“OUR MOST INTRACTABLE SIN”
A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear
Sunday,
All
There’s the old story of the parents who sent their little boy to church, though they themselves didn’t attend. After a while, they began to suspect that he was actually skipping church and playing with friends instead. So they decided to question him each week to make sure he went and paid attention. Every week they’d ask the same questions, and he’d give the same answers:
Parent: Did you go to church today?
Boy: Yes.
Parent: Did you listen to the preacher?
Boy: Yes.
Parent: What did he preach about?
Boy: Sin.
Parent: And what did he say about it?
Boy: He was against it.
Well, here’s one preacher who has never actually preached about sin before. Or, at least I’ve never used the word “sin” to describe what I’m speaking out against. Until today.
It’s not that I’m for sin, exactly. I don’t think that little boy would go home from here on any given Sunday and report to his parents that I was in favor of sin. I just find the word generally of little help in making us think critically and carefully about right and wrong. If something is self-evidently wrong, attaching the word “sin” doesn’t make it any more wrong. If something is morally ambiguous and we’re not sure, attaching the word “sin” does not contribute to our understanding of the issues involved in resolving a moral dilemma. Sometimes the word fogs up rather than clarifies our vision.
Part of my
avoidance of the word is also derived from our Unitarian and Universalist
histories. Both traditions were spawned
in colonial
In that environment, early Unitarians and Universalists alike objected, affirming instead the dignity of human nature, not its depravity. The doctrine of original sin, as it was strictly taught, tore human identity away from its divine source. Yes, humans can and do make wrong choices, but that is because we are human, not because we are born with an evil nature.
So it is odd that I find myself speaking now on sin. Not only do I speak of it as sin, but what I identify comes uncomfortably close to some kind of “original” sin – or at least universal sin.
The sin I speak of is “hubris.” As the word is used today, we generally think of hubris as “excessive pride or arrogance.” It is that, of course, but it is also has more nuanced meanings. The word is used most often in theological contexts, and it carries with it an implication of placing yourself on God’s level, of being certain and right, never making a mistake or needing correction from others. In fact, you are so right that you don’t need God or anyone else to stand in judgment. Hubris.
The concept of original sin comes from the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. On a superficial level, the story tells about disobedience to God. God tells Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, and they disobey. Thus, sin.
But I think it’s not quite so simple. The sin was not in disobeying God, but rather in trying to be God. When the serpent spoke to Eve, tempting her to eat the fruit, he said, “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.” The original sin was not about having a depraved and evil nature, or even rebelling against God. The original sin was denying your fallible human nature and trying to think like God, to be God. In fact, when God discovered what Adam and Eve did, he issued a number of punishments for them, but the primary punishment was that they would not live forever. They were mortal. Finite! So there! That should put a damper on their out-of-control hubris.
The twentieth century Christian theologian Paul Tillich put it this way: “Hubris is the elevation of the human person into the sphere of the divine.” Hubris, he said, is “sin in its total form.”
I suppose that is the sense in which hubris can be understood as “original” sin. It is hubris – thinking ourselves in any way superior to others – that allows us to behave toward others in a manner that is often considered “sin.” Those who steal believe at some level they are more deserving than those they steal from. Those who lie believe their hearers aren’t worthy of knowing the truth. And so forth. Hubris is the ground from which almost all sins flower.
Hubris appears at many levels of human experience – personal, religious, and political. I’d like to look at these three levels separately.
Hubris can be seen, perhaps, on a personal level whenever one person claims they know what’s best for another person, and tells them so, or believes that their way of doing things or their way of thinking is the right way. The notion that hubris is another word for “pride” breaks down here. Hubris is not being proud of what we do or what we think. There is no sin in feeling good about your accomplishments or being strong in your convictions. Hubris is when we don’t accept that maybe we might be wrong or someone else might help us see things better.
Many relationships have been damaged by such hubris – marital, friendship, neighbor, or co-worker. In fact, the very notion of human relationship assumes that each of us can benefit by being open to another person’s perspective or understanding.
So, on a personal level, the presence of hubris is in fact the absence of respect for other people.
It is at the level of religion, perhaps, that hubris finds its most nourishing environment. Religions, by their very nature, are inclined to offer certain answers, claim to answer eternal questions, and so forth. This is especially true of Western religions. Less true of Eastern religions, but true nonetheless.
To me the very idea of proselytizing or converting other people away from their religion is an act of hubris. It says in blunt terms: “I’m right, you are wrong.” It says, “God would approve of you if you only agree with me.” There is ample room, of course, for interfaith dialogue. It’s great to have not only discussion, but a healthy give-and-take disagreement, provided each one respects the other’s integrity of conviction. But to try and change a person’s religion, to covert them, is the height of disrespect and hubris. It is no accident that religion has been a major contribution to most of the wars in human history.
