Pride: "I Alone"

Pride: "I, Alone"

Seven Deadly Sins Sermon Series—Pride
Philippians 2:1-4
February 10, 2008

If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in
the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind,
having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish
ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of
you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.

I’ve been thinking about why I decided to do a Lenten sermon series on the seven
deadly sins, and I have to be totally frank with you: I’m not sure why I chose such a
potentially challenging and, even explosive topic. I’m not a huge fan of topical sermon
series, though I have done them before, even here, but I do think there are times to
pay attention to the big picture, or to an overall arch, to see how something like the
ancient wisdom of the church might have something to teach us even in this day and
age.   Or maybe it’s because I am feeling particularly sinful right now, and I want to
wallow in it for awhile—who knows, to be honest. But it is Lent, and so it is the time
when the church asks us to look inward, to look at our hearts, and to acknowledge the
shadows within us, and to see how we can throw more light into those same hearts.
The point is not to wallow in the shadows that we all carry within us, but to challenge
that night, that darkness, in us, and to change our lives so that the light we also carry
within us will shine more powerfully, more beautifully, as it did in Jesus when he was on
that mountain, with the disciples and Moses and Elijah, something we explored in last
week’s sermon.

I wanted to begin this series with one of the seven deadly sins that is considered the
deadliest, the sin of pride, and I wanted to begin there because the tradition of the
church is that this sin is the root sin of all the other deadly sins that are considered so
harmful to our souls, and so harmful to others who must suffer because of our negative
choices. Pride is identified as the desire to be more important or attractive than others,
or sometimes it’s the failure to give compliments to others when they are deserving of
them, and at other times, it is defined as the excessive love of self. Dante, the great
poet who gave us the Inferno, said pride was “the love of self perverted to hatred and
contempt of one’s neighbor.” In another words, if I can’t be number one, then I need to
make sure you’re never going to be number 1, of if I am number 1, you need to know
for sure that you’re merely number 2. Its that excessive love of self that I think is the
key to understanding the sin of pride—for me, it really is this false idea that who we are
and what we have done in this life, the good stuff, the stuff to be proud of, is actually
only the work of our own hands—that we are a self-made man or woman, that accidents
of history or birth, or genetics have nothing to do with what we have accomplished in
this life. Pride says, I did it by myself, I alone am to be credited the success I have had,
I alone have done or created the success I am enjoying or the skill I have nurtured, or
the gifts I have been birthed with.

Now, I am going to give you a ridiculous example of the sin of pride right now: this past
Wednesday was National College Football Signing Day for High School students to sign
up with the schools of their choice, and much to my utter, utter delight, my alma mater
Alabama beat out Notre Dame, Georgia, Miami, and Florida, for the top ranked
recruiting class in the nation. I emailed a clergy colleague who went to Auburn
University, our in-state rival, to brag on this recruiting class, because lately, there hasn’
t been much to brag about for us Alabama alumni, with Auburn beating us the last six
years. Auburn had a miserable year recruiting compared to us, and so I felt the need
to be proud of something I did not do—I mean, no one is coming to Alabama to play ball
because I personally asked them to—but I had to make sure that Ginny knew where
Auburn stood—20th or something like that in the recruiting rankings. What did Dante
say about pride? It is “the love of self perverted to hatred and contempt of one’s
neighbor.” It’s not enough to be proud of my own yard, but I have to have the best
looking yard in the neighborhood, and others should be quite aware of that truth.   I
have to have the most toys, the best cars, the biggest house, the most money,
whatever, than someone else.

