THE SUPERFICIAL SAGA: PART II
I served the First Presbyterian Church of Luverne, Minnesota from April of 1991 until July of 1996. There were a number of farmers in my congregation and occasionally they would come to me to ask me to pray about the weather. Farmers tend to be a rather faithful lot. You have to be faithful when your livelihood is dependent upon something as precarious as the weather. In any case, occasionally a farmer would come to me to ask me to pray about the weather.
One Sunday morning, a farmer stopped me before worship and asked me if I’d pray for rain. I asked him when he wanted the rain. He said, “Tomorrow would be nice.” I said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ve got a softball game tomorrow. How would it be if we prayed for rain on Tuesday?” He said that would be fine. We prayed for rain during the worship service that morning…and on Tuesday morning, it began to rain.
Another Sunday morning, a farmer stopped me before worship and asked me if I’d pray for some sunshine. I said, “What, exactly, do you need?” He said, “How about eighty-five degrees and sunny by Wednesday? And a little wind to dry up the fields would be nice.” We prayed for that in church and what do you suppose happened? On Wednesday it was 85 degrees and sunny, and it was windy to boot. Of course, it’s always windy in Minnesota, but that’s beside the point.
As you might suspect, I began to get a little cocky. What was that line Janice read from the book of Proverbs? “Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall?” Trust me. I was about to get my comeuppance.
Not long after my perceived success at impacting the weather, I was helping to lead a mission trip to New Hampshire. The youth director and I and twenty-one teenagers were camped in tents in upstate New York, right beside Lake Ontario. That evening there were ominous clouds out on Lake Ontario, and our youth director said that I’d better do something about it. I said, “No problem. I’ve got it covered.” After all, I had God on my side. I had prayer power over the weather …or so I thought.
That night at about 4:00 in the morning, we were hit with just about the worst electrical storm I’ve ever seen. Our tents flooded and we were forced to sleep in the van. The youth director said to me, “I thought you said you had it covered!” God taught me a very valuable lesson that night. The lesson is this: God is God and I am not. Oh, there is power in community prayer when there is a true need…but that power has absolutely nothing to do with me. We often shorten Proverbs 16:18 into five simple words. We say, “Pride goeth before a fall,” and that’s the truth. When we strut out to the end of the stage and place all the focus and the glory upon ourselves, we are wont to topple off the end of the stage…and fall, flat on our faces. I speak from first-hand experience. Keep that thought in mind as we move on.
This is the second in a series of sermons entitled, The Superficial Saga. It’s a sermon series on the seven deadly sins. We poke a lot of fun at sin these days. Truth be told, I don’t think we take sin very seriously. Yet God takes sin seriously. In fact, God takes sin so seriously…that he sent his Son to die on a cross in order to overcome it. Sin is not a matter to be taken lightly, as though a person could saunter into God’s presence at any time, in any mood, with any sort of life behind them…and at once perceive God there. No, the sense of God’s reality is a progressive and often laborious achievement of the soul…a soul that takes sin seriously and earnestly tries to dispel it.
Like I said, The Superficial Saga is a sermon series on the seven deadly sins. The seven deadly sins are as follows: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. Yet along with the seven deadly sins there are what we call the seven holy virtues or the seven cardinal virtues. The seven holy virtues are meant to counteract the seven deadly sins. For example, the opposite of pride is humility. The opposite of envy is kindness. The opposite of wrath is forgiveness. The opposite of sloth is diligence. The opposite of greed is charity. The opposite of gluttony is temperance and the opposite of lust is chastity…or purity. You see, the way to conquer sin…is to replace it with something better.
Today, we’ll be looking at the sin of pride. In The Parson’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer refers to the seven deadly sins at length. He compares them to a tree whose branches produce twigs that stick out in many different directions. Yet at the root of the tree is pride. C.S. Lewis dedicates an entire chapter to the topic of pride in his book, Mere Christianity. There Lewis writes:
According to Christian teachers the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison. It was through Pride that the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every other vice. It is the complete anti-God state of mind.
That’s pretty harsh, don’t you think? After all, pride – considered in itself – can be a most attractive virtue. As parents, don’t we try to instill a sense of pride or self-worth in our children? My wife and I have two boys, and they could not be more opposite. For example, our oldest boy could be in a baseball game playing shortstop. He could boot four ground balls in a row, yet still he would come off the field believing that he was the best player on the field. Our youngest son could play in a baseball game as well. He could go four-for-four at the plate, with two doubles, two home runs, and ten runs batted in. Then he boots one ground ball and he comes off the field saying, “I’m no good!” My quandary was always to lower the pride level in the one and to build it back up in the other.
To be sure, too much pride is called “arrogance.” But perhaps there is also a beneficial side to pride. Pride can give us a sense of achievement, a desire for excellence, and an aspiration to do the best we can in all that we do. Surely those are not bad things, are they?
Pride is unique among the seven deadly sins in that it has undergone something of a transformation in recent years. It is not an overstatement to say that pride has moved from being the chief of the seven deadly sins – the root of all evil – to being the root of all virtue. We see it now as a positive good to be carefully practiced and lovingly nurtured. Pride has been rehabilitated from being a vice to be avoided…to being a virtue to be cultivated. How often do we hear the words proclaimed these days: Black Pride, Gay Pride, Pride of Workmanship, and so on?
