The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Proper 17C
The Episcopal Church, like the rest of the Anglican Communion, sits in a spot between the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant churches of the Reformation. In that in-between spot, we have a different relationship to the Bible than either the more Protestant churches or the Roman Catholic Church.
You may have noticed that we read from a book called “Sirach” today. If you open a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox version of the Bible, you’ll find Sirach nestled in the Old Testament, put right before the prophets. In more Protestant Bibles, you won’t find Sirach; during the Protestant Reformation, there was a move to only accept the books of the Old Testament that were part of the Jewish canon, which meant that Sirach and a bunch of other books were moved to a section called the “Apocrypha.”
And we were stuck in the middle of the argument. In the 39 Articles of Religion that we inherited from the Church of England, and which we in the Episcopal Church adopted in a modified form in 1801, we set forth a middle way. These texts that were part of the Apocrypha, that were accepted by the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholics but were disputed by the Protestants, we would accept them as good reading for faith and morals, but they were not to be used as doctrine. (page 868 of the prayer book).
And so we would read them occasionally in church because the Apocrypha has some good stories like Tobit and Judith, and some wisdom like Sirach, but if you were a theologian you would not be quoting from those books.
So our first reading today, Sirach, comes from that Apocrypha. It offers us wisdom about pride, of that inflated sense of self which makes room for nothing else.
Sirach begins with the result of sin: we withdraw from God. If we have an inflated sense of self, if we are puffed up, then there is no room for God. We turn away, we close our hearts. If the only person I think about is me, then what need do I have for anyone else? I stand alone.
We see how that plays out. The wealthy who do not have need of anyone else … other than all the workers in their companies. The powerful who do not have need of anyone else … other than the people who follow their orders. Yet these same people think that they alone are worthwhile. They have lost their sense of connection with anyone else; they do not respect the dignity of other human beings because they start to lose their ability to see the humanity of anyone else.
But Sirach pushes it further – it is not just an individual issue. The prideful person affects others around them. The proud king sets himself up over a kingdom and begins to think he has a “divine right” to rule, that because he’s in charge, it must be destiny. He’s better than others. And so the pride at his heart eats him up, and it eats up the kingdom. His pride begets hate, and his humanity is rotted from the inside out. The king’s illness spreads out to the kingdom, and then the kingdom’s sickness will infect the king’s successor.
Sirach points us to how soul sickness is not an individual issue. Soul sickness is social, too, and it spreads. Sickness in people and society spreads back and forth.
We saw that pretty clearly back in the height of the COVID days. It didn’t take long for the inner sickness where a part of America decided that any mitigation efforts were an unforgivable restriction on their rights. Even masks became unbearable to them. No one was to tell them they couldn’t do something, even if it was pretty minor, if annoying – I remember wearing them and getting all that fog in my glasses!
But it said something about our American culture that those mitigation efforts were rejected. We didn’t know then just how hard it would be, and we still don’t know the effects of long COVID or whether the virus stays hidden in the system for years, like chicken pox or the Epstein-Barr Virus. But something in our culture as Americans saw any mitigation as a restriction rather than an effort to care for one another and to buy ourselves some time to understand the virus better.
And so there are folks who were formed by that response. Folks who were suspicious of the mitigation efforts became suspicious about medicine, and the efforts to find a vaccine suddenly translated to suspicion about all vaccines, even ones in long use. We find ourselves facing measles, a disease that I’d never heard much about in my lifetime because it was so exceedingly rare because of routine childhood vaccines.
But beyond literal sickness, there’s other aspects of that soul sickness in our society, too. We live in a nation where some imagine themselves committing violence – either for some grand cause or for getting revenge. How many people post on news stories about how if someone threatened them, they’d be glad to shoot them? It’s not about defending themselves; it’s about having an excuse for violence. When I was at the grocery store yesterday with my parents, I saw a musclebound man with a shirt proclaiming that “if it comes to violence, I do violence better than you can.” There’s profound sickness there.
We live in a nation with such wealth and abundance, but so few believe they can never have enough. They value themselves as captains of industry, as the smartest and best – and now wages are stagnant for most Americans, the dream of home ownership has become a fantasy, and what used to be public goods are now hoarded for private wealth. Cities will sell out their water, land and air to coax a business to move in, promise never to add taxes to them, and leave their citizens holding the bag.
This is a far, far cry from what Jesus counsels us in the Gospel. Jesus counsels us to humility. Humility as a way of life is a non-attachment to status or power. It’s taking the lowest seat, not in the hope that your host will move you upward, but because there is absolutely nothing wrong with having the lowest seat. The lowest seat is perfectly fine. Our sense of self is rooted in being a child of God, and from that basic fact we do not need to cling to status or power. Being a child of God is enough.
This is the healing that we need. This is the healing that our culture needs. We are a profoundly sick culture – and the healing is humility. Humility that enough is enough, humility that does not delight in violence, humility that looks for the good of others as well as our own.
And so, as always, we must start with ourselves. How do we learn this lesson of humility? How do we put it into practice?
We can start by looking at things from other people’s perspectives. That work of empathy is also a work of humility. Empathy says that another person’s experience matters as well as our own. Empathy lets us look at an enemy, at someone we have a disagreement with, and see the sacred child of God before us. We are a sacred child of God, and they are, too. If we are not fighting with them about seats at a banquet, if we turn our hearts toward them and turn our hearts toward God, even if we disagree with them about deeply important things, we will not forget that they are a child of God, and we are a child of God. From that humility, our pride is changed to empathy. So now that you know a cure for much of what ails us, what will you do to take and share that cure to help heal the world? Amen.