A New Way To Be Human

"A New Way To Be Human"
Matthew 6:1-6


Psychotherapist Philip Chard says of pride that given “our national plague of entitlement, combined with our go it alone approach to the world, I’d say we’re full of ourselves.”  He went on to write that as a country, “...we are overrun with narcissists, egomaniacs, and spoiled brats.”

I thought about what Chard was saying.  I wonder if a country is defined by who we emulate.  We honor and respect our military, police and firefighters.  But we emulate movie stars, entertainers, and sports figures--most of whom are self-addicted.  I mean, how many award shows does one profession need?  There are no award shows for plumbers:  “And now the award for the best installed trap in a home setting goes to…”  Why do singers and movie and television personalities need so many award shows, serving to make them even more self-infatuated?

Pope Gregory the Great, who first created this list of the Seven Deadly Sins, wrote, that in pride, man “favors himself in his thought and walks with himself...and silently utters his own praises.”  But now with our country’s rampant narcissism, there are no silent praises.  People hire publicists to do that for them.

In Jesus’ day, he only had to talk about people praying in public places for show.  Now people act in every negative way imaginable, just to keep themselves in the spotlight and national attention.

People like Whitney Houston.  Dying in her own bathwater after snorting cocaine, an addiction she evidently never kicked, gets continued headlines.  A lot of those headlines talk about her deep faith.  If she had such a deep faith, why is she snorting cocaine?  One could ask the question if she planned her death in a sick way to get more publicity.

Like Kurt Cobain, the lead singer for the rock band, Nirvana.  He committed suicide back in 1994, and left a tortured, angst-ridden suicide note that closed with the words:

Thank you all from the pit of my burning, nauseous stomach for your letters and concern during the past years. I'm too much of an erratic, moody baby! I don't have the passion anymore, and so remember, it's better to burn out than to fade away.
Peace, love, empathy.
Kurt Cobain

Addicted to publicity, even in death, the prideful find ways to self-destruct in self-promotion.  One last string of headlines.

Pride has been the major target for prophets, priests and church theologians, almost since day one.  It is the king and queen of sin, the foundation upon which all other sins are based.  The reason is, as St. Augustine wrote, “Pride encourages man to displace God.”  In that way, pride is not the thing worshipped in place of God; it’s the subtle but destructive inner voice that is trying to distract us thoroughly from God and towards ourselves.

It’s been a proven fact that ominously excessive pride, both individual and collective, has preceded the downfall of the world’s great empires.  Based on Philip Chard’s evaluation of our country, mentioned at the start of this message, it does make one wonder if our country is headed for a great fall--and none of the kings men will be able to put Humpty Dumpty together again.  Pride, as one of the Seven Deadly Sins does seem to be a yardstick for measuring the health of an individual or a culture.


You and I, wrestling with pride, is what I want to concentrate on this morning.  The more I read about pride, the more I began to see that it has to do with struggling to understand our own humanness.  Who am I?  How do I define myself?  The other deadly sins (anger, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, sloth) are all ways I interact with the world.  But pride isn’t about interaction.  It’s about definition.  Self-definition.

That self-definition is an ongoing process.  But it seems to be ramped up at a couple of strategic stages in our life growth.  As three to five year olds.  As adolescents.  And at mid-life, our 40’s and 50’s.  Those are the times we are most active in defining and redefining who we are.

We seem to have two choices in how we construct our self-definition.  God’s way; or our way.  There doesn’t seem to be a third option.  Each time we struggle with how we are going to define ourselves, those are the two choices.  And here’s the deal:  If we choose to go our way, we will lose both ourselves and God.  To choose to go God’s way, at first, it appears we lose ourselves.  But in the end we gain ourselves back.  We are given ourselves back, by God, but we are different.  It’s a different self than if we had just chosen our own way--which, by the way, is the way of pride.

This inner, self-defining struggle goes on in what one author calls our own, “pathetic, little, inner conversations.”  We have conversations with ourselves.  In those conversations, we’re trying to answer those basic questions of selfhood:  Who am I?  How do I matter in the world?  How do I make myself matter in/to the world?

Our little inner conversations are our struggles at controlling our world.  Not the big, wide world, but the little world of our singular lives.  That’s the basis of the struggle:  Is it really my world, my life?  Or is it God’s world, and God’s life?  If it is my life, then I get to feel all the pride when I make things go well.  But then I must take all the brunt of negative consequences when I make things go really badly.  Either way it goes, it’s all up to me.

That’s one way to be a human being.  If we choose the prideful path of my life, then we go back and forth between pride and humiliation.  As the Proverb states, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,” (Proverbs 16:18).

When informed by one of his scouts that they were in for a big fight, and that there were enough Sioux to keep them busy for two or three days, General Custer replied with a smile, “I guess we’ll get through with them in one day, then.”  He likewise declined help from the 7th Calvary or the aid of using Gatling guns.  Well, Custer was right about one thing.  One day was all it took.  Custer fell as result of his pride and haughtiness.  And a great fall it was, since he took his men with him.

C.S. Lewis, in his amazing book, The Great Divorce, has one of the heavenly beings say to another, “There are only two kinds of people, in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘thy will be done.’”  Again, only two choices.