And pride, wanting to be more attractive than others can make us do crazy things—
think of that young man in Nevada last week who set up a press conference in the
gymnasium, with the whole school there, to make known his decision between two
different football scholarships offers he had from Oregon or Cal, and so amidst the
cheering crowd at the conference he picked Cal—but when Cal was contacted to be
told the good news, well, they had never heard of the young man. It was later
discovered he had made the whole thing up, just trying to get some attention, trying to
be the center of something, I suppose. You see, no one much cares for the runner up
to Miss America in this world, sadly enough—this year’s Miss Indiana will be nothing
more than an asterisk in most people’s eyes, because number two doesn’t count for
much—only Miss Michigan will be remembered. You see, our own personal pride can
effect others around you and me, and what seems such a personal sin has such public
& ecological consequences, especially as we keep using up more and more of God’s
creation in order to not only keep with up the Jones’ but to have more than the Jones’.

Now, before I get into trouble here, I want to make sure you that you don’t think that I
equate the sin of pride with the need for personal self-esteem, which is the way many of
us actually use the term—“have some pride in yourself!” we say to those are struggling
with feeling “not good enough” or not worthy enough, or just who need an incentive to
do a better job.   Many folks struggle with having a good sense of self-esteem, and its
something important to have—if we don’t believe we are worth something in this world,
more than likely other people will treat us as if we were worthless. Self-esteem is
knowing and believing that I am a person of worth, though imperfect, though not without
flaws and shadows. Self esteem is what people are really talking about when they talk
about black pride or gay pride—it’s not about being better than others, but about
recognizing the goodness that exists within that others said did not exist in “those”
people. We are called to love others as we love ourselves, but we can’t love others if
we don’t love ourselves us— and if we don’t treat ourselves with respect and love, it is
highly unlikely we’ll know how to treat others with respect and love.

Real pride, not self-esteem, but sinful pride not only believes that I am of worth, but I
am the ONLY worthy person, the best person in the world, the center of the universe,
the only person that really matters in this world. And if you believe that lie, then it
doesn’t take long to understand why the sin of pride is considered the root of all the
other sins were going to be talking about in this series—envy, greed, sloth or laziness,
lust, anger, and gluttony. Each of these sin incorporates the lie that I alone matter,
what I want is alone the only thing that really matters, and it gets in the way of caring for
other people and doing the things necessary to mend the rips in our relationships. In
the novel Love in the Time of Cholera, Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez portrays
a marriage that disintegrates over a bar of soap. It was the wife's job to keep the house
in order, including the towels, toilet paper and soap in the bathroom. One day she just
simply forgot to replace the soap. Her husband exaggerated the oversight, of course:
I've been bathing for almost a week without any soap. She vigorously denied forgetting
to replace the soap. Although she had indeed forgotten, her pride was at stake, and so
she wouldn't back down. For the next seven months, they slept in separate rooms and
they ate in silence. It was almost as if their marriage had suffered a heart attack, some
sort of debilitating illness. Even when they were older and composed, writes Marquez,
they were very careful about not bringing it up, for the barely healed wounds could
begin to bleed again as if they'd been inflicted only yesterday. How can a bar of soap
ruin a marriage? The answer is actually very simple. Because of their pride, neither
partner would say, Forgive me. (Les Parrott III, All For a Bar of Soap, Vital Ministry,
September-October 1999, 18.) That’s what pride does to us—it weakens our ability to
admit when we were not number 1, those million of times when the great recruiting
classes didn’t come in, or we committed one of those other deadly sins against another,
or even ourselves, and we can’t admit that we did something wrong. Pride just ruins
our ability to have good relationships with each other, and with God, and that robs of so
many good years, so many good years in our marriage, so many good years of
friendship, so many good years of a relationship with God. Folks, we ain’t perfect, but
our pride so often can’t seem to let go of the lie that we are perfect, that we shouldn’t
ever have to say, “I’m sorry,” to others, to God. And pride robs us having good
relationships with those we think we’re better than, those who don’t have the money,
the brains, the class, we think we have, and what we are left with is, “I , alone; I, alone,
truly alone.”

