The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 17, 1 September 2013

“Pride”

The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 17

1 September 2013

St. Anne’s Episcopal Church

Fremont, California

Sirach 10:12-18

Psalm 112

Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16

Saint Luke 14:1, 7-14

INI

Introduction:

This is a strange enterprise isn’t it?  A stranger enters your holy of holies and now stands before you to advise you about your life in Christ.  Not knowing one another, or the circumstances that inform each of our lives, makes this undertaking a little difficult – scary as a matter of fact.  Perhaps a quick snapshot of me will help you understand the context in which I do theologizing and preaching.  I shall depend on each of you to clue me into your story.  Well, what do you need to know?  I have been a priest for some 42 years now, ordained in 1971 after four years of post-graduate education in the Lutheran educational system.  I have served parishes in New England (The Lutheran Church of the Way), New Jersey (The Lutheran Church of Saint Ambrose), and California (St. Francis Lutheran Church, Trinity Episcopal Church, Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, The Episcopal Church of Our Saviour, and now you.)  You may be wondering when I made the leap from the Lutheran Church to the Episcopal Church.  That was a process that began in 2005 and continued until I was received in 2008 under the gracious understandings of “Called to Common Mission” the full-communion document between the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.  I have one daughter, who teaches Spanish at Idaho State University in Pocatello, Idaho.  I am married.  My partner of some 22 years, Arthur Morris, and I were married two weeks ago.  The decoration on top of the cake was a simple inscription of the word, “Finally!”

I love being a priest, and I love serving in a parish.  From that point we shall walk together for three months, learn from one another, and live in the Gospel.

Pride-in the midst of our Community.

It isn’t often that the lectionary provides us with such an acute theme – indeed a word to describe the value that the Church wishes to place in our hearts.  That word is pride, and we hear it the First Reading, the Psalm, and the Gospel.  I publish a blog in which I write commentary on the lessons for the lectionary each Sunday, and when I went to find a symbol for pride on Google images the first image that popped up was a gay flag!  I startled at the image, because my image of pride is so much more all encompassing.  Perhaps it was the result of some algorithm that Google employs to inform its search engine about the individual who is doing the search.  What is important in this story is that I quickly realized that pride was so much more.

It may be that the first question that we need to ask ourselves is one of intent.  Why do we want to talk about pride?  What is the point and purpose of our pride?  Is there a downfall to our pride?  My purpose is to touch on each of these so that we can understand the readings for today, and how they might impact how we live each day.  I know that the readings have a negative take on pride, but there is a positive aspect as well, somewhat described in the reading from Hebrews.

The question that will help us begin this journey is simple.  What makes your proud?  Is it something that is within you, or something that comes from without?  Is it your community and neighbors, or is it something peculiar to you?  I am pushing us toward the community because that is the immediate context of what we are doing right now.  We are in community (even though some of us are strangers) and we are doing our Common Prayer.  Thomas Cramner had an innate sense of what pride was truly about when he called it the Book of Common Prayer.  It is talk with G-d that is common to all of us.  Even when a visitor, or better yet, a guest, comes, they are apart of the community.  Our pride should be our communion with them regardless of where they have come from.  It is this basic sense and meaning to pride that forms a foundation up which we can build a greater understanding.

Pride and blindness to the world around us.

There is a dark reverse to this thing called pride.  Sometimes our pride of community or of self can blind us to the world around us.  G-d has pride in the world around us.  We need to remember G-d’s pronouncement as each component of creation issued forth from G-d’s mouth – “And G-d saw that it was good.”  Its goodness didn’t need us to make it good, or to provide for anything to make it good.  G-d was proud of its goodness.  To understand why Sirach and Proverbs, the Psalms and Jesus comment on pride is to know the reverse side of pride – the not-so-nice side of pride.  There’s a great Greek word to describe this troublesome nature of pride.  The word is “hybris” and it is best illustrated in the story of the Tower of Babel.  In order to prove their prowess and pride, humans attempt to build a tower that will reach up to heaven, to the gods.  Of course it is all put to naught as the people in the story are struck with another source of pride – language.  We might substitute other aspects of ourselves that lead to the blindness of pride: our community, our color, our culture, our possessions, our country, our gender, our education, our social standing, well, you get the idea.

Our pride can lead us to a blindness of the needs of the others that surround us; to the hunger and poverty that may be close to us but unseen or realized by us.  That is why the Sacred Space ministry is so important not only for those who are served by us, but for our own ability to witness to our community as well.  There is a pride that will not let us give, and there is an equal pride that will not let us receive.  So many tell me about how exhilarated they are when they sit down with those whom they are about to feed, and discover the humanity of the other.  We are joined, hopefully in the pride of being human, but not in the blind pride that separates us from others. 

Jesus advises us how to live with our brothers and sisters, how not to let our pride disconnect us from them.  It is easy, he says, to connect with our peers, the people whom we like.  The theology of the situation goes beyond the connections that we recognize to the connections and relationships that sometimes elude us.  It is easy, Jesus says, to invite friends – for there is the promise of reciprocation and repayment.  But what about those who cannot repay, whose need is such that they need our invitation?  Is it possible that our sense of pride and self often blocks our invitation to those who need what we have to give?

Pride Common to Our Baptism

Let me tell you a story.  I went to college with a young man who was very wealthy.  What bothered me about him was his habit of affecting poverty.  He dressed poorly, had bad manners, was somewhat arrogant, and seemed to not respect others.  Me thinks he protested too much about his comfortable state in life.  At Eucharist one day, I looked up as I knelt in prayer after my own communion, and there came John.  He had just communed as well, and as my initial reactions to him kicked in they were met by a realization that he was carrying the body and blood of Christ as well.  He and I were related – shared a common pride granted to us in Baptism. 

The font!  As a counter to our own pride, or perhaps even as an additive to the positive side of pride we ought to visit the font each time that we come here.  The author of the letter to the Hebrews captures some of that which accrues to us at baptism – “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid.  What can anyone do to me?”  This is not pride that is born out of fear, but rather pride that is born in inclusion. 

When we peer into the font, we should see reflected back to us not only our own image, but also the countless faces of all who have died with Christ in its waters.  We are family and beyond that we live with a new name.  It used to be that the liturgy began with the phrase, “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”, and all signed themselves with the sign of the cross.  Then as now we entered the liturgy not as Michael Hiller or under our own names but with a new name – Father, Son, Holy Spirit.  It is a brazen and prideful act and it is one that G-d bids us do – to come in here in G-d’s name – to invite anyone to come in with G-d’s name. 

When you leave today, go to the font and touch the water and remember.  Remember who you really are – who we really are.  You know, that is what makes it easy for me to come into your midst as a stranger.  We are granted a genuine pride in our Baptism. We are family in baptism.

SDG