“Power of Pride or Power of Humility?”

Mark 8:27-38

Stephen Nash

While on vacation at the beach early this summer, Diana and I took advantage of a particularly rainy day to go to the movies. We saw “Bruce Almighty,” in which Jim Carrey plays the role of Bruce Nolan, a TV news reporter in Buffalo, New York who has a knack for making people laugh. Because of that he was always assigned those kind of sweet human-interest stories, like the baking of the biggest chocolate chip cookie in Buffalo. But for someone whose hero is Walter Cronkite, Bruce considered those assignments to be undignified and beneath him. What he really wants is to become the TV anchorman. When, instead, the job goes to his nemesis, a man by the name of Evan, Bruce just loses it on the air and gets fired. On that very same day, he gets beat up in the parking log as he’s trying to help someone else.

Well, Bruce is angry and he begins to blame God. “You’re the one who should get fired,” he rails at the heavens. God answers Bruce. He appears to him in human form as a man dressed in a white suit (played by Morgan Freeman) and he tells him, “Since you’re so dissatisfied with the job I’m doing, I’m going to let you be God. I’m going to give you all of my power. There are only two stipulations. You can’t tell anybody you’re God, and you cannot violate free will.

Well, you can imagine Bruce, with God-like powers, proceeds to mess things up. He uses those powers, first of all, to get revenge. He sabotages Evan and gets the job of anchorman. Then he realized that he has to deal with what is the most arduous of all divine tasks by listening to and answering prayers. The way he deals with that is simply to give everybody what they ask for. As a result, turmoil ensues. There are natural disasters and financial calamities. Bruce learns that being God . . . we’ll, it isn’t a piece of cake. In fact, his god-like powers don’t bring him happiness – just the opposite. Bruce is so busy getting everything that he wants, he ignores his girlfriend Grace, played by Jennifer Aniston, and she leaves him. His self-absorption drives her away.

In the end Bruce realizes that he’s messed it all up through his arrogance and his selfishness. He’s lost the one thing he wanted. So God comes back to Bruce again and asks Bruce if he wants Grace, his girlfriend, back. Bruce thinks for a minute and he says, “No,” because he recognizes his failure. “I just want her to be happy, no matter what that means. I want her to find someone who will treat her and love her with the love that she deserved from me.”

Well, if you haven’t seen the movie, the Nashes recommend it. I don’t think it’s out yet in the video stores, but it’s a funny and a touching and meaningful film about the power and importance of humility and the dangers and evils of the power of pride.

I have to admit that I wince a little bit every time I see the “Power of Pride” bumper stickers that have been so popular in the renewed wave of patriotism in the last two years. I don’t wince because I am unpatriotic. Authentic patriotism, in contrast to blind jingoism, is a noble and a good thing.

Nor am I unaware of the fact that there is such a thing as good “pride,” as in “taking pride in one’s work . . . or taking pride in advocating human freedom . . . or taking pride in doing what is just.” And I give the benefit of the doubt when I see those bumper stickers that this kind of pride is what the person displaying the slogan means by it. I make no judgments upon the sentiment that a given individual is trying to express by displaying that bumper sticker. It may be a very fine sentiment to express.

But what makes me wince is that as a nation and as culture we seem to have forgotten that “good pride” is a hair’s breath distance from “hubris”—which has been considered one of the seven deadly sins – in fact, which theological thought has considered to be the core of all sin. The original sin. Pride—hubris. Arrogance—a sense of absolute independence.

It’s interesting to me that we have been able to elevate it into a virtue that one should not be without lest one be considered unpatriotic. I’ve been looking for a “Power of Humility” bumper sticker. “Power of Gratitude” bumper sticker, or a “Power of Compassion” bumper sticker, but all I see is the “Power of Pride” bumper stickers.

What gives? You’ve seen the WWJD phenomenon in recent years. – WWJD “What would Jesus do,” It’s based on the Charles Sheldon book from years ago that I read as a boy, In His Steps. I wonder what kind of bumper sticker Jesus would slap on his mode of transportation, were he to be driving about among us.

And I don’t know that we have to speculate too much about that:

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” or “the one who would be first of all must become last of all” or turning to a Pauline texts “do nothing from selfish conceit but in humility count others as better than yourself” or a Petrine text “clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility towards one another, for God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” Or what about the wisdom of the biblical proverb: “pride goes before a fall and a haughty spirit before destruction.” Or “the one who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.

