PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Matthew 6:16-21                                                          The Seven Deadly Sins:  Pride

Ash Wednesday Sermon February 5, 2008:  People's UCC, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

 

            In his book titled Hawaii James Michener invites us into a vast and beautiful story of the Hawaiian people, their struggles and their accomplishments, their joys and sorrows.  In the movie version, one of the chief characters is not a Hawaiian at all.  Back in the 1820's the Congregational Churches of Massachusetts sent missionaries to the Hawaiian Islands to convert the people to Christianity, and Michener tells the story of one of those missionaries, the Rev. Abner Hale. 

            Hale grew up in a very strict Calvinist home and was taught more of the law of God than the love of God.  In Hawaii he was confronted by Queen Malama, the Alii Nui.  If he could convert Malama to Christianity, all the Hawaiians would turn to Christ.  But Malama stubbornly clung to the traditional ways of her people—the laws and orders which kept her society together.  For his part, Abner Hale insisted on some very clear demands:  that she should send her consort away (he was her brother), that she should stop trying to tell Hale what to do and instead she should obey his orders, that her people should change their clothes to what he considered "modest," change their way of training their children, their language, their views on everything.  Hale never did understand that a lot of his rules were not God's laws at all, but the way things were done in New England.  But Malama saw it; and so most of the story is this constant debate between the missionary and the queen. 

            Finally Malama comes to Hale and says that she want to be baptized.  Again he tells her his conditions.  She says she wants to be baptized anyway and asks, "What must I do?"  Hale answers, "Humble yourself before God."  She looks him straight in the eye and asks, "Are you humble?" 

            Pride is the mother of all other sins, because pride is our desire to burst through the limits of our humanity.  We discovered limits when we were still babies.  We could run, but we fell down and skinned our knees.  We came to the top of the stairs and didn't know how to go down them.  We ran to keep up with Daddy, but we couldn't run that fast.  And we didn't like our limits; in fact, we learned to hate by hating our limits. 

            And no matter how old you become, there are always limits.  You work all your life, pay your bills, put a little back for retirement.  When retirement comes, no matter how much you've put back, it isn't quite enough.  Limits. 

            What I want to say this evening, as we begin the season of Lent, is this:  GUARD YOUR HEART AGAINST PRIDE—against that spiritual arrogance we brandish against our limits. 

 

            Now please understand:  I'm using the word "pride" the way the Bible uses it, the way the ancient teachers of prayer use it.  We modern Americans also use the word "pride" to mean something completely different—not a sin at all, but rather an appropriate feeling of goodness in a task well done, a house well built, a marriage well lived, children whose lives have quality.  That "pride" isn't about our limits:  it's about fulfilling our tasks in the world with gratitude and hope. 

            In contrast, the sin of "pride" is a spiritual arrogance that turns me away from the realities of my life, blinds me to what God might be up to in what I consider my failures.  I become my own god, dealing out what should and shouldn't be mine.  Arrogance is a sin in both a homeless vagrant and an emperor.  The proud person doesn't need God, and doesn't believe they have any responsibility for their neighbor or for the earth.  It's the woman who has such class about her that she seems to have Gucci bags under her eyes.[1]  It's the man who walks around as if he were balancing the family tree on his nose.[2]  GUARD YOUR HEART AGAINST PRIDE. 

 

            For, as Reinhold Niebuhr has pointed out, your last limit, the great unbreakable human limitation, is death.  I've been going to family funerals since I was ten years old, and I still don't understand—I am limited to this side of the curtain.  I see an ending, but I can not comprehend not being.  They say it's impossible to contemplate your own death.  We can talk all day about the mortality of humanity, but I can't get my mind around the idea that I will lie down and cease.  And the reaction you and I have against this last limitation is to revolt:  we deny it; we reject it. 

            There's a meditation in Dag Hammarskjöld's journal, Markings, that talks about our revolt and how disruptive it is for real living.  He wrote:[3]

 

 

Not just the Egyptian pharaohs—we all want to build our own pyramid, our own great wall that can be seen from space ten thousand years from now.  It's a matter of your heart.  So the other Egyptians, the Desert Saints who owned nothing and left nothing behind them but words, speak to us across the millennia and say:  GUARD YOUR HEART AGAINST PRIDE. 

 

            We humans are driven beings.  Jacob wasn't really wrestling with an angel:  he was wrestling with his own desires, fears, anger—his own limits.  But if there is a God, and if God cares about you, God is involved with your life:  God invites you to be honest about the things that threaten you, limit your reach in this world.  You can engage God in a conversation deep in your own soul, and out of that conversation will come meaning.  This meaning is the only thing that can ever really reach past your ending. 

            My great-grandchildren will hardly know my name, much less anything about me; but God knows my name and my value; and God is my only hope to avoid oblivion.  If I try to stretch that far, I fall into pride, spiritual arrogance.  But if I would truly survive my own ashes, it will not be of my own doing:  God is in charge of that.  My pride gets in God's way.  GUARD YOUR HEART AGAINST PRIDE. 

 

            A young couple had just gone through the horrible, glorious hour of their first child's birth—a baby girl, who was now sleeping quietly in the cradle beside the mother's hospital bed.  The father, still wearing the gown from the delivery room, was sitting in a rocking chair gazing out the window into the night.  She said, "You're mighty quiet.  What are you thinking about?"  He looked at her and said, "It's not just any boy who's going to date our daughter!"[4]  That's the good kind of "pride."

            But the arrogant heart has grown stiff, stony:  it's an unyielding spirit that will fight God and neighbor, because it's centered in myself:  I'm going to build my pyramid.  And even then, I too must die. 

            As we begin Lent, GUARD YOUR HEART AGAINST PRIDE.  Train your soul in humility with God, mercy with your neighbor, and gratitude for yourself.  It says in the Book of Proverbs:[5]

 

 

 

But the greatest fall of all is the failure to become a person.  GUARD YOUR HEART AGAINST PRIDE.

 

AMEN