When the Ego does us in

Luke 18: 9-14

Sermon from Oct. 24, 2010

"Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self.” -- Wayne Dyer

⁹He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: ¹⁰“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. ¹¹The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. ¹²I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ ¹³But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ ¹⁴I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” "

One of my new Lutheran pastor friends from this past summer in Virginia wrote this on facebook on Tues:

“Preparing a sermon for a group of pastors for tomorrow.”

A colleague of his responded:

“You have a good text for that. Hit them hard. They are all pharisees! They are all self-righteous! They ought to be humble - like the tax collector... (by the way, I won't be there tomorrow) :)” And he ended it with a smiley face. (facebook exchange between Eric Hullstrom and Mike Strangeland)

Of course, there’s some truth in what my friend’s colleague wrote. A lot of people think that anyone who is religious i.e. attends church regularly or is a minister, is self righteous. Some people have had a bad experience of religion and they category us all with the label of self-righteous and judgemental. Or they’ve never been to church in their life -- yet still we have this label of being judgemental.

What they don’t know is that we have the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector to keep us humble. God is more jubilant over the tax collector making a choice to change his life, than the Pharisee who follows all the religious laws to the nth degree.

Tax collectors were known for their sinfulness in Christ’s time. They were in cahoots with the Romans who ruled the land. They had a certain, painful amount that that needed to take from all the citizens on behalf of the Roman Empire and they had to add an amount to secure their own livelihood. They could take more money than required from the common citizens because they were backed by the Roman Empire and its army. They were sinful, greedy people.

Of course, the Pharisee could look down upon the tax collector. Yet, the Pharisee is not valuing the man as a person of God and does not know that the tax collector is repenting of his ways. The tax collector is choosing to change his life to God’s ways.

What the Pharisee was dealing with and what we often deal with is the hard shell of ego.

When we are born, God creates us as beautiful pure essence. As we grow up, we can be hurt by hurtful things that are said or done to us. To protect ourselves, we make a defensive shell around us. That’s called the ego. The ego provides a shield that we become comfortable living our life behind – but it separates us from God and from living life as our real self.

Wayne Dyer says ego “is like a ghost that we accept as a controlling influence in our lives.” He says, “I look upon the ego as nothing more than an idea that each of us has about ourselves. The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self.”

Ego can cause us to believe that we are what we have or what we do or what others think of us. It can cause us to think we are separate from one another, not connected “It sends us false messages about our true nature. It leads us to make assumptions about what will make us happy and we end up frustrated. It pushes us to promote our self-importance while we yearn for a deeper and richer life experience. It causes us to fall into the void of self-absorption again and again, not knowing that we need only shed the false idea of who we are. – (From Wayne Dyer’s e-newsletter, “The Ego Illusion” Sept. 13, 2010. )

Ego can cause us to believe that we are what we have or what we do or what others think of us. It can cause us to think we are separate from one another, not connected.

I think ego is the way to look at this passage of the Pharisee in our day and age. God wants us to be adults, of course, but adults who know their true essence comes from God. We know that we can get caught up in letting outer things make us happy – what our possessions are, defining ourselves by what we do in our job or what we do each day. We can become caught up in thinking about in thinking only about ourselves and that we are alone – not that we are connected to each other.

The Pharisee is caught up in a type of selfishness. He builds himself up by putting others down. And he’s not seeing his connection to those he puts down. That he and each person is made by God and so each are his brother and sister. He’s not seeing his own potential to be a sinner as much as the tax collector is. That’s an important aspect of our humility as Christians – that we have an awareness of our own vulnerability to sin.

Part of Dyer’s definition of ego has quite struck me. It’s his words “(Ego) leads us to make assumptions about what will make us happy and we end up frustrated.”

These last months we’ve been horrified by the arrest and conviction of the former Colonel Russell Williams. In recent weeks, the police investigation has unfolded in the media. Somehow a respected military leader develops a fetish for breaking into homes and stealing women’s underwear. He’s not caught, the immoral and illegal habit escalates and two women are brutally killed.

The police set up a road check. But it’s not necessarily to check for drinking drivers as much to match the wheel base to tracks they found near a victim’s home. The Colonel is stopped. The police officer who talks to him, recognizes him and waves him on.

You see, Russell Williams is like a Pharisee. He has a respected position in the community, a position of authority. He is waved on.

But another officer was checking the wheel base. He doesn’t know the status of the man behind the wheel. The wheel base matches the tracks they find. Surely the head of Canada’s largest air force base could not have done such a crime. But as they check into where the Colonel has lived, the locations match where similar burglaries have taken place. The illusion falls away.

The person who was respected for his position of authority turns out to be a deadly criminal. The person who was respected turns out to be a sinner.

On Thursday, Russell Williams spoke to the Court, he told those gathered he is deeply ashamed, that he is aware of the hurt he’d caused.

Not matter how much revulsion we feel at what Williams has down, we

have to know that God is looking upon him, if he is truly repentant with great love. With the love God showed for the tax collector who had violated so many common people over whom he had control.

But the key is this: God’s love won’t necessarily flatter our ego, allow us to live puffed up in ourselves. God’s love for Russell Williams and for us calls us beyond our ego and its falsehoods to authenticity and Honesty. Honesty like that of the tax collector: “God be merciful to me a sinner.”