And yet we all know that pride goeth before a fall, as the book of Proverbs reminds us.
Douglas and I were with friends from Boston this summer, visiting different parts of
Michigan. We had a chance to visit the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, in Paradise,
in the UP, and I really came to understand the full story how the ship the Edmund
Fitzgerald came to find her grave at the bottom of one of the Great Lakes. The
Edmund Fitzgerald was a giant ore freighter, 729 feet in length, and was the largest
carrier on the Great Lakes from 1958 until 1971. The Fitzgerald was labeled “the pride
of the American Flag.”   On November 10, 1975, the Fitzgerald was hauling a heavy
load of ore to Detroit, Michigan, when it ran into a severe storm. This storm generated
27-30-foot waves with a following sea storm. During the evening hours the ship
disappeared from radar screens; apparently it sank in a matter of minutes. It now rests
on the bottom of Lake Superior broken in two with the bow upright and the stern upside
down still loaded with its cargo of ore and all 29 hands. Its been said that nothing could
bring down that ship, that it was almost impregnable, just like the Titanic—it was the
best of the best, but we all know that every empire eventually falls, every star
eventually fades, and every light on this side of eternity grows dim. Pride does lead to
a fall, because it sets us onto waters we shouldn’t be on—it dares us to take chances
when the odds are against us, and it wrecks our relationships because we cannot admit
that there are some thing we can’t do alone, by ourselves. “I, alone,” says our pride,
when we really need to say, “us, together” during those times when we need each
other, and even during those times when we don’t.

Our scripture today offers us a different way, a way that is different than the way of
“selfish ambition and conceit,” as the writer of Philippians puts it. You see, the opposite
of pride is humility, and it shouldn’t be a surprise, especially after what I’ve said so far,
that the writer here explicitly connects humility with being together, with community, with
connection with others. The writer wants us to be think about other people, to not only
calculate the cost to us, but the cost to others, to friends, strangers, loved ones, to
people half away across the globe, and to make sure that it gets put into the equations
we make when we have to struggle towards a decision. It’s an odd thing for us to hear
the Scriptures ask us to regard others as better than ourselves, because we’ve been
told that the gold standard in this world is equality, that we’re not better or worse than
others, but all equal to each others. And though I am big fan equality in this world
especially in our social and political life, I’m not sure that what is Christ is asking us to
do within the life of the church—Christ asks us to serve each other, to get in the back
of the line, to be humble with each other, and to do the same with the rest of the world,
a world where everyone is instead pushing to get to the front of the line. “How can we
be great?” the disciples ask Christ, and his response—“by serving each other, by
treating each other as if each and every one of us mattered enough that we would
bother cleaning up after each other if we were needed for that messy work.”

The word humility is related to our word humus, meaning earth or earthy, so if you’re
humble, well, you’re close to the ground, near the bottom. Think of humility as being
down to earth, which is the opposite of pride, which is all about being above, put on a
pedestal, the center of attention, with the exquisite ability to look down on people on the
earth below. You and I, we’re not so good as not to get our hands dirty with the
messiness of this world, or the messiness of other people’s lives, or, probably more
realistically, the messiness that comes with cleaning up the shadows in our own hearts.
It takes some effort to get a fire started in the darkness, especially to get the light we
are born with, the light within us, to burn brightly enough to burn away the deep night of
pride that is sometimes found in our hearts. But its worth getting dirty over, changing
the way we see the world, so we can change the world, so we can serve the world, and
help heal the world, and see the world for the beautiful and broken thing that it is.
Humility does what Christ did, what God did—humility loves the world enough to get
dirty with messiness of it all, in order to help God clean up the mess that we and others
have sometimes made of God’s good world. Pride says stay in the heavens, look down
on it all from above, don’t get involved, don’t get yourself dirty, but not love, not
humility, not God—God is right down here, doing what God himself has asked us to do
on this earth—to practice humility by helping to heal the world, and to do right by those
that deserve it and those that don’t deserve it, knowing that we all need mercy, that we
all need forgiveness, that we all need a little help now and then to get through another
day. Amen.