7th Sunday in Ordinary Time - 2025c

Lesson One – Genesis 11:1-9

Lesson Two – Romans 3:21-28

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The First Sin

 

INTRODUCTION: Back in the late 1920s, Henry Ford embarked on an ambitious building campaign deep in the heart of Brazil. 

 

Since rubber was an important component in the production of his cars, Ford was looking for a way to acquire the material cheaply and quickly. Believing he had struck upon a solution to the problem, Ford bought a tract of land in the Amazon roughly the size of the state of Tennessee so he could build his own rubber plantation to supply his tire needs.

 

Literally known as Fordlandia, the plantation was intended by Ford to be a Utopian oasis right in the middle of the jungle. Within Fordlandia there would be paved sidewalks, all the latest electrical appliances, contemporary American homes, and even a golf course.

 

Fordlandia, in other words, was going to serve as a shining example of human ingenuity and creativity.  

 

ONE: Of course, from the get-go, the Utopian city of Fordlandia was plagued with one problem after another. 

 

First, the workers from Brazil didn’t take too well to American food, or the idea that they were expected to work through the blazing hot afternoon sun everyday – a practice foreign to many people in Latin American countries even today.

 

So workers were constantly coming and going from the plantation, leaving only a skeleton crew to man an area the size of Tennessee. 

 

The decision to plant the rubber trees in tight groves also turned out to be a disaster. Normally, rubber trees grow spaced far apart, protecting them from the spread of blight and diseases. Needless to say, planting the rubber trees closely together only fostered the spread of disease causing them to die as fast as they were being planted. 

 

And then there were all the deaths in the first two years of the plantation’s operation – 92 in all. Some folks died from malnutrition, others from snake bites, and still others from malaria and yellow fever. There are even written reports of infants being carried away by jaguars into the jungle never to be seen again. 

 

So Henry Ford’s Utopian dream of a plantation named Fordlandia ended up disintegrating into a disaster. The very city in the heart of the Amazon that was to be a symbol of human ability and achievement was eventfully closed without ever producing one single drop of rubber.          

 

And while descendants of some of the original workers at Fordlandia still, amazingly, live there, the place has largely been reclaimed by the jungle, leaving only rusted out warehouses, cracked sidewalks, and dilapidated, slowly crumbling homes.

 

TWO: Well, we hear about the collapse and slow fall of Fordlandia and it’s easy for the Tower of Babel to also come to mind. 

 

After all, the Tower of Babel, just like Fordlandia, was also another attempt on the part of humans to display our ingenuity and greatness, wasn’t it? Living in the land of Shinar, humans decide it’s time to make a name for themselves by building a city with a tower that will stretch all the way to the heavens. 

 

“Come,” they say, “let us build ourselves a city with a tower that stretches into the heavens so we can be known throughout all the earth.”

God, of course, doesn’t take too fondly to such divine aspirations. Staring down on the tower in mid-construction, God has a very different take on the massive building campaign going on below. 

 

Realizing humans plan to keep on constructing the tower until it reaches into the heavens, God sees the endeavor as just another example of humans thinking too much of themselves. “Build, build, build!” says God to the heavenly court of angels around him. “Trust me, folks, this is only the beginning of what these humans will try and do. For once they’ve reached the heavens, their next desire will be to do away with all of us just so they can take our places.”

 

So the Tower of Babel is, in part, a shining reminder of humanity’s tendency to overreach and to assume too much about who we are and what we can accomplish. 

 

So God does what needs to be done. Creating multiple languages on the spot, the construction on the Tower of Babel is brought to a screeching halt because of the sudden inability of the builders to communicate. Like Fordlandia rusting away in the jungle, the Tower of Babel must finally be abandoned to the wind and other elements of nature.

 

The tower, which was supposed to be its own expression of human achievement and ability, is left to slowly but surely crumble back to the ground.     

 

THREE: The real point behind the story, of course, is the age old problem of human pride. 

