by Deb Ferrenz
Service at UUCSS on February 28, 1999
(I've included some notes on opening hymn, opening words
and responsive reading
because the sermon refers to them & will not make sense without them.)
Relevant line from Opening Hymn God of Grace and God of Glory
Bend our pride to thy control
Opening Words from a poem by Louis Untermeyer
Ever insurgent let me be,
Make me more daring than devout;
From sleek contentment keep me free,
And fill me with a buoyant doubt.
From compromise and things half done,
Keep me, with stern and stubborn pride;
And when, at last, the fight is won,
O keep me still unsatisfied.
| Leader: Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee1
and the other a publican.2
The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, Cong: God, I thank thee that I am not as other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. Leader: And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, Cong God, be merciful to me, a sinner. Leader: I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for everyone that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. --------------- 1Pharisee--a school of religious thought that emphasized strict adherence to Jewish law and resistance to any assimilation to Greco-Roman thought 2Publican--an Israelite paid to collect taxes for the Roman conquerors; despised by his countryman |
by Deb Ferrenz
| My original intention for this Biblical passage
was not to use it as a text for a UU sermon, but rather, to turn it into
a cartoon aimed at conservatives whose posturing about people on welfare
was driving me crazy. I envisaged the Pharisee as a well-off Republican lawmaker
saying something like,
"God, I thank thee that I am not as other people, dead-beat fathers, adulterers, or even as this welfare mother. I hold down an honest job, I go to church every week, I pay taxes." while of course the welfare mother was cowering in a corner of the cartoon, saying "God be merciful to me, a sinner" I was going to make this into a large placard and carry it in demonstrations; also mail a copy to everyone in Congress.... I figured this was sure-fire. Most conservatives like to think of themselves as good Christians, and here I'd be, hitting them with something straight from the Master. The thing that finally held me back, aside from the fact that I can't draw, is that somewhere along the line it struck me that I was feeling entirely too righteous about the whole thing. In fact, I was saying, maybe not to God exactly, "I thank thee that I am not like these heartless conservatives, I feel for the poor, I donate to charity, I volunteer at Beacon House, I don't complain about taxes..." The story that across 2000 years still speaks to us, spoke entirely too aptly to me. I was even reminded of another saying of Jesus, "why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye but perceivest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" If there is a word for "joy in the misfortunes of others"--and let me digress here for a moment to share something from Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works where he argues against the hypothesis that it proves anything about German culture that German has a word for this and other languages do not. He says that he has never explained the word Schadenfreude to anyone and had them reply, " Joy in the misfortunes of others---what a strange concept---I don't understand that at all." Rather, everyone always says, "You mean there's a word for it? Cool!" Anyway, is there also a word for "joy in the sinfulness of others"? I think there is, and that the word is Pride. And that the feeling is very hard to resist. But how far do we think we should resist it? Agreeing for the moment that comparing oneself with others, belittling them is bad, is a little quiet self-satisfaction okay? What if, as my friend Greg put it, "you're just good"? Most religions argue that even this is morally perilous. Perhaps they don't go as far as Peter DeVries portrayal, in The Blood of the Lamb of his Dutch immigrant community: Total Depravity [was] a tenet for some reason always especially dear to our folk. My uncle was explaining its connection with Original Sin, taking himself as an example to say that, while conceding that he had character, integrity, a keen mind and a gift for scholarship second to none, he was unworthy in his own eyes and in the eyes of God, all his works as naught and his righteousness as filthy rags. This being our view of human merit, it can be imagined what we thought of vice. But they are likely to agree with C.S. Lewis's formulation in The Screwtape Letters where a senior devil advises his nephew on how to lead his human away from the Enemy (God): The true end of humility [is] ... self-forgetfulness. ...[But] thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools....The Enemy wants to bring a man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. Ponder that standard for a moment! Even Unitarian-Universalists have been known to advocate humility occasionally. Meg Riley spoke just 3 weeks ago about how regarding the stars makes us humble, and we are willing to listen to warnings against falling into complacency. We put the Untermeyer poem in our hymnal, after all. but but but I'm sure that all sorts of reservations about this Biblical passage have already come into your mind, as into mine. Let me throw out a few and then open the whole question up to all of you. First, is it even true that comparisons are always odious? What if I rewrote the story so that the first man was instead one of my Irish immigrant ancestors, on these unkind shores but a year or so, praying something like this: Thanks