I don’t want to put too sharp a point on it, but, well, come with me to our text for the morning and see the point that Jesus puts on it. When Peter acknowledged Jesus as Messiah, Jesus began to explain to the disciples that his messiahship involved a demonstration of what a life lived in faithfulness to God is all about. The way of Jesus is a path of death that leads to life. That is the paradigm, the model, the way of life that is distinctively “Christian.” Not necessarily physical martyrdom, or even necessarily giving up “stuff,” but a metaphorical “death” to a certain way of seeing and being and a resurrection to a new and different way of seeing and being in the world. When Peter couldn’t quite accept that for Jesus this meant death, Jesus sternly corrected Peter: “Satan, get away from me! You are thinking like everyone else and not like God.”

And then he told the crowd and the disciples to come closer and said: “If you want to be my followers, you must forget about yourself, take up your cross and follow me. For the one who wants to cling to their life will destroy it, but if you will give up your life for me and the good news, you will find it.”

Servanthood . . . humility. It applies to individuals . . . it applies to churches, and it applies to larger social structures, even nations.

Humility isn’t one of those virtues that’s high on our list, or that we really consider very important. Instead of “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth,” we’re more likely to believe “Blessed are the self-promoters, the aggressive, blessed are the wheeler dealers, blessed are the greedy, because those are the people who get what they want.” Only the strong survive in this world after all, and brute force is the only language most people understand. You see, we really believe more in social Darwinism than we do in the gospel of Jesus. Which is fine, if that’s what we believe, but why then bother with Christian faith? It’s crush or be crushed. Those are the kind of rules of the world that we seem to live in. There’s no room, really, for humility in the corporate board room, or the playing field, or in the halls of government, or in international relations.

Humility? Well, you see, that’s just for the weak, it’s for the powerless. Who wants to become a doormat to the rest of the world? And yet, as we’ve already seen, when we turn to the pages of the Bible, there is no way of getting around how constant and pervasive a theme is the association of humility with greatness on all levels. Seems to us like a formula for disaster. What evidence is there that God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble? People who know what they want and go after what they want, they’re the ones who really seem to succeed in this world. Where is the power in humility?

To answer that question, we have only to look at the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In his great Christological hymn to the Philippians, Paul says that “though Christ was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, so he emptied himself, took on the form of a servant and humbled himself, becoming obedient to death on the cross.” You see the greatest story ever told is not a rags to riches story, but rather a riches to rags story.

The greatest power in the world is not coercive power, but it is the power of love that humbles itself and gives itself freely. Now you and I know that you can force people to do what you want them to do at the point of a gun, but you can’t really change a person or a society except through the power of love. Real power is exercised, you see, over hearts and minds, not over bodies. And that’s the power we see in Christ who becomes our master by first of all becoming our servant.

In the film Bruce Almighty, there’s a point where Bruce asks God, “How do you make somebody love you without changing free will?” “How do you make somebody love you without changing free will?” And God responds, “Welcome to my world.” But in God’s world Christ wins our love precisely by laying aside his power. In the end, it is the power of humility that will always trump coercive power.

Edmond Burke, the philosopher, wrote that “humility is the basis, the foundation of all of the Christian system. It is the firm foundation of all the virtues. It is the beginning point of Christian life—the foundation of all else that we learn.”

Don’t misunderstand, please. Humility is not humiliation. Servanthood is not servitude. Meekness is not weakness. There is great power in the way of Jesus, and it takes great courage to follow that way. Sometimes love has to be tough and forceful. But it is an acknowledgment of the reality of the way things are. . . and there is always authentic power in truth. And the truth is, pride is ultimately destructive, because it fails to acknowledge the reality of our human sin and need.

Harvard professor Howard McClelland once observed that there are four stages in the growth of an individual to maturity as relates to power. In stage one we see power as originating outside of ourselves and directed toward us. In stage two, power is perceived as originating inside ourselves and used for the sake of self. In stage three, power is perceived as originating inside one’s self and used for the sake of others. But in stage four, we understand that power originates outside of us, is processed through us and is used for the sake of the world.

That is what maturity is all about, and discipleship, and the way of God in the world.

Humility is a condition for human wholeness, because it keeps us open to the possibility of growth in our lives.

There was a young husky 13-year old farm boy who was very ambitious. He worked from dawn to dark, and his parents were very proud of him. So for his 14^th birthday, his father bought him a used lawn tractor. He used that to begin to earn extra money by mowing the lawns and fields of his neighbors, and he took real good care of that tractor. He would wash it and clean it and polish the engine every day.

One day he noticed that the blade was dull, so he took the tractor into the barn and turned it over and tried to begin taking off the bolt that held that blade in place. He knew from his experience that to loosen that bolt you turned it counter clockwise. So he put a big wrench on the bolt and gave it a turn. It turned a tiny bit, but then it wouldn’t budge. Now this boy was very proud of his physical strength. He was a linebacker on the high school football team. But he couldn’t move that bolt at all, and he didn’t want to go to his dad about his kind of routine matter. He was too proud for that.

