Dr. John Young 8/31/08
Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville
Pride & Humility
(Labor Day Sermon)
I am wearing work clothes today because of Labor Day Sunday but also because I grew up in a small town as a middle class boy going to school with the children of ranchers, oil field workers, and refinery employees. Where I grew up, you were proud to be a working person, but you knew you were just a regular person, and people presumed that almost everybody else was actually just a regular person, worthy of respect but also needing to remain humble. I got more formal education than anyone else in my generation of my extended family; my Dad who had not graduated from high school and my mother, who got a junior college degree finally while I was in high school, never let me forget that my education did not put me in a position to ‘lord it over’ other people. It just gave me greater responsibilities because of my greater opportunities. Unitarian Universalists are among the most thoroughly trained clergy, but our members appropriately never let we clergy forget that our training does not give us any spiritual superiority to any other member. Our denomination means its democracy; it actually believes that all people are children of God or Creation.
There are 7 traditional Western sins [pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, anger and sloth] and 7 virtues [the ancient Greek and Roman 4: wisdom [sometimes called prudence], courage [sometimes called fortitude], temperance, and justice, and the 3 New Testament virtues: faith, hope and love. During this congregational year, I’m doing a monthly sermon addressing a sin or sins and a related virtue or virtues. I’ll combine some of the listed and add a few other important sins and virtues.
Unitarian Universalists have often been so pre-occupied with affirmations and tolerance that we may not be paying adequate attention to evil. If you don’t like the term ‘sin,’ translate sins and virtues as good or evil, or as systematic and conscious mistakes or wise choices,--suit yourselves. Our second UU tradition “challenges us to confront the powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion and the transforming power of love.” Whenever we are unable or unwilling to face our own or other’s actions of evil, sin, or systematic and conscious error, then we dis-able ourselves and diminish our positive impact upon others and the world. Every virtue can be over done and each sin is persuasive because it may contain positive value. Love can become obsession, possession, or narcissism. Hate may contain the courage and fortitude to confront seemingly overpowering evil. Each sin-to-virtue is a spectrum. I will be connecting, comparing, and contrasting a virtue or virtues and a sin or sins that I believe are best understood by being connected along a spectrum.
Today, I want to address pride, and what I believe is the appropriate complementary virtue, humility. It can be argued that the ancient Greeks, Jews, and Christians all considered pride to be the greatest of the sins. Ancient Greeks called it hubris, exaggerated pride or self-confidence, and their epics and dramas were usually centered on a hero, god or goddess who had let their pride get the best of them, fallen into hubris, and been brought to tragedy and grief.
The Jews argued that pride was the initial sin of the mythical Eve and Adam, who tried to “be like God” [Gen. 2:5], attempting to go beyond their creaturely status and to usurp the place of God. From the Tower of Babel through Moses to the latest of the Jewish prophets, their leaders condemned their peoples’ tendency to become a stiff-necked people who had become too proud of themselves and prone to corruption and the worshipping of false idols instead of doing justice to their neighbors and thereby worshipping the living God.
Augustine set the tone for Christian thinkers by arguing that “pride is the origin and head of all evils,” that it was pride that led the devil to rebel against God and that all human beings put themselves in most jeopardy by rebelling against God, which motivates and excuses their excesses against other people. In the 20th century, Reinhold Niebuhr held that the evils of the flesh flow from the evil will of the spirit that has ceased to trust in God and has set itself up as its own ultimate.
Pride takes many forms. The prides of power, whether that power is military, physical, political, economic, social, age, class, race, or gender-based is the most dangerous because unbridled power leads to domination, oppression, dictatorships, violence and violation. However, the pride of knowledge and the pride of religious or ideological righteousness are, for most of us, particularly repulsive. Why, because these forms of pride are supposed to be founded upon and sustained by virtue, the virtues of knowledge, faith or insight. The education or spiritual leader or any other supposed model of virtue whose pride gets the best of them has fallen under the sway of their own righteousness. Having set standards of ethics, morals, and virtue, they have then betrayed their own standards. Their righteousness was wronged by their own actions; their pride became hubris. This is also true in our primary relationships. If we, as parents, spouses or friends, set standards that we then fail in our own behavior, there is a great sense of betrayal from our child, spouse, or friend.
None of these ancient traditions argued that all pride was bad. People need and deserve self-respect, the satisfaction of doing something well. Central to our human achievements in the 20th century were the increasing liberation of appropriate pride, self-respect and opportunities for achievement and life fulfillment among oppressed races and peoples, genders and life styles. In my life-time, I have grown through Black pride, women’s pride, GBLT pride, although I am none of the above. Aristotle saw this proper pride as a virtuous mean between the vices of arrogance and self-depreciation. I certainly agree. I believe that Unitarian Universalists are clearly in favor of self-actualization just not self-infatuation or egotistical obsession.
