20 June 2002 Evening Prayer
St John the Evangelist Cold Lake
Psalm 85
1 Samuel 2:27-36
Matthew 18:10-20
An anonymous man of God prophesies to Eli about his fate and the fate of his sons for their failure to follow God – you see Eli’s Sons are taking more than their share of the sacrifice and are growing fate off of what should have been sanctified to God. As a result of this betrayal, Eli is told that his family will be reduced to beggars.
I have often wondered about the reason for our Lord’s demand for offerings of burnt flesh so often described in the Old Testament. The pagan practice was to make these offering so that that particular God may eat and be satisfied. We find this description of Yahweh no where in the Old Testament – but rather that the scent of the offering is soothing to Him. Indeed, our present tradition of using incense in service finds some of its historical roots in burnt offerings – in the Compline service we also hear the words, let my prayers rise to you like the incense, the lifting up of my hands like the evening sacrifice. Yahweh does not demand these offerings because he needs to eat but for much the same reason we make our offerings of alms and oblations now – it is a form of personal sacrifice in God’s honour.
This concept of personal sacrifice is the one that I want to develop tonight.
Our modern world spurns the idea of personal sacrifice for the most part. In many places it seems as if the idea of self-sacrifice for a greater cause is almost laughed at as an anachronism, a feature of a distant past that has no place in a modern enlightened society. This manifests itself in many ways….
To end an argument quickly and happily usually takes one of the parties to apologize – even if they weren’t the one that started the conflict. I can speak personally that this can be a very very difficult thing to do, especially when I know that I am the one who is in the right! Wow, that moral high ground sure feels like a good place to be, doesn’t it?
That moral high ground is the cause of much conflict on national scale in our world today.
As we as Anglicans have experienced most recently, the issue of same-sex rights are likely going to be the most divisive issue our church has dealt with in decades. I suspect that it will make the entire ordination of women topic look like a kindergarten reader. What is the basis of these demands for equality – is it the resolution of long-standing oppression, or is it an expression of hurt pride and a lack of humility? I will leave that discernment to you.
I’m not going to listen to that Priest – he hasn’t been alive as long as I’ve been going to church.
What links these situations together, and how does this relate to self sacrifice?
Before someone willing gives of themselves freely and unconditionally they need to have a handle on what I consider to be the worst of all the sins – pride. For it is pride that manifests all of these examples: it is our pride which holds back a quick apology; our pride that makes us assert our rights over the tenants that scripture and the holy church has laid out for us; it is pride that assures us that we are smarter or wiser than anyone else who we come into contact with.
It is our pride that allows us to start reasoning by saying, ‘well, you know the bible isn’t always fully true.’ And finish by saying ‘these scriptural verses are not relevant to our situation, after all they were written by people in a radically different culture a long long time ago.’ It is pride which leads us from the church of God, to the church of Man.
It is pride which stops any sense of self-sacrifice from making our world a better place to live. It is pride which will eventually lead us far from God, and far into the comfort of our own self-assurance and our own intellect.
Eli’s sons stole the offering because they thought it was their due. I remember a past boss of mine who had just returned from a very trying United Nations deployment to Haiti telling a story about the cult of ‘I deserve this’. What he said was that the day you start justifying your actions with the reasoning ‘I deserve this’ is the day that you start to fall prey to the sin of pride. There have been more than a few people in prominent places who have fallen to this reasoning and, I expect, many more who have not yet been found out.
A recent dramatic example is the Enron scandal, now felt in Canada with Arthur Anderson Accounting. The story so far is of deliberate actions to obscure and falsify data so as to push up stock prices for the betterment of the corporation, and then when found out, to shred thousands of pages in an attempt to cover up the crime. In all this deceit there was only one senior trader at Enron who came forward and told the truth – and in the words of Jesus I ask, which one of these was justified before our Father in heaven?
We continually fall prey to the sin pride. Going back to the enlightenment, you can see the strains of human pride pushing forward the cult of science and quantitative method. This central tenant of the humanist belief system places man at the helm of all belief and reason – if we can prove it, it is true. We are the ones who define our universe and the buck stops with us. There may be higher powers, but until we can be convinced scientifically that this exists, it is not rational to accept any of it. Our belief in our own capabilities surpasses the existence of God Himself.
This spirit of self-sacrifice is what the gospel tells us this evening. While our world tells us that the one sheep is an ‘acceptable loss’ and ‘the good of the many must outweigh the good of the few’ our Lord tells us that he will not abandon us, regardless of what the world says. This standard calls to us, to draw us out of our own pride to help us mimic God’s level of care for us – we are called to go forth and search for that one sheep, regardless of the cost to ourselves.
To be self-sacrificial as our Father is, and as Christ physically showed us here on earth, requires us to be empty of human pride. To willingly give of one’s self without any expectation of return means that we need to die spiritually to the human world, and to be reborn in Christ Jesus. How do we do this as Christians? How do we do this in our mode of worship that we call Anglican? By holding true to the things upon which the Anglican church was founded:
- the supremacy of scripture in that ‘it contains all things necessary for salvation’
- the three creeds as our entire basis for belief
- the importance of tradition in moderating our desire to change
- liturgy as our basis of worship, developed in the global communion
- the episcopacy as the guiding principle
How is this not being demonstrated today? Scripture is almost taken as optional. Thus we see manifestations like the rewriting of hymns to include lines such as ‘God our father and our mother’, and the rationalization (there is pride again) that we are more enlightened then those that went before, therefore we are able to reinterpret what were previously thought to be ageless truths. Our tradition is being gradually dispensed with by the same means – since we are obviously wiser than anyone who has preceded us, simply by virtue of the fact that we are further along the time line. The episcopacy as our guides has been dispensed with as we see revisionist bishops who rewrite liturgy to meet their own social agenda, even when the consensus of the college of bishops contradicts them – again, rampant pride.
What then is the solution. Like anything important, there are no easy answers. Pride is the sin that I wrestle with the most and I have found that the only thing that works is prayer and openness to God’s presence. Only through the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives can we hope to overcome the power of pride. Only through prayer will we continually welcome him into our lives to work these changes. Only through self-denial and mortification through small things – regular fasting, giving to the needy, and undertaking activities not because they will make us look good but because they are the right thing to do will we start to win over this most difficult sin. In the end, it is God’s grace that will overcome and it is our task to enact that grace into the world around us. Amen.
