In the spirit of the late Henny Youngman, I was going to begin this sermon by asking if you’d like to see my pride and joy. Which I would then hold up for you to see….a little bit of pulpit “show and tell.” But all I can show you is my Joy, given that they don’t make Pride anymore. Joy, of course, being a brand of dishwashing detergent. Pride, a brand of furniture polish. The fact that I completely missed the fall of Pride shows you how often I polish furniture. Truth be told, I’m not sure if I ever polished furniture (although I am a whiz when it comes to washing a dish).
Tina Grubb (who works in our office) expended no small amount of effort searching for Pride on Friday. Alas, she was unsuccessful. All she remembered was that Pride sponsored the soaps (how’s that for a connection?) back when Search for Tomorrow was on for 15 minutes instead of half an hour and she watched it at Grandma Carroll’s house. But don’t ask Tina how many years ago that was or she’ll be embarrassed and I’ll be in trouble.
“Take a little pride in yourself,” my mother used to say, whenever my manners or my apparel fell short of her expectations. Which led me to think that pride must be a good thing, because why would my mother want for me a bad thing? So you can imagine my surprise when I got to seminary and found that not only was pride a bad thing but, quite possibly, the worst thing.
Who said so? Well, Thomas Aquinas, for one….Thomas being that renowned medieval philosopher and patron theologian of Roman Catholicism who, in addition to giving us five classical proofs for the existence of God, also gave us seven deadly sins. Which he extrapolated from Holy Scripture, there being at least six Hebrew roots for the word “pride”….all of them translatable by the phrase “to be high,” and all of them sub-translatable with words like “arrogance,” “loftiness,” “presumption” and “boasting.”
There are a few passages in scripture where pride is deemed natural and acceptable (Job 28:8, Proverbs 16:31 and I Corinthians 11:15). But “the distinctive biblical thrust is overwhelmingly against human presumption and self-glorification” (J. A. Wharton). My grandmother used to talk about people who were “a little too full of themselves.” But I never knew what it meant until I got to seminary. Then I read Thomas Aquinas (who I didn’t understand) and thought about my grandmother (who I did). For whatever else the sin of pride may be, it starts (and maybe ends) with being “a little bit full of ourselves.”
But the Bible doesn’t stop there. In passages too numerous to count, pride is singled out as the “ground of sin”….or the soil from which all other sin springs. Which is why the proud are always being humbled in scripture, and human haughtiness is always having its legs cut out from under it (read especially Isaiah 22:17, and the lovely but scary words of Mary’s Magnificat in Luke 1:51).
“Pride goeth before a fall,” suggests popular wisdom. Which is why pride is always associated with elevation. And which is why the fall (biblically speaking) is always associated with being toppled from elevation. When I was a kid (growing up in a neighborhood where one’s masculine status was always defined in physical terms), we sometimes played King of the Hill or its companion, King of the Castle. As a game, it wasn’t rocket science. Neither was it electronic. Playing it successfully had more to do with battering than with batteries. You clawed your way to the top by whatever means possible. Then you fought like heaven to keep someone else from displacing you. Needless to say, I left my violin case in the closet whenever I played King of the Hill.
You have all heard of the Golan Heights. But I’ve seen the Golan Heights. Four times. Not much to look at, really. Nothing more than an elevated ridge separating northern Israel from southern Syria. Israel grabbed it in 1967. Syria wants it back. Not because there are towns there….houses there….heavy industries there….lush vineyards there. There is nothing there. But Israel knows that if her enemy sits up there, they can fire down upon the Galileans who farm below there (on the most fertile acreage in the entirety of Israel). So Israel feels that in order to secure the valleys, it must control the hills.
But there was a time when Israel confused physical ascendancy with spiritual ascendancy and paid the price. I’m talking about the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11. You remember the rubrics. One people. One language. Incredibly industrious. And incredibly visionary. “Let’s build a city,” they said. “And within it, a tower.” How big a tower? A humongous tower. With its upper floors penetrating the heavens. I mean, Jack and the Beanstalk is nothing compared to this. Talk about people being a little bit full of themselves. Listen to this. “We will build it with its top in the heavens, and we will make a name for ourselves.”
Well, you know how the story came out. God said something that sounded like: “We can’t have this. If we allow this, nothing will be impossible for them, and (by inference) who knows what they will do next?” So the people were scattered. Their languages, confused. And a proper pecking order was restored in the universe.
So is this a mythic story? Sure, it’s a mythic story. Which means that the issue is not whether it was true once, so much as that it is true always. What goes up must come down. Pride goeth before a fall. It’s spiritual gravity.