be to God that I'm not like yon Patrick 0'Malley, that beats his wife and drinks up the half of his miserable pay every week. No, I bring my pay home, though it's little enough and often I'm thinking of cutting out on me own for the West where I won't have to see my bairns wanting what a father should be able to provide. If you heard him, if perhaps you were his priest, would you rebuke him for the sin of pride and sing him "There but for Fortune," or would you say "Well done, me boy; yes, you are doing better than poor Patrick and keep up the good work"? Second, can there be good pride as well as bad pride? I am indebted to Molly Ivins for pointing out in her latest book, You Got to Dance with them What Brung You that there are languages, such as French, which actually have different words for the two kinds of pride. I wonder whether their Christian ethicists differ from the English ones on this subject, to say nothing of how they translate the Bible. I also wonder if we have to go back and argue with Pinker that maybe NOT having a word for something doesn't prove much about a culture, but having two words where another culture has one may make a big difference in how you can think about a subject. Isn't it true that pride--individual or collective--can keep us from doing wrong, and push us to do good? Untermeyer says 'keep me from things half done.' And even the more traditional hymn said 'Bend our pride to thy control' rather than, as another hymn NOT in our hymnal said, 'Take away our pride.' Don't we encourage our children to be proud of their skills and their virtues? Third, is feeling afraid and/or ashamed and/or guilty really the feeling that best inspires one to be good? Plenty of people think so, think it isn't a proper religion unless it rubs in every week what miserable sinners they are. People chose to listen to Jonathan Edwards, whose "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" sermon I suspect most of us encountered in our high school English anthologies. They weren't forced into the pews like the Puritans of 100 years earlier whose attendance and wakefulness were enforced on them. People chose to go to the revivals of the Great Awakening, and to revivals in the 19th century and to revival meetings to this day. I myself, age 13, visiting a revival meeting as a field trip in comparative religion with my Sunday school class--United Church of Christ, as close to Unitarian-Universalism as you can get and still hold on to the Trinity--marched up to the front and accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior, to the considerable chagrin of my teacher, I think. Powerful stuff. Of course, when I confessed this to my mother, she said, "Oh, and is it going to make you act any differently?", which goes along way to explain why I am now skeptical about the inducing of guilt feelings as the path to virtue. Still, since Unitarian-Universalism is something of a fungus growing on the Judeo-Christian tradition--a metaphor for which I am indebted to Mark, here--perhaps we need to be careful about knocking this sort of religion. Especially since we aren't doing a really great job of explaining our preferred view, which is that self-esteem is the prerequisite for virtue. I'm not saying that the concept is wrong, mind you, just that there are still an awful lot of people "unclear on the concept," as the cartoonist has it. Must be, if --according to a story in the Post last December on holiday shopping frenzy--a single mother on a limited income feels she has to buy her 7-year-old son all the fashionable clothes and toys for the sake of his self-esteem. Fourth, can't people have too much humility for their own good? Chris and Mark introduced us to Nelson Mandela on this subject and William Hartung read him only last week, but I don't think we can hear him too often: Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure...We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?...Your playing small doesn't serve the world. Isn't this also a better way to express what we are trying to get at in our blather about self-esteem? I'll take this farther and argue that a great deal of active evil is done in the world by people suffering from inferiority complexes and trying to compensate. Christianity has nothing to say on this problem. Some have suggested that perhaps that's because inferiority complexes didn't exist before Christianity. It may be necessary to rein in all pride and competitiveness in a closed society where the situation is zero-sum: I cannot get ahead without stomping on you. But in a society where progress is possible, where hard work or innovative thinking or both can truly "make two blades of grass grow where one grew before," I think it is folly to preach C.S. Lewis's utter self-forgetfulness. We joined a church largely for support in the moral education of our daughter and chose the UU's not only because they wouldn't expect her to believe 6 impossible things before breakfast, but also because the morality would be based on reason and hospitable to the pursuit of excellence. I now invite you to share your comments on these issues.
Conclusion: I couldn't find a hymn that dealt with the good and the bad sides of pride. However, Hymn 159, which I now invite you to join in singing, expresses some of the generosity of spirit--rejoice in your own virtue and in that of all others--that I would like us to leave with. And wouldn't it be great to have a multi-national group sing it in the Balkans? The hymn includes the words 'my country's skies are bluer than the ocean....but other lands ... have skies as blue...' and ends 'a song of peace, for their land, and for mine' |