The news in America has been so full
of charges about sexual predators that I have decided to deviate from my usual
posting. Instead of a meditation based
on verses selected from the Daily Lectionary, I am posting a sermon that I
preached seven years ago. I am sorry to
say that it seems more relevant today than it did back then.
Remedy for Hubris—A Child Could Do It
Sermon preached, July
25, 2010
Elmer Ewing
Matthew 18:1-5,
2 Samuel 11:27b-12:9, 13a
It is spring, when kings go out to battle…but the king is not
going. Not this year. Years ago the women used to sing how he had
slain tens of thousands for God and country.
The body count may have been inflated, but the king has earned the right
to stay home and plan wars for others to fight.
Besides, the current campaign is going well without him. His troops are devoted to their king, and his
commanding general is brilliant on the battlefield. Sure, the general is ruthless and devious—but
he knows which side his bread is buttered on.
With a king so popular, the general will do the king’s bidding.
It is spring, when even an older man’s fancy may lightly turn
to… thoughts unworthy of a king. The
king gets up from a nap and walks on the roof.
On a distant roof he spies a woman—a young woman. She is bathing. The king inquires about
her. No one questions his right to
ask—not out loud, they don’t. He’s the
king. The king learns that her husband
is away, at the front--fighting for the king.
She must be lonely. He sends for
her, that he may…comfort her. She is
helpless before him. He has all the
power. The king is not above the law--he
makes the law, interprets the law, decides when the law applies and when it
does not. He is the decider. He enjoys executive privilege. He is the king. Then comes the message: “I’m pregnant.” And the world changes.
What happened to David, the youngest of Jesse’s eight sons, the
ruddy lad with beautiful eyes, who humbly tended his family’s sheep? What happened to David, anointed by Samuel as
God’s choice to be king? What happened
to the heroic David, who ran alone with sling and stone to confront the mighty
Goliath? What happened to the honorable
David, who twice spared the life of King Saul, the very man who was trying to
kill him? From such heights, how could
David have sunk so low? So low as to
force himself on the wife of one of his faithful soldiers, and then conspire to
have the soldier killed by the enemy?
Hubris. Hubris is the word.
David was king, and he began to consider himself the greatest
person in the country. So great that he
had the right to do anything. He saw
himself as the center of existence. He
was the very picture of hubris—hubris: arrogance, self-inflated conceit. The theologian Paul Tillich had a more
complete definition: “Hubris is the
self-elevation of [human beings] into the sphere of the divine.”
“Hubris” is a relatively new word. It wasn’t in the dictionary I had in
college—Webster’s New Collegiate, copyright 1953. But dictionaries change, because language
changes. In the 1950’s prominent
theologians like Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr were using the word. Maybe they started a trend, because hubris
appeared in our 1978 Scrabble dictionary, and by now it is in every dictionary. In 2005 hubris was voted Word of the Year in
an online poll run by the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. Type “hubris” into Google, and there will be
more than two million hits. The word is
on a roll.
Actually, the word is not new, just reborn. It goes back 25 centuries. In Greek tragedy, hubris was always the fatal
flaw that doomed the hero. The hero
would reach for what belonged only to the gods, and that was his or her
undoing.
The word hubris is not in the Bible, but the concept is there—yearning
to play God, to be above the limits that apply to mere mortals. It was hubris that made Adam and Eve want to
eat the forbidden fruit, because eating it would make them like God. Hubris led the disciples to argue about which
of them was to be greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. And it was a clear case of hubris that made
David suppose he could have his way with Bathsheba.
Hubris—self-elevation into the sphere of the divine. A perfect description of what overcame
David. David wielded absolute power, and
as Lord Acton said, “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The name of such corruption is hubris.
Perhaps you read George Will’s column a week ago Friday in the
Ithaca Journal. Will, a prominent
conservative, reviewed Peter Beinart’s book on the history of how hubris has
controlled American foreign policy. I
haven’t read the book yet; but according to George Will’s column Beinart sees hubris in the way the map of the
world was redesigned by President Wilson after WWI. He sees it again in the Viet Nam War and in
many smaller military actions (Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Kosovo), and more
recently in the pre-emptive war in Iraq and our current entanglement in
Afghanistan.
Say the word hubris, and famous names roll off the tongue:
elected officials of both parties, CEO’s, movie stars, generals, athletes,
financiers, religious leaders—the list is long, the examples are legion. The greater our power over others, the
greater the temptation to hubris; but we simple folk are by no means immune. It is easy to see the speck of hubris in the
eye of another person while overlooking the log of hubris in our own. We need to focus on identifying the hubris in
ourselves.
Hubris involves building myself up by tearing others down,
climbing to the top by stepping on anybody in my way. Hubris is my attempt to make myself the
center of all things; to gratify my own needs and wants at the expense of the
rightful needs of others; to control my own destiny rather than leaving myself
and the world in the hands of God.
