The Passions of the Soul | Pride

Friends, our teaching scripture this morning comes from Luke

Luke 18:9–14

chapter 18 verses 9 to 14. It says he also told this

parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were

righteous and regarded others with contempt. 2 men went up to

the temple to pray. 1A Pharisee and the other a tax collector.

The Pharisee standing by himself was praying.

Thus, God, I thank you that I am not like other people, thieves,

rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.

I fast twice a week. I give a tenth of all my income.

But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up

his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast, saying, God,

be merciful to me, a Sinner, I tell you, this man went down to

his home justified rather than the other.

For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who

humble themselves will be exalted.

This is the word of the Lord. It is good to see all of you

today. We were gone for a few weeks,

but it's good to be back. So I want to begin today by

talking about the 2006 Pixar film Cars.

I'm channeling Parker here, but with a less highbrow movie.

It chronicles the story of hotshot racer Lightning McQueen.

He's at the top of his career in the final for the coveted Piston

Cup. And the thing that I want to

point out is that he had real skill and real virtue.

He was very good at racing, but there was something about the

way in which he was good at racing that came at a cost.

So throughout the movie, you come to see that Lightning

McQueen is carrying a profound loneliness, a disconnection

where he can't really be seen and known by others because it's

competition that defines his life.

He had so indexed his identity to being better than everyone

else that he couldn't see the gift of others.

When he arrives in the town of Radiator Springs, it would never

cross his mind that there could be sources of life and growth

and good in this out of the way place.

His vision of the people of the town is so broken that he

doesn't even recognize that one of the most famous race cars in

the world is the judge of the town.

Lightning McQueen is so caught up in the passion of pride that

he can't see the reality of the life of those around him.

And the result is loneliness and disconnection and

purposelessness. Now, I'll set Lightning McQueen

to the side, but we'll return to Radiator Springs by the end of

the sermon. So we've been in a sermon series

over the past eight weeks. Hopefully you've been here for

some of them, but I do want to commend our podcast online if

you have not been here for them. There's been some really great

teachings, but over the last eight weeks we've been looking

at the passions. If you haven't been with us, or

if this is your first time, or if you just want to confess you

haven't been paying attention for the last two months, I don't

want to talk about the passions are the space in which God has

placed this energy in us, this outward movement towards the

world. They're this Nexus of emotions

and thoughts and energy. And it's really easy for us to

become in that space, overly attached to things of this

world. And our passions can become

disordered and take up this really big space in our lives.

And we find our lives. They are just going a little bit

off track. And so we've talked about some

things that maybe not everyone wants to talk about in church

every week. We've talked about lust and

gluttony and greed. We've introduced acedia and

despondency and anger. And last week, Parker talked to

us about Vainglory. And I think that part of why

revisiting some of these things is so helpful is that these

passions aren't parts of our life that are like 1 and done.

We don't wake up 1 morning and say, like, I've been completely

healed of greed. That's not a problem for me

anymore. I'm just going to go about my

life. No, these are places where we

come together to find ourselves over and over again in the

healing love of God. The healing of our passions

takes our whole lifetimes, but the good news and that taking

this time to just look at some of these ways in which our soul

is misaligned, is that God isn't surprised or disgusted by any of

it. God continues to view us with

compassion and care, and God never stops pouring out God's

love on us. And I think that's always has to

be our starting point for thinking about the passions.

We have to think about God's gracious love and care because

The thing is like, honestly looking at what's true about our

lives takes a lot of courage, and that courage is itself a

gift from God. And so this morning I'll be

wrapping up our series, but I hope that this isn't the end of

the work that God is doing, healing our hearts each and

every day. I'm going to continue conclude

the series by looking at the Passion of Pride.

So pride is something both the Bible and the spiritual

formation tradition have a lot to say about.

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams says

that most analysis of the passions and the destructive

impulses of the soul take pride as the root of everything that

goes wrong, which is why pride often comes either at the

beginning or the end of the lists.

So for our sermon series, we placed pride at the end.

