Sermon manuscript:
There is a very old Christian saying: “Pride is the queen of
sins.” Pride is at the top. It is unimaginably damaging and sinister. Pride is
worse than other sins. It is worse than visiting prostitutes. It is worse than
wasting all your money. It is the biggest factor in people failing to fear,
love, and trust in God. Pride is a hardening and contributing factor to other
sins. I suspect that 99% of the people who go to hell are proud. Only 1% are
broken and in despair like poor Judas. There is no greater hindrance to saving
faith. It is therefore useful for Christians to learn about pride.
We will consider how pride fights against the keeping of the
Ten Commandments with its two tables of the Law. Then we will see how God
breaking our pride is a God-sent. There is no better preparation he can give us
for believing in the Gospel.
We will begin with pride and the commandments. Pride fights
against the first three commandments, the first table of the Law, the
commandments that have to do with God. At its root, pride is worship of one’s
self. The first commandment says that we are only to worship the Lord our God.
Worshipping the Lord our God is unnatural for us. It is natural for us to
worship ourselves.
Pride and self-worship afflicts all human beings—young and
old, good and bad, those in high places and those in prisons. Smart, beautiful,
rich, charming, honorable—glittering specimens of the human race—these people can’t
help but gaze in the mirror and be happy with what they see. You might think
that these supermen and superwomen have good reason to be proud. We are even
taught that we are supposed to strive to be like them, then we can worship
ourselves too. But you should know better than that.
What does anybody have that has not been given to him or her?
There is nothing that anybody has which has not been given by the Creator. Just
to prove that point, when God is gracious, he will sometimes take away those
gifts. Until he does that, though, we believe in ourselves. We believe in our
smarts, our hard work, our savings, our respectable life, and so on. We believe
that we are entitled to blessings and happiness because of what we have and how
we have acted. Believing in yourself is very different than believing in the
Lord your God. It is a contradiction of the first commandment.
Very quickly I’d like to mention how pride fights against
the second and third commandments. Pride causes us to not make use of the Name
of the Lord our God. When things are going swimmingly, when we are super-duper
awesome, what use have we for prayer?
It is a similar story with the third commandment. What use
has a person for God’s Word when they are doing fine on their own, thank you
very much? God’s Word is boring. Plus it doesn’t appear to increase wealth,
physical fitness, or make anybody get ahead in life. For that the proper books
of study are self-help books. Those are the kinds of books that will make you fabulously
wealthy or healthy, that is to say, blessed.
Pride is also very destructive for keeping the second table
of the law, the commandments that have to do with our fellow human beings.
Pride makes us worship ourselves, and we would like it if everyone else would
join in on that worship of us too. We’d like to be recognized as the glittering
specimens of humanity that we are. Everyone wants to be the smartest, the
prettiest, the wealthiest, the strongest, and so on.
Thus we must make our case accordingly. Everybody else has
to be degraded, while we have to be promoted. I am not primarily talking about
how we speak out loud to one another. We were all taught that this kind of
thing is impolite. It will hamper you on your way to the top. I’m talking about
how we converse within ourselves in our soul.
If you think about it (normally we do not think about it),
but if you think about it, it is appalling what we say within ourselves. We
render the harshest judgments. Nobody is spared. Everybody else is doing it
wrong. You, and you only, are doing it right. You’ve made judgements about me,
and I’ve made judgements about you. If we were to make all the horrible
internal dialogue that we engage in public—if we actually told other people
what we have thought of them—we wouldn’t have any friends!
We render harsh judgments internally even with those we like
and love the best—our best friends, our brothers and our sisters. Think of this
even: We do this with our spouse—the one with whom we are one flesh! If we didn’t
hold back and keep private the judgments that we make the divorce courts would
be even busier than they already are.
Understand that I am not advocating that we should make our
private, evil judgments public. They are already more public than they should
be. As we grow up sin grows up too. We learn how to make our evil judgments
public, but in a subtle way. That way we can continue on with our evil, but
won’t get called out for it. Thus we learn how to make public our judgments
with raised eyebrows, with snubbing actions, with double-weighted words. If
only we could shut up these more subtle things like we’ve learned how to keep
our mouths from speaking plain judgements! We would have a pleasanter place to
live. So I’m not advocating that we should make our evil internal dialogue
public. What I’m pointing out is that we are evil.
Our pride makes us evil. We are easy on ourselves and hard
on others. The way it should be is the other way around. We should be hard on
ourselves and easy on others. We hate—and I mean hate—it when anything negative
is pointed out about us. We secretly love it when negative things are pointed
out about others. We love to hear good things about us. We get bored when we
hear good things about others.
