Sin

Today is the fifth and final Sunday of our message series for the season of Lent, called "Attitude Adjustment." You see there is an attitude adjustment that every single one of us needs to make, everybody, including me.  The attitude that we're talking about is actually a virtue. A virtue is a habit of high standard. This virtue is, perhaps the most important virtue of all, because it is the foundation of all virtues. We are talking, of course, about humility.

We started out this series a few weeks ago telling a story about a great man of true humility, Pope John Paul II.  We are ending this series with another story of another great person, Mother Teresa of Calcutta about when she went to Baltimore, Maryland to open a hospice for AIDS patients.

At that point, she was world famous and attracted huge crowds wherever she went. In Baltimore, that day, there were crowds of protesters, lots of them, because any group that had an ax to grind against the Catholic Church, was out on display. There were even protesters protesting the protesters. There were unstable people too, including scary ones. It was bedlam. And it got worse after she arrived. The pushing. The shoving. The shouting. The jockeying for position.

Mother Teresa was this petite, frail little lady.  People feared for her safety that day. Through it all, she was completely calm. She smiled, seemed unfazed and sailed right through it. It was really remarkable. She seemed as if everything that was going on had nothing to do with her.

Once inside the lobby of the hospice, before starting the ceremony, Mother Teresa politely asked everyone to wait. Then she walked off into the building and disappeared.  Those in charge had no idea where she was going. She reemerged back into the lobby a little while later dragging a kitchen chair, and a couple of church officials stepped in to assist her, but she insisted on doing whatever it was she was doing all by herself.

And what she did was she pulled this chair up under this huge framed photo of her and she climbed up on the chair and she wrestled this picture off the wall. And then she climbed down and she dragged the picture. She couldn't possibly pick it up because it was bigger than her.

But she dragged this picture to a nearby closet where she shoved it in and closed the door. And then she turned around sweetly and said, "Now we can get started."

To me, it was the perfect illustration of the practice of the habit of humility because it is a habit and it does take practice. How often? How often is our thinking and feeling dominated by thoughts of ourselves? Like that huge photo of Mother Teresa dominating that lobby, and how helpful would it be for our own efforts moving forward to just go ahead and take that picture down?  Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It is thinking of yourself less.

You see, humility is not weakness.  Humility is not a low opinion of yourself.  Humility is a clear opinion of yourself. Humility is beautiful knowledge of yourself as you really are.

And as we've learned, humility is surprisingly powerful because if you can be humble, you can learn and grow. If you can be humble, you can bring peace into your relationships. If you can be humble, you can cultivate patience for the world around you.

Humility is grounded in the reality that everything we have comes from God. A few weeks ago we spoke of a key way to grow in humility. It turns out that we grow as we listen. Humble people are good listeners, and they listen first and foremost to God.

Two weeks ago we looked at what we call the comparison trap, which damages and destroys humility. We are tempted all the time to compare ourselves to others, especially to compare ourselves to other people's faults and failures to feel better about ourselves.

But every time we do that, we're just inflaming pride and creating a distraction for ourselves. And finally, in the course of this series, we learn that ultimately, it is the attitude of humility that can take any situation and turn it around for our favor and our success moving forward.

If you're interested in catching up on any of these past homily messages, they're all on our website.

As we wrap up our series today, we want to look at how helpful the attitude of humility can be when it comes to recognizing and eliminating sin in our life. And to do it, we're going to take a look at a passage from the Gospel of John where we read this. "Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. But early in the morning he arrived again in the temple area, and all the people started coming to him, and he sat down and he taught them."

At a certain period towards the end of his life, Jesus spent some time in Jerusalem teaching at the temple each day, but in the evening, he would retire to the countryside, to the Mount of Olives. So here he's coming back in the morning to teach. And here's what happened. "The scribes and Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and made her stand in the middle. They said to him, 'Teacher this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law, Moses commanded to stone such a woman. So what do you say?' They said this to test him so they could have some charge to bring against him."

They create this huge scene simply to trip up Jesus and trap him as somebody who breaks the law, which was a very serious offense.