It's a way of seeing that the passion of pride, you get tied

up in so many of the other passions replacing at the end

because it can be insidious, because pride can keep keep us

from actually looking at our lives in a way that we can

actually see what's going on with all of these other

passions. So to begin opening up our

thinking and our imagination about what pride might be for

us, I want to look at that parable from the Gospel of Luke

that Parker just read. Luke is the storyteller of the

gospel, gospel writers, and he captures these parables of

Jesus. Parables are just stories that

Jesus tells that help capture the imagination of his

listeners. When Jesus taught, it often

wasn't through direct statements, do this, don't do

this. But it's about these stories in

which the listener finds that the story itself is reading

their life. And so this parable is

introduced with the words. He also told this parable to

some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and

they regarded others with contempt.

So from right off the bat, Luke tells us what this parable is

for. It's for people who trusted in

themselves that they were righteous and regarded others

with contempt. So in the monastic tradition,

those two moves are the foundations of pride, trusting

in yourself and regarding others with contempt.

So throughout this series on the passions, we've talked about the

ways in which the passions are about a lack of vision.

When we're enthralled by a passion, we become unable to

truthfully see ourselves and to truthfully see others.

We get so caught up in these strong emotions and these

attachments that we lose our ability to embrace and see

reality. That's part of why, as I said is

so much ago a few minutes ago, that the tradition.

So pride is the passion that pervades all the others because

at its very base it's about a lack of vision.

It's the inability to see yourself rightly.

And as you don't see yourself rightly, you also become unable

to see others, which prevents you from being able to love.

So when we get stagged by pride, we become like Lightning

McQueen, unable to see the goodness that is surrounding us.

And we have not had the possibility to have these

connections in love with others. But at least part of the good

news I want you to hear this morning is that Jesus doesn't

abandoned those people who are caught up in pride, just like

Jesus doesn't abandoned us anytime we start to get a little

bit off track. Jesus wouldn't have been telling

this parable if there was for the people, if there wasn't an

ability to hear it rightly and to come to follow Jesus more

closely. There's good news in hearing

kind of a hard parable that shows ourselves to us.

So let's see what it's saying about pride this morning.

So two men went up to the temple to pray. 1A Pharisee and the

other a tax collector. The two men in this parable

aren't always the people you would have thought of as just

the epitome of pride. They're people who are honestly

trying to follow the ways of the Lord.

They're both in the temple praying, they're doing what they

should be doing, but they're not a pair that's likely to have

been together. So Pharisees believe in this

really strict observance of the law, a separation from the world

that they were afraid would pollute them.

And I think sometimes we see that a little negatively because

we're used to reading the New Testament.

But the Pharisees were really trying to swallow God

faithfully. They were trying to make sure

that they could keep the law, which they saw as a gift from

God. They were reform movement from a

temple that they believed had been captured by dreams of

nationalist power and collaboration with the Herodian

governors. They would have regularly gone

up to the temple to pray, earnestly seeking God.

Meanwhile, a tax collector would be a person who, rather than

resisting this collaboration with the Romans, had completely

given into it. In fact, this tax collector was

probably benefiting from the imperial occupation.

He derived his wealth and position from the ways in which

he would work to oppress his own people.

And we can easily look down on that too.

But I would also note that throughout the Gospels, the tax

collectors are some of the people who most often respond to

the call of Jesus. And this tax collector in

particular does seem to be moving towards God.

He is coming to the temple to pray.

So by starting a story with two men went up to the temple to

pray. 1A Pharisee and the other a tax collector.

Jesus is almost like giving us the opening of a joke.

It's like if a Pharisee and a tax collector walked into a bar.

What's going to happen? What will transpire?

Will it be humorous? Will it turn violent?

The original hearers likely weren't sure of what the outcome

would be. But then we arrive at the prayer

of the two people, which is really the heart of the parable.

We'll start by looking at the prayer of the Pharisee kind of

in depth, and then we'll turn back to the prayer of the tax

collector. It says the Pharisee, standing

by himself, was praying thus. God, I thank you that I am not

like other people, thieves, rogues, adulterers or even like

this tax collector. I fast twice a week.

I give a tenth of all my income. So this is the part of the

parable where I really start to see the outworking of pride.

When the Pharisee comes before the temple to pray, where does

he begin? He doesn't look towards God, he

doesn't look towards himself and the work that God is doing in

his heart. He instead starts to look at all

the people around him. We see that pride has consumed

the Pharisee to such an extent that when he comes to pray, he

can't even talk about himself. When this Pharisee talks to God,

he begins in the logic of comparison.

