| The Sins He Died For: Pride
Sermon by Brigid A. Boyle February 29, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 58:1-12 Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Wednesday past marked the beginning of the season of Lent on the Christian calendar. There is nothing biblical about this season in the sense of injunction. Although there is some evidence that early Christians fasted 40 hours between Good Friday and Easter, the custom of spending 40 days in prayer and self-denial, as Lent has come to be understood, did not arise until later, when the initial rush of Christian excitement was over and believers had gotten very ho-hum about their faith. “When the world did not end as Jesus himself had said it would,” writes one,“his followers stopped expecting so much from God or from themselves. They hung a wooden cross on the wall and settled back into their more or less comfortable routines, remembering their once passionate devotion to God the way they remembered the other enthusiasms of their youth … Little by little, Christians became devoted to their comforts instead: the soft couch, the flannel sheets, the leg of lamb roasted with rosemary. These things made them feel safe and cared for -- if not by God, then by themselves. They decided there was no contradiction between being comfortable and being Christian, and before long it was very hard to pick them out from the population at large. They no longer distinguished themselves by their bold love for one another. They did not get arrested for championing the poor. They blended in. They avoided extremes. They decided to be nice instead of holy, and God moaned out loud.” Hearing such a moan, I suppose, some decided it was time to issue a wake up call for these Christians, and the early church began the season of Lent. Looking to the 40 days that Israel spent in the wilderness learning to trust God, the 40 days Elijah had spent in the mountain’s crack before hearing the still, small voice of God, and the 40 days Moses spent listening to God give the law, and of course, to Luke’s story about Jesus’ own 40 days in the wilderness, the early church began this season. It is 40 days set aside to head to the wilderness of our lives and learn to trust God again, to climb up the proverbial mountain and listen for God, to take ourselves to a place where we confront all the sin that would pull us away from God and just there to remember that because of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, none of that will ever succeed. While I think that there is always a danger in Lent that we might begin to think we can ritualize repentance and calenderize seasons of the soul, I also believe that an Easter morn with hallelujahs that ring hollow would grieve his heart. So it is that we use these days and weeks to think about the sins for which he died, our sins for which he died, that, come that glorious day, we might not be ho -hum about our faith but be ever more grounded and ever more grateful. And so, we begin a sermon series for Lent, The Sins for Which He Died. Looking at the sin and the sins for which he died. With this list of seven deadly sins, Pride, Avarice, Greed, Sloth, Gluttony, Lust and Anger, as point of contact with our lives and with the Bible as point of contact for our proclamation, there just may be, by God’s grace, some sort of wake up call for you and for me and for us together. The Seven Deadly Sins were first catalogued by Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th Century. They were so called, Deadly or Capital, because, it was believed, they could have a fatal effect on an individual’s spiritual health. Centuries theological writings and art and literature reveal a pretty clear connection between committing any of the deadly sins and ending up with a nice little home in hell. Dust off Dante if you need reminder. Even now, there is still plenty of material out there about the “seven deadlies.” There are movies, books, websites, even a website I came across which attempts to argue persuasively that each one of the sins is represented by a character on that famous uncharted desert isle, “Gilligan’s Island.” Well, some 15 centuries after Gregory put them on parchment, I look to these timeless sins not so much as vehicles to eternity in the underworld, as I do handles for us to hold on to that we might see and examine how still we separate ourselves from the Almighty, how always we prefer the darkness. I see these vices not so much as the things that make for unending torment in the afterlife as I do the things that He died for, that we might have life. Even so, we are, I think, these days, still in need of a word about sin, about the reality of sin, no matter how much we don’t particularly want to hear it. Reinhold Niebuhr spoke right of us when he said "Christians in America would like to believe in a God without wrath that saves a world without sin through a Christ without the cross." We would rather, most of us, prefer a cozy Christianity, a neutral Christianity, than a convicting one. To the point, I repeat Kathleen Norris’ words “Pastors can be so reluctant to use the word ‘sin’ that in church we end up confessing nothing except our highly developed capacity for denial. One week, for example, the confession began, ‘Our communication with Jesus tends to be infrequent to experience that transformation in our lives that You want us to have.’ ... at such times I picture God who leans across a table and says, not at all gently, ‘Could you possibly be troubled to say what you mean? It would be refreshing to answer simply, ‘I have sinned.’” This season of Lent, we will say just that. And we begin by looking first to the sin of pride. Pride is, it has been said, is the mother of all sins, the one from which all others are born. It is, (John Ruskin) “at the bottom of all mistakes.” By first definition, according Webster’s, pride is “a high, inordinate opinion of one’s own dignity, importance, merit or superiority, whether as cherished in the mind or displayed in bearing, conduct.” Pride as sin then is a high inordinate opinion of ourselves, or even of humanity itself, which assumes, either directly or not, that we, on our own, are somehow worthy of dignity, import and merit. It is, wrote Barth, a “snatching after the honor that is due to God.” It is when we either by choice or by indifference, our opinions of ourselves get all out of whack. Listen again to the text we read from Matthew’s gospel this morning. In the context of teachings on practical piety as a part of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says to them, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them, for then you have no reward …” Of prayer, he warns, “Whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and in the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Of fasting, ‘Do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting.” Do not, he says, turn practices intended for worship and self-reflection into demonstrations of a faith that pretends to be deeper and stronger than all others. Do not, he says, act so that you might prove yourself superior and another inferior. That is not what pleases God. Quite to the contrary, reward, Jesus says, comes from this God who sees in secret. Pride as self-elevation is perhaps the most obvious way of getting after what this sin of pride is all about. While you and I are not necessarily those who pray on street corners in attempt to we prove our superiority in faithfulness, and while we are not necessarily those who would disfigure our faces in fasting to as to bear witness to our superior devotion, we are those, nevertheless, who spend our days, even our lives, jockeying for position in one way or the other. From where we find ourselves this morning and on out, I think of the way the clamor of competing autobiographies heard just about every time people are together. I think of the haughtiness so present in our society, in this society, that would secure one’s superiority, even one’s worth, to their income or their education or their bloodline. I think, too, of expectations attached to church pledges that would attempt to elevate personal opinion with a dollar sign. I think of the constant fight for the moral high ground, and the “I’m OK you’re not OK” mentality of our days which, of course, out one up and one down. You see, pride is not just about one. To wit, C.S. Lewis’ words “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more than the next man. We say that people are proud of begin rich or clever or good looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer or cleverer or better looking than others. If everyone else became equally rich or clever or good looking,” (or faithful or powerful or whatever!) “there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest.” But more, there is a more indirect, though equally sinful I think, way in which pride weaves itself into the fabric of our lives. It happens when we human beings seek not just to be superior one over the other, and so deny our inherent equality as children of God, but when seek to be "as God," to be God, rather than bow down before God. It happens when we start running own affairs, and all the world’s affairs, as though we are really in charge and as though our purposes, or purposes defined what whomever the political leaders of the day happen to be, are supreme. It happens when we trust own skills, relying on facts we have discovered and processes we understand, as though no one else need be trusted and we are just fine on our own. It happens when seek after our own interests, with blinders on to most others, as though, for some reason, perhaps because of power or position, our interests are the only ones that really matter. It happens when we begin to think that we are capable of deciding who is worth something and who is not, who is in and who is out. In affairs ever so personal and ever so political, it happens when God is disobeyed simply because God is forgotten. But the trouble with pride is not just that the Bible is full of warnings about it, and not just that God takes little delight in our shows or in our rankings. The trouble is that pride, more so than anything else, attempts to make God irrelevant. It forgets that it is God’s world and not ours to control or manipulate. It forgets that God alone bears ultimate power and authority, not us and not our country and not even our church. It forgets that God’s purposes ultimately will prevail, and not our own, whether we like it or not. Ironically, for all the promise pride teases us with, the truth is that at the end of the day, all human pride, be it our puffed up selves convinced of our own superiority or our renegade selves convinced we need no on whom to call, is empty. Any human glory we claim for ourselves and all sense of honor we snatch away from God will never be enough to satisfy or secure, I promise you. It is not worth our lives because when all is said and done, pride, enticing as it is, leaves us empty because it is quite simply an attempt to live without this God who has given us life. In these days of Lent, then, for us, we who are undeniably a bit ho-hum about our faith, perhaps there is something for us in braving the emptiness within, in peering into the Godless hole that human pride carves out, not that we might see how empty we really are, but that, by looking deep and dwelling long, we might wake up enough to realize how very full he has made us, through this one who will die for us, for our sin, for our pride, even Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God. Amen. |