“More Powerful Than I” Vance L. Toivonen
As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
READING Ekhart Tolle, The New World
Resistance is an utter contradiction, a hardening of the shell of the ego. You are closed….If the shutters are closed, the sunlight cannot come in. When you yield internally, when you surrender, a new dimension of consciousness opens up. If action is possible or necessary, your action will be in alignment with the whole and supported by creative intelligence…If no action is possible, you rest in the peace and inner stillness that comes with surrender. You rest in God.
SERMON
I have much to praise about therapeutic practice. My life changed forever the day a seminary professor asked me if I had ever considered therapy. Actually, I should say my life changed forever when I took his question seriously, and sought out the therapy he was suggesting. This opened the door to self-awareness for me, an essential component of spirituality. The ego is strong in us, and does not want to be exposed. Self-awareness allows us to examine the ego, to wonder about why we act the way we act, and gives us an opportunity to change our behavior.
Eckhart Toll writes, “awareness and ego cannot coexist…Ego takes everything personally…ego confuses opinions and viewpoints with facts…Every ego is a master of selective perception and distorted interpretation.” (Ekhart Tolle, The New World).
It is of extreme importance, then, that we gain perspective when confronting our own egos. We may pay a therapist to do this, or listen openly and honestly to a trusted companion. We need someone to see us as we really are in order to gain the insight and perspective we need to change ourselves for the better. And while it is true that we need to listen to ourselves, we need to approach our inner voices with the same skepticism with which we approach external voices. The incessant “I” of our own egos will not always have our best interest in mind, and certainly not always the best interests of others.
Eckhart Tolle writes,
The word “I” embodies the greatest error and the deepest truth, depending on how it is used…In normal everyday usage, “I” embodies the primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This is ego…what Albert Einstein…referred to as “an optical illusion of consciousness”...The good news is: If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves. (Ekhart Tolle, The New World).
What Tolle is pointing to is a spiritual process whereby we make a shift from identification with our minds, to “the awareness in the background.” When we are defined by our egos, we identify with the past, with our own history, with our homes and all of the stuff in our lives. The “I” is all bound up in perceptions and productivity. The “I” is captivated by the way things are supposed to be, by a persistent leaning toward so-called normalcy. Life becomes for us a series of tugs and pulls toward what we expect rather than what is, and this is no less true of ourselves than anyone or anything else.
John was out in the wilderness baptizing folks. His was a baptism of repentance, a cleansing act on the heels of confession. People came out to experience this baptism, and to know this cleansing. I suppose John was not unlike any number of gurus and preachers who provide for the human condition a temporary reprieve from the ego. But it is temporary. The confessional booth of the Catholic Church reminds us of this, for the average Catholic knows that he or she will visit that booth on numerous occasions throughout life.
This is not all bad. It has been said that confession is good for the soul. Most of the Lutheran worship services I have presided over in my ordained life have opened with confession, with the following prayer prayed corporately:
We confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. We have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. For the sake of your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us. Forgive us, renew us, and lead us, so that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways, to the glory of your holy name. Amen.
How does that prayer make us feel? Are we a little uncomfortable with it? Would we like to tinker with it just a bit; make it more palatable perhaps? And what is the genesis of this discomfort? Let me suggest that it is ego, the illusory “I” that demands autonomy from such indictments. After all, don’t we prefer reading about how we’re OK just as we are? Or don’t we warm up more to the idea that someone else needs adjustment rather than us?
That prayer concludes “Forgive us, renew us, and lead us.” John tells the crowd clamoring for some messianic leadership that he will not provide that leadership for them. There is, he says, “one who is more powerful than I.” It is a turn of phrase I cherished as I prepared this sermon, because it put that illusory “I” of the ego right in the crosshairs. There is a greater “I,” an “I” who will take all of that illusion, all of that falseness, all of the chaff of who I have thought myself to be, and burn it into nothing but a heap of gray ash. But the wheat, the pure unadulterated self, born of the spirit, born of God, birthed in the beginning – this “I” will be left to emerge, to be renewed, restored, and revitalized.
This requires a yielding, what Tolle refers to as “an inner acceptance of what is.” Am I a really together person who has life all in order, and my ducks all in a row? Am I perfection personified? Am I independently oriented so that I do not need anyone else? Or am I a fragile, somewhat broken human being who suffers from emotional and physical pain, who is consumed at times by addiction and compulsion, who knows what God wants and yet acts in quite the opposite manner?
People brought this brokenness out into the wilderness, received John’s baptism, and were then informed that there was a greater baptism still to come. In the early stories of ancient Israel we hear God described simply as I AM. God is the ultimate and purest “I” in the universe. There is no illusion with the great I AM. And John is telling the crowd that one will soon come, in fact Jesus, who will embody that great I AM. He will take all of the brokenness, all the addiction and compulsion, all of the pain and suffering and help us find our truest and most beautiful selves in the midst of, and in spite of all of the chaff that fills our lives, all of the illusory “I” that holds us in its spell.
Then, and only then, will we be able to “rest in the peace and inner stillness that comes with surrender.” Then we will know that there is one who is greater than us, more powerful than us. Then we will know that it is true, what the voice from heaven declares; that no matter how we might feel about ourselves, or one another, God, who sees us as we really are, says to you and to me, “You are my son, my daughter, my beloved. With you I am well pleased.”