He says, I thank you that I am not like other people, the

people that he isn't like. He starts with these kind of

theoretical imagine people. I'm not like the thieves and the

rogues and the adulterers. He begins with the people that

pretty much everyone in his society, and maybe even in our

society, would say are bad. Of course, we shouldn't be

thieves or rogues or adulterers. Those are social sins that are

ripping apart the fabric of society.

And from so here, right at the beginning, we see that this

Pharisee thinks that he is preserving the right function of

the world. He's not like those people.

And I wonder this morning how we might participate in the same

kind of fiction. We think of ourselves.

We might begin by saying, well, of course we aren't like those

other people. We aren't like those people who

don't welcome immigrants, those people who seek selfish gain

rather than openness to the other, or those people who have

lost all of their moral compass and the pursuit of power.

I want to be really clear. Those are not things we should

do. The virtues are a gift from God

and we should celebrate whenever we find them in our hearts.

Dorotheus of Gaza, an early monastic Abbot in the desert,

when talking about this passage, says that when the Pharisees go

on to say when he says I fast twice weekly and I give away

1/10 of my income, that he was rightly seeing those as good

things. He's doing these good things and

he's pursuing God, but he's not stopping to give God credit for

those things. They are the things that he is

doing. And yet there is this one thing

that makes him not perfect, and that is at the beginning of his

prayer, even though he gives a 10th of his income and even

though he prays regularly, he starts by saying, God, I thank

you that I am not like other people.

This looking down on others is the pride that keeps the

Pharisee from a life of connection and relationship and

love. Because although he begins with

these theoretical people that he's not like, he's not like the

thieves and the rogues and the adulterers, he finally comes

home to rest in this very specific person, this tax

collector who's standing right beside him.

So the problem with pride is that it prevents us from the

love of others and our desire to stand on our own, under our own

power. The Pharisee can't love the

neighbor, this tax collector, right in front of him, because

pride has bloomed into being unable to see the image of God

in this tax collector who is here at the temple praying

alongside with him. So where does that show up for

us? Maybe at our pride at holding

the right political views. We find ourselves discounting

the relative who would rather not love.

Maybe out of our pride at having our lives together and not

needing help from others, We find ourselves discounting and

judging that person who we think makes unwise financial

decisions. So maybe out of our pride at our

theological positions and rightness, we find ourselves

unable to see the Spirit moving among those of our Christian

brothers and sisters with whom we disagree.

You know, I've spent probably too much of my emotional time

and energy there. And I think that's where pride

usually starts. We begin by seeing our own

goodness. We see something that God has

given us that is good and right and a gift.

But then when we see our goodness, we immediately start

comparing it to others. We start with comparing it to

these theoretical people that we know we're not like.

But in the end, it always comes down to our inability to love

the person who's right there in front of us.

When we hold ourselves on this moral high ground, we end up

without relationships and without connection.

We end up lonely because no one else can measure up to the

standards that we have set, and so we end up like the Pharisee

that the passage says is standing by himself.

We are justified in our own eyes, but we're utterly devoid

of connection and love. We're like Lightning McQueen

sitting alone in his trailer, A success, but with no one to

call. But also, I just want to give a

little word of caution because I think that this dynamic of pride

can start to reproduce itself sometimes.

We of course know that we would never show up at church and say,

God, I thank you that I'm not like this tax collector.

But then maybe we can also end up in a place where we say, God,

I thank you that I'm not like this Pharisee because that's

what we do, right? We're not about judging.

We don't identify with the Pharisee because we know we

aren't justified by our own actions and we still got caught

up in pride at being self-righteous.

So maybe we're saying, God, I thank you that I am not like

those people who think they're not like the Pharisee and so on

and so on and so on. Because the problem isn't about

who the other person is that we're not like.

It's about the dynamic of pride, about the looking down and

judgement on the other. And I know that probably just

seems like what it's like to be human.

How can we not end up in this competitive rat race, always

keeping in this internal ranking of where we stand?

As long as we're not at the bottom, we're OK.

As long as we're not like the other, whoever we imagine that

other to be. It's exhausting and it's lonely

and at times it feels like there's no way off this hamster

wheel of comparison. What hope is there for us?

