When Pride Separates Us From Our Maker by The Rev. Don Hamer, Rector
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Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford, CT
Year C, Proper 17
August 28, 2016
“When Pride Separates Us From Our Maker”
Jeremiah 2:4-13, Psalm 81, Luke 14:1, 7-14
In each of our three passages from Scripture this morning one finds the message that God will provide for God’s people. Now, that is pretty central to our Christian faith, and I imagine few if any of you would argue with the principal.
The harder part of that faith – as with so many aspects of life in general and Christianity in particular, is to put that faith into actual practice. The prophet Jeremiah highlights the human tendency when times get tough to kind of forget about God and instead to try to go it alone. And when you come right down to it, he is really talking about human pride.
Now I’m not using the word “pride” in the sense of “I take pride in doing a good job,” indicating one’s commitment to doing ones best with one’s God-given gifts. Nor am I talking about use of the word “pride” in terms such as “Gay Pride” or “Black Pride” or similar usages. In these examples the word “pride” is used as a reasonable, justifiable sense of one’s worth or significance, a synonym for “self-esteem” or “self-regard.” In these senses, use of the word “pride” simply denotes claiming the dignity that is due by virtue of being children of God. It builds up our relationship with God. That is not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the pride in our human nature, our own accomplishments, our own status that does not give the credit, does not give the glory, to God. This type of pride is more closely aligned with arrogance, conceit, pretension, vanity, or self-importance. This is the type of pride that at best discounts, and at worst tears down, our relationship to God. The apocryphal writer Jesus ben Sirach summarizes it perfectly: The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker. – Sirach 10:12
And the community to which Jeremiah was writing was doing just that – forgetting that their community was founded upon, and gained its strength and legitimacy from, its relationship with God. It was a turbulent time: Israel and Judah were about to be overwhelmed by the Babylonians, who would put them into exile. And yet Jeremiah writes words of hope for the future, trying to call them back into relationship with God. As Kathleen O’Connor writes in her commentary to the Book of Jeremiah, Events in the past, promises about the future, and appeals to the reader in the present are all braided together. Memories of the past shape the present and remain alive in it, just as future hope changes perceptions of the present.” It was a time of rapid and confusing change, and rather to look to God, in fear they took to their own devices. God speaks through the prophet: “What wrong did your ancestors find in me that they went far from me? . . . They did not ask, “Where is the God who brought us up out from the land of Egypt, who led us through wilderness, deserts and pits, in a land of drought and deep darkness, in a land that no one passes through, where no one lives? He continues: . . . The rulers transgressed against me; the prophets prophesied by Baal.” At the end of the passage he concludes, “My people have committed evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.”
And we are reminded of the words of Sirach: The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker. The term “pride comes before the fall” describes EXACTLY what became of Israel and Judah.
Pride was identified as one of the capital sins by Thomas Aquinas. He used the word “capital” not because it was worthy of death or capital punishment, but because the typical ends of such sins, such as the pursuit of wealth, the pursuit of power, or status, or control, are so attractive and so much a part of the human situation that it requires other sins to bring them to fruition. Like a pool of stagnant water attracts mosquitos who spread the Zika virus, this type of pride becomes a breeding ground for other sins.
Jeremiah refers to it as “building our own cisterns.” St. Augustine of Hippo, in his classic work City of God, described this destructive sort of pride as the original or source of all evil: Man regards himself as his own light. (City of God, 14:13). In traditional Christian ethics, human beings are indeed the apple of God’s eye, to whom God has entrusted stewardship of the rest of God’s creation. But our value is not rooted in our humanness; our value exists ONLY in our relationship to the Divine. We believe that the Lord is our light and our salvation – not the other way around.
And this is where our pride can get in the way with our relationship with God – and, as Aquinas and Augustine warned, lead to messing up our relationships with one another. When you take a look at the life and teachings of Jesus, the relationship with God was the hub through which all human relationships were understood. In Paul’s epistles, especially in 1st Corinthians, Romans and 2 Philippians, he sets forth his understanding of the human/divine partnership in creating community:
-- Everything is God’s
-- Gifts are given to us as stewards to be used in service to others.
--Gifts are not to be hoarded but utilized and shared.
-- Always having regard for others as better and at least equally worthy as ourselves (cf: 2 Philippians 3, 13).
-- Everyone in the community is to have “enough” with the Old Covenant example of manna in the wilderness.
-- And finally, Paul taught that within every community of faith, God provides all of the resources that community requires to meet the needs of its members and to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews put puts it this way in this morning’s passage: Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have; for he has said, "I will never leave you or forsake you." So we can say with confidence, "The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?"
And in his parable in this morning’s Gospel, Jesus takes a simple lesson in social courtesy and turns it into a lesson about life: That all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. It is a reminder that in both the Hebrew and the Christian scriptures, God teaches that in God’s economy, the world’s values are reversed – that it is not the great, the privileged and the powerful who matter most to God, but the weak, those who live on the margins of society, and those whose voices are not heard. If we have power, if we have wealth, if we have privilege, Jeremiah and the Psalmist remind us that we enjoy those benefits by virtue of birth, happenstance, and the grace of God, and not by our own devices. To believe otherwise is to fall prey to the sin of pride, to regard ourselves not in the light of Christ but as our own light. Augustine had it right, didn’t he? We always look great in our own light!
Our Scripture passages today call us to look at ourselves and our relationship to our Creator, both as individual children of God and as the gathered Body of Christ. In whom or what do we place our trust? Do we use what God had given us for God’s glory, or do we hoard it in order to preserve it for ourselves? Do we trust that God will provide us with all we need to do the work we believe God calls us to do? Consider these words from Frederick Buechner: Self-love or pride is a sin when, instead of leading you to share with others the self you love, it leads you to keep yourself in perpetual safe-deposit. You not only don’t accrue dividends, but you become less and less interesting every day.
Let us pray: Generous God, the author and giver of all good things: Save us from the sin of human pride that draws us to rely more on our own human instincts than on your extravagant generosity. In Jesus, you show us a way of humility and hospitality with power to transform the world. Give us grace to love those things that please you and the courage to live them not to our own glory, but to yours. AMEN.