Pride or flaunting. . .

Since now the month of June has ended and its Pride parades and events completed, it might be a good time to reflect on what pride is and what it is not.  Yes, the times have changed and things were more, shall we say, muted than in the past.  That said, those who sponsor and support Pride are less proud than they are defiant and less proud than they are flaunting what they know will provoke and offend.  It is less about pride than it is about self-aggrandizement, the promotion of vice and virtue as one without any reflection, judgment, or shame.  The dictionary gives as the primary definition of pride as a sense of one's own proper dignity or value; self-respect.  That is the point.  Proper dignity, value, and self-respect are what seems to be absent from most of the Pride celebrations.  Instead, these tend to focus on the last of the possible definitions:  arrogant or disdainful conduct or treatment; haughtiness.  It is clear that the arrogance, defiance, disdainful conduct, and sheer haughtiness of most of what passes for Pride is the chief aim of those celebrations.

Of course, it is not quite fair to blame only the rainbow array of desires and genders for this.  Open any social media page and you see self-promotion, the display of vice as well as virtue, and the unashamed taught that to love someone is to support their every thought, word, and deed.  That is also the point.  The rainbow folks are taking to extreme what the rest of the world seems intent upon -- being me, flaunting me, and doing it defiantly so.  I have Facebook "friends" whose posts I tend to ignore because they are so "me" oriented.  You probably have the same.  They are anything but modest in both their display of themselves visually and the way they speak about things.  If anything, such modesty ought to be what Lutherans mean when we speak of moderation.  It is not that one is free to indulge in things as long as you do not indulge too often or too deeply into the forbidden fruit of desire and selfishness but rather than you are modest in such things.  Surely this is also what St. Paul means when he speaks of self-control.  Modesty is nothing if it is not self-control.

Ill-tempered rants and raves are the complaint porn of our age.  As a culture indulge this at least as much as the sexual porn.  These too are perversions.  There is a shameful pride in the failures of others more than there is a real lament in their errors or mistakes.  This is one of the reasons I moderate comments here.  Some folks seem to delight in flaunting their own pride and judgment as much as the June parades and events flaunt the rainbow causes.  In every case, we need to look at the cost of our excesses.  Limitation of what you say or concern for how you say it seems absent -- so absent that the virtue of restraint is completely missing around us and in us.  If we think it, we feel like we need to say it and if we say it we think we need to act on it.  Proper dignity and value as well as self-respect call us to a higher standard.  As we look at the Pride month in the rearview mirror, it would be good for us to look through the windshield of the future and scale some things back.  Scripture is pretty clear in its warning that pride goes before a fall.