by CCW | 15 March 2009 14:02
The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, preached this sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent[1], based on the Gospel reading, St Luke 11:14-28.
All sermons should come with an advisory, a warning that this may be dangerous to your health, either because it is too underwhelming or too demanding, too controversial or too boring. Or too long or just plain impossible. Today’s sermon is all of the above. You may want to ponder the Athanasian Creed or the Thirty-Nine Articles; if you can find them in the Prayer Book before the end of the sermon, extra bonus points and kudos to you! An advisory, I suppose, is most appropriate for today. It is the 15th of March, after all. Beware the Ides of March!
This gospel is the necessary counter to our greatest fault, spiritual pride. The capital sin of the seven capital or chief sins, we might say, pride is the head of all the deadly sins. It is actually the principle that is at work in all of “the seven deadly sins,” to use the categories which belong to the Christian moral tradition. Why? Because pride is the explicit denial of the grace of God without which we are indeed dead in ourselves.
“Ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord,” St. Paul explains to the Ephesians. No strangers to the forms of pagan darkness, they had need to be reminded of the conditions of our journeying. “Walk in love … walk as children of light,” he says, knowing your darkness from which you have been delivered, knowing the life to which you have been called in Christ Jesus. For “the fruit of the light” he adds parenthetically is “goodness and righteousness and truth.” He exhorts us to “have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness.” In a way, it is about waking up to the reality of our life in Christ. In the desert light of Lent, we are meant to see things more clearly, both the good and the bad.
Critical to that awakening is the clearer recognition of evil and of God’s countervailing grace. We deceive ourselves so easily! We deceive ourselves in thinking that we can do what is needed to get our souls in order. There is, quite simply, the presumption of pride that we can do it ourselves. We forget the premise of the Lenten journey: it is not about us; it is about Christ in us. And for a very good reason. Left to ourselves and our own devices we are nothing.
This compelling gospel story should shatter the idea that it is all about ourselves. We didn’t make ourselves and we can’t fix ourselves. This challenges all the promises and premises of the Do-It-Yourself Schools of spirituality that are about everything except God. A New York Times editorial some months back noted an interesting difference between those who call themselves ‘religious’ and those who claim to be ‘spiritual’. Interestingly, those who call themselves spiritual show no or little commitment to others, so absorbed and obsessed in themselves they are. Beware of the spiritual ones!
The problem, quite simply, is that there is the constant temptation and tendency for all of us to focus on ourselves. In a way, it is a double problem: we think we know what we don’t know and we think we can do what we can’t do. There is a kind of paradox at work in this. On the one hand, it is wanted that we should come to identify our own weaknesses and shortcomings; on the other hand, there is the danger of presuming that we know ourselves better than we do. The profounder point is that God knows us better than we know ourselves and, while it is wanted that we should see light in his light, we have to acknowledge our own blindness, whether it is the limitation of our knowing or whether it is the perversity of our wills. In any event, we are as the poet, William Wordsworth, put it, “too much with ourselves.”
Those who know me, know that I am quite skeptical of ecclesiastical pronouncements on matters of politics and economics (not to mention theology, too!) and very critical of the Church assuming directly partisan or political roles on the issues du jour, however much Christian moral and social doctrine demands the Church’s voice in contemporary affairs. My concern is that it be the Church’s voice and not some cipher of the various factions and parties in the political landscape of the day. It was the old joke that the Anglican Church was merely the Conservative Party in prayer. That at least, had the merit of acknowledging the Conservatives need for prayer. Nowadays it might seem more like Chardonnay Socialists, the NDP, having a meet-and-greet, otherwise known as passing the peace!
Ecclesiastical pronouncements on economic matters worry me the most, being mindful of the English Prime Minister’s retort upon hearing of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s remarks and suggestions about the economic and social policies of the English Parliament in the 1930s, namely, that perhaps a parliamentary committee should be convened to consider a revision of the Athanasian Creed! Wonderful! At least, the Prime Minister knew and could assume that every one else knew about the Athanasian Creed. And us? Today’s leaders?
Yet, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has offered, in his Cardiff Lecture on the Economy, a most careful reflection on the contemporary economic distresses that confront us in the global community. Quite appropriately, his analysis is largely restricted to the moral and ethical discourse and aims at unearthing some of the early assumptions of economic life that have, undeniably, their root in Christian culture. He points out the ways in which certain sensibilities have been eroded, especially in the face of the “market state,” to use Phillip Bobbit’s descriptive phrase. The market-state is the latest development of the modern constitutional state.