It is common to say that hubris is a form of pride, which is
the word generally used in the Bible to describe it. The two words are related, but not quite the
same. The athlete is proud of his
talent. Then he decides he is entitled
to boost his talent with performance enhancing drugs. He has gone from pride to hubris. The political candidate is so convinced he or
she deserves to be elected that it seems okay to use unfair accusations or
dirty tricks, and pride has become hubris.
You may be proud of your daughter, which probably means that
you love her, take great joy in her, and are thankful for the kind of person
she is. If such pride develops until you
demand that your daughter be granted special privilege in school or work, then
you could be edging over into hubris.
You may be proud of your school’s athletic team—you watch every game you
can, you cheer for them, follow the athletes, and rejoice when they do
well. When you swear at the referee, or
maybe let him know how much he needs a visit to his optometrist, you are
sliding down the slippery slope to hubris.
It is fine to feel good about yourself—after all, you are a
child of God. We just need to be careful
when we want to feel like God’s favorite child, like Joseph in his fancy
coat, lording it over his brothers; like the teacher’s pet. A good worker takes satisfaction—call it
pride—in a job well done. When that
worker is so proud that she belittles anyone who dares question her accuracy,
or she puts down other workers to make herself look better, then pride has
begotten hubris.
George Will ended his column on hubris by saying this: “Hubris
is a vice arising from ambition, which is, in moderation, a virtue. Hubris is a by-product of success, of which
America has had much. By producing folly,
of which America has had too much, hubris is its own corrective. There is, however, a high tuition paid for
such instruction.”
Pride (or hubris) comes before a fall. Unfortunately, when we practice hubris, it
not only brings us down, it often has consequences for others. Hubris typically has victims. Bathsheba was a victim, her husband Uriah was
a victim; and more and more victims were sucked under by an ever-widening whirlpool. David’s sons were affected, and several of
them developed their own cases of hubris.
Eventually the whole kingdom was involved in a royal coup, and after son
Solomon’s death the kingdom was ripped in half by hubris.
Even for us commoners, it is not hard to find examples where
the hubris of the parents is visited upon succeeding generations. Bad things happen to the victims of
hubris. Oppression is connected to
hubris, among nations and among families.
Extreme oppression, suffered long enough, may break the human
spirit.
Victims come to blame themselves; victims of spousal abuse
often feel they deserve to be beaten.
They feel worthless, like dirt, debased.
At one time or another in our lives, to some extent, I dare say most of
us have been guilty of hubris and at other times have been victims of
hubris. Hubris hurts.
So, what to do about hubris—starting with our own? We need to see our own hubris for what it
is. Give David some credit—when Nathan
confronted him with his guilt, David saw himself for what he was. “I have sinned against the LORD,” he
said. A lesser king would have had
Nathan’s head lopped off. To admit that
we are wrong is a defeat for hubris.
Hubris wants us always to be right.
Hubris must win every argument.
Our hubris never concedes our own mistake, let alone the fact that our
hubris exists. Hubris just complains
about others—never content with the world, always a victim.
But don’t wait for God to send old Nathan to point an arthritic
finger. That may be too late. We must be the constant observer not only of
our own actions, but of our own emotions and thoughts. This is not easy or pleasant; it is not done
quickly or once-and-for-all. Take time
daily for self-examination. Self-examination
and repentance go together. It is by the
grace of God that we are able to do them.
Sometimes we need a visual aid.
In response to the hubris of his disciples, Jesus set a visual aid in
front of them…a little child. Then Jesus
told them to be humble like a child if they wanted to enter the kingdom of
heaven. Reflect on what it means to be
humble. Jesus was humble. He said, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn
from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart….
” In Philippians Paul reminds us
that being found in human form, Christ humbled himself. Think what it means to be humble as Jesus was
humble; as a little child is humble.
To be humble like Jesus is not self-abasement. Humility gets a bad rap. It is not to feel
worthless, or worse than worthless. In
his classic book, Markings, Dag
Hammarskjöld writes: “Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement
as it is of self-exaltation. To be
humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither
better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe.”
To be humble like a child is not to feel like a nobody, not to
feel that we are scum of the earth. A
child who has been born into a loving family does not feel worthless about
herself. A little boy who has been loved
does not consider himself among the world’s great sinners. God so loved the world that God gave God’s
only son. We are part of the world that
God loves, part of God’s family.
God loves you, God loves me, just as much as anyone else in the
world—not more, not less. We don’t need
to pump ourselves up by putting others down, don’t need to claim that we are
number one and that all the rest of the world ranks lower, in order to earn
God’s love. We have that love
already. You are worthy. God loves you as you are. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for
us,” said Paul. “To be humble is not to
make comparisons,” said Hammarskjöld.
There is no need to compare; each of us is a child of God, loved by
God—and that is sufficient.
Be grateful for that kind of love. It is enough to make us leave hubris behind;
enough to heal us if we are a victim of hubris; enough to make us want to share
God’s love even as God shared Jesus with us; enough to make us servants of our
servant Lord, who gave his love for all.
Jesus loves me, this I know—remember that.
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