August 31, 2025
Proverbs 25:6-7
Luke 14:1, 7-14
Of the classic “Seven Deadly Sins” – pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth – I am vulnerable to… all of them. Which makes me, I suspect, much like most human beings.
Of that list, however, the one I’m most conscious of as an ongoing problem is pride. You may have noticed that I have no problem in standing before you from week to week merrily telling you what you should do. It takes a certain amount of gall to do that. And I’ve got it.
Jesus took an ancient proverb about how to behave in the royal court – cautiously – and brought it home. “Do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence” became, when Jesus spoke of it, advice to take a seat at the edge of a wedding reception rather than heading for the family table. Jesus’ hearers didn’t spend time in royal courts, unlike those who assembled the collection of proverbs into the book we call, well, Proverbs. They knew all about the complexities of relationships in a Judean or Galilean village.
As E. Trey Clark writes at Working Preacher, “In Greco-Roman society, formal meals like this would often take place at a U-shaped table. Each guest would be assigned a seat at the table that demonstrated their rank or social standing—from highest to lowest. It would be deeply shameful to sit at the place of honor, only to be moved to the lowest place.”
We do not live in a culture that operates the way Jesus’ culture did. The social sanction of shame and the social reward of approval are still powerful, but not as powerful as they were for Jesus and his contemporaries. Still, we would hesitate to cross certain lines, wouldn’t we?
As we enter the autumn, we’re approaching what I tend to think of as “fundraising dinner season” here in Hilo, because aren’t there a lot of them in November and December? Cheryl Lindsay, the UCC’s Minister for Worship and Theology, used to work as an event planner. She writes at UCC.org, “One of the last and most challenging tasks would often be completing the seating chart. Fundraising events, in particular, make this delicate and extremely political work. For events that worked on the first-come, first-served basis, it was a simple matter of tracking reservations in order. Most events, however, did not use that framework. Honored guests, corporate sponsors, organizational leadership were all statuses that needed to be considered in placement. Other relational knowledge, such as collegiality, also played a role. No one worked on seating assignments without having some insider knowledge and sensitivity.”
Having attended more than a few of these dinners over the years, I can attest to that.
Pride, however, isn’t just about putting yourself in a better social position. For me, at least, pride happens when I think I’m right. When I think you’re wrong. In and of itself, being right isn’t pride itself. It’s not hubris to say, “I know something that somebody else doesn’t.” It is, in fact, a likely experience for just about any of us in this fairly specialized work environment of ours. I’ve had training you haven’t; I’m going to know things you don’t. You’ve had training I haven’t. You’re going to know things I don’t.
It’s possible that I’m wrong about some of the things I think I know, even the things that I spent the most time learning. Possible? Let’s face it, it’s likely. I just don’t know what they are. We can all think of things we were taught as true that simply aren’t. The late British fantasy author Terry Pratchett used to refer to education as the process of learning less untrue lies, and there’s something to be said for that idea. I learned the rules of English grammar and they were first taught to me as fairly rigid things. My teachers didn’t mention that some of the best writers broke those rules. In physics, the work of Isaac Newton describes a lot of the reality that we could see and measure in the 18th century – but when we could measure even more things in the 20th century it no longer worked. Along came the ideas of Albert Einstein. Less untrue lies.
Then there are the things that people teach that aren’t true and never were true but people believed it. They still believe it. Things like the inherent moral superiority of this culture over that culture, of this gender over that gender, of this race over that race. Whether it’s Romans, Chinese, Indians, British, or Americans, those things never were true. But they were taught that way. And sometimes we believed them.
Some people still want you to believe them.
Don’t believe them.
You have worth. You matter. But not because of your nationality, the place of your birth, the heritage of your family, your gender, or even your training and education. You have worth because God created you and delights in you. You are special and unique, and everyone is special and unique because God created them and delights in them, too. Even the annoying folks who bring out their pride and tell you what to do as if you didn’t matter as much as they do.
Yes, they have worth. Just don’t believe them when they tell you how much more they’re worth than you are.
“But let’s face it,” writes Debie Thomas at JourneyWithJesus.net, “humility is a tricky thing. We too easily conflate it with self-effacement, low self-esteem, and complicity in the face of oppression. Even if we manage to define it in healthy ways, humility betrays us; the very instant at which I claim to achieve humility is the moment when it eludes me. Worse, very little in our culture rewards or supports the humble. Whether we’re talking entertainment, politics, sports, or even religion, we in Western cultures have an unhealthy admiration for the loudest, the biggest, and the greatest. Whether we recognize it or not, we are known around the world for idolizing the superlative. What would happen to our discourse if we shunned the word ‘best?’”
What would happen if we abandoned the ridiculous assertion time and time again that somebody is the “Greatest of All Time”? I hear it time and again, usually with the acronym “GOAT,” which confused me a lot the first few times I heard it without knowing that the letters stood for “Greatest of All Time.” I grew up on the Peanuts comic strip, in which the one to blame for a failure was often called the goat. I still have that in the back of my mind when somebody gets called the GOAT.
What would happen if we abandoned the notion that each of us has to be the best at something? I’m not the best preacher you’ll ever hear. I’m not the best photographer or poet or musician. That’s OK. I don’t have to be the best. More to the point, I don’t need to insist on being the best. I just need to strive to be better than I was yesterday, to approach the fullness that God imagined at my birth.
I also need to separate knowledge from power. I may be right about something, but most of the time that does not give me license to require it of you. It might not even be appropriate to try to persuade you of it. It might not even be appropriate to mention it. The exceptions are usually when somebody is being harmed. Then it’s time to say, “Somebody is hurting because of what you’re doing. Please stop.” In other matters, though, it’s not my place to tell you what to do.
You know. Like I’m merrily doing now.
As Melissa Bane Sevier writes at her blog, “If you are one of those people who thinks you deserve the best place at the banquet, think again. You need to be humbled. And if you are one of those people who thinks (or you’ve been told) you only deserve the lowest place at the banquet, think again. You need to be strengthened—you need to accept your own privileged status as a child of God.
“At God’s table, every place is the same. There is always enough to go around. There is always room for you. Be strong and be humble. They are not mutually exclusive.”
Pride might feel good for a while. Self-respect, one that knows we have limits, feels a lot better for a lot longer. Pride might make big changes in the world around us, and some of those might be improvements – but in the long run, people who act out of pride will ignore the consequences to those around them, will even adopt cruelty as a means to their ends. Pride might build a family, a business, or even a nation, but these are families, businesses, and nations with a crumbling foundation. It may take centuries, but they will fall.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching, so the prepared text above will not precisely match the sermon as he delivered it.
The image is “A Parable – Where to Sit” by Cara B. Hochhalter, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=59048 [retrieved August 31, 2025]. Original source: Cara B. Hochhalter.