The choice to go God’s way as the foundation of your life against the self is called the way of humility.  But even in humility, we have to watch out for pride’s subtle interference.  Humility can be distorted by our own pridefulness vs. a humility that is clarified by God’s activity in history.  God’s activity in history is shown, for example, in the way that God continuously chose insignificant people, who weren’t full of themselves, to carry out his historical will.  Humility recognizes that there has been a lot of stuff that happened way before I came along.  And there will be a lot of stuff that happens after I’m gone.  All that history is controlled by God, not by my little life in the here and now.

Paul recognized this when he wrote to the uppity Corinthians, who had a huge pride problem:
Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life.  I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families.  Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”?  That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God.  Everything that we have--right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start--comes from God by way of Jesus Christ.  That’s why we have the saying, “If you’re going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God.”

We probably have no problem hearing these words, knowing they were written to some other church.  Some other group of Christians.  Not us.  But what if they were?  What if you were the one’s Paul called not “the brightest and the best...not influential, not from high-society”?  Any inner voice telling you, “Hey, I’m a somebody; I’m not a nobody”?

That’s why pride is so insidious.  We hate and despise that in others that we see in ourselves.  Maybe we find it so easy to disparage pride so much, especially when we see it in others, because we see it so clearly in ourselves.

If we are ever going to move from pride to humility, then, we’re going to need a transformation.  Nothing else will displace the prideful “pathetic, little, inner conversations” except for a transformation.  And, as we just found out from Paul, that transformation has to happen from God’s hand through Jesus Christ.  Otherwise, if we thought we effected such a transformation, it would only be fuel for our pride.  We would still be in control.

There are two elements, two signs of that thorough transformation, that leads away from pride and towards humility.  These two elements were identified by the desert fathers and mothers, who tried to get away from all the hubris and blow of society, escape to the desert, and wrestle with God.  What these spiritual seekers found out was that they had to wrestle more with pride when they were on their own, than if they were immersed in society.  They discovered there were two main ways that God effected a transformation in them through Jesus Christ, in dealing with their pride.

The first was by a willingness to learn from others.  That was a sign that Christ had worked his transformation from pride to humility.  It sounds like such a simple thing at first hearing.  But understand that humility is a way of finding your place in relation to God and your neighbor.  Humility is a way of loving both God and neighbor without allowing the need for attention, honor, gratitude, or even being right to interfere.

So being willing to learn from others means having the sight to see Christ in the other.  If we greet each person as someone who carries Christ in them, then we will always have something to learn from them, no matter who they are.  The Christ in them has something to teach us.  If we are looking down our nose at them as insignificant, nobodies, we will miss Christ.  That was one of the hallmarks of Mother Teresa’s work in Calcutta--the sight to see that every one she treated was Christ in disguise, and learning from them.

This means the standards of the world no longer apply, if we are going to live the transformed life in Christ.  Each person we meet can bear Christ to us in a particular way, has something to teach us.

The second sign of the transformed life that the desert monks identified is an unwillingness to stand in judgement of others.  Again, this comes back to the understanding that Christ is in each person.  That each person has the image of God in them.  If Christ is in each person, how can anyone judge another?  To do so would be judging Christ.  Do you really think you can be in that position?

We do our judging so subtly or in jest, so we think it’s harmless.  A man chatting with his neighbor said, “My family and I will soon be living in a better neighborhood.”
“So will we,” the neighbor said.
“Oh, are you moving, too?”
“No,” the neighbor said.  “We’re staying.”

Remember we’re talking about transformation here.  If we are needing transformation, or if we are trying to be disciples of that transformation for others, which is better to bring that about:  prideful judgement, or humble compassion?  Which motivates people better for the purposes of God?

But most importantly, to be unwilling to judge is an acknowledgement that you are not God.  To judge others is to mistakenly feel like you get to hold the power of God over someone’s head.  That’s pretty arrogant.  Humility is the understanding that we will never have the sight or insight of God to be anyone’s judge.

As I said, these two signs of Christ’s transformation from pride to humility seem fairly simple.  But think about it.  To treat every person, every person, as if they carried Christ, or were Christ in disguise, and had something for you to learn, is immensely difficult.  For us to get past that we need to quit looking at people as a lesser than, we have to get past the self-inflated assumption that we know it all, or at least know more than that so-and-so.  To look at every person in the face and think first, “I have something to learn from this person,” rather than thinking, “What a loser,” is extremely hard.

And to be totally nonjudgemental, to not see yourself over and above, or more worthy than anyone is going to push you to the limit.  To look at each person you see and see Christ in them, and therefore withhold your judgement, will transform you and how you live.  To look at someone and not judge them in any way, either spoken or in your mind will stretch you to the utter limits of your being.

That’s why these are two signs of pride’s transformation.  You can only demonstrate these if you are changed by Christ.  If you are transformed.  If your pride is taken over and transformed into humility.


As I said, we’re all struggling with our own sense and definition of our humanness.  What does it mean to be a human being?  How do I define myself at the most basic level?  How am I having those pathetic little inner conversations in my head?  How do I get God involved with that conversation so it’s not pathetic or little anymore, but has to do with something much larger than myself, and everything to do with God?  In other words, how do I define myself as a human being not according to my pride, but according to the humility of God?  How can I be transformed by Jesus Christ, so that pride is not the voice of my self-definition?  Those are the questions that need to be asked.