But there was still my mother to contend with, don’t you see. “Take a little pride in yourself,” she said. “But it will be deadly if you do,” Aquinas said. So I sat there trying to balance the equation. My mother versus Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas versus my mother. What to do? So I thought, why don’t I just let mother slug it out with Thomas Aquinas? But she never did. So I had to.
I started by admitting that my mother was partly right. All mothers are partly right. Family life in America would be a whole lot better if children understood the “right” part of “partly right,” and mothers understood the “partly” part of “partly right.”
My mother was saying: “Billy, think well of yourself. Take care of yourself. Find your best self and put it forward.” I suppose she was talking about self esteem before it became popular to talk about self esteem. Today, everybody talks about self esteem. And self esteem is a good thing…. lest people walk all over you….or (worse yet) lest you walk all over yourself. I say this, even though the ways we’ve tried to teach self esteem have occasionally been flawed. Judith Walker-Riggs writes:
I once watched a child bring a parent a drawing over which he’d worked a good half hour. The drawing was visibly the product of much thought and care. The parent praised the child and hung the picture on the wall for everyone to see.
The child, enjoying the praise and attention, rushed away. In 30 seconds he was back with a hasty scribble of crayon. The parent gushed the same praise as before and hung that one up, too. A series of ever smaller and hastier scrawls appeared. Each gained equal praise.
The parent, I am sure, was hoping the child would learn self esteem in this exercise. What the child actually learned was:
A. It’s easy to con adults.
B. It doesn’t matter if you work hard because everything’s worth the same in the end.
C. Adults are fools who can’t tell a good drawing from a bad one.
True self esteem needs some base in reality.
And while you’re pondering that, consider the plight of high school basketball players who are over-hyped and over-praised, to the degree that if they aren’t starting and starring by the third game of their freshman season in college, they figure that somebody just doesn’t “get it” and it’s time to move on. Not everybody who turns your head does you a favor, given that very few people with turned heads walk in straight lines.
We all need pride….if, by pride, we mean knowing that we are somebody and that we matter to someone. Long after we will have forgotten the tactics of Martin Luther King or the politics of Jesse Jackson, some of us will remember both men as preachers whose sermons made hearers stand a little taller, walk a little prouder and feel a whole lot better about themselves. Having heard both, I thought to myself: “It would be hard to sit, week after week, in the shadows of their pulpits and feel like a nobody.”
But too much pride can keep you from doing what you need to do. I know people who won’t mend a friendship, offer an olive branch or initiate forgiveness because doing so would force them to swallow their pride (“You say I should call him….I’ll never call him….You can look for hell to freeze over before I call him….I have my pride….So he can call me”).
While others are too proud to try something new, different, offbeat or adventuresome. Because they might not immediately excel, don’t you see. Or, worse yet, look foolish (“I’d really like to try, but I’ve got my pride”). How wise was Chesterton when he said that anything really worth doing is worth doing badly. Think about that for a minute and you’ll see how much sense it makes.
And then there’s the fact that pride can be dangerous, and maybe even kill. How else would you describe road rage and the part pride plays in needless death or injury?
So is humility the answer? Sometimes, given that there are good reasons to be humble. Some of which are supplied by the universe. Wasn’t it Harry Emerson Fosdick who wrote: “One would suppose that intelligent human beings living on this wandering island in the sky, on the outskirts of a universe where the nearest fixed star is millions of light years away would, in the nature of the case, be humble when trying to formulate truths about life.”
While reality supplies others….reasons to be humble, I mean. Some of you may remember Gary Moore, a 1960s television personality. Gary was eventually made Vice President of CBS. He was very proud. Then a friend told him some companies dish out vice presidencies like gold watches. That friend worked for Nabisco and told Gary that at Nabisco, they even had a vice president in charge of Fig Newtons. Gary didn’t believe it. So he phoned Nabisco and asked to speak to the vice president in charge of Fig Newtons. Imagine his surprise when he was asked: “Is that packaged Fig Newtons or bulk Fig Newtons?”
Why, just the other day, Jeff Nelson told me he bought the first book I ever wrote for ten cents from a used book table. And if that weren’t enough, he rubbed additional salt in the wound when he opened it to where I had inscribed it (in my own hand): “To my dear friend.” Of course, Jeff doesn’t work here anymore. But the point is well made. There are lots of reasons to be humble.
Until “humble” becomes prideful. As was the case with my seminary roommate who told anybody and everybody….some of them more than once….that he was so poor that he would have never made it through college (and into ministry) had he not spent his four years at Albion cleaning toilets.
Or, until “humble” becomes demeaning. A colleague writes:
I was once at a friend’s church, and the minister had gathered the children around him on the chancel steps. Giving each child a long piece of cardboard, he asked them to write on the white side something about themselves they were proud of.