I believe that the Judeo Christian virtue of humility can be helpful in guiding us to find Aristotle’s golden between arrogance and self-depreciation. The ancient Greeks indicated that gods-goddesses and people often only overcame their hubris through humiliation, but I would argue that finding an appropriately humble perspective often makes humiliation unnecessary and less likely. Like other Unitarian Universalists, I believe that people do not necessarily need to be repeatedly humiliated in order to remain humble. Few people, however, get through their lives without periodically humiliating themselves, catching themselves betraying their own standards and ideals.
In the Old Testament, Israel’s humble origins and its normal lack of military success or imperial wealth provided actual restraints that reinforced the Jewish scriptures which taught that Israel’s God delivers the humble, poor and afflicted and brings down the haughty [see 1st Samuel 2:6-8 and Deut. 7;7-8]. In much of Israel’s history humility and too often humiliation, poverty and oppression, became the spiritual traits of the devout. [Psalms 22, 25; Prov. 16-23].
In the New Testament, the Old Testament lessons are affirmed, particularly in Jesus’ Beatitudes. But most of the references to humility in the New Testament relate not to spiritual self-abnegation but to objective states of poverty and affliction. The divine condemnation of Jesus certainly exemplified humility, but it also has, too often, been used to excuse a consequent lack of spiritual humility. Because Jesus sacrificed, some Christians assert that ‘you only need to believe in order to be rescued.’ Too often this has nurtured a lack of humility about Jesus’ sacrifices, which betray those sacrifices. Too often believers have seen their good fortune, wealth or power as signs that they were righteous and that the oppressed, the poor, or those who believed differently were unsaved. This idolatry of position or good fortune also betrays Jesus’ intent. It is idolatrous hubris, destructive spiritual pride.
Let me be specific now about how I believe humility can work among us. People should see themselves as at home in the universe, full participants in Creation, important elements of the interdependent web of nature, and as world citizens in the evolution of human culture. But they also need to recognize that they will never get too rational to be fools, too scientific to become demonic, too pure to become corrupt, too enlightened to become dominating, or too rich or powerful to be evil. There’s no reason not be appropriately proud of our inherited gifts and our learned talents, skills, and experiences. The border between appropriate self-actualized pride and the sin of hubris is whenever the ego forgets that life and reality are divine gifts almost entirely not of our own making, and that these gifts can be withdrawn unpredictably, that we are never promised an endless earthly existence, the complete absence of pain, failure, or tragedy. In theological terms, we always need to remember that we are creatures, to remember how small are our parts, how short our times, how momentary our influence or insights.
Secondly, we need to remember that our fondest truths and wisest solutions to life’s dilemmas are rarely the right answer for everybody else, seldom even the best answers for most of the people that we love. Human relationships are built on give-and-take, and they do not thrive through any form of domination or dictatorship. If a man needs to be in charge all the time, he is neither a grown-up nor a real man. If a woman needs to repeatedly be the center of attention or the central symbol of love, then she is neither a grown-up nor a real woman. Friendships, communities, and congregations thrive because of people that are willing to bow and bend, who have enough pride and self-confidence so that they rarely feel the urge to put other people down or to act out. These are activities that children participate in while they are growing up, but they need to be outgrown. Read our congregational covenant, and come to our activities when you are ready to play by those rules.
I am delighted by our increasingly liberated world. I have spent much of my life striving to help others overcome various forms of personal and community oppression. But, I am dismayed by the many ways in which people are misunderstanding and abusing the objectives of liberation to excuse hubris, egotism, selfishness, and their self-obsessed exercise of social violation. It is time to re-learn the virtue of humility. You have a right to self-respect, but that right comes with the obligation to respect others. If you want to be loved, you must be patiently loving. If you want to be heard, you must speak your truths as your truths, not as the truth, as your experiences, not as the only way or the only virtuous path, and you must listen as much or more than you talk. Hubris still, as the ancient Greeks knew so well, leads inevitably to tragedy and grief. When I was young, I found my pride and felt liberated by it, and now, when I remember to be appropriately humble, I have discovered that humility is even more liberating. Humility constantly reminds me to be myself, but not to claim to be any more than who I am. Humility reminds me to savor life but to never forget that it is a gift and a constant process of grace, and that gifts and grace can always be taken away and will forever be changing. We need to constantly remember that actions can be good or bad, wise or stupid, virtuous or sinful, but that they are almost always so in particular situations, and that no one, no philosophy or faith, group or country is always sinful or constantly virtuous.
I began today with opening words by Reinhold Niebuhr. Those words have become for me the most effective definition of humility. “Nothing worth doing is completed in our life time; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”