Topic: Pride

Obedience to God is the only way to true happiness. But in order to trust and obey God, we must first abandon our pride and admit that we are no longer going to do things “our way.” Only when we begin boast in the Lord and not in ourselves will we know the joy of salvation and help others to find their way to God.

The rich man in Jesus’ parable about Lazarus isolated himself in his wealth, never inviting the poor and the lowly to join him. The rich man’s greed separated him from Abraham across a great chasm in the afterlife, which could never be crossed. Christians living in 21st century America should be careful to consider how we, like the rich man, might be allowing our own arrogance to prevent us from loving God and our neighbor.

In our sinful nature, we naturally seek personal gain and prosperity over the Word of the Lord. We are tempted to fool God into thinking we are perfectly good (when we are not), just as we fool other people into thinking we are more righteous than they. But God will not be fooled by our human deceptions, and we cannot escape our own hypocrisy except through the Grace of Jesus Christ. Prosperity will always disappear, but the Word of the Lord stands forever.

We live in a time of great arrogance. We are an arrogant people, and arrogance comes from pride. Pride was not created for human beings; pride comes from the Fall in the Garden. Pride is the unwillingness to accept the truth out of our own insecurity. One defense against these temptations is humor, for it requires us to be poor in spirit, and embrace humility. Humor for the Christian is a serious virtue, for it teaches us to laugh at ourselves.

Every sinful instinct we have tells us we can do it all on our own. We are beholden to our pride. We are so held captive by our pride, that we have a whole month to celebrate it! The bread of man is this: you can define who you are; you can define your identity; you can do whatever you want and expect the world to affirm you; you can define your own meaning of life; you get to define your meaning of love, your meaning of truth, your meaning of justice. All the answers, and ultimately your salvation, are found deep inside yourself. The Holy Eucharist is a repudiation of all of this, everything our culture stands for.

We spend all our life building our own towers of Babel – monuments to sin and pride. Both collectively and individually, we put ourselves in the place of God. We build them brick by brick, over the course of decades, and we become blind to the fact that our building of the towers is not only sinful, but irrational. And therefore, we can’t expect the world to improve – to take down the collective tower of Babel – unless we are willing to take down our own towers, brick by brick. Listen as the Rev. Galloway explains the importance of confronting our sins.