From Despair to Pride—Encouragement for God’s People

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

When I was a young man in college, I used to hate it when the Ten Commandments were read. They always seemed to be so demanding and I could pretty much go through them and check off which ones I had failed to keep. Covet other people’s stuff? Check. Especially my fraternity buddy’s Corvette. Stolen stuff? Check. Dabbled with that as a boy until one of my buddies got caught. Lied? Check. See the commandment about stealing. Honor your parents? Not really. In fact, I’m surprised my dad never throttled me. Remember the sabbath and keep it holy? Are you kidding me? I was usually too busy nursing a hangover from the frat party the night before. Murder? I managed to avoid that, but the day’s still young. Adultery? Hadn’t lived long enough to commit that yet. That would come later with divorce and remarriage. As Jesus reminded us, anyone who divorces without good cause and then remarries commits adultery. Great. Make idols? Well, I didn’t have idols like golden calves sitting around but I sure had some that I spent a lot of time worshiping, my newfound ego that came with losing a lot of weight and sex being among the top ones. And then there was that first commandment. I didn’t like to admit it but I was pretty sure I had at least one other god before God, and his name was me. But what the hey? God hadn’t rescued me from Egypt. Heck, I was just trying to get through college. The point is that whenever I heard the Ten Commandments being read, it reminded me of how rotten I was and I suspect I am not alone in having this reaction. Did any of you have a similar experience or are you just wondering how I ever managed to become a priest? Me too.

But interestingly, hearing the Law read can evoke the opposite reaction. Both Jesus and Paul remind us in different ways that it is quite possible to get all puffed up and proud about our ability to keep the Law. As Paul tells us in today’s epistle lesson, he was a Jew’s Jew, a man among men in his zeal for keeping the Law and in his mind that made him something special. We can assume Paul would have thought that made him special in God’s eyes as well. I bet many of you know someone like that in your life.

But then Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus and everything changed. Paul saw how hopeless and futile it was to try to earn God’s favor and merit by scrupulously keeping the Law the way he had tried to do because we humans are too profoundly broken to do that. And so he gave up his pride and delusions and sense of privilege that can come from being one of God’s people. He tells the Philippians rather graphically that he considers all his efforts and qualifications as a Jew to be rubbish. The English translation of the Greek word Paul uses for rubbish is much too genteel and doesn’t do justice to how emphatic Paul was in rejecting his old lifestyle. To convey the crudity of the Greek, Paul was saying to the Philippians, “Who I was and what I was trying to do? It’s all crap” (BDAG).

And human pride was precisely the underlying problem in Jesus’ parable about the landowner (God) and the tenants (God’s people). God had called them out to be his special people to help bring his healing love to a broken and desperate world. God had given his people his Law, the Torah (of which the Ten Commandments are the foundation), to help them behave as God’s special people so that they could once again reflect God’s image that sin had defaced to those who needed to see it, namely to the pagan nations, so that God could use his people to help rescue these nations from their bondage to slavery and sin.

But God’s people were as deeply flawed as the people they were supposed to help God rescue and they became ingrown and proud. They looked to their identity as God’s people as a badge of privilege, merit, and honor rather than as a divine commission to be God’s humble servants, and Jesus reminded them that God was about to call them on that. God sent his prophets to rebuke God’s stubborn and proud people and set them straight so that they could be for God and the world the people God called them to be. Then finally God sent himself as Jesus. But most of them did not accept any of it, in part, because they were too proud and too enamored with themselves as God’s special people and it was about to blow up in their faces.

But you see, it was part of God’s eternal plan for our rescue that he knew his people would be part of the problem. And so God became human and dealt with the problems of sin and evil by dying on a cross for us so that his holy justice would be satisfied. As Paul tells us today, because Jesus was the true representative of Israel and because he was truly righteous, those who are in him, in other words, those who believe Jesus is who he claims he is and who have a real and living relationship with him, can claim Jesus’ righteousness. This is what it means to be justified by grace through faith and it takes care of the vexing problem of what happens when the unholy (that would be us) meets the holy (that would be God) so that we can have the hope and promise of being able to live directly in God’s Presence in the New Creation.