To say all this, by the way, does not let Unitarian Universalists off the hook of hubris. True, we don’t proselytize or seek to convert others away from their religions. But we are sometimes prone to do something that is just as bad, maybe even worse. That is to belittle what others believe, calling it superstition or a “crutch.”
Over the years, I’ve heard a various criticisms about Unitarian Universalists. Some criticisms are simply wrong, and deliberately antagonistic. Many of them are just based, I think, on misunderstandings. Some of them have a little more than a grain of truth. But the one, I think, that probably sticks more than any other I’ve heard is that UUs can carry a certain smugness to their beliefs. That is, sometimes we have an air about us that suggests we are above the need to believe in fairy tales and fables. We see things as they are. Sometimes I see that smugness that others see in us. Sometimes I see it in me. Whenever I see it, it shames me. Another word for smug, of course, is hubris.
It is on the political level in which hubris becomes most dangerous, perhaps. One of the most respected American theologians of the 20th century, Reinhold Niebuhr, built a theological system around the notion of national hubris. He observed how common it is for nations to think of themselves as standing for the good and the right, and therefore seeing any competing nation as a threat to goodness.
Nations, like individual human beings, are flawed with imperfections. Most political or international conflicts arise from an unwillingness to accept the limitations of our own righteousness.
“Civilization,” he wrote, “depends upon the vigorous pursuit of the highest values by people who are intelligent enough to know that their values are qualified by their interests and corrupted by their prejudices.”
Furthermore, there is a dangerous tendency among nations, and in politics in general, to justify actions by asserting not just their rightness, but their righteousness. Here is one way Niebuhr said this:
“All men (and women) are naturally inclined to obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity. [But] religion is more frequently a source of confusion than of light in the political realm. The tendency to equate our political with our Christian convictions causes politics to generate idolatry.”
It isn’t because we are finite beings with limitations to our thinking that has caused us to have so much cruelty in human history. Rather, Niebuhr said, it is because we deny the limitations we have in our thinking that has lead to a bloody history of human conflict. We fail to acknowledge our fallibilities as human beings. The denial of our own human limitations is hubris.
“Hubris” isn’t when a nation has thousands of nuclear weapons and tells other nations they can’t have any. That’s not hubris. That’s just garden-variety hypocrisy. Hubris is when that nation which has thousands of nuclear warheads justifies their possession because they’re on the side of good. Their right to own weapons of mass destruction is self-evident. That’s hubris. I don’t mean to suggest that there can be no justification for owning those weapons. I’m just suggesting that a declaration of our own moral purity is not one of them.
I don’t want to
belabor this point, but I don’t want to avoid it either. We are at a stage in our history where
respect for the
It doesn’t take much of a stretch to see the appalling degree of hubris in Al-Qaida or other Islamic fanatics and terrorists. They wear it on their sleeve. They believe themselves to be the agents of God himself, and all the killing they promote is doing God’s work. Their divine mission is above the simple human rules of a civilized society. As I say, it is impossible to miss their hubris.
But one insidious quality of the sin of hubris is that it is so easy to see it in others, but so difficult to see it in ourselves. That is true on the personal level, true on the religious level, and true on the political level.
I call hubris the “intractable sin” because it is so pervasive. It isn’t easy to overcome because it isn’t easy to recognize. It sneaks up on you, and it disguises itself as virtue, truth, and right.
There is, in fact, a very effective antidote to the sin of hubris. That is humility. I’ve come gradually to feel that humility may, in fact, be one of the greatest of all human virtues. There is probably no quality that does more to foster healthy relationships than humility.
And humility ought to be accepted as a religious virtue. Reinhold Niebuhr said as much, and his words can be applied on a personal level or the religious level, or the political level. “Real religion,” he wrote, “produces the spirit of humility and repentance. It destroys moral conceit.”
Humility is essentially recognizing our limitations by virtue of being human. When we honor those limitations, we are more open to learning from others. When we honor those limitations, we are motivated to improve ourselves and our own circumstances and those of the world around us. When we honor our own limitations, we know why it is important to nurture healthy relationships. When we honor our own limitations, recognizing that we are not God’s voice, we may find ourselves more attuned to the voice of transcendence when we hear it, and allow it to feed our soul.
There is an old Hasidic adage that addresses this topic. It is said that to be genuine and honest as a human being, to have real integrity, we should walk around with two pockets, and a slip of paper tucked in each pocket to pull out when needed. On one slip of paper it says, “For my sake this whole magnificent, amazing universe was created.” In the other pocket, the slip of paper says, “I am but dust and ashes.”
That’s pretty much all I have to say this morning, except for one more thing. I never thought I’d ever say what I’m about to say. But when you go home today, if anyone asks you whether you went to church, you can say “yes.” And if they ask whether you listened to the preacher, to the extent that it’s true, you can say “yes.” And if they ask what the preacher talked about, you can say, “sin.” And if they ask what they preacher said, you can report: “He’s against it.”