The world thinks that we have made so much progress. We know
so many things about so many things. We have made zero progress, however, when
it comes to the most important thing that makes us all miserable. We’ve made
zero progress in combating pride. In fact, all our progress in other areas has
only made us prouder. Not only do most people consider pride not to be a sin,
they consider it to be a virtue. Books get written, curricula in schools get
formulated, for the very purpose of making us prouder. And this is some
teaching that we can all really get behind, because it is the very thing that
our flesh can’t get enough of.
Pride is the queen of sins.
In order to slaughter this queen God has been known to take
some drastic actions. If God is gracious he will humble us. If we are wise we will
use this for our benefit.
Consider what we heard in our Gospel reading today. The
worst thing that could have happened to that younger, prodigal son would be
that somehow, some way, the money kept flowing in. Maybe he made some good
investments or something so that he could continue on with his enjoyable
lifestyle. He would have continued with his spiritual slumber while having a
good time.
For him God’s wrath was God’s mercy. God stripped him to the
bone. God broke his pride. He was ready and willing to accept a whole different
arrangement with his father than he had before. Before he proudly asked his
father for his inheritance so that he could be done with him. After God broke
his pride he was willing to work as one of his father’s hired hands. In this
way he was prepared to receive the grace and mercy of his father and appreciate
it.
The older brother, on the other hand, did not have his pride
broken. Furthermore, this older brother went further. He wrapped up his pride
with pious looking clothes and pious sounding phrases. Thereby he doubly
insulated himself from actually being converted like his little brother was. He
doesn’t think he has done anything wrong. He can’t think of any sin. And
perhaps we can grant him that in a very limited sense. Perhaps we can grant
that he hasn’t done too much wrong—outwardly.
Outwardly he has followed the rules somewhat. Outwardly he
has obeyed his father somewhat. But how are things inwardly? We actually catch a glimpse of that at the end of the
reading. The older brother hates everybody. He hates his father. He hates his
brother. He thinks his father is stingy and mean—not even giving him a goat, to
say nothing about a rich and tender grain-fed calf! And then, who does he give such nice gifts to? His good-for-nothing
brother. He probably wasted all his money on prostitutes! I’ve never wasted my money on prostitutes. I deserve everything I
have and more.
The example of this older brother is of special concern to
us who gather around God’s Word and Sacraments. People who live to pursue
pleasure will go to hell. I’m sure this makes the devil happy. But I wonder if
it doesn’t make him even happier if he is able to take people to hell who are
life-long members of congregations who come to church every Sunday. I have to
believe this gives him more pleasure. We are people who are surrounded by the
riches of the Father. “Everything that is mine is yours,” he says. And
yet by our pride and judgments of others, while neglecting judgment of ourselves,
reveal our true colors. We show to whom we belong.
If you cannot empathize with any and every sinner, then you
are no Christian. If you believe that you are above other people, then you are
no Christian. You must understand yourself to be a full member of the common class
of “sinner.” I’m not urging you just to pretend that you are a sinner, or that
you should just say it so as to please me. Pretending or faking won’t cut it.
You must understand and believe that you are not better than anybody else.
Supposing that you were better, supposing that you did
manage to keep every other commandment, pride is still the queen of sins. This
finely dressed lady will drag you down into hell just as surely as any other sin
that doesn’t wear as nice of clothes. That’s what makes her so tricky. She
doesn’t look half as bad as more grotesque things. However, there is no worse
commandment to break than the first one. Whenever we compare ourselves to
others and sing our own praises, we are worshipping ourselves.
May God be gracious to us and continue to break our pride
until we have safely made it into the grave. Pride attacks everyone. Old people
do not outgrow it. In fact, old people only grow more prone to pride. There is
no other sin that is so destructive to faith. This is why it rightly has been said
to be the queen of sins.
I’d like to close with yet another Christian saying that I
have gotten from somebody else, who said that he got it from yet another. He
said, “The task of evangelism is one beggar telling another beggar where to get
bread.” Beggars can’t be too proud. Christians are beggars. The only difference
between a Christian and a non-Christian is that the Christian has been told
where there is a heavenly Father who will run out to greet us, throw his arms
around our neck, kiss us, put a robe on us, a ring on our finger, and will
celebrate and make merry. He who was lost is found. He who was dead is alive
again.
No comments:
Post a Comment