Sermon Illustrations on Virtue
Background
Augustine on Virtue
In his book On the Morals of the Catholic Church, Augustine re-intreptreted the classical virtues through the distinctly Christian lens of love:
I hold that virtue is nothing other than the perfect love of God. Now, when it is said that virtue has a fourfold division, as I understand it, this is said according to the various movements of love…We may, therefore, define these virtues as follows: temperance is love preserving itself entire and incorrupt for God; courage is love readily bearing all things for the sake of God; justice is love serving only God, and therefore ruling well everything else that is subject to the human person; prudence is love discerning well between what helps it toward God and what hinders it.
Augustine of Hippo, On the Morals of the Catholic Church
The Heart of Christian Virtue
If love is the soul of Christian existence, it must be at the heart of every other Christian virtue. Thus, for example, justice without love is legalism; faith without love is ideology; hope without love is self-centeredness; forgiveness without love is self-abasement; fortitude without love is recklessness; generosity without love is extravagance; care without love is mere duty; fidelity without love is servitude. Every virtue is an expression of love. No virtue is really a virtue unless it is permeated, or informed, by love.
Richard P. McBrien, quoted in Christianity Today, Vol. 40, no. 1.
Virtues: Acquired Moral Qualities
How are vices and virtues distinguished? How is a vice different from sin?…Although most references to the lists of seven use “vice” and “sin” in a roughly synonymous way, distinguishing the two turns out to be important. A vice (or its counterpart, a virtue), first of all, is a habit or a character trait.
Unlike something we are born with—such as—such as an outgoing personality or a predisposition to have high cholesterol levels—virtues and vices are acquired moral qualities. We can cultivate habits or break them down over time through our repeated actions. And thus we are ultimately responsible for our character.
Virtue as Part of Our Story
Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue reconnected thought about the ethical life to virtue by connecting virtue to the story a life is a part of. In order to know how we ought to live, we first need to answer the question, “of which story am I a part?” According to MacIntyre, each life is a story, “specifically a play in [the] genre of tragedy, because each life ends in death.” We lose sight of this because we divide life into distinct spheres that hardly touch at all: work and leisure, private and public, corporate and personal. But virtue is excellence of the whole character and indivisible into watertight compartments.
To illustrate how the otherwise absurd components of a life story only have meaning as part of a story, MacIntyre asks us to imagine that while waiting for a bus, a young man next to us says “The name of the common wild duck is Histrionicus histrionicus histrionicus.” A perfectly intelligible sentence, but an absurd event, until it is integrated into a story.
The event loses its absurdity with a little context:
-
“He has mistaken me for someone who yesterday had approached him in the library and asked: ‘Do you know the Latin name of the common wild duck?’”
-
“He has just come from a session with his psychotherapist who has urged him to break down his shyness by talking to strangers. ‘But what shall I say?’ ‘Oh, anything at all.’”
-
“He is a Soviet spy waiting at a prearranged rendez-vous and uttering the ill-chosen code sentence which will identify him to his contact.” (After Virtue, 210)
Though any of these would be unusual, they are no longer absurd, because they find their place in a story.
We Are Engraved for Good or Evil
Dan B. Allender, in his book Leading Character, notes that the Greek word “charaktér” was “used in connection with tools designed for engraving.” Greek philosophers noted that our past actions “engrave” themselves on us so that certain future actions are easier to do and others harder. When these tendencies are good, they are virtues. When they are bad, they are vices. Our character becomes our life-shape. This “engraving” should mark us, Allender urges, as image-bearers of God “to make him known in a fashion that no one else on earth can do in the same way.”
William Rowley (see Dan B. Allender, Leading Character (Zondervan, 2008))
Stories
Our Stories Shape Our Values
A close friend who started a financial loan business took thirty of his executives to the poverty- and violence-filled section of Montreal where he grew up in order to introduce them to the section of town that inspired his company’s name. My friend, who has suffered the cruelty and mockery of many for the physical disabilities related to albinism, wanted his executives to see why he values and loves his community and what it taught him about life. He invited these men and women to see, smell, and taste both heartache and hope. In addition to telling his story, he enabled his executives to see why he so prizes honesty, integrity, commitment, and risk taking. Stories shape how we see ourselves and how we envision our calling in the place we work and serve.
Dan B. Allender, Leading Character (Zondervan, 2008)
Virtues and Vices Can Offer Fresh Perspective
Reaching back to the tradition of virtues and vices can also give us fresh eyes and expose new layers of meaning in our reading of scripture. Before I read Aquinas on sloth, I would have associated it with only a few proverbs about sluggards and perhaps the parable of the talents with this vice. A closer study of sloth helped me to see it in the Israelites’ resistance to embracing their new home in the promised land, and in Lot’s wife turning back to the familiarity of Sodom while angels attempted to rescue her.
Similarly, understanding the distinction between wrath and righteous anger helps us understand how Jesus integrated justice and love—how he could burn with anger against Pharisees who would deny a man healing on the Sabbath and then forgive those who crucify him. Studying avarice leads us to see connections between the story of the widow of Zarephath and the prodigal son. Once we grasp the envy-charity link, we gain new insight into the depths of the brothers’ antipathy toward Joseph, Jacob’s favorite son.
Analogies
Goodness Stamped Into Us
In his thoughtful book, Our Good Crisis: Overcoming Moral Chaos with the Beatitudes, Jonathan K. Dodson provides a wonderful analogy of what happens when we cultivate the virtues in our lives:
When goodness becomes who we are, not just what we occasionally do, we become virtuous. When I was a kid, I ate sticks of rock candy that had the word Brighton stamped on the end. No matter how much I licked, the word didn’t disappear. The letters seeped all the way through. Virtue is like that. No matter how far down you go, goodness still shows up.
