I got up this morning completely focused on working on my sermon for this Sunday. Preachers who read this blog will know what it’s like to have that kind of mid-week tunnel vision that is so focused on Sunday that every thought and idea tends to relate to the text for the week. In this case, for me it’s Acts 19 and the story of Paul stirring things up in Ephesus. It’s a text about idolatry and about the power of the gospel to change whole societies.
What I didn’t focus on this morning when I got up, however, was my calendar. I have a MacBook, an iPad, and an iPod Touch, all with my calendar synched up on them and all with my appointments for the week. A couple of weeks ago, one of my parishioners invited me to come to his retirement ceremony from the Air Force. I got a formal invitation, put it on my calendar, RSVP’d for the event, and agreed to do the invocation. He and his family would be moving right after the ceremony to their new home in Oklahoma, so it would be a chance for me to not only celebrate his career, but also to say goodbye to a family whom I had the privilege of serving through some tough times. The retirement ceremony was this morning at 10:00am.
At 10:00am, however, I was in my office working on Paul in Ephesus. I was so focused on reading that I didn’t check my calendar this morning; in fact, I had rebooted the computer so that I could try and fix a printing issue so no calendar was up at all. At noon I got a call from my Air Force friend. Sorry, we must have gotten our wires crossed he said, offering me a large benefit of the doubt. No, it wasn’t the wires that got crossed. It was the lack of using the wires and wireless network I had available to me. I felt sick as soon as I heard it was him on the phone. I could not apologize enough.
I know I’m not the only pastor who’s ever missed an appointment due to the idiot effect–you know, that momentary brain cramp that keeps you from realizing what’s happening at random but important moments. It’s happened to me before, and it will likely happen again. As one of my colleagues put it to me when I tweeted out my idiocy, “Peace, brother. You’re human.”
But, truth be told, I don’t want to be human! That’s an occupational hazard of being an ESTJ on the Myers-Briggs scale. We tend toward extreme perfectionism, and when something goes wrong (especially when we are at fault) we tend to obsess about it ad nauseum–literally. My gut is still churning a couple of hours after the fact. I am usually good at forgiving others when they make mistakes, but I have an extremely hard time forgiving myself when I screw up. I want to be seen as responsible, I want people to know I’m there for them, and I want to do my job with excellence. Failure is not an option–that’s the ESTJ way of life. Our prayer is generally, “God, help me to not try to RUN everything. But, if You need some help, just ask.”
Ironically, one of the pieces of my research this morning (during my oblivious state) was listening to a sermon online by author and preacher Tim Keller, who was talking about Acts 19 in terms of dealing with idolatry. It’s a great talk, which you can watch and listen to here. He lays out a lot of idols that need to be dealt with before we can really hear the gospel. In fact, he says, the first thing that Paul did when he went to a new town was to point out the idols, as in Lystra, Philippi, Athens, and in Ephesus. He went through a whole list of idols we continue to chase after today, some of which we’ll talk about on Sunday.
But I was struck by one of the idols that Keller poked at that I didn’t expect. He said this (I’m paraphrasing): When you say, “I can’t forgive myself,” it’s clear evidence that there’s a higher god in your life than God. Your god (be it expectations, your past, or whatever it is that causes you to reject forgiveness) is your spiritual master. And those gods are generally violent and offer no mercy. None of these gods will save us, they will only seek to destroy us.
I listened to that again after getting off the phone. My parishioner offered me sincere forgiveness for my mistake, but I’ve spent a lifetime fighting forgiveness because one of my idols is perfectionistic expectations. I don’t know where that god comes from in my life, but he has always been a cruel taskmaster. There’s no excuse for me missing that appointment today and I rightly feel equal measures of guilt and disappointment. But the god of my perfectionism will always keep piling on.
Giving up that god isn’t easy, just as it wasn’t easy for the Ephesians, who rioted when they heard about the God Paul was talking about–the one who is the real savior of the world. Our gods are anything we can’t live without, those things we depend on to save us. Sometimes, and maybe even most destructively, that god can be our false sense of ourselves. We have to smash that idol and its falseness before we can really hear the gospel. We’ll talk more about that on Sunday–and I will speak from personal experience!
Today, though, I’ve been reminded that, yeah, I’m subject to the Idiot Effect. But as my friend says, “Peace, brother. You’re human.” Thank the one and only God that you have a real Savior!
