When Fred offered me this opportunity to use his pulpit, my gut reaction was to say "Thanks, but no." I had no idea what I would speak about. But I was flattered to have been asked. I figured I had nearly a month. I'd think of something.

I should have listened to my gut. I'd hate to tell you how many drafts I have written, but now I do have an idea what I want to say. I will begin, however, by saying this. This experience has only heightened my respect for a man who can put together a really good sermon nearly every week, all the while spark-plugging a dynamic church and participating in denominational and community activism.

Preparing this talk, one of the things I noted is that much of it is about me. I'm sorry. I'm a lay minister and not a clergyman. I have no training in theology nor hermeneutics, nor in the art of putting together a sermon. So all I have to offer is myself: my philosophy, my experiences, and my thoughts about my experiences. I can only hope that you will find some value in comparing your own philosophy, experiences and thoughts with mine and possibly derive something of value from the exercise.

Another thing which has struck me, and which has troubled me from the first draft to the last, is the realization that the very act of putting together a sermon about pride is an act of arrogance. This is particularly true as I address this congregation. I know many of you, and I know that you know me. One of the things I know is how many proud deeds many of you have achieved. And one of the things I suspect is that the proud deeds I know of are only a vestige of your full accomplishments. So, who am I to be talking to you about pride? I'll tell you one of the things I am proud of. I am proud to be one of you, to belong to this assembly of proud people.

My starting point is my observation that, for anyone who becomes a source of great public admiration, a critic will arise to tear that person down. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, both the Roosevelts and John Kennedy will do for examples. So, in fact, will you and I, if we ever happen to attract enough notice to render us vulnerable.

More than that: all of us, to ourselves, are quite important enough to be candidates for just such destructive criticism. And all of us know ourselves well enough to know of what we should be ashamed. All too well, we know our clay feet, you and I. Each of us must wake in the night sometimes and think, "I am a failure. My mistakes are terrible to contemplate. My successes are miserable by comparison." Moreover, when we are in such a critical mode, we can find similar shortcomings in our associates, our friends, our families and our spouses.

As you sit here among your fellow UU's, in your religious community, among your friends, none is without fault. Not the person on your right, nor the one on your left, nor him behind you, nor her in front. Not even the one who warms your own chair. We are all humans. We are all quite imperfect. I abjure you, therefore, be gentle with one another. More than compliments spoken, or material gifts given, it will be in this gentle forgivingness -- in this foregoing of criticism, in this acceptance, that we will express love. And it will be in this loving that we will render our own brokenness whole.

On rare occasions -- RARE occasions -- it may be necessary to make our disapproval of one another known. If such a case should arise, let us express our concern to the one who needs to hear it, in private, and with the most careful concern for his or her feelings. This, too, is a way of loving.

But I am supposed to be talking about pride.

Here is a question. What have you ever done to be proud of? I don't mean this rhetorically. Rather, I mean to offer you an invitation to soul-searching. And I certainly do not want to hear your answer. If you have a sure answer to that question, you have a treasure to clasp to your heart -- a flame to warm you when the winds of fate chill you to the bone. On the other hand, if the only answers you can muster are matters of degrees attained, medals awarded, or fortunes amassed, I am sorry for you. These things will look good on your obituary, but they will be small comfort in the days preceding that final news item.

I have a grand-daughter, eight years old, who seems to have as many extra-curricular activities as regular school commitments. I notice that, when her gymnastics class performs for admiring parents and grandparents, everyone gets a trophy. I'm not sure how they work it, but it appears that everyone is best. I guess this is supposed to boost self-esteem, and perhaps it does. At any rate, I have not forgotten how I used to feel when teams chose up sides for baseball. I was often the last one chosen. This did nothing for my self-esteem, but I could understand it and accept it, painful though it was. My granddaughter is not stupid. I don't know what she thinks of her trophy, which looks just like every other child's trophy, but I doubt that it affects her self-esteem, and I am sure it is not something that makes her proud.

On the other hand. I once interviewed a candidate for medical school. He told me that he had been four years at the University of Maryland and had done well, so I asked him what he had gotten from his time there and he said, "I have a four-oh average." "That's good," I said, "but what else did you get?" "I got a 4.0," he replied. "You can't get much better than that."

