Sermon for the 4th Sunday After Trinity, 2021

You can tell a lot about a culture by the professions that its people honor and aspire to join. Athens had its philosophers, Sparta its warriors, Rome its patricians, the Middle Ages its saints, the Renaissance its artists, the Industrial Age its titans of industry, and so on and so forth. It is perhaps a sign of our society’s deep decadence that the equivalent aspirational vocation in our society--as I have learned from hearing the dreams of many of my students--is, in fact, the social media influencer. For those of you who don’t know, a social media influencer is someone who is perceived to have credibility on a certain topic, has a massive online following, and can motivate their followers to act based on their recommendations, earning them the big bucks from large corporations looking to cash in on these influencers’ fan bases. While one might think that shilling merchandise for cash might cost influencers followers, being paid to promote products has become such a status symbol online that, as The Atlantic reports, some wannabe influencers actually create fake sponsored posts that suggest they have cut lucrative brand deals with big business. With the social media influencer, we have arrived, I believe, at the apotheosis of humankind’s predilection towards vainglory, which is the subject of this morning’s homily.

In these early weeks of Trinitytide, the Prayer Book focuses our attention on the seven deadly or capital sins. This week, the collect and our readings present us with the sin of vainglory. Simply put, vainglory refers to an excessive or disordered desire for status, recognition, or fame. As the word itself indicates, the “glory” being sought after is, however, “vain,” insofar as it is sought for the wrong things, in the wrong way, or from the wrong people. 

While closely related to pride, vainglory is a distinct sin: we can, for instance, take pride in our excellence without needing it to be affirmed by others, as in the case of someone with a narcissistic superiority complex; likewise, we can be vainglorious without having any actual excellence to take pride in, as in the case of the fraudulent social media influencers. Think of it this way: if pride is thinking yourself better than others, whether it be at your job, at trivia night, or even in your spiritual walk with God, vainglory is making sure that others know that you are better than them at those things. Thus, our social media influencers are our poster children for vainglory: their goal is simply to win fame and approval from others without having actually done anything truly virtuous or excellent that would merit such honor and attention. They are, simply put, famous for being famous. 

This overview of vainglory brings us to the collect and readings for this morning. Let’s start with the epistle, from Romans 8, where the subject of glory runs through the entire chapter. In our passage for this morning, St. Paul reminds us that the human desire for glory is actually something that God has built into us, for we are intended to desire that glory “which shall be revealed in us” at the time of our “full adoption as sons” and the “redemption of our bodies.” Paul is speaking of our future glory, which will be made manifest in us when God brings all things to their consummation in the new heavens and the new earth. This has been God’s purpose for us all along; as Psalm 8 tells us, God made man “lower than the angels, to crown him with glory and worship.” Thus, as Rebecca DeYoung explains in her excellent book on the vices, “The glory itself isn’t the main problem; it’s the vanity of how we seek it and what we seek to find in it.” Indeed, as St. Paul puts it back in our Epistle reading, the problem is that our desire for glory has been distorted, corrupted due to sin, and as a result all of us (and even creation itself!) have been subjected to vanity, to the pursuit of a false or vain glory that only leads to emptiness and disappointment. Within the present “bondage of corruption,” we find ourselves frustrated by our inability to be as we were intended to be before the Fall. And so, we instead pursue a false glory, vainglory. Our pursuit of the applause and the affirmation of others, as understandable as it may be, can only ever lead us to the words which open the book of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever.” 

What then shall we do? Paul, in our Epistle reading, shows us how we can reorient our thinking away from vainglory. For Paul, our hope in this future glory is what allows us to endure the sufferings of this present time. We need not chase after the empty applause and fleeting approval of this world precisely because God has promised eternal glory to those who endure, with the help of the Holy Spirit, our present sufferings, looking forward to the “glorious liberty of the children of God” at the time of the resurrection. We can certainly understand how those who, without this eternal hope, survey the wreckage of the world around them with the aforementioned attitude described at the outset of Ecclesiastes and conclude that the best they can make of their lives is to pile up as much wealth, power, and status as they can--fleeting and vain though they know it to be--before they die, hoping to be remembered as someone who has gone down in history as having been famous and important. But this is not the way of the Christian; we need not fight over the scraps of vain glory in this life because we can look forward to feasting on the glorious banquet that God has promised to those who have been adopted as his sons. This, I think, is what the collect for this morning is getting at: it beseeches God to help us to “pass through things temporal, that we may finally lose not the things eternal.” Indeed, one of the things that is so ruinous about our pursuit of vainglory is that it diverts our attention from God’s eternal promises. 

