7UP: Pride

Text: Romans 14:1-12
Theme: “7UP: Pride” (2nd in a series)
13th Sunday after Pentecost
September 11, 2011
First Presbyterian Church
Denton, Texas
Rev. Paul R. Dunklau

IN THE NAME OF JESUS

1 Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters. 2 One person’s faith allows them to eat anything, but another, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. 3 The one who eats everything must not treat with contempt the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does, for God has accepted them. 4 Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.
5 One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind. 6 Whoever regards one day as special does so to the Lord. Whoever eats meat does so to the Lord, for they give thanks to God; and whoever abstains does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God. 7 For none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone. 8 If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. 9 For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living.
10 You, then, why do you judge your brother or sister[a]? Or why do you treat them with contempt? For we will all stand before God’s judgment seat. 11 It is written:
“‘As surely as I live,’ says the Lord,
‘every knee will bow before me;
every tongue will acknowledge God.’”[b]
12 So then, each of us will give an account of ourselves to God.

Many and various have been the remembrances, testimonies, services of worship, and special events surrounding this day, which is the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on our country. Last week at UNT, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates – who served under both President Bush and President Obama -- led us through a long and detailed history of terrorism in our time which reached a culmination of sorts on 9/11.

While listening to some of these civic rituals, I was reminded of the days and weeks and months which followed that horrible day. There was such an outpouring of national unity. For a little while, just a little while, we seemed to set down the rhetorical weapons of our caustic political warring and sensed a togetherness as Americans that we hadn’t experienced in quite awhile. Flags seemed to fly higher. They were draped over railings and banisters. Mini-versions of Old Glory were affixed to automobile doors. The national anthem was sung with more vigor, and it was often accompanied by a fly-over of F-16s. Our hearts and our dollars and pints of our blood went out in unprecedented proportion to the victims, the families of the victims and first responders. A patriotic fervor swept the nation. New bumper stickers were omnipresent. One of them, featuring an image of the red, white, and blue, said, quite simply: “The Power of Pride.”

Pride does seem to have a power: the power to look back on the past and confidently assert that we’ve learned its lessons. Pride includes the power of experience, tradition, and ties of family and background and religion. Pride, carefully understood, can be a good thing. Pride can be, as one scholar suggests, a “most attractive virtue. Parents try to instill a sense of ‘self-worth’ in children.” Yes, too much pride is rightly called arrogance, but the beneficial effects of pride – a sense of achievement, a desire for excellence, an aspiration to do the best that one can do and be the best that one can be – seem to outweigh the negative.

It’s difficult to see how pride, rightly understood, could be a deadly sin. But there it sits, nonetheless, on the historical list of the most deadly sins. Some would say that pride has been rehabilitated from being a vice to be avoided to a great virtue to be cultivated – think of National Pride, or Black Pride, or Gay Pride, or Southern Pride. There is pride in the great state of Texas. “I wasn’t born here, but I got here as fast as I could,” say some “foreigners” now living in our Lone Star State. I have to admit that pride is plastered all over my office walls with pictures from Nebraska’s national championships in football. Even more insidiously, there are placques noting my vocational attainments. And Pride dominates our politics. It is featured in our rehabilitation and counseling centers where “self-esteem” is encouraged. The great sin doesn’t seem to be pride at all. William Willimon states:

Somehow Pride and its cousins – arrogance, egotism, vanity, and conceit
- got trumped by self-respect, self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-ascribed dignity. Jesus’ exhortation to “love thy neighbor as thyself” has been shortened to a hard and fast, ruthlessly enforced mandate: love thyself.

After probing deeply into what many theologians and philosophers and thinkers have observed on Pride, I think it accurate to say that pride cut off from a connection to almighty God is a deadly sin. Moreover, a heart that is filled with pride alone is not the route to go. The Lord’s servant Moses prays as follows in the 90th Psalm: “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Wisdom, and not pride of the foolish or vain variety, is the route to go.

But how shall we gain wisdom? Is it gained by earning an associate, a bachelors, a masters, or a doctoral degree? Someone once said that “your education is what you have after you’ve forgotten everything you’ve learned in college.” Is wisdom, therefore, only the sum total of your experiences?

What’s this about numbering our days? When we number our days, we mark time – days, weeks, months, and years. It jogs our memories. “Do you remember when?” we sometimes ask in conversation. We discover, very quickly, that our own days on this earth are numbered as well, although we don’t know that number. We have no way of knowing, for sure, whether we will be here for another day, year, or decade.
This knowledge of our limits -- indeed, the wisdom gained by numbering our days – drains the tank from the engine of our pride. The question now becomes this: since our days are numbered, how are they to be lived?

As the blessed apostle Paul points out to the Romans Christians in today’s text, our lives are to be lived toward the Lord – to the Lord and for the Lord. Paul declares: “For none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone. If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living.”

St. Thomas Acquinas said that “Pride is the unavoidable sin.” The more we try to avoid it, the more we face it. But we are not left to our own devices. Our Lord, in Jesus Christ, came to seek us and to save us. As the old hymn says: “Chief of sinners though I be, Jesus shed His blood for me – died that I might live on high, lives that I might never die. As the branch is to the vine, I am His and He is mine.”

As we number our days, as we mark time, as we face our limits, as we remember events tragic or joyful, the words of the Lord through the prophet Jeremiah say it all:
This is what the LORD says:

“Let not the wise boast of their wisdom
or the strong boast of their strength
or the rich boast of their riches,
but let the one who boasts boast about this:
that they have the understanding to know me,
that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness,
justice and righteousness on earth,
for in these I delight,”
declares the LORD.Amen.