Hol-e Work

In my first two years of seminary there was a 2 week period in January, called J Term, where we could take an extra class that was typically geared differently than the regular classes we took. One year I took a class on the 7 Deadly Sins. The premise of the class was that the sins were not really sins unless a person turned them into one. Our professor taught us that there were both good and bad qualities to each of them. For example pride is often viewed as a sin because we think of the extreme of it which puts us at the center and makes us think of ourselves as better than everyone else. When I was in high school I tried out and made the JV basketball team, and so did a kid I knew and played with in junior high. He was always an excellent basketball player and knew it, but something changed between junior high and high school and he was, in my opinion so very full of himself. He even let everyone else know it. It got so bad that I actually quit the team because he felt that he could and would the the only person on the team that would lead us to victory. He was the epitome of what some coaches warn against when they say, “there’s no I in TEAM”. His pride made him a terrible teammate and I couldn’t deal with it. Seeing things like that as well as elsewhere in our society is what causes Christians to stick a seven-foot pole between them and the concept of pride. My professor would agree with that aspect of it because that is an extreme…that is what leads pride to being a sin.

He would go on to argue that avoiding pride completely leads you to a lack of self confidence. It leads to not loving oneself and never thinking we are good enough for anything including God’s own love. That we cannot be redeemed because we are too far from it. That too, he would argue also leads to sin. A person should avoid both extremes in order to live a healthy balanced life. He would say, you need pride in your life. You need to have a good sense of self-worth. You need to take pride in your accomplishments. Know that the Spirit has given you gifts with which to serve and that you should take pride and have confidence in the gifts that each of us have been given because we are the body of Christ and no body is complete without each of us being proud of and using those gifts.

Another way to talk about this sense of pride is our ego. Our ego is often how we identify ourselves especially if we look at philosophers and psychologists. Even they agree that our ego should be balanced. The word derives from the Latin word also ‘ego’ which also happens to be the word in Aramaic and it literally is translated as the word “I”. Hence the I AM statements from Jesus in Aramaic are “ego eimi”. In other words the ego is the self the “I”. Deep down the ego, the self, wants to protect the self. But what often happens is that our sense of self gets distorted because of so many factors and it tends to becomes a defense mechanism against everything that is thrown at us in life. So we fill our ego with things that help us survive and give us worth.

But what are those things that it gets filled with? It often gets filled with those two extremes, we either fill it with words that tell us that we are not good enough, or find ways to fill it with words that tell us that we are better than others. That because of this or that we are better than the other person and we protect ourselves by thinking we’re superior or better off or we don’t ever see ourselves as good as anyone else. As a side note did you know it can be quite hard to find free images of some of the things I want to show, but there was no short supply of images about the ego. Very interesting… While it is nice to know that the ego, the self, is trying to protect us and fill us as best as it thinks it should, Jesus offers us a different way, a better way.

I know that was a lot to soak in, but if we take all these ideas of pride, ego, and self, and then we look at our scripture readings today then I think we are presented with an eye-opening insight into the kind of life Jesus is calling us to live. Jesus says to his disciples that if anyone wants to follow him they must deny themselves and follow him and that we must lose our lives to find our life. Jesus isn’t talking about martyrdom and hes’ not talking about completely removing who we are to follow him, but we are to get rid of all the ways that our ego has filled us with coping and defense mechanisms, all the pride and self-doubt and replace all of that with following in the path of Jesus. We are to die to the ways the world validates us and gives us worth and replace t with the worth of Christ. You can gain the whole world and fill your ego with everything it wants to defend itself or you can give it up and let the love of God in. Jesus is inviting our ego into a new way of being and living.

Paul furthers this idea in his second letter to the Corinthians by pointing out to them that this tent, our body can be built up and torn down by this world, but if we have our self living the life of God then our place, our safety, our comfort, our worth is eternal because it has been entrusted to God. That doesn’t mean that we won’t face hardships but when everything eventually fades away we will find ourselves still where we always were because we placed our life and our trust in God. Which is exactly what the psalmist says…he calls God his refuge and his stronghold and the only one in who he places his trust. While everything around him may fail his trust in God won’t and then God will show him God’s salvation.

Paul felt this idea was so important that he shares it with not just the Corinthians but also with the Ephesians by telling them to change from their former way of life that was corrupted by deceitful desires and instead clothe yourself as the created in God’s image person that you were meant to be. Again, Paul is telling them to rid the ego, the old self, with all of its doubts and unhealthy views of both self and others and replace it with the new life, the new clothes that we have received through the Spirit.

You’ve heard my professor talk about it, you’ve heard Jesus and Paul talk about it, and now I want to share with you all my own way of thinking about it. I haven’t necessarily used the terms ego and self, but this is what I have said for many years. We, as people, have a hole inside of us that we are always trying to fill. For some of us we know that hole exists and for others its not quite so obvious, but it exists. Throughout our lives we try to fill that hole. It might be with fame or fortune, for some it might be food, some its family and friends, others it might be sports or games, or cars, and others it might be drugs or alcohol. There are all sorts of ways in this life that we might try to fill this hole. And for many people they may go through many stages in their lives in which they try different things I’ve listed or others. But I believe we all have this sense that we have something in our lives that needs to fill that hole, that vacancy and we do everything we can to fill it up.

The reason I think why so many people chase after it and are never satisfied is that the hole that exists is our need for God. We are all children of God, but when we don’t know it, when we haven’t gone through this transformation we have through these last weeks of seeing how important a connection with God is then we fail to grasp the one thing in this life that actually fills that gap inside us and completely satisfies, is to toss aside all those other things that don’t fit and don’t satisfy and to place God in it. God is that perfect fit because it is the one thing in this life that can ever truly make us whole. When we put aside all those other things in life and place God in, then we can have a healthy ego, we can see what our true self looks like. We can know that we have a place in this life and in the life to come, and that when we place who we are in the loving arms of God then no rust, nor moth, nor idle fancy, can ever take away our salvation in Christ Jesus. With God in our lives guiding us, we are on the path to seeing our true self as a beloved child of God, the kind of person that God sees us as and desires for all of us to know in our hearts. Amen.