Late night TV ads

I don’t have cable or a TV for that matter, and when I am around one I will tend to watch all kinds of rubbish. Late night TV ads are an endless source of fascination for me – selling products that nobody really needs, making them sound like necessaries, with really fast speaking at the end of how you can pay and how many free gifts you can get if you would just “CALL NOW”. I remember catching a late night TV ad that was for a jewelry cleaning product. It was a liquid into which you could dip your tarnished jewelry, hold for just a few seconds, and when you would pull it out, voila, bright and shiney as new. Clearly I needed this product … not that I wear much jewelry but when I do it tends to be silver and anyone who wears or uses silver knows it tarnishes easily. For our context here at church, we have special gloves to handle the silverware to reduce the effect of fingerprints and smudges in accelerating the smudging process.

But silver naturally tarnishes with use … the tarnishing is inevitable.

If you use your silver, it will tarnish. To keep it shiny, cleaning and polishing are inevitable.

As followers of Jesus, we are very much like silverware … with repentance and the gracious mercy of God’s love and forgiveness, we are made clean, like precious yet tarnished items, dipped into that late-night-TV cleaning product … as human beings going about our daily lives, the smudgy prints on our hearts and intentions are as inevitable as the tarnishing of silver.

One of the biggest sources of human tarnish is the ego.

Ego is defined in two main ways: pridefulness or an inflated feeling of one’s superiority to others

And secondly in terms of consciousness of your own identity … so when we do things – good or bad, the things we do make us conscious of our own identity – pride or inflation of the ego if we did something good, or in a bad way (shame or deflation of the ego) if we do something bad.

Eastern religions like Buddhism identify the ego as the source of many problems. If you think of your ego like a pet, it is constantly on a leash, attached to us by pride, judgment, self-righteousness and self-promotion.

·   It is hard not to pat ourselves on the back when we do a good deed

·   it is hard not to speak of sacrifices we make

·   It is hard to not impose our expectations on others based on what we do well, or think we do well, or think we know more about.

If the ego is considered like a pet, it is one that is fed by good deeds, by things we do well, by things society in general or the popular culture would applaud.

Like any pet, the ego can easily become a ruling force in one’s life: demanding attention, jumping up and down until it gets fed, tangling around your feet until it is petted and watered to its liking.

Like any pet, the ego will put conditions on our time, on our living space and therefore on our lives.

When we do good things, it is important that we are not doing these things only or even mostly to meet the demands of this little pet ego. This is a gospel thing, and I am going to show you how and why.

God in Jesus who died for our sins has provided the cleaning product that does indeed wash us of all our transgressions – making us clean and tarnish free – something we would never be able to do on our own NO MATTER HOW MANY GOOD DEEDS WE DO (or for that matter how many swims we took in pristine lakes).

Jesus calls us to respond to the love of God with

(a)   complete love, devotion and servitude for God (that’s what love God with all your heart, mind and soul means)

(b)   love of others that mirrors our love of self – this usually translates into “good works” or “good deeds”.

Our response to Jesus’ call in these two most important commandments might be expressed in good works and generosity, in prayer, in fasting, and in refraining from bad choices. But the key thing is that these should be our responses that stem from love.

If we are doing good works, exercising generosity, praying, fasting, refraining from bad choices in order to feed our little pet ego … if we are doing these things to expand our own sense of self, we have completely lost sight of the Gospel.

If we are doing these good things Jesus talks about in the Gospel reading: being pious, giving to the church or the poor, praying or fasting in order to make ourselves feel better, in order to show how obedient we can be, in order to be worthy of God’s sacrifice in Jesus – as Christ followers, and specifically as Lutherans we are barking up the wrong tree, we have become slaves to our own egos and our own self- importance … we are trying to make our own way into God’s graces - something we would never be able to do on our own NO MATTER HOW MANY GOOD DEEDS WE DO.

If we do the good things, the “churchy” things for the wrong reason all we are doing is being good ego keepers … we are feeding the hungry fire of pride with our actions if we do good for any reason other than the complete love of God with all our minds, hearts, and souls.

Pride and ego are little pets … what I mean by that is they are not like magic horses that defy space and time … we cannot ride a pet ego beyond the confines of this life. We cannot ride a pet ego to the place where those who have died are, in eternal peace with Jesus. Your pet ego might be an earthly treasure, it might be fed by earthly treasures, but it won’t get you any further than this finite little life … and God wants so much more for us, God guarantees so much more for us than this finite little life in Jesus. Through his Son, all eternity, all peace, and all love are available to us. No amount of late night TV can sell you that product!

Today as we prepare to begin a very intentional journey of penitence and self-examination, think carefully on this:

·   Why do you do the things you do?

·   Are your actions and meditations a response to the love of God in Jesus Christ?

·   Or are you feeding a little pet ego, a demanding little hopping up and down, tangling between your feet and sitting on your head kind of pet who will bring you no further than this finite life? 

And then think carefully on this: you are precious, precious in God’s sight. Like silver or gold times a million … God in Jesus who died for our sins has provided the cleaning product that does indeed wash us of all our transgressions – making us clean and tarnish free – something we would never be able to do on our own NO MATTER HOW MANY GOOD DEEDS WE DO.

This is the Gospel of our Lord. Amen.