Friends, our teaching scripture this morning comes from Luke
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.