It’s all about me

Christianity is focused on others, right? I was, after all, taught as a child “J.O.Y. is Jesus first, yourself last, and others in between.” Nevertheless, I am convinced that there are times when I need to be honest with myself and admit, “It’s all about me.”

            Here is how it works: I read something in the Bible and think, “I wish [insert name here] would read this. They sure need to pay more attention to this.” When I do, a little alarm goes off in my mind to remind me, “It’s all about me.” All those passages that I think are tailor made for someone else have something to speak to me too. Before I get set on deciding what others need, I would be better served to look inwardly and see what focusing on others has blinded me to seeing about myself.

            Jesus put it this way, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own” (Matthew 7:3-4).

Rather than concentrating on the speck of sawdust clouding another person’s vision, I had better confess that the scripture I just read or the sermon I just heard might really be all about me. I have to stop seeing others faults long enough to let the Holy Spirit teach me about where I have room to move my own walk of faith further along the path God has for me.

The time when I personally do this the worst is when it comes to judging others for judging others. I can catch myself saying, “How dare they accuse another person. Don’t they know that the Bible teaches that we are not to judge one another.” In that very act of accusing a fellow Christian of judging others, I become the hypocrite. If I were to look in the mirror at that point I would see a big plank of wood hanging out of my eye.

That plank-in-the-eye syndrome is nothing new of course. About two hundred years after Jesus preached about it, a community of monks developed in the desert of Egypt. These Christian hermits devoted their lives to living out the teachings of the Gospel and some of their wisdom was collected in writings that still exist today. Here is a story from that third century Christian community quoted by Kathleen Norris in her book Amazing Grace: a vocabulary of faith.

“There was…a meeting in Scetis about a brother who has sinned. The Fathers spoke, but, Abba Pior kept silence. Later, he got up and went out; he took a sack, filled it with sand and carried it on his shoulder. He put a little sand also into a small bag which he carried in front of him. When the Fathers asked him what this meant, he said, ‘In this sack which contains much sand, are my sins, which are many; I have put them behind me so as not to be troubled about them and so as not to weep; and see here are the little sins of my brother which are right in front of me and I spend my time judging them. This is not right. I ought rather to carry my sins in front of me and concern myself with them, begging God to forgive me for them.’ The Fathers stood up and said, ‘Truly, this is the way of salvation.’”

It is not that I need to dwell on my own sins. God has already put away the sins for which I have asked for forgiveness. But before I begin to take the sins of another person out to concentrate on them, I should first look at my own failings. Jesus had a funny feeling that every time we do that, we’ll realize that compared to the plank in our own eye our fellow Christian has but a speck of sawdust in their eye. It’s all about me after all.

            (The Rev. Frank Logue is pastor of King of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland.)

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