Proper 20 9/24/06 “The Sin of Pride”

Mark 9.30-37, James 3.13-4.3, 7-8

I’m a big fan of the seven deadly sins. Well, maybe that doesn’t sound quite right! What I mean is that I think the traditional list of the seven deadly sins—pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust—make for a pretty comprehensive catalogue of what is wrong with us human beings.

I find it particularly interesting that the list is about internal things. Look at the Ten Commandments, and you’ll see that God forbids murder, and adultery, and theft, and lying—mostly external things, things people do. But the list of the seven deadly sins doesn’t include any external actions. This list addresses the heart, the will, the mind—the internal part of us, where things go on that other people cannot see. And so it reminds us that human sin is not primarily about what we do. One common prayer of confession refers to our “thoughts, words, and deeds”—notice what comes first in that list! Sin begins inside, with our thoughts, our attitudes, our inner workings.

The second lesson this morning from the letter of James addresses this same reality. Conflicts and disputes—where do they come from? They come from within, from our cravings, our desires. They come from our envy and our selfish ambition—again, all things that are invisible to other people. And so it seems to me that the seven deadly sins make a really helpful template for us to use in considering our own standing before God, a way to think about our own sinful selves so that we can come honestly before the One who knowest all about us.

Of course it isn’t easy to do that. Consider this morning’s gospel lesson. In looking back through my files this week, I discovered that I have never actually preached on this text. Maybe that’s because it strikes too close to home. Here we have the disciples, walking along to Capernaum. Now let’s think about who the disciples are. They are pretty ordinary, humdrum individuals. There’s not a sparkling intellect among them, as far as we can see. They don’t have much money, don’t have much influence. They are really unimportant, undistinguished people, in the way the world views things. They are on their way to Capernaum, which is a backwater, no account, unimportant little village. They are listening to Jesus speak of his coming suffering and death.

And oh yes—they are having a little side conversation about which of them is the greatest. It’s almost inconceivable to think that this is what they’re talking about. Who is the greatest—among these backwater nobodies? Yet that’s their concern, their preoccupation.

Well, on the list of the seven deadly sins, pride usually comes first. It doesn’t take much for a human being to fall victim to pride—it is, after all, the mother of all sins, the idea that I am somehow, in some way, better than other people. “I am the greatest!” Mohammed Ali once proclaimed, and we were offended, most of us, at such arrogance. But he was only saying out loud what most of us harbor in our heart of hearts.

In a few weeks, I’m giving a paper at the Lutheran Historical Conference on Lutheranism in gold rush era San Francisco. One of the stories I’ve uncovered is about a Swedish pastor who came to San Francisco and found it tough sledding. He was astonished, of course, at what he saw as the debauchery and sinfulness of that frontier city. But what finally made him go back to Sweden was an earthquake. It so unsettled him, that he had a dream that God destroyed the city and struck down every person living there—except him. He alone was spared. Well, he had not only a fear of earthquakes, but a pretty high opinion of his own righteousness, didn’t he? Probably just as well he went back to Sweden.

What makes pride so destructive? Perhaps the first thing is that pride can masquerade as something positive. In our day, we’re big on self-esteem. We know it is important psychologically for a person to have a sense of self-worth. We are created by God, redeemed by Christ, called by the Holy Spirit, and those are things for which we give thanks. We are precious to God.

But pride is the distortion of that sense of being precious to God. Pride is the insidious idea that God loves us because we are so good, that we in ourselves are so precious. The conviction is that we are the important thing, that we are worthy and deserving, and that God is pretty darn lucky to have us! And that’s a distortion.

It’s probably why Jesus responds to the disciples’ prideful argument by putting a child before them. Now keep in mind that the ancient world was a lot less child-centered than we are. For them, hard as it is for us to understand, children were more or less expendable, and certainly not very important. So by taking this child in his arms, Jesus was saying, “God doesn’t love you because you’re important, or the greatest, or even useful. God loves you because he’s your Father, and you are his child.”

Pride is also destructive because it is probably, of all our sins, the one we have the most trouble recognizing and admitting. Are we guilty of lust? If we are, we generally know it. Do we have excessive anger? We usually are aware of it, even if we try to justify it. Are we envious of others? We may not like to admit it, but in our heart of hearts, we know it.

But pride is different. Very often we don’t realize it at all. You don’t find self-help groups for those suffering from pride. If your sin is anger, gluttony, even lust, you can find others willing to talk about their struggles and seek ways to help one another cope with these things. But not pride. Pride is a lonely sin, one we seldom admit to another because we can’t even admit it to ourselves.

And that makes it hard to admit even to God. Look at how the disciples respond to Jesus’ question: “What were you arguing about?” They are silent. You see, when faced with the question, they suddenly realize how sinful their argument had been. But they can’t admit it. Pride means not wanting anyone to know the truth about us—that we aren’t the greatest, that we aren’t the perfect people we’d like others to think we are.

I recently visited someone who is in jail, and who will probably be there a very long time. Something he said really struck me. He said he spends a lot of time thinking about what people must think of him. At first that seemed sort of odd to me; of all the things one in his situation might think about, why would “what people might think” be high on the list? But then I realized, “Well, that’s a pretty common human reaction.” It really boils down to pride, doesn’t it? We want people to think well of us, we want to be seen as good, or competent, or successful; our failures, our sins—those things our pride wants to hide.

But there is no hiding from God. Jesus knows what these disciples have been thinking and arguing about. They won’t admit it to him, but he knows. And so he teaches them, by taking this child, that they don’t have to be afraid of what he will think of them. They don’t have to hide from him. They don’t have to cover up. He loves them as they are, just any parent loves their child.

And he’s teaching them—and us, too, if we will listen—that pride is fundamentally resistance to God. Luther says somewhere that the proud heart is the biggest obstacle to God’s grace. The proud heart, you see, doesn’t believe that it needs God’s grace. The proud heart doesn’t believe that it needs God’s mercy. “I’m just fine all by myself,” it says.

But if we listen to these texts, we learn that God invites us to be honest with him and with ourselves. “Draw near to God,” James writes, “and he will draw near to you.” I take that to mean that God wants us to be truthful—truthful about ourselves, even if it’s hard; honest about our sins, even we’re ashamed of them; honest about our need for God’s mercy and grace.

That is precisely how we draw near to him; and it is when we draw near with faith, that he takes us in his arms and welcomes us.