Try as I might, I could not get him to contemplate the possibility that four years of college had netted him anything other than a good grade point. To my mind, this was an example of self-esteem substituting for pride. Here was a young man willing to make his entire idea of his own self-worth hinge on the fact that his professors had given him good grades. To be sure, he was admitted, but not on my recommendation. Most likely he gained admittance to AOA, the medical honorary society, and went on to build himself a lucrative practice. Medicine, however, can be a humbling profession. I like to think that somewhere along the line he may have had an humbling experience to start him on the transformation from self-esteem to pride. If so, he may have become a good doctor as well as a clever one.

In the Book of Job you find the epitome of a proud man. When everything he had worked for was taken from him, when everyone he loved had died, when his health was shot, when he could find no evidence that God loved him, when his wife advised him to curse God and die, when his friends assumed he was being punished for his sins, Job refused either to curse God or to grovel. All he ever asked of God was a fair hearing. He had his pride, and he maintained it. What God had is another matter. God, so the story tells us, had self-esteem. God's need was to demonstrate to Satan how truly Job loved him. In the final chapter, God, in his arrogance, undertook to make everything right with Job. He gave Job back all that he had taken away from him. He ultimately gave Job everything but the one thing Job had asked: a fair hearing. A divine whom I greatly respect once shocked his congregation by declaring from the pulpit, "God was a jerk." I agree. What God had was self-esteem.

I once had an older friend, Whitney. Whitney was not perfect. I am not inclined to dwell upon Whitney's faults, but he was certainly not without fault. However, when Whitney rode a horse he had trained into a show ring, you knew you were beholding a proud man, a man in control both of the horse and of himself. No one ever doubted Whitney's word, or ever had cause to.

When, in the depths of the Depression, Whitney lost his house and his farm, his two brothers gave him a few acres. Then he took me and a couple of other youngsters into the woods. He taught us how to turn a stand of tulip poplars into saw logs. We took along his team and his wagon, and together we hauled those logs to a mill and hauled the lumber to his new home site. In time, he built himself a house and a barn and built up a riding stable business which supported his family and himself for the rest of his life. I did not really need to know how to fell trees or to haul logs, but, while he was teaching me those things, he taught me how a proud man deals with adversity. Nothing I ever learned in school has been so valuable to me.

My father was a proud man. I never knew him to tell a falsehood. He was a physician in days long before Medicare. His first fee for an office visit was a dollar, and his last was five dollars. I do not believe he ever refused a patient for financial reasons or gave one less than his full wisdom and skill. He made house calls. He was on call seven days a week, and pretty much at all hours. He was a proud man.

Father once defended me against a sadistic teacher. This was not his style. His style was to expect me to respect my teachers. The teachers' words were law, in the classroom and in my home. But this teacher overstepped the line. She impugned my veracity. "My son does not lie," he told her, speaking through his teeth. He was furious, but I was proud, because it was true, and that truth overrode all the rules about respect for teachers. It may be only incidental that it soon came out that it was the teacher who had lied.

I am a proud man. Within reason, I have lived the sort of life I have meant to live. Within reason, I have been true to myself. But only within reason. At times I have shamed myself before others, and, at times I have shamed myself in my own eyes. I would not care to describe those times for you. They are my private shames, and I shall keep them that way. I acknowledge them to myself, however, and in so doing, I reinforce the will that is my wall that protects me from living shamefully. Thus, I remain a proud man.

Contrary to much that one hears and reads about pride, I hold that pride is a good thing; it is hubris that is bad.

Pride is a matter of self-respect. Over a period of years, or over a lifetime of years, one develops a vision of the sort of person one would like to be, and then one invests much effort into being that sort of person. Sacrifices of time, money, and short-term pleasure are often required. One tells the truth when a lie would be profitable. One pays a fair price where a hard-nosed deal is within reach. One stands by a past commitment that it would be convenient to forget. These sacrifices, in general, bring only one sure reward: the privilege of examining oneself from the inside out and finding that, overall, one is OK.

