Sermon for the Third Sunday after Trinity
“For God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble.”
Humility is not only the counter to pride; it is the condition of our access to God’s grace, the necessary condition of our being raised up or exalted, albeit “in due time” and not without “hav[ing] suffered a while.” Grace is what truly and rightly defines and dignifies our humanity. The Epistle and Gospel for today speak profoundly to lessons which have ever to be learned and relearned, again and again, and certainly for us in our world and day.
Just recently, The Economist magazine included an insert from its sister magazine, Intelligent Life. The first article asked the question “What is the deadliest sin?” and provided a series of very thoughtful reflections by a number of notable writers and thinkers on envy, pride, ingratitude, greed, gluttony, sloth and lust. Not bad. Six out of the classical and traditional seven deadly sins! Though ingratitude is a serious problem it is not one of the seven deadly sins classically speaking. It is wrath that is the one sin that was curiously omitted. I say ‘curiously’ since wrath is such a dominant feature in the destructive nihilism of contemporary culture and so it seems odd that it should have been left out. There are no end of examples of wrath in our contemporary world, after all. But what is more remarkable is that the very idea and language of sin and of the seven deadly sins should be the subject of a sophisticated contemporary journal.
It suggests at the very least that the moral discourse about sin which is part and parcel of the Christian faith is very much needed in our present times and is there to be recovered and reclaimed. Pride, as the novelist Will Self points out, “is so much a part of every one of us that we can’t see how deadly it is – it inheres in our very self-consciousness, and has metastasized through the body politic.” That is a profoundly theological view. He goes on to argue that “pride is paramount” in the modern economy, in what he calls “the commoditisation of pride,” the sense that we think we deserve what we want “because we are worth it.” Even more, he shows how pride “is the three-personed god we have made of ourselves,” which he describes wonderfully as “the Big-I-Am; King Baby, Me-Me-Me,” what he calls “the true trinity of the modern psyche.” Utterly remarkable. The descriptive force of this is undeniable but what is the prescription? Humility.