Then he remembered what his father had told him in a similar situation. “Get a longer piece of pipe and put it over the end of the wrench handle, and that will give you more powerful leverage.” So he did that. He got the pipe, he put it over the wrench handle, and he pulled on that pipe for all he was worth—and nothing. Finally he put his whole weight down on that pipe, and still nothing. The bolt wouldn’t move.

Finally, the young man took the tractor into a shop in town. When he got there, the mechanic looked at the stuck bolt and said, “Well, wait a minute. Let me check something.” He went to his books and came back and said, “I hate to tell you this, but for several years the manufacturer of this tractor has reversed the threads on that bolt. You’ve been tightening the bolt while trying to loosen it. In fact, you’ve tightened it so bad now, we’re going to have to burn it off with a torch.”

You see, because he believed in his own strength, and was too proud to ask his father for help, he only made the situation worse. The recognition of our limits makes us stronger, not weaker, whether it’s personally, socially, or nationally. God gives grace to the humble, because only the humble will admit their need to receive it. Humility empowers our growth. No one will learn anything at all unless one first will learn humility. Humility empowers growth. Growth of self and growth for others. The more we learn, paradoxically, the more we realize we don’t know, and that fosters both humility and continued growth.

Thomas Edison once said, “I don’t know one millionth of one percent of anything.” Someone has said, the larger the island of knowledge the longer the shoreline of ignorance.

The most dangerous people in the world are those who think they have a monopoly on truth and virtue, and that evil in the world can be overcome without recognizing, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn once observed, that the line between good and evil cannot be absolutely drawn between us and them, but it cuts through the hearts of each one of us.

Albert Schweitzer once said that our highest knowledge is to know that we are surrounded by a mystery that engenders great humility. And T.S. Eliot defines heresy, in fact, as an attempt to simplify the truth by reducing it to the limits of ordinary understanding, instead of enlarging ourselves to the attempted apprehension of the truth as it really is.”

Humility carries with it the only potential for transformative growth, whereas pride and arrogance feels that it already has everything tied up neatly in one box – a dangerous delusion.

Many observers today believe that the greatest threat to the world and to civilization is proud and unhealthy religion. Bob Puckett recently wrote a book review of Charles Kimball’s When Religion Becomes Evil.

In it Dr. Puckett analyses Kimball’s observation that religion is the most powerful force in the world, for good or evil . . . unfortunately often for evil. We’re keenly aware of that since September 11 two years go this past week. But sick religion is decidedly not confined to Islam. Extreme authoritarian religion of any fundamentalist brand becomes dangerous when it is practiced by anyone who believes that they alone know the whole truth and nothing but the truth, or try to impose their understandings on others, as our friend Bob observes in his review. Bob’s got more than friendliness and a pretty face going for him.

A religion of arrogant pride such as that exhibited by Judge Roy Moore of Alabama, who seeks to illicitly impose a particular religious system upon all is not a healthy religious system. And make no mistake, the Ten Commandments are not a generic ethical code, but a religious system. The Bible refers to them as a “sign of the covenant between God and Israel.”

A religion of humble servanthood, however, which walks in the non-coercive, winsome spirit of Christ, on the other hand, can be the most powerful and pervasive force for good on earth.

Elisabeth Elliot in her book The Mark of a Man, relates a story about her late husband Addison Leitch. When Leitch was dean of a small college in Pennsylvania, he learned that the walls of a certain men’s dormitory were smeared with shaving cream, peanut butter and jelly. He went over to investigate. Of course not a soul around had any idea how it could possibly have happened. In room after room he met with surprised innocence. He had several options. He could make every man in the dormitory go to work and clean it up. He could call the custodian. It happened that the custodian was a very good worker, an amiable and therefore very valuable man. To scrub up the mess would have been beyond the call of duty, but he would have done it. There was a third option. Addison Leitch went and got a bucket and a brush and set to work himself. One by one doors opened, heads popped out, word spread of what the dean of the college was doing, and soon, he was not alone in the scrub job.” Mrs. Elliot adds this comment. The power of servanthood commands respect, it does not demand it.”

One of the most Christ-like spirit I have ever known, and hence one of the most influential persons for good that I have ever personally known, was possessed by my mentor in ministry, a man who really became my adopted father, Dr. Calvin Phillips. Calvin served as senior minister of the South Side Christian Church in Munster, Indiana for 34 years before becoming president of Emmanuel School of Religion, a graduate theological seminary in Johnson City, Tennessee. I had the privilege of giving some remarks at his retirement dinner a few years ago, and I closed my remarks, and I close my sermon today, with these lines of verse:

For me ‘twas not the truth you taught

to some so plain, to others dim.

But when you came to me you brought

a sense of him.

And From your eyes he beckons me

and from your life his love is shed

Until I lose the sight of you

and see the Christ instead.

Amen.