Setting vainglory in this context of the contrast between “things temporal” and “things eternal” allows us to further unpack how vainglory sinks its claws into our souls. As the church fathers recognized, we are often ensnared by the things of this world insofar as vainglory is usually connected with the vice of greed. After all, if vainglory emphasizes keeping up appearances and having others think highly of us, this sin will often manifest in the need to have to keep up the kind of lifestyle that others will find impressive and respectable. In fact, in his most famous homily on vainglory, St. John Chrysostom targets precisely this connection with greed: while people of his day sought to accumulate ever greater possessions, he reminded them that in God’s economy it is the poor and the outsider who is the greatest in his kingdom. In particular, Chrysostom had an intense interest in instructing parents to guard their children from vainglory, and his counsel focused on the relationship between vainglory and conspicuous consumption. As Chrysostom laments, “[A] father thinks of every means, not whereby he may direct the child’s life wisely, but whereby he may adorn it and clothe it in fine raiment and golden ornaments. Why dost thou this, O man? Granted that thou dost thyself wear these, why dost thou rear in this luxury thy son who is as yet still ignorant of this folly?” Rather, Chrysostom thunders, “I shall not cease exhorting and begging and supplicating you before all else to discipline your sons from the first. If thou dost care for thy son, show it thus, and in other ways too thou wilt have thy reward. [...] Raise up an athlete for Christ!” By using this athletic metaphor, hearkening back to Paul’s use of similar language in the New Testament, Chrysostom is pointing parents towards a vision of training in virtue that will impress upon their souls, from a very early age, the ways of God. In the case of vainglory, then, parents have the particular responsibility of modeling for their children a household in which concerns for status, especially insofar as they derive from an attitude of “keeping up with the Joneses,” are subverted by commitments to simplicity and generosity and to avoiding ostentation and greed. Would that we raise up such athletes for Christ in this parish! Keeping God’s promises ever before our eyes, and before the lives of our children, enables each of us and our families to put aside our vainglorious pursuits and instead live the kind of life modeled to us by our Lord Jesus Christ, as evidenced in this morning’s Gospel reading.

In the Gospel lesson, taken from Luke 6, we find a further antidote to the sickness of vainglory. These famous words of Christ, also found in Matthew’s Gospel as part of the Sermon on the Mount, provide some of the core ethical content by which God’s people are called to live. While we could certainly approach this passage from any number of angles, this morning I am most interested in seeing what it tells us about the subject of vainglory. In verse 39, the Lord warns us against following purported guides who are, in fact, blind. As Jesus says, “Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?” While the collect reminds us that God is to be our “true ruler and guide,” we all too easily fall under the influence of any number of false guides. To return to the image that opened this homily, we live in a time in which our most popular guides are vainglorious influencers who generally lack true sight beyond their own desire for further likes and clicks. Even within the church, the phenomenon of Christian celebrities who wield great influence over their followers apart from any formal training, commissioning, or accountability suggests that the problem of “the blind leading the blind” is a symptom of the disease of vainglory within the body of the church. These words of Jesus, then, should cause us to pause and reflect: who is leading you? Where are they leading you? To things temporal, or to things eternal? To fight the sin of vainglory, we must first learn to recognize and reject those vainglorious influences in our lives who would seek to make us into their images. Instead, the central pursuit of our lives must be to follow our true guide, Christ, regardless of the attitudes and opinions of others. Rebecca DeYoung points to a story about the desert father Macarius to illustrate what it might look like for Christians to reject vainglory in pursuit of single-minded obedience to Christ: Macarius “once counseled a young monk to go to the cemetery to shout both curses and praises at the dead. The monk returned reporting that he had dutifully done so and that in both cases (not surprisingly) they had made no reply. Macarius then delivered the punch line of this living parable, soberly informing the monk that he too must become like the dead, deaf to both the abuse and the accolades of others.” Rather than follow the blind (or the dead, for that matter), or to constantly compete with others for attention and prestige, we can, as this poor monk learned, walk forwards in faithfulness and obedience without concern for the opinions of others.

How, though, do we actually go about practicing this? While vainglory pulls our attention outward, as we focus on winning the approval and applause of others, Jesus’ teachings here instead pull our attention inward, suggesting that we should be more concerned with cultivating our own souls than with impressing others or competing with others for the sake of earthly recognition. Thus, in verse 42 of this passage, Christ instructs us to “cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.” And so while we can easily point out the vainglorious behavior of celebrities and so-called “lifestyle influencers,” careful self-examination reveals that we are likely no better off than many of them. How many of us, after all, use our own social media accounts to present a carefully curated picture of our perfect lives and perfect families to the world? How many of us are truly content to serve others in a way that no one else will ever know about or thank us for? How many of us spin conversations to make ourselves out to be better than we really are? No wonder, then, that our collect beseeches God to “increase and multiply upon us thy mercy.” For it is only by his mercy and his grace that we can transcend our proclivity towards vainglory. It is only by his mercy and grace that we can become more like Christ, who, as Paul tells us in his letter to the Philippians, “made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men.”  It is for this reason that Jesus, in verse 36 of this passage, commands us to “be merciful, as your Father also is merciful.” The one who truly understands and has been transformed by God’s mercy, grace, and forgiveness, should have little trouble extending that same mercy, grace, and forgiveness to others who have wronged us. And, I suspect, a Christian who has been so transformed will be more eager to magnify God and work for his glory rather than pursue his own self-glorification.

You may not ever become a celebrated philosopher, warrior, artist, or titan of industry, much less a global celebrity or social media influencer, but when you work for God’s glory and not your own, when you put aside vainglory and train yourself to be an athlete for Christ, know that you can rest assured that you are working towards an imperishable, eternal reward, worth far more than all the likes and clicks of this world. Amen.