Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. David Williams; 12.23.12
Pride goes before a fall, or so that old saying from the Book of Proverbs goes. As memory serves me, this was the season in life, just about now, when I had learned that lesson best. Because this is the season in life when many souls return from their freshman year at whatever college or university they’ve attended. They return with minds brimming over with new knowledge, a few extra pounds from all those...um...protein shakes...they’ve been drinking on their formerly trim midsections, and four cubic yards of laundry.
In my case, that first return from College included coming back with a significant and much-needed dent in my eighteen year old male pride. As I’d left high-school, I’d left convinced of two things. First, that there was pretty much nothing I couldn’t do if I put my mind to it. If I was doing badly in a class, that had nothing to do with the elegant, carefully wrought, and existentially meaningful poem I submitted. Ok, sure, it was a math class. That my math teacher returned it not with a grade but just with the words “You Idiot” written in large red letters was a sign that he had understood the underlying subtext of the poem’s articulation of the absurdity of being. Had I actually studied, I would have nailed it. I was sure of this.
Then, I encountered first semester Russian, eager to read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in the original language. It was a blisteringly-paced class designed to identify naturally gifted linguists, CIA analysts, and potential foreign servants, and to weed out the weak and the slow-witted and pretentious eighteen year olds who wanted to read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in the original language. No amount of study, no amount of effort, no amount of working with the TA, none of it seemed to make a difference. I wanted to do well, I did, and I poured effort into it. It mattered. But it was as futile as trying to bang out a dent in your bumper with your forehead, and only slightly less painful. I just couldn’t do it.
The second thing that I was sure of was that if I was actually good at something, and I knew it, I just couldn’t flail. Philosophy, or so I thought, was where I excelled. And in a class that the professor actually managed to call the “Meaning of Life,” I was sure my inherent amazingness would carry me through. And I did great in class discussions, and nailed every last one of the papers, and managed to come out of the class with a C...getting a “C” in the Meaning of Life, Lord, how that stings...because I’d forgotten to turn in the short writeups that were required prior to every class. You don’t do the grunt work? You don’t get the grade, no matter how brilliant you imagine yourself to be, Mr. Smarty Pants.
Pride is almost always like that. It’s a strange thing, because in some ways it would seem to be good. It’s good to have confidence in our abilities, and to know that there are some areas in life where we have been given gifts. But pride does real damage, at least as much damage as uncertainty and anxiety and self doubt. It messes with our lives. It tears apart communities and cultures. But why?
In today’s scripture, we hear a little bit about why. We are told the story of two Judean women at a time of rejoicing in both of their lives. One was six months pregnant, the other...well...she’d just had a strange encounter with an angel, and was also expecting. It’s an intimate, vibrant, earthy passage, filled with poetry and song, which is why it might seem weird to find it in Luke’s Gospel. Luke, after all, was the historian and the scholar, the one who begins his Gospel by telling his audience that what he was doing was producing an “orderly account,” after careful investigation and research.
But as you heard in the sermon last week, history in the ancient world was a very different thing. It’s not a list, and it’s not data. It was storytelling, deep and personal and rich with life. And what Luke gives us is just that. Mary goes to see her relative, finally pregnant, and it’s a moment full of promise and life. It’s a familiar promise, too, one that has been part of the human experience for pretty much ever.
On the sound of Mary’s voice, that growing child in Elizabeth’s womb does one of those tumble-kicks that my wife used to describe for me, as our boys practiced in-utero tae kwon do inside her. It’s a feeling that I can only imagine. It’s a feeling that is also deeply shared across humanity, a joy that all can feel, no matter who they are and where they are.
Mary and Elizabeth were certainly not in positions to feel powerful. As women living in a rural area of Judah, they wouldn’t have been anyone. Not anyone at all. What would the source of their pride have been? They would have had no wealth. They would have had no right to study Torah, or to learn, or to study and debate the sacred alongside men. They would not have had the right to access the temple, or to amass worldly wealth.
They were just two women, one six months pregnant, one only recently realizing that something wonderful was happening inside her. But what we get from them is not a lament about how little they have, or words of sorrow about how oppressed they are.
Instead, Elizabeth shouts out with joy, sharing a blessing with Mary. And Mary then offers up her rejoicing, which Luke remembers for us in verses 46 through 55. That passage is called the Magnificat. Even though Mary’s just received a celebratory blessing from Elizabeth, the focus of the celebratory poetry we hear from Mary doesn’t show any signs of her ego being inflated by what she’s just heard.
I mean, seriously, here your relative has just called you the “mother of her Lord.” If anything might go to your head, that would be it.
What the Magnificat from Mary celebrates is not herself, or even her role. Instead, what we get from Mary is an affirmation of her position. She is simply a servant, and a lowly one, at that. What she rejoices in is not power, and not wealth, none of the things that stir human beings to feel they’re better one than the other. She rejoices in the gift of life she has received from her Creator, and the promise of God’s setting-things-right for all of humanity.
The Magnificat reinforces a potent truth about the human encounter with the divine. It takes apart the things that we think make us more significant or more important than any other creature. Here a young no-one from nowhere bears within her the gift of the living promise of God.
The Rich? Sent away empty. The powerful? Cast down from their thrones. And the proud? Scattered.
Pride always does that. It is a scattering, shattering thing. It scatters us, one from another. It rises in us when we view those gifts that we have been given as belonging to us, as something that makes us better than others. Whatever gifts and skills we have only draw their value from how they deepen our connection to one another. Whenever we view those things as ours alone, we close ourself off from the reality of how we connect to and care for one another.
Pride shatters us, because seeing only the image of ourselves that we’ve created, we can lose sight of the reality we inhabit. We become lost in our own thoughts and our own story about how very perfect and right we are. Then, well, reality does have a pesky tendency of catching up with us.
If we allow ourselves to be closed off from real relationship to the reality around us, it doesn’t matter how skilled we are or how much potential we have. Those gifts will do nothing, nothing besides causing us to look like fools.
That does not mean God wants us to hate ourselves, or to despise the life and the gifts all of us have been given. Right here on the cusp of Christmas, we are reminded that we are all called to use the lives that God has given us in ways not guided by pride. Though we aren’t much more than dust and ashes, God has placed within each of us the gift of God’s own love. It’s that gift that we are called to share, fully and wholly, with the world around us.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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