The paradox of the market-state, as Williams clearly sees, is that a state that rests its legitimacy upon its capacity to satisfy consumer demands and maximize choices presupposes a form of maximized control and minimized risk that is simply unrealistic, unmanageable and impossible to be realised. Following Bobbit, the Archbishop recognizes that this overlooks two fundamentals of economic reality; first, the inexorable truth about scarcity as a feature of a materially limited world – economics is, after all, always the realm of the more and the less – and secondly, that real productivity (not virtual) and added value are required for the market itself. Forget these categories and one is into a great deal of trouble indeed. At the heart of the problem is the assumption that one can somehow be free of the limitations of the finite and can somehow ignore the evil of the human heart, that somehow we are on the threshold of a “brave, new world.” It is not his phrase but it captures the mindset of the much of the last thirty years or so of globalization.
The problem, as the Archbishop sees it, and here I think he is quite perceptive, is not with our materialism and greed but our pride. He makes the convincing point that “we are a culture that is resentful about material reality, hungry for anything and everything that distances us from the constraints of being a physical animal subject to temporal processes, to uncontrollable changes and to sheer accident.” In a way, he is saying that in our hubris, our pride, we have forgotten the inescapable conditions of our creatureliness, let alone the awareness of the destruction and devastation that our willfulness causes. Pride, not greed, is the real problem, the idea that somehow our generation and world is so superior to all other eras such that for us there are no limits. This is the folly of pride to which, no doubt, greed has led us. In the traditions of the Egyptian desert, acquisitiveness, or greed, was indeed a great sin but underlying it, is pride and, in our time, the element of pride has come to dominate more and more. Everything is meant to serve my immediate self-interest. What is missing is any sort of “ethical seriousness” about the other, especially the poor and needy.
In such a view there is no room for another. Ultimately, pride does close us off; ultimately, pride does isolate us from others and from the created order. And that is just the point that a principled Christian witness should address. “Acquisitiveness is, in the Christian monastic tradition, associated with pride, the root of all human error and failure; pride, which is most clearly evident in the refusal to acknowledge my lack of control over my environment, my illusion that I can shape the world according to my will. And if that is correct, then the origin of economic dysfunction and injustice,” the Archbishop goes on to say, “is pride.” This is to speak in the moral and ethical categories belonging to our Christian witness. It is refreshing, at least to my mind, to hear it said.
Beelzebul is the prince of devils in the older Jewish lexicon of spiritual terms. William Golding, at the height of the Cold War, uses the term to great effect by way of one of its translations, “Lord of the Flies,” in a novel by that name. The association of the devil and “Lord of the Flies” has to do with death and decay, the consequence of turning away from light and life, the consequence of discovering “the darkness of man’s heart.”
Here in today’s gospel we are reminded that we contend against real spiritual forces. There are real struggles in our souls for what ultimately defines us. We cannot take the grace of God for granted for then it ceases to be grace; we turn it into a mechanism for our manipulation. In this we fool ourselves and find ourselves in contradiction with ourselves. “Nothing is more hidden than true grace”, the 17th century puritan, Richard Baxter, observes, “we understand it not certainly in another, hardly in ourselves.”
It will only be by “the finger-grace” of God that we may be saved from ourselves by choosing to turn and repent, that we might “walk in love … as the children of light.” That turning and choosing is the miracle of grace, God’s will working upon our wills to will what he wills for us. It is about us and God and that can only be where we are with one another and not in the dreadful isolation of our pride. There is the need, as the Archbishop puts it “for a comprehensive sense of belonging in a world – and a world that is neither self-explanatory nor self-sufficient, but is transparent to a deeper level of agency or liberty, that level that is called God by the religious traditions of humanity, … a world [that] exists because of the free act of generous love by God.”
The Gospel shows us how easily we call good evil, accusing Jesus of casting out demons by Beelzebul. It goes on to show us the dangers of our own self-will, unconstrained and unawares of the grace of God, without which “the last state of that man is [indeed] worse than the first,” and we are that man. Yet to be aware of this is precisely our good, precisely on this day.
Fr. David Curry,
Lent III, March 15th, 2009
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2009/03/15/sermon-for-third-sunday-in-lent/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.