"Ego and Other Barriers to Community" August 26, 2018 Dr. Roger L. Ray
Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig argues that “every gesture of resistance which is void of either risk or impact is nothing but a cry for recognition.”
In the past year, it has been difficult to write a single sermon that does not mention our current train wreck of a president. I don’t want to talk about, heck, I don’t want to think about him. I don’t want to hear his voice or see his picture. He is never featured in the outlines of sermons that I send to our musicians in advance because I always want to talk about serious topics without mentioning him. But today’s message is about ego and it seems impossible to talk about an inflated ego without mentioning the standard bearer of the disorder.
But, to be completely honest, some credit is due to our Clementine Caligula for being a master at manipulating the media.
He has managed to keep himself in the news in a way that initially helped him to get loans for risky business ventures, then won him his own reality TV show, and remarkably, though he was seen as a joke of a candidate for president, he managed to defeat both qualified and unqualified contenders for his party’s nomination, not through brilliant debate performances or persuasive speeches, but more by dominating the news cycle with one embarrassing scandal after another, and by delivering strings of outrageous lies that we somehow couldn’t muster the strength to look away from.
The novelty candidate, the clown on the stage, actually won the election to be the most powerful person in the world… maybe he won it, actually, probably he didn’t but in the end, that was the official conclusion. I famously place a wager that he would be impeached within his first year in office and, frankly, I didn’t think it would really take more than a month or two. I was wrong, not because there was not ample evidence to impeach him but because I made the classic mistake of assuming that members of the Senate would be forced to act out of conscience, forgetting that most of them couldn’t find a conscience with a search party and a 30-minute head start.
I do believe that he has over played his hand and that an impeachment trial is in his future. And I don’t want to be a starry-eyed idealist about this, but I want him to be tried for conspiring with Russians to rig our election, for money laundering for Russian mobsters, for emoluments, for self-dealing with government contracts and tax cuts, as well as his own tax fraud and organized crime related business deals.
I have never watched a single episode of any reality TV show, unless, of course, Morning Joe has, in these Trump days, become a remake of the Apprentice. But I can tell you this, over the last several months, I have decided that it is best to shower after I watch the news rather than before.
Still, in the face of what has become an inevitable impeachment trial, Trump said on a Fox news interview this week that if he were impeached that everyone in America would suddenly become very poor without him steering the economy. This delusional little man sets the high-water mark for the topic before us today, which is about ego.
It is sometimes easier to understand a disorder by looking at its most extreme examples. What has become obvious to the world over the past year is that what Trump wants from being president is adoration.
He continued holding campaign rallies after he had won the election and when bad news comes his way, his staff 
plans another rally to drag all of the racists, xenophobes, and neo-Nazis out of the backwaters of America to publicly cheer him on.
But rather than spending any more time this morning exposing the bloated ego of this pathetic figure, I think the more helpful thing for us to do is to consider how much of this we have to own in our own lives. Because, whether we are arrogant or shy, we all want recognition. We want the approval of our parents, even when our parents, in any objective sense, didn’t have both oars in the water.
One of the things that corporate researchers have discovered is that many times they get more results in improving employee retention and workplace moral by giving awards, celebrations, and praise than they get from giving employees bigger raises. Once you can pay your basic bills and the wolves are no longer at the door, being appreciated, valued, treated with respect and dignity can mean more than money.
All during my career as a denominational minister, I was given a nice raise every year and, it is probably true that at the time that I left my last denominational position, I may have been the highest paid parish pastor in the denomination but there were several budget meetings over my last several years there when I objected and said, “Don’t give me another raise, just treat me better.” Which seemed impossible for them to grasp. Irrationally hostile board meetings and cabinet meetings were the only way that they knew how to be a church and they were willing to pay me handsomely to endure it.
I don’t make half as much money now, but I also have not had a therapist or been on anti-depressants, nor have I had to take Prilosec to keep my stomach from digesting itself for ten years! And we’re lucky if we even get around to having a board meeting every year!
Still, we are people, aren’t we? I think that as faith communities go we are among the more healthy examples of how a church can be both free of conflict while taking on hard topics. Generally, churches have to choose, they either take on real issues or they peacefully get along by doing nothing and saying nothing. We have managed to be both prophetic and united, not that there have not been attempts at starting ego battles over our decade together.
Scott Peck’s book, A Different Drum, is the most helpful book I have ever read about community building. One of the key insights he explains is that a community is always inclusive, to build community you have to let go of racism, prejudices about sexual orientation, class, education, party affiliations, but the one thing that a community cannot be inclusive of is a lack of inclusiveness. That is, when someone wants to divide the community, excluding others within the community, that person has to be excluded. A genuine community is inclusive of everything except the failure to be inclusive.
As I wrote in our prayer of confession this morning, it is always easier to give recognition and approval when we have already received it ourselves . . . our egos work like that. But if you want to be the kind of person who actually helps to build community, to heal the racism, prejudices, and partisanship that divides our civilization, then you have to be the kind of person who gives acceptance and approval before you have gotten yours.