Perhaps the great sin in our minds today is not pride, but rather, the great sin in our minds today is low self-image. Somehow pride and all of its cousins – arrogance, egotism, vanity, and conceit – got trumped by self-respect, self-esteem, self-confidence, and the like. As a philosopher named Adam Smith once said, “Take away pride…and you have a society of lethargic, slovenly creatures who are content to live in the mud.” To him, pride is a good thing. Greed is a good thing. Envy is a good thing. And we thus live in a world that could produce a Donald Trump.
To tell you the truth, I can’t think of much that’s wrong with a healthy sense of pride except for this one important thing: Jesus was against it. Only a faith that believes that Jesus Christ was the full revelation of God would consider pride to be a sin. When we take too much credit for our lives and for our achievements – and when we come to look at our lives as the product of our own striving, rather than as a gift from God – then we are moving close to an idolatry in which the creature refuses to give due to the Creator.
Arrogance, conceit and vanity are just some of the sins that stem from the sin of pride. Self- respect is one thing. Self-infatuation is another. Self-infatuation keeps us centered on ourselves and forever separate from the real world. The secret to overcoming pride and self-infatuation is humility. In fact, that is exactly what Jesus was getting at in the passage we read from the gospel according to Luke.
Jesus tells a story about two men who went up to the Temple to pray. One of the men was a Pharisee, while the other man was a tax collector. The Pharisees, of course, were an exclusive sect of the Jewish faith 2000 years ago. This particular Pharisee was a very righteous man. He worshiped God in the Temple, he gave God 10% of his income, and he dutifully obeyed Jewish law. Thus, the people listening to Jesus’ story would have seen him as the hero. The tax collector, on the other hand, was not a righteous man. The people listening to Jesus’ story would have seen him as the villain.
Tax collectors in Jesus’ day were actually thought to be traitors. They were ordinary citizens who had the good fortune – or the bad fortune, depending on how you look at it – to have been appointed by the Roman government to assess and collect taxes. They were notorious for their dishonesty. They frequently overcharged the Jewish citizenry, obtaining great wealth for themselves and earning the disdain of the general populace. Because the Pharisees hated tax collectors, they thought Jesus should hate them too. Thus, in the parable Jesus tells, we have a clear-cut case of good versus evil – the good and faithful Pharisee versus the evil and traitorous tax collector.
The Pharisee was quick to make distinctions. He actually said in his prayer, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers…or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.” The Pharisee sees the tax collector as less than human. In making this distinction between himself and the tax collector, he is arrogant in his assertion that he is not like him.
I think of a wonderful line from Jonathan Swift, who is perhaps best known to us as the author of Gulliver’s Travels. He once said, “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. Perhaps that was the Pharisee’s problem as well.
The tax collector, however, was in the Temple to pray as well. His prayer was a little bit different than the prayer of the Pharisee. He stood far off – he could not even bring himself to look toward heaven – he beat his breast and he cried, “God be merciful to me, a sinner!”
Now remember, this is a parable. A parable of Jesus always has a twist and a central truth. The twist of the parable is this. Jesus says, “The tax collector went down to his home justified, rather than the other.” Jesus’ audience would have been shocked. It was not the happy ending they expected.
The question we’ve got to ask ourselves is this: “Why?” Why was the tax collector justified in the eyes of God while the Pharisee was not? I believe Jesus gives us the answer to this question at the end of the parable. He says, “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves…will be exalted.” That’s Jesus’ way of saying, “Pride goeth before a fall.” The secret to justification – the secret to peace with God – is humility.
Well what, exactly, is humility? Does it have to do with keeping your eyes to the ground and seeing yourself as a nobody? Does it have to do with self-deprecation? I don’t think it does. One can have a healthy sense of self-esteem and still be a humble person. Let’s look again to the writing of C.S. Lewis in, Mere Christianity. Regarding humility, he writes:
Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call humble nowadays. He will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person who is always telling you that, of course, he is a nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him, it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility. In fact, he will not be thinking about himself at all.
In other words, a humble person is a person who thinks of someone besides themselves. A humble person is a person who puts you ahead of him or herself. A humble person places others above himself because he has learned to see others as precious children of God as well. This is the kind of person who will be exalted, as Jesus says, because this is the kind of person who comes nearest to the heart of God. Think of the truly humble people you have known in your lifetime. They do seem strangely “Godly,” do they not?
How do we get there? I think of how we do the sacrament of baptism in this church. Typically, a mom and a dad bring a child to the baptismal font. After the parents answer a few questions, I take that child and baptize him or her. Then I present that child to you, as you sing, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” The child, ideally, looks at you and beams. And the child does nothing in the baptismal service…except humbly and graciously receive.
When it comes to approaching God, this is who we are. We are not the big, self-sufficient and self-reliant adults we pretend to be. We are little children – frail, empty, and dependent – needing a gracious and loving God in the worst possible way. You see, you can’t get into God’s kingdom if you are all grown up, and big, and important. You can only come in through a very small window…as a dependent and empty child.
To overcome pride, one must first encounter humility. To encounter humility is to see oneself as one really is. And to see oneself as one really is…is to see others in the world as being in the same boat in which we find ourselves. We all need God. We all need God in the worst possible way. And perhaps we need him now, more than ever. Humility…is the first step to finding him. Amen.
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