that would sufficiently atone for the destruction of the cosmos past and enable the birth of a new one.
     Despite his bravado, the warrior god could not bring himself to do it.  But the humble god happily leaped into the flames and arose as the sun, that celestial object which so many cultures consider essential to existence.  (Subsequently, the warrior god had a change of heart and threw himself upon the flames and emerged as the moon.)  The one who was viewed least likely to provide an atonement in fact became the one who did so; the one who walked humbly and apart turned out to be the progenitor of a new cosmos.  The least became the greatest.
     Countless other religious legends echo these sentiments, that the one who is overlooked becomes the one in whom the keys of life find root.  So does Jesus, drawing from Psalm 118, remark to some of his detractors, those who could not wrap their minds around the fact of a humble and broken messiah, that, "The stone [Jesus] which the builders [his opponents] rejected, this became the chief cornerstone [the foundation of the new spiritual order]", then adds, "This came about from the Lord." 
     It's very difficult for we humans who have been raised to acknowledge and respect and pursue power, in a variety of forms, to imagine that to find spiritual wholeness we must reject power, for doing so militates against nearly everything about whom we suppose we are.  Yet this is the way of God:  in humility is the path to genuine life.  In humility is the road to understanding the world and the God who made it.  In humility is the recognition that in this world all we ultimately know and have is a sense of place and, happily, of wonder.  We had absolutely no part in putting ourselves here, and we had absolutely no part in determining what our genes will be.  So the wonder goes.
     As the writer of Psalm 100 notes, "It is God who made us, not we ourselves."