Taken from Our Good Crisis: Overcoming Moral Chaos with the Beatitudes by Jonathan K. Dodson Copyright (c) 2020 by Jonathan K. Dodson. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
The Importance of Practice in Developing Virtue
Very simply, a virtue (or vice) is acquired through practice— repeated activity that increases our proficiency at the activity and repeated activity that increases our proficiency at the activity and gradually forms our character. Alasdair MacIntyre describes a child learning to play chess to illustrate the process of habit formation. Imagine, writes MacIntyre, that in hopes of teaching an uninterested seven-year-old to play chess, you offer the child candy—one piece to play, and another piece if the child wins the game. Motivated by his sweet tooth, the child agrees.
At first, he plays for the candy alone. (And he will cheat to win, in order to get more candy.) But the more the child plays, the better at chess he gets. And the better at chess he gets, the more he enjoys the game, eventually coming to enjoy the game for itself. At this point in the process, he is no longer playing for the candy; now the child is playing because he enjoys chess and wants to play well. And he understands both the intrinsic value of the game and the way cheating will now rob him of that value. He has become a chess player. Moral formation in virtue works much the same way.
We often need external incentives and sanctions to get us through the initial stages of the process, when our old, entrenched desires still pull us toward the opposite behavior. But with encouragement, discipline, and often a role model or mentor, practice can make things feel more natural and enjoyable as we gradually develop the internal values and desires corresponding to our outward behavior. Virtue often develops. That is, from the outside in. This is why, when we want to re-form our character from vice to virtue, we often need to practice and persevere in regular spiritual disciplines and formational practices for a lengthy period of time. There is no quick and easy substitute for daily repetition over the long haul. First we have to pull the sled out of the old rut, and then gradually build up a new track.
As with most human endeavors, we usually do not do this alone. Our parents, most obviously and deeply, contribute to our character formation, but so do friends, mentors, historical figures, and the community of saints past and present. If we marry, our spouse will shape our character, as will our teachers, and the fictional characters we read about and find inspiring. Our coworkers influence our habit formation. And so do the friends with whom we spend the most time—which is why good parents care so much about their children’s friends. When we make a new resolution or try to cultivate a new habit, having a community back us, or even a single partner with whom to practice or from whom to learn, can make all the difference.
Values Vs. Virtues
There are real and very important differences between what we now call values and the virtues as they had traditionally been understood. Let me put it this way. A value is like a smoke ring. Its shape is initially determined by the smoker, but once it is released there is no telling what shapes it will take. One thing is certain, however. Once a smoke ring has left the smoker’s lips it has already begun to evaporate into thin air.
Volition and volatility are characteristics of both smoke rings and values. By contrast, a virtue might be compared to a stone whose nature is permanence. We might throw a stone into a pond where it will lie at the bottom with other stones. But if, at some later date, we should want to retrieve that stone from the bottom of the pond, we can be sure that the shape of the stone has not changed and that we will be able to distinguish it from the rest of the stones.
The virtues define the character of a person, his enduring relationship to the world, and what will be his end. Whereas values, according to their common usage, are the instruments or components of moral living that the self chooses for itself and that the self may disregard without necessarily jeopardizing its identity.
When Vasili Arkhipov Saved the World
Everyone knows that during the Cuban Missile Crisis we were perilously close to WWIII and nuclear Armageddon. Most people don’t know how close we were. Or how much we owe to Vasili Arkhipov.
Arkhipov was second-in-command of the Soviet diesel-electric submarine B-59 during the Cuban Missile Crisis — one of four such subs sent into the waters near Cuba in 1962. He was a distinguished officer, having acquitted himself with great courage during the 1961 nuclear accident aboard the nuclear submarine K-19.
It’s hard to imagine the stress the crew was under. Submerged deep in the ocean, they were unable to receive any messages from home — or even the civilian American radio they had picked up earlier in their cruise. They could not know whether war had broken out or not above. Complicating matters, the sub was hot — really hot. Not only was the submarine not really designed to operate in warm waters like the Caribbean, but their extended time under the surface meant that batteries were running low, the air conditioning had failed (temperatures were in excess of 120 degrees Fahrenheit), and carbon dioxide was accumulating.
And then the American vessels on the surface decided to drop depth charges on them.
During the Cold War, one of the tactics used by surface vessels when they detected a submarine was to drop signaling depth charges (practice depth charges) on the submarine. These low-powered charges aren’t dangerous, but they signaled to the submarine that “the game was up” and that they needed to surface.
So, with depth charges exploding in the water around them, the captain of the B-59 had to decide whether war had broken out on the surface and whether he was to carry out his orders in that event to launch nuclear torpedoes on American coastal cities.
The captain made the decision to launch and his political officer agreed. Had this order been carried out, thousands, maybe millions, of Americans would have instantly died in this first strike. Millions more, American and Soviet, would have died in the series of attacks and reprisals that would have followed.
Unusually, the agreement of the captain and political officer were not enough on the B-59. Arkhipov may have been second-in-command of the vessel, but he was also Commodore of the small fleet dispatched to Cuba. He had to agree, too. And he argued that they needed to wait for orders from Moscow.
The submarine surfaced and made contact with American destroyers and, receiving new orders from Moscow, returned home. His courageous dissent prevented nuclear disaster.
William Rowley
More Resources
Related Themes
Click a topic below to explore more sermon illustrations!