Well, I think this parable also shows us what it begins to be,

to be healed of the passion of pride.

In contrast to the Pharisee, we find the tax collector.

But the tax collector standing far off would not even look up

to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, God be

merciful to me, a Sinner. This is the picture of the

healing of pride. And it comes in this really

unlikely place, this tax collector.

And that's so often the picture that we find in the Gospels.

The Kingdom of God seems to be really present and closely and

just unexpectedly there in the lives of those where we don't

expect it to be those who are standing in need because that's

what this prayer of the tax collector is about.

It's about acknowledging his need.

I think sometimes when we read this passage with our 21st

century years, we have trouble with this prayer of the tax

collector. We don't want to take our advice

on our inner life from someone who beats his breast and doesn't

even want to look up towards heaven.

We worry that what he is feeling is shame, not humility.

And that's something to rightly be worried about.

Shame is destructive of our sense of connection too.

But I don't think that's what Jesus is encouraging in this

parable. The tax collector isn't just

trapped in this space of shame where he thinks that he's just

bad at his core, no matter what he has done.

I think that's what shame is. It seems to me that what's going

on for this tax collector is that he is seeing his life

rightly. He knows that he has done wrong.

As a tax collector, he was complicit in the oppression of

his people. It would have been almost

impossible to be morally right in the system when which he

worked. I wonder how many of us work in

systems like that too. But what's amazing about this

passage, and what makes me think that it's not shame, is that

even in the midst of this brokenness, in the sinfulness of

his life, the tax collector doesn't retreat into himself,

away from others, standing all alone.

Rather, he comes before God, taking what he knows to be true

about his life. And I think that takes deep and

real courage, which is a gift from God, not like shame.

So what is the difference between this Pharisee and this

tax collector? The tax collector knows that he

is dependent upon the mercy of God.

I think that reveals to us some of these deep inner workings of

pride. Rowan Williams argues that the

root of pride is a refusal to accept the truth of our own

dependence. Pride is a refusal to accept

that everything we are depends upon the mercy of God and God's

ongoing work of creating and sustaining and renewing us in

love at each and every moment. Pride really gets going when we

imagine ourselves at the beginning of the passage when it

talks about trusting in ourselves that we're righteous.

The trusting in ourselves tries to believe that we are

self-sufficient for everything we need under our own power.

Pride is about the myth of the self-sufficient man, and I use

man there deliberately because the tradition of this heresy of

self-sufficiency has always looked down on women because of

their association with the dependence of children.

It's really easy for us to believe that we have to have all

of our stuff together. But the trouble there.

So we find we don't actually have very much room left for God

then, which is why the monastic tradition and really just the

whole of Christian theology is so worried and nervous about

pride. When we imagine that we can put

ourselves in the right, when we ignore the truth of our

dependence, we find that we don't actually really need God.

We miss the truth that it is indeed good and right and

flourishing to need God's help. It is good and right and

flourishing to have a need and to share that need with others,

to not be able to do everything on our own.

Because the myth of the self-sufficient man doesn't only

disconnect us from God, it disconnects us from others too.

Because relationships need some level of dependence and

vulnerability to work. If we have everything we need,

we don't actually have space for others.

Maybe we can make business partnerships.

We're probably not making friendships or falling in love.

But part of what is so challenging about this myth of

self-sufficiency? Our Rage Against our dependence,

what I'm calling our pride is that it's so rewarded by our

society. It's really good if you don't

need help from others, is what we are told even when we're

little children. But I want to say it's not only

about our society. Who's rewarded in this ancient

society as well, or Jesus wouldn't have even been telling

this parable. So the beginning of recognizing

the passion of pride is to begin to lean into and to live into

the truth of our dependence. And that's really hard.

It's hard to acknowledge that you don't have it all together

and that maybe you're in the same boat as some of those

people that you don't want to be like.

Because pride, pride can't bear to see or to live in the reality

of need. The beginning of Lightning

Mcqueen's healing and reintegration into society from

the wilderness of Radiator Springs.

By acknowledging that he needs help.

He doesn't know how to turn right, to go left.

