Fr. Chuck on Pride

Ecclesiasticus 10:(7-11) 12-18; Luke 14:1, 7-14

Beginning in the mid 1980s I worked as a social worker in Boston for the Department of Public Welfare.  For the first four years I was there, we worked in a rundown old building on Blue Hill Avenue.  I’m not sure when the building was built, probably in the 1950s, but it was built to be a government building and it looked like it.  The outside was made of pale yellow brick, the inside was dirty and dilapidated, and the walls were painted that puke green, which is found only in government buildings.  The building was four storeys tall, the reception area was on the first floor, and we interviewed clients in the basement.  My office was on the fourth floor, and I ran up and down the stairs literally all day long.  If I was interviewing a client in the basement and needed a folder from my desk, I ran up the four flights of stairs and back down again.  If the receptionist called me at my desk on the fourth floor and said a client had arrived, I ran down the steps to the basement and back up when the interview was over.  Up and down all day long.  As I ran up and down the stairs, I would see large groups of my coworkers waiting for the building’s one slow, rickety elevator.  As I looked at my coworkers standing there, I thought I was so great; I viewed my coworkers with contempt.  I thought they were lazy.  I thought it would do them a whole lot of good to use the stairs and show a little gumption.  When I started working at the welfare, I was twenty-three years old.  Now I am forty-five years old and I know that now I would be one of those people waiting for the elevator.  How the mighty have fallen.
 The sad truth is that twenty years ago I could do things – like run up and down four flights of stairs all day long – that there is no way I could do today.  It’s easy to make fun of the excesses of so-called political correct language, but one expression I really like is “temporarily abled.”   I like that expression so much because it perfectly describes reality.  As our lesson from Ecclesiasticus says this morning, “Even in life the human body decays.  A long illness baffles the physician; the king of today will die tomorrow.”  Not to mention, God forbid, the affects of a serious accident.  The fact of the matter is, as we age our bodies become less and less able.  And this is true for all of us.  Therefore, there is no sense in taking pride in the ability to run up and down four flights of stairs today because in a very few years we will be waiting for the elevator.
 The abilities we have – whether they are physical, mental, spiritual, or emotional – are not something we earned; they are gifts from God.  Certainly with education, and training, and practice, we can perfect our gifts, but, fundamentally, we did not create those gifts.  A great musician practices hard every day to perfect her gift, but the gift was already there – it’s a given, we say.  Using the more elegant language of the Prayer Book, our collect this morning makes the same point by describing God as “the author and giver of all good things.”
 The sin I committed twenty years ago was the sin of pride.  I thought that I had given myself the gift of good physical health and youth, but, of course, I could not have been more wrong.  Pride is the same mistake that the people make in today’s Gospel lesson.  The Gospel says that as Jesus sat at table he observed “how the guests chose the places of honor.”  The mistake the guests make is thinking they can choose their own seats.  As Jesus’ parable makes crystal clear, it is the host of the banquet who assigns the seats, not the guests.   And, even more importantly, the host assigns seats according to his own criteria, which is not the criteria of his guests.  If the host assigns the seats according to his own criteria, then a guest cannot be proud of the seat he is given.  “How can dust and ashes be proud?” Ecclesiasticus says.
 The other day I was getting off the ferry in Manhattan and there was a little old man in front of me using a walker.  Of course the line back up and slowed down, and I felt myself getting more and more frustrated.  “Argggg, let’s get going,” I thought.  So, I still struggle with pride and haven’t improved very much in twenty years.  At least now I’m aware of it.  But what I know now that I didn’t know then is that God especially loves that lame old man.  And while it is true that God loves us all, Jesus shows us that God as a special place of honor for the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and all those who are on the bottom of the heap.  It is a harsh and unforgiving world we live in.  As we go through life our bodies decay and our spirits are bruised and battered.  But our faith teaches us that the God who gives places of honor to the dishonorable does not see us as the world does.  As we fall in the eyes of the world, we rise in the eyes of God. Amen.