A metaphor for life
The new season of American Idol has begun and I have to admit that I am drawn to it like a moth to a flame. There are all of these reasons to knock it. Like all reality shows, it boasts that it is unscripted, which may be the case, but it is incredibly choreographed. Another thing that the show is rightly criticized for is that it does at time take advantage of people. There have showed a couple of people on there, trying to sing, who clearly had different disabilities, and the producers went for ratings at their expense. I am sure that there are other things that we could, and should, fault the show for. Yet, I keep watching.
The reason that I keep watching is that in so many ways the show is a metaphor for life. Last year, at this time, I pointed out some of the ways that this is true. As I was watching this week, another of those ways occurred to me. The show illustrates that there is one kind of knowledge that is the most rare: self-knowledge.
To understand this, you probably don't even need to have seen the show itself. You can probably glean this from the commercials. But, for those of you who have never seen it, let me give you some background. The show is essentially a huge talent content to find the best singer. In the first few episodes of the show, the three judges go to different cities and sit through thousands of auditions, choosing more than 100 people to go to Hollywood to compete further. The singers who made it through the first round are winnowed down until there is 12 and the TV audience takes over in choosing who makes it to the next week and who goes home, until there is only one person left. This one person then gets to bask in the glory and the acclaim of their great talent and drive.
But all of those things, glory, acclaim, and talent are in short supply in the early weeks. There are so many people who are auditioning who have no talent. So much so that the show has been likened to watching an old person slip and fall on ice, as these people belt out an out-of-tune song with all of their might. There are so many auditioners that couldn't carry a tune in their ipod!
And yet, there are the wonderful, rare exceptions. This week there was the good-looking, unassuming 16-year old kid who came in and just sounded so great. The judges applauded him. They definitely told him that he was going on to the next round. In addition, they gave him some advice—to be confident and believe in himself. They went on to say that the audience wants to see that he believes in himself, so that they can believe. This is great advice, because there is nothing that can undermine your performance faster than self-doubt. It doesn't matter whether you play sports, have a business pitch, or a school presentation. If you are filled with fear and doubt, you will not do as well as you would if you were confident.
What stuck me as I was watching this, however, is that it is not good advice for everyone. So many of the contestants who couldn't sing a lick had plenty of confidence. They were so confident that they were going to be the next American Idol. They just knew that they had all of the talent that we needed to beat out everyone else. But, they were just plain wrong—painfully wrong.
So, why was the advice good for the young man and not for the others? What is the difference? At one level, the difference is that they have don't have a great singing talent and he does. But, the real issue is self-knowledge. He has talent and he knows it. They don't have talent, but they DON'T know it. All of their confidence just made their lack of talent more clear. It turns out to be over-confidence and even hubris.
The real trick is to know yourself. What are your abilities and what are your weaknesses? As I watched the show, I just kept asking, “Don't they know that they can't sing?” And the answer time and time again seemed to be, “No, they don't.”
Know Thyself
In ancient Greece there was the great Oracle at Delphi, where people would go to find wisdom and insight when they had a big decision to make. Above the temple, any pilgrim would read the words, “know thyself.” Greek literature is filled up with stories of rulers and others who sought wisdom at the oracle, but much to their peril they misunderstood it, because they didn't know their limits. Someone who doesn't know themselves is a danger.
This is the point of our sermon text today. It is a teaching of Jesus, that comes from the Sermon on the Mount. In these passage Jesus is trying to redefine for us how we should relate to one another. We are the people who have been forgiven, restored and renewed. We shouldn't interact with one another according to the ways of the world. We have been called to a new type of family and we have to act out of interest for others, and not our own interests.
Scripture: Matthew 7:1-5
1 "Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. 2 For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. 3 Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your neighbor, "Let me take the speck out of your eye,' while the log is in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye.
You Just Don't See It
Jesus is taking direct aim at our tendency to judge other people, to criticize, and to find fault with others. We all do it. It is just part of our sinful nature. When we feel attacked by others, we tend to go on the offensive ourselves. You know what I am talking about. Your spouse is complaining about something that you are guilty of, but you don't admit it. Instead, you launch into some accusation about he or she is not doing. Or, if you are feeling bad about yourself, you might just be more critical of others, in order to make yourself feel better. Or, you might act out of the universal fear of not measuring up. For whatever reason, we all go to criticizing sooner or later.
And every time we do we are being hypocrites. We are acting like we don't have reason to be criticized. Jesus warns that the standard that we use to judge others will be the standard by which we are judged. If we are really harsh, then we will be judged harshly.
The biggest emphasis, though, of what he says is that when we do this, we are doing it out of lack of self-knowledge. We are like a person who looks over at another person sitting next to us and notices that there is something in their eye. “Hey, there's something wrong with them!” And we want to remove the speck. However, we are completely unaware that we ourselves have a stick in our eye. In this analogy Jesus is making a double point. First, what we have in our own eye is worse that what plagues our neighbor. We are in worse shaped. Second, the stick in our own eye will actually prevent us from removing the speck from our neighbor's. Not only are we unaware of our own problems, we are also unaware of what how they affect others.
Invincible?
Many of you have heard the story of Ben Roethlisberger, quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers. He is the youngest signal-caller ever to win a Super Bowl. He is a rising superstar in the NFL and has been the recipient of a number of endorsement opportunities. However, as of June 2006, he also has a new perspective on himself.
In July of 2005, ESPN reporter Andrea Kremer asked Roethlisberger to explain his decision to ride his motorcycle without a helmet:
ESPN: It's not the law in Pennsylvania to wear a helmet. Why don't you wear a helmet?