He needs someone to show him. So we use pride to prop

ourselves up by taking comfort and what is actually good about

our lives. And rather than celebrating

that, we use it to put down the good that is in others.

But we start to overcome this pride by recognizing that all of

us, each and every one of us, are in such need of the mercy of

God. And that's what the tax

collector in this parable realizes.

He is acutely aware when he turns to God that he humbly asks

for mercy. So Jesus concludes the parable

with, I tell you, this man went down to his home, justified

rather than the other. This conclusion of the parable

sums up the great reversal of the Gospel of Luke, that those

who are seen as far from God are actually close and beloved by

Him, and that those who think they are close are really the

ones who are far away. This is how we come to

experience healing from pride. It's not about trying really

hard to be humble. It's not about taking this

really objective and scientific view of our lives.

We have like a survey where we can tell what's actually true.

It's not about inflating the reality of others or deflating

what they are like. We come to heal pride by

standing before God and saying, this is what's true about me.

I'm not hiding who I am, either through an inflation of my own

ego or by putting down others. I am here in my brokenness, in

my uncertainty, in my sinfulness, even when I want to

do it. And as we stand here in that

way, I think we might be able to begin to find the healing of

God. Because as the parable says,

those who humble themselves will be exalted.

God isn't trying to love some ideal version of yourself where

you have it all put together. He's trying to love who you

really are, even the you that is so consumed by pride.

I think that this story shows us what it looks like.

It's an important one. So there's a story that just

follows this parable immediately.

Parker didn't read it, so you have to listen to me.

Luke goes into the story without any transition from this story

about this parable. It says people were bringing

even infants to him, that he might touch them.

When the disciples saw it, they sternly ordered them not to do

it. But Jesus called to them and

said, let the little children come to me and do not stop them.

For it is to such as these that the Kingdom of God belongs.

So I think this story, we actually really struggle to hear

it rightly in the modern world because our primary image of

children is 1 of innocence and great value and care.

But that wasn't the story in Jesus world about children.

Rather in the ancient world children didn't have any value

really. They were expendable and not

really all that important. Who's morally acceptable to

abandon unwanted children? So I think what Jesus is getting

at here in this story is the image not of the infant as

innocent and valued, but as one who is deeply in need.

Someone who isn't valued by society.

Someone who isn't seen as important, but someone who just

really needs help. The Kingdom of God belongs to

those who come, not because of what they have done, not because

of their pride, not because of their goodness, because of God's

unmerited favour and love. And that's when we come to the

end of pride. When we acknowledge that we

stand before God and before others in need of help.

Maybe we can start to think of ourselves as infants, the

infant. What the infant does to receive

care is actually very small. At most it's a cry.

And that's what we're looking for as we turn towards God this

morning. Maybe through our series you've

noticed something that is in need of healing.

Or maybe today you've recognized that your pride has made it

actually really difficult to see where you need that healing.

The good news is that God is the one who's doing the healing

here. All we have to do is like a

child or like an infant, just raise our hands and open

ourselves to be loved by God. Amen.

So I think we're going to do the liturgy we've been doing each

week. So if you all would stand and

say that with me, I'm the first person.

So let's all say this together. So I am infinitely loved by God,

and God's infinite love is in the process of healing

everything in me that clings to false things.

The invitation of God is to allow God to be the divine

physician. The medicine of God is God's own

love poured out into my heart through the Holy Spirit.

So now we're going to turn towards some ministry time.

The worship team want to start to make their way up.

We're going to have people to pray for you on the sides, like

Parker has something. There's a couple things that

were kind of coming to my mind listening to Thomas.

The first one is just that thing about I almost had this image of

someone trying to sort of steer their life in a particular

direction. Like you're gripping the wheel,

you're trying to sort of force an outcome, whether it's maybe

in your work or in your parenting or some other thing.

But for you that that image of trying to steer your life in a

particular direction is like vivid and resonates.

And so I would love to to pray for you.

And the other thing is just, I'm aware of a few people that I've

talked to even already this morning who have pain in their

body. It's just like a nagging pain,

like a little bit of, you know, whatever, like elbow pain or

arthritis or whatever it is. And I think I think God would

maybe want to heal some people this morning.

So I would love to also pray for you, the team would love to pray

for you if you're just experiencing some some little

pains in your body.