There is emotional risk in trying to be healing. It deserves to be noted that while those with huge egos are the most noticeable, I’m guessing that those people are outnumbered by those who suffer constant self-doubt and a rabid lack of ego. It is even possible that some of the most narcissistic people in the world are also the ones who have the least self-confidence. I don’t want to try to psychoanalyze our president, but I have heard more than one professional speculating about Trump’s hunger for his father’s approval which, evidently, he never satisfactorily received. If he were my son, I’m not sure that I could love him either but that’s possibly a personal issue.
Sometimes people who are acting out in the most socially unacceptable ways are not doing so out of excesses of self-confidence but rather the opposite. It is akin to the way that people express prejudice against homosexuals. If you are secure in your heterosexuality, why do you care whether Ted, Sue, Billy, or Alice are either gay or straight? Frankly, as a single straight guy, I wish more men were gay to cut down on the competition for available single women!
I’m begging for some empathetic understanding here, some added patience with the people who probably annoy us the most. Everyone needs air and water and food and sleep, and right behind that they also need some emotional reassurance, some acceptance and affirmation if not love and certainty of emotional safety. If you deprive someone of food and water long enough, they will eventually try to take yours. If we deprive others of acceptance and affirmation, they may also try to take yours.
Have you never noticed that the people who are the most likely to be insulting, to cut you down, and be critical of you are the most likely to be so fragile that if you did the same to them, they would fall into pieces?
Let me share something with you: Many years ago, a group of critics in my former church hired a private detective to try to find enough dirt on me to get me fired. Sadly, after eight months and quite a lot of money, he couldn’t find anything. I don’t have a terribly interesting personal life, I am not, after all a member of Congress. But when I finally got to see a copy of this gum-shoe’s final report, it was an amazing document to read. A woman whose husband very publicly bragged about his sexual exploits with paid sex workers told the private investigator that she had heard that I had prostitutes come to my house…. Where I was raising my then elementary school aged daughter. A guy that I had raised money to keep out of jail for embezzling money from his employer told the investigator that he had heard that I used the church’s credit card to pay my personal bills. An out of control alcoholic said that he heard that I drank too much. A married woman who was having what she thought was a secret affair with another woman said that she thought I was secretly dating men.
Though no one had any actual evidence, they all, page after page, did project their greatest personal embarrassment onto me. I was angry when I read this stuff but after the initial wave of anger passed, I realized how sad each of these people are. They can never get their minds off of their own deep personal pain and embarrassment and the only way they knew to ease that pain was to project it onto someone else. . . someone they thought would never know what they had said.
It wouldn’t work in every case. Some people have a black hole where their intact ego should be, but don’t you wonder how they might have been different kinds of people if those around them had shown them enough acceptance and approval that they didn’t feel like that had to go take it from someone else? If you found some way to let them know that even though they had endured some real and consequential pain, that you didn’t judge them, that you accepted them, that you believe that they have inherent worth?
I took as our wisdom lesson today this intriguing quote from the Austrian novelist, Stefan Zweig, who said that“every gesture of resistance which is void of either risk or impact is nothing but a cry for recognition.” Many of us spend a good deal of time on social media, posting about our political beliefs, our moral outrage, our contempt for crooked politics, a crazy healthcare system, and an unjust economic system but, if you are like me, you are posting that to be seen by lots of people who already agree with you. So why do we do that? It is cathartic, and sometimes we need some catharsis . . . some days more than others. But what does it accomplish? Or to echo Stefan Zweig, what does it cost you?
What I’m trying to say today is that we humans are, by our evolutionary nature, social animals. We need one another.
There is no more cruel punishment than solitary confinement. And yet, most people in the world have damaged or deficit egos in one way or another. Most people in the world, regardless of whether they would ever even admit it to themselves, are lonely. They are lonely, and they are surrounded by 350 million people. It is not that there is a dearth of possible connections, it is that we are waiting for someone to take the risk first, to reach out, to give us acceptance and approval and we reserve our own acceptance and approval out of fear of being rejected or hurt.
We boldly say that we want to change the world. We want to change the political system. We want to stop ICE agents from taking children from their parents at the border, we want to reform the prison system, we want to fix the income disparity problem, and end racism but we are afraid to invite a neighbor to come over for dinner and that, I submit, is perilously close to religious hypocrisy.
We can only be effective as agents for social justice, we can only have legitimacy as a community of faith that says that love is our religion, if we can be successfully connected in meaningful ways to other people. A labor union has power if the workers can stay united. A political party can influence the outcome of an election if they can keep from cannibalizing one another. A church has an impact on the ethical thinking of a society if they do not become an example of a dysfunctional family that becomes an object of derision rather than a source of light.
I am not asking that we become saint through extreme personal sacrifice. I’m just saying that you need to get some flesh in the game. Most people would like to be better connected but they are just as timid and afraid of rejection as you are. Sometimes the distance between you needs to be bridged with an honest apology.
One of the people who told a crazy story to that private investigator came to me years later and apologized and then helped us to start this church. Reconciliation is possible, but it takes three things: humility, courage enough to tell the truth, and the ego strength necessary to forgive someone who really buried a knife in your back.
Sometimes all that is necessary is for you to give over a prejudice you have nurtured that really only screams about your own insecurity. Let it go, and risk showing some else acceptance. Imagine how our world might have been different today if only Donald Trump’s father had paid some attention to him before he became a dangerous ego-maniac?