They wrote simple, touching things. One said, “I can sing good.” Another, “I can really catch a ball.” A third, “I can make my bed.” When the children were done, the minister told them to turn over their piece of cardboard. Which was when the congregation could see the word “SINNER,” lettered with a big black magic marker. The minister went on to tell each child that no matter what they thought was good about themselves, they were always sinners, quoting the old prayer of confession about erring and straying from the way, to the point that “there is no health in you.”
Well, the theologian in me knows that preacher spoke great truth. But the pastor in me fears that pastor did great harm. For there is health in those children. Just as there is health in you….health in me….health in us. And one job of the church is to help people find that health, claim that health and increase that health.
So how does one do that without falling prey to the deadly sin of pride? I’m not completely sure, but I think I know where to start, thanks to the wonderful line of Isak Dinesen in her book Out of Africa: “Pride is faith in the idea that God had, when God made us.” Let me roll that one by you again. “Pride is faith in the idea that God had, when God made us.”
Which gives me an opening to close with this.
Once there was a little lion who lived in the jungle. He was born into a noble family of lions, the king of beasts. But when this little lion was still a baby, something happened which caused him to get separated from his family. I don’t know what caused the separation….maybe it was an earthquake or a blinding storm. At any rate, the little lion woke up the next morning to find himself all alone in the world. He began to wander through the jungle, looking for a home. Finally, after walking a very long time, he came upon some sheep grazing in the meadow. Standing at the edge of the jungle, he watched them as they ate the green grass.
“This must be my family,” the lion said to himself. “I’ll go over and join them.” So he did. But the sheep paid him little attention. He was sufficiently small that he posed no threat to them. Watching as they ate the grass, he tried to copy them. He didn’t much like his first few mouthfuls. And his neck hurt from bending over to eat. But after a few days, he got the hang of it. Which was when he began working on his “baa,” just like the other sheep. But his never sounded quite right. By day he would wander across the meadow, and by night he would huddle with the flock. It bothered him that his fur didn’t grow as long and woolly as everybody else’s. But they were all too busy eating grass to notice any difference from their end. Which is why, over time, he began to feel very much at home.
Until the day when the flock was grazing in the meadow and a loud, thunderous roar came out of the jungle. The sheep ceased eating and huddled together in fear. Then into the clearing stepped a gigantic, noble lion. Following another earthshaking roar, the leader of the sheep started running as fast as his little legs would carry him, and all of the other sheep went with him.
But something froze the little lion in his place. Something fascinated him about the majestic-looking figure he saw emerging from the jungle. He was frightened by what he saw. But he was also drawn toward what he saw. Which was when the big lion let out another roar and spoke to the little lion.
“What in the world do you think you’re doing?” the lion asked.
“Who, me?” responded the little lion.
“Yes, you. What are you doing wandering around with those sheep? And eating grass? And saying baa? Not only do you look ridiculous, you sound ridiculous.”
“But I am supposed to eat grass and say baa,” said the little lion. “All the sheep do it.”
“You are not a sheep,” roared the big lion.
“Not a sheep?” asked the little lion in complete puzzlement.
“No! Just look at yourself. Come over here and tell me what you see in this pool of water.”
The little lion timidly edged toward the pool where the big lion was now standing. Stopping at its edge, he gazed into the water. To his utter amazement, he saw there not a white, woolly sheep, but a caramel-colored lion. Not as big and strong as the lion standing beside him, but the resemblance was impossible to ignore.
“See,” said the big lion. “Those teeth….those eyes….that fur….those claws. None of those belong to sheep. You are one of us. You are a lion.”
* * * * *
“Pride is faith in the idea that God had, when God made you.”
Notes: For those who might not otherwise catch the subtlety about the reference to Jeff Nelson, he is a much-beloved associate minister on the staff of First Church. More to the point, he is still working here. He didn’t seem to mind my humor at his expense.
As concerns the story about the lion, I have had it in my files for more years than I can remember. Truth be told, I can’t remember using it until now. Nor can I remember where I got it. I want to credit Frederick Buechner. If that be the case, it can probably be traced to one of his earlier collections of sermons, The Magnificent Defeat or The Hungering Dark.
Judith Walker-Riggs holds a Ph.D. in some aspect of religious studies and has the unique function of teaching pastors how to be “interim ministers for congregations that employ such persons.” Presently, Judith is serving an interim assignment herself at Fountain Street Church in Grand Rapids.
As to all of my biblical references on “pride,” I turned (as do most of my colleagues) to one of the volumes of the Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible and to a wonderful essay by J. A. Wharton. I should also acknowledge that the popular phrase “Pride goeth before a fall” is traceable to Proverbs 16:18.