This is the only real antidote for folks like me who hated to hear God’s Law being read because it reminds us of how rotten we are. It is also the only real antidote for the sinfully proud folks like Paul once was, who try to earn their own righteousness in God’s eyes or who have the presumptuous attitude that because they are God’s called-out people they are automatically in the club of the redeemed. We have peace with God and are considered righteous in God’s eyes only by the blood of Christ shed for us. In baptism we have been buried with Christ in his death so that we can also share in his resurrection. Our faith, guided and nurtured by the Spirit living in us, will help prevent us from falling into despair or becoming too puffed up and full of ourselves because the cross of Jesus is the great leveler of the human condition.

When, by God’s grace, that happens, we will not look at God’s moral law as something to beat us down and remind us of how rotten we are. Neither will we see it as a challenge to be conquered so that we can be better in God’s eyes (and our own) than the other poor schleps who aren’t nearly as good as we are in keeping the Law. Instead, we will fall on our knees at the foot of the cross and thank God for doing the impossible for us. This necessary and healthy dose of humility will then help give us eyes to see God’s Law as guidelines to help us become truly human and Jesus’ agents of healing and New Creation in the world.

So what does that mean for us here in this room today? From what we have just said, if we are going to be true to our mission statement, Changed by God to make a difference for God, it should be obvious that there is a place for each of us in the Church, from the worst of sinners to the most proud of sinners, and each of us has work to do. God has given us an incalculable gift in Jesus that none of us can ever hope to repay and that provides us with the needed grace to raise us up or bring us down, depending on where we are. We no longer have a reason to make life about ourselves. Instead, we have every reason to make it about Jesus.

This, in turn, gives us the proper incentive to roll up our sleeves and live as Jesus’ agents of healing and New Creation. We do not have to worry about our future, which is precisely the New Creation that Jesus’ resurrection previews. God in Christ has taken care of our future for us and we can stake our very lives on it. When we are freed from the baggage of our past sin and have the power of the Spirit living in us to help us always be on guard against our human pride, we are freed to live as God’s people who are empowered by God to make a difference in this world. However, it starts first and foremost with our relationship with Jesus. If that goes south, we become nothing more than angry activists in our efforts. And if we neglect our call as God’s people to bring his healing love to the world, focusing instead only on our relationship with Jesus, we become nothing more than introverted navel gazers.

It is much more complicated than this because the human condition is infinitely complex. But it is no less than this. The point is that God is God and is able to overcome our complexity and our failures. He died for us, for heaven’s sake (pun intended). Freed from the crushing guilt that our sin can produce and from the arrogance of human pride that deludes us into thinking we are actually fit to live in God’s presence because we keep the rules so well, just as Paul once thought, we are able to look around us and bring to bear on God’s world the gifts and skills with which we have been blessed—all with the Spirit’s help.

Jesus has taken care of the sins of the world and by his Presence among us frees us to be the humble servants God calls his people to be. So we do not have to worry about producing results. We only have to worry about being faithful in our obedience to Jesus and work at imitating him. Why? because in Jesus’ example as well as the Ten Commandments we have a magnificent vision of what it is to reflect God’s glory to the world, and so we strive to make that our goal, just as Paul reminds us. Sometimes we get it right. Sometimes we don’t. But we press on because we are people of hope.

In the meantime we do the things necessary to make sure that we are open to the Spirit’s help and Presence in our lives. We come together to worship God regularly. We feed on God’s word in Scripture and on the very body and blood of Jesus each week. We are humble enough to know that God has given us each other to help us in his call to each of us, and we love God enough to want to bring his love to bear on others, even when they sometimes do not realize what we are offering them. It is hard work but it is God’s work and in it we will find meaning, purpose, and power to live according to God’s good will and intentions for those whom he loves.

And how do we know God loves us? Because we come to the foot of his cross regularly in utter astonishment that God would die for someone as unlovable as us. Moreover, we know God is with us because he is helping us to grow in faith, hope, and love, all the while blessing us with the fruit of his Spirit living in each of us and collectively as his body, the Church. This gives us real hope, even in the face of terrible opposition, even in the face of our darkest fears and failures, and yes, even in the face of our stubborn pride. And when, by God’s grace, we become convinced of this truth (do you see the dynamics of faith, hope, and love in all of this?) it reminds us that we really do have Good News, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.