They were deliberately casting him in an unwinnable position, because the Jewish law called for death by stoning, but the Roman law forbids such things. So, however, he answered he'd be breaking someone's law, thereby setting himself up for trouble with the authorities, which is exactly what his enemies wanted. Beyond that was the obvious and stark contrast between Jesus' consistent teaching of mercy and forgiveness, and grace juxtaposed against this harsh, inhumane law.

In the face of this test, and the seemingly impossible challenge at hand, here's what Jesus did. He bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger. So he just slows things down.

I don't know about you, but when I get in situations where I'm stressed out, where someone is attacking me or trying to trip me up, my emotions can command my response and I'm tempted to respond in an impulsive way that very rarely serves me well. That's not what Jesus does here. He just slows down.

One of the most effective things you can do when confronted with unexpected conflict or sudden emergency or surprise is to just pause because there's power in the pause. So he takes his time to answer, and when he finally does, here's what he says, "Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to cast a stone." One of the all-time brilliant responses, he totally reframes the issue so that it's not about the accusation, it's about the accusers and their sinfulness. And then he goes back to writing in the sand.

What was Jesus writing? We don't know. All we know is that, "In response, they went away one by one. So Jesus was left alone with the woman before him and Jesus straightened up and said to her, 'Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?' 'No one sir.' Then Jesus said, 'Then neither do I condemn you.'"

He humbles the religious leaders who had exalted themselves with so much pride that they couldn't even recognize the Messiah they were waiting for when they saw him. He humbles the mighty, and in the process, he exalts the humble, lifting this woman up out of her shame and giving her a way forward. His charge is, "Go, and sin no more." But I think the emphasis there is on, "Go," "Go."

He gives her life back, but he gives her more than that, a way forward into her future, a future that now can be lived free from sin and shame. Humility is her path out.

Well, as we know, not all sin is of the same weight.  For instance, in this story, the woman's sin is actually less weighty than the sins of the religious leaders. It's true she committed adultery, and that's serious. But their sin is pride. And that's more serious. In fact, it's the most serious sin of all.  Pride was the sin of Lucifer and the fallen angels, and that's the sin of the Pharisees, too. That's why, over and over again, Jesus reserves his most bruising, his most withering criticism for the prideful Pharisees.

The reason pride is the most serious sin is because it blinds us to other sin in our life and thereby can be the most consequential of sins. Whatever stage or station of life you're in, your life and mine, too, is sometimes marred by sin. And if you're like most people in our community, perhaps that sin, is not terribly serious in the larger scheme of things, perhaps not always deeply consequential, things like gossip or ingratitude, impatience, overindulgence, impurity, and temperance, but sin, for sure.

Did you know that sometimes God actually allows us to struggle with sin, and did you know that it's very possible the reason that God allows us to struggle with sin is to teach us humility?

Sometimes God saves us from the worst possible sin, the sin of pride, as we struggle with lesser sin. Little daily reminders of how far from perfect we are. Pride makes us artificial, fake; humility makes us real. Humble acknowledgment of our sin, to ourselves and before God, first of all, but also to others, when appropriate, and from time to time, perhaps in the sacrament of confession, can be the path out of sin and the path into a future freer from sin.

This is what we want you to know this week. The attitude of humility is very helpful when it comes to recognizing and eliminating sin in our life.   The woman was adulterous, but her accusers had the greater sin of pride.

The reason pride is the most serious sin is because it blinds us to other sin in our life and thereby can be the most consequential of sins.  While pride blinds us to sin and inevitably leads to more sin, humility can recognize sin and help us with the grace of our Savior to move beyond it.  To paraphrase Saint Augustine, commenting about the former angel Lucifer, he said: It was pride that changed angels, like Lucifer, into devils; it is humility that transforms people into angels. That’s what we want you to know.

This is what we are encouraging everyone to do this week. Humbly acknowledge your sins, to ourselves and before God, first of all, but also to others when appropriate, and from time to time, in the sacrament of confession.

For this is the path out of sin and the path into a future freer from sin. We have a great opportunity to participate in the sacrament of confession this week.

We will have eight priests here to hear confessions this Thursday evening at 6:30pm. Why not take advantage of that opportunity to practice a little humility and become freer from sin?

It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes people as angels.  Humility is not thinking less about yourself. Humility is thinking about yourself less.