Inevitably, in this process of self-realization, one makes mistakes. I am not talking about the mistakes where you have used your best judgement and it turns out to be faulty. The only way to avoid mistakes of that sort is to do nothing at all, and that is inherently the greatest mistake of all. In a very important sense, to do nothing at all is not to live at all. We may regret our errors of judgement but, if our faith is sure, we can continue to hold our heads high despite them. The inevitable mistakes of which I now speak, however, are sadly different. I am talking about the mistakes we make when we permit ourselves to forget the proud self we have envisioned in favor of a devalued self, the tawdry remark, the cheap shot, the evasion, or the flat-out lie. If pride is a good thing, reflecting our struggle to be the men and women we would wish to be, the price of these other mistakes -- of these falls from grace -- is shame.

Shame, I would maintain, is the down side of pride. A person without pride can know no shame. Joseph Welch, counsel for the Army, once turned to Joseph McCarthy on the floor of the United States Senate, and cried, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last have you left no sense of decency!" The question was rhetorical. As a man totally without pride, Senator McCarthy never ascended to the level of a man capable of shame.

What Senator McCarthy, and all too many people of his stripe, have had in abundance is hubris. I have no doubt that, having been honored with a seat in the Senate, and having used that position to make himself feared by many far better men and women, McCarthy felt that he had grounds for pride, but he had not. All he had was hubris.

Pride is personal and it is internal. Hubris is something else. Hubris is the value I place upon myself because of acknowledgements or honors I receive. It is a high grade point, and never mind how you got it. If one basks in admiration, however sincere or however well-intentioned, which one receives from others, that is hubris. If one achieves distinction by undiscovered cheating, one builds hubris, and shame.

So, here is the essence of my message. To be perfect is not possible. To be proud, we must first discern what sort of person we wish to be. Then we must recognize the high price of being that sort of person. Then we must resolve to pay the price. We must let neither our successes nor our failures lead us to lose that resolve. In the end, we will be proud. And it will be worth the price.

About once a month Nancy attends church here with me, and about once a month I attend church in Washington with Nancy. Nancy belongs to St. Mark's Episcopal Church. You may know the saying that UU's have trouble with hymn singing because they are always trying to read ahead to make sure they don't sing any words they don't agree with. I'm afraid that is the way I worship at St. Mark's. Earlier, I read you the confessional as it appears in the book of Common Prayer. I have to censor it. I have no trouble with "I have sinned ... in thought, word and deed, by what I have done and by what I have left undone ... I am truly sorry and I humbly repent." But after that I have to put on the brakes. I leave out the part about "For the sake of your Son, Jesus Christ, and so forth." The officiating priest then says "Your sins are forgiven." Now, bear in mind that the word "sin" is taken to mean "missing the mark," in which sense, we are surely all sinners. Bear in mind, also, that he does not say "I forgive you your sins," but rather, "Your sins are forgiven."

Now, I know very well that he has in mind that Jesus died for the forgiveness of sin and that that is why he says my sins are forgiven. However, you may have heard me on this subject before; you may recall that my God is universal, and is unlikely, for your prayers or mine, to change the courses of the planets around the sun, nor even to intervene in the matter of the early bird and the early worm. You may further recall that I consider that a piece of the universal God is within me. It is this internal God, who knows how short of perfection I am, who forgives my sins. If you want to be cynical about it, you may say it is I who concedes my weakness and who forgives myself. The essence of this forgiveness is that, knowing that I have missed the mark and that I will miss the mark again and again, I repent my failures and resolve to try to improve my aim. It is not because of any delusion that I will never miss the mark again but because I am striving to improve my aim that I remain a proud man.

If what I am saying makes any sense to you, I am encouraging you, also, to be proud.

I would like to close with a commercial. About a year ago, this church of ours, in cooperation with St. Phillips, completed its first Habitat for Humanity house. This is something to be proud of. A Habitat house is not a gift, as we ordinarily think of a gift. As part of the deal, the recipient family poured a lot of their own sweat into it so that, in the end, it was truly their house. But we and the people of St. Phillips also poured in a lot of effort. The foundation, the walls and the rafters contain our sweat. And we put in substantial amounts of money. In a month or so, we are going to start our second Habitat house. If you can drive a nail or tote a two by four, or come up with ten bucks for a pin like this, or with more, for the sheer joy of being part of a noble effort, talk to Pat Fleeharty or Ed Johnson. No offer will be refused. And we will all be proud.

As we extinguish our chalice, let us go forth with love, with humility, but also with pride, resolved to better ourselves however we may.

© Leo Karpeles, Lay Minister January 30, 2000

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