 

Yep, ever since Adam and Eve first disobeyed God, we humans have had a hard time taking good stock of ourselves, haven’t we? We get to talking and thinking about ourselves and before long we’ve concluded we’re a pretty special collection of beings. So special, in fact, it’s easy to begin seeing ourselves as being more important than we really are. 

 

The British poet and critic Dame Edith Sitwell once put it this way, “I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty, but I am too busy thinking about myself.”   

 

Well, that’s what pride is, in the end. It is the turning away from God to ourselves as if we were the answer to all our own questions. 

 

Perhaps that helps explain why C.S. Lewis called pride the great sin and why he also believed that it was at the source of every other sin committed by humans. For with pride, we all too easily see ourselves being vested with powers and abilities we don’t truly have.

 

The great theologian Thomas Aquinas, in a manner very similar to C.S. Lewis, liked to call pride the very first sin of all; and consequently, the wellspring for all others. For as far as Aquinas was concerned, pride was a kind of wrongly ordered worship. Rather than worship God, with pride we end up worshipping ourselves. 

 

Or as Ecclesiasticus likes to put it: “Pride is the beginning of all sin.” 

 

There is a Jewish man who likes to say the Jewish faith can be boiled down to basic beliefs: First, there is a God; and second, we are not it!

 

Well, the same could be said for us as well. At the heart of our faith lies the same basic notion. There is a God, and we aren’t it.

 

FOUR: Of course, such negative talk about pride can sound pretty archaic these days, can’t it? 

 

For if there was ever a sin that has gone through a massive transformation, well, it’s got to be pride. After all, pride is pretty much the rage these days, isn’t it?

 

Yep, somewhere along the way pride got transformed from a vice that was to be avoided into a virtue that is to be honed and nurtured above all else. It’s not pride we worry about anymore, but instead low self-esteem, for which pride is the needed remedy. 

 

Or as another man has put it: “Somehow Pride and its cousins – arrogance, egotism, vanity, and conceit – got trumped by self-respect, self-esteem, self-confidence…Jesus’ exhortation to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ has been shortened to a hard and fast, ruthlessly enforced mandate: love thyself.”  

 

And no doubt the transformation of pride from a vice to a virtue over the years can be traced to the way it has sometimes been used to defend the status-quo and to keep people in check. I will be the first to admit it, we Christians have sometimes expressed our concerns over pride in ways that are far from helpful.

 

For while pride might indeed be a sin, there’s also no denying it has been used perversely at times to keep people subjugated and, well frankly, enslaved. After all, how many slaves were told over the years by their Christian masters they shouldn't think themselves worthy enough to be free of their shackles.            

 

But of course, there is a difference between believing in one’s inherent dignity and worth as a child of God and pride, right? Dignity claims the image of God that is within all of us, while pride is concerned with our tendency to improperly bask in our perceived self-importance. And in a universe that is estimated to be 13.7 billion years old and 93 billion light years in diameter, well, pride hardly seems to be the first response we should have.           

 

Several years ago a guy named Stanley Hauerwas, who teaches at Duke Divinity School, was named “The Best Theologian in America” by Time magazine. But in response to the award, Hauerwas had some rather strange thoughts to offer. 

 

While thanking Time for the honor, Hauerwas pointed out that Christians don’t really consider words like “the best” or “the greatest” to be all that helpful.  After all, as Hauerwas pointed out, Jesus clearly spent a lot of his time critiquing such concepts as well as the people he believed were too enthralled with them.                      

 

Well, a healthy and proper view of pride, it seems to me. 

 

CONCLUSION: So look, even though it seems outmoded, we can still talk about the sin of pride, can’t we? 

 

Not in ways that are harmful or hurtful to others, of course, but rather in ways which honor the way pride can lead us to think too much of ourselves.

 

For while we human beings are certainly capable of many great things, because of that it can also be easy for us to forget our proper place in the grand scheme of things.

 

For as the first of all sins, pride unexamined can all too easily allow us to forget one of the great themes of our faith.

 

First, that there is a God, and second, that we ain’t it. 

 

And now to the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.