Roethlisberger: Because you don't have to. It's not the law. If it was the law, I'd definitely have one on every time I rode. But it's not the law and I know I don't have to. You're just more free when you're out there with no helmet on.
Unfortunately, Roethlisberger was involved in a serious motorcycle accident in June of 2006, less than one year later. When a 62-year-old woman failed to yield at a Pittsburgh intersection, Roethlisberger was thrown into the windshield of her Chrysler Town and Country. His bike was totaled, and emergency surgeons spent over seven hours repairing a broken jaw, a fractured skull, missing teeth, and several other facial injuries.
After being released from the hospital, Roethlisberger apologized to the fans, his family, and his team for risking his health (and life) unnecessarily. In another interview, he was no longer focused on taking advantage of his individual freedom: "In the past few days, I've gained a new perspective on life. By the grace of God, I'm fortunate to be alive." He also added that, if he ever does ride a motorcycle again, "it will certainly be with a helmet."
Before the accident, Roethlisberger saw himself as invicinble. Accidents were things that might happen to other people, but not to him. Obviously, he was wrong about himself. He lacked an accurate picture of the threats and dangers. But he was also wrong in that he throught that he was alright, as long as he didn't break the law. And we too are tempted to take this view: that we are alright—we are good people—as long as we don't break the law. It is the lawbreakers that have things in their eyes but not us. Of course all the while we have the big stick of pride protruding from our eye. The story tells us that this is a dangerous place to be.
Hard to Learn
So, how do we know ourselves? This is really the hardest thing, because you don't know what you don't know. But, I believe that there is a deeper difficulty that makes knowledge of ourselves the hardest thing to learn—we don't want to hear bad news about ourselves. We resist it. We ignore it.
In American Idol, one of the judges, the Brit named Simon Cowell, takes the self-appointed role of being the bearer of bad news. If the contestant can't sing, he tells him. If they are incredibly bad, he says so. And you can just imagine the reactions. The most common is the counter-attack. He tells them they can't sing and so they launch into accusation mode and tell him that he can't sing. And sometimes they even say much worse about him. It just highlights the fact that we don't like to hear negative things about ourselves. When we do, it often evokes a fight or flight response. He tend to either attack back or to flee and avoid and tell ourselves that they had no idea what they were talking about.
Getting to know ourselves...
Thus, it is clear that understanding who we are is a very difficult proposition. How can we see ourselves as we really are? How can we not be hypocrites, seeing ourselves one way, when in fact we are another? There are three ways that can really help. They are interrelated and indispensible. The first is other people.
...from what others say
The surest way to find out about how we look on the outside is of course from other people. I just told you how Simon Cowell, on American Idol, is the self-proclaimed bearer of bad news. He takes it as his role to disabuse the contestants of their illusions of grandeur that they have about themselves. Not only that, but he sees this as the best thing that we can do for them. He made a comment once to this effect, saying that no one else in their lives has been honest with them.
I agree with him. I don't think that you have to be so harsh when you tell someone the truth. Otherwise, I think he is right. Too often, we are far more concerned with hurting people feelings than we are with delivering the truth.
Now, before we leave here and go out, letting everyone around us “have it” with all of the things that we have left unsaid, we need to remember what Jesus is trying to tell us in the passage. We need to first try to see our true selves before we go on a mission to set everyone else right. And we need to be reminded of this because it is inevitably more fun to set other people straight than it is to hear hard things about ourselves.
How can we do this? I think it is safe to say that there are things about all of us that the friends and family in our lives might be afraid to tell us, because they are afraid of how we will react, whether it be with counter-accusations, or tears or a flood of emotions. Any one of which could be really intimidating. I wonder, though, what would happen if we let those same people know that they can tell us the truth and we wouldn't overreact, and then, ask them to tell us about our weaknesses, or how we drive them crazy. What would we learn? It could be powerful, because truth is power, especially if it is the truth about ourselves.
...from a prayerful reading of Scripture
What we need more than anything else is a perspective on ourselves, from outside of ourselves. We can get this from other people. That would be a start. But there is another place we can go—the Bible. God has given us his Word to tell us about himself, to tell us about the world that we live in, and especially to tell us about ourselves. It is the only perspective that we can get that's not biased. But if we will open the Bible and read, we get the skinny on who we really are.
Now, there are the same obstacles—our own reluctance to accept hard words about ourselves. So, we need to do something else. Before we open the Bible we need to pray and ask the Spirit to give us soft hearts that can accept the truth. We need the Spirit to give us ears that can hear. Then, and only then, we can open the Bible and read the words of life, because they reveal to us the truth. And when we read with a submissive heart, we will not just learn about ancient times, we will not just learn about God, but the Spirit will also reveal things about us. How many times has it happened to me, where I am reading about something that Jesus said to some one else, and I know that the word was meant for me as well. By the power of the Spirit, God uses his Word to show us the sticks in our eye.
...from Jesus
The third way that we can learn about ourselves is by looking at Jesus himself. Because, he is the one who embodies true humanity. You and I are all broken and messed up in all different ways. Without him, it is like trying to put a shattered vase back together when you have never seen what it looked like before it was broken. Jesus is the vase before it was broken. His life is what our lives were supposed to be like. So, when we look to him, we discover what God's original intention for our lives was. Then, we can better understand the ways that we are broken and the ways that we fall short of God's intention for our lives.
We can also look at how the people reacted to Jesus, and understand more about our tendencies as well. Some doubted. Some rejected him. Some believed and then betrayed or abandoned him. Many just couldn't receive his word. Each episode is a reminder to me that I am in need of grace, even as I am in need of the truth.
After we learn more about ourselves, then we actually can help remove the speck out of the eye of our neighbors, friends, and family.
Preached at Clayton Presbyterian Church
January 28, 2007