Re-Influencing Yourself

“Re-Influencing Yourself”

November 16, 2025 CObleskill United Methodist Church, Pastor Anna Blinn Cole

Isaiah 65:17-25; Luke 21:5-19

Twenty Third Sunday after Pentecost

We’re talking this month in church about what is enough.  Last week, I kind of unloaded about how I’ve had enough with power systems in our government that make the rich richer and the poor poorer.  We have enough for everyone!  Let’s start acting like it.  In the days that have followed, I’ve been amazed to see you step up even more than you already were to help make sure this church’s feeding ministries are well supported.  On Friday at the food pantry, we had twice as many volunteers as we usually do as you just showed up and wanted to shadow and learn how this important work is done.  If it wasn’t this past this Friday, it was others of you who have made a point to say you’ll be in on a Friday or a Sunday for food pantry hours in the near future.  Some of you have even committed to being here one Friday every month.  It’s truly amazing. 

I also loved the way four different people, unrelated to each other, asked me this week if our church had a supply of take-out food containers.  Each person was thinking the same thing.  At our community potluck dinner coming this Thursday, how can we make sure all the food goes home with people who need it.  I told them all what I’ll tell you now.  Bring in your tupperware, folks, because there will not only be enough food, there will be MORE than enough food.  

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for what you are doing to donate your time, your money, your food and your good ideas.  Every little bit helps us stand proudly behind our unwavering belief that there will be enough.  

This week we continue to talk about Enough but today I want to shift the conversation inward.  We’ve rallied behind the question “Will there be enough?” but when you turn the question inward what happens?

Do you ever ask yourself, personally, “Am I enough?”

If you’re like me, you probably have.  In fact, some studies suggest that more than 85% of Americans struggle with feeling like they’re not enough. 

This general dis-ease about our own self-worth creates the perfect entry point for outside influence… a nudge or a planted idea that confirms your fear and suggests, instead, a solution that will solve your problem of not being enough.  In fact, our desire for outside influence to tell us how we could be better and have more self-worth is SO STRONG right now that a new kind of profession has emerged in the last 5-10 years.  The profession is called an “Influencer.”  An “influencer,” the internet defines, is a person who has built a credible online following and uses their expertise, authority or relationship with their audience to affect their followers’ purchasing decisions and behaviors.  

Influencers have become a professional class of people, why?  Because companies pay them to find your insecurities and help you become secure again with some new idea or thing that can be yours for a certain price tag or the submission of your email address low or the soul of your firstborn child.  Well, just get kidding on that last one.. kind of.  This buy more, get more system all operates from the basic assumption that you are not enough until you have more. 

And I tell you what, it is a vicious cycle these days.  The influencers are in cahoots with the algorithmic overlords of social media feeds and now all it takes is for one little product-placement reel with a happy woman putting name-brand butter all over her turkey and suddenly everywhere you look, the internet seems to be obsessed with making you long to have the most perfect thanksgiving ever and suddenly you “realize” all of this can only be possible if you buy a new set of farmhouse chic table and chairs, spend 10 hours decorating said table, and buy name brand butter all while taking some stranger’s advice on how to make “the best pumpkin pie of your life.”  

Here's another example: I recently entered a new decade last year, my forties, and suddenly the internet became obsessed with the possibility that I may be getting wrinkles.  I now cannot escape the influencers who now think my life will not be complete until I have their anti-wrinkle cream in my possession. Every other thing on my social feeds is some new and improved “glow” cream that will iron out every worry line and make my life care-free and my face more beautiful.  And it only costs $130 dollars.  That’s all!  Worries and their pesky lines will disappear, all for $130! 

And the thing is, the more they tell me I need it, the more I actually start to believe them.  The influencers are pretty influential. It’s hard to mount an internal resistance to this kind of pressure.  With enough companies and beautiful people telling me that I’m not enough until I improve my appearance, I begin to believe it. 

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this, but this is not an experience limited to anti-wrinkle face creams for women in their early 40s.  When you stop to think about it, outside influence is everywhere…always keeping you in a position of thinking you need more than you have. Maybe for you it’s the new and improved zero-turn fully-enclosed Cadillac of snow blowers complete with a heated steering wheel and coffee dispenser.  (That’s a real thing, right?)  Or maybe it’s the iPhone 17 (how is it they’re on model 17 anyway!?  Why does there need to be a new one every year?).  Or maybe for you it’s a home makeover and the latest colors in a kitchen remodel.  Or a new car that comes with all the built-in bells and whistles.  Or an app for your iPad that all your friends tell you that you, too, really have to have.  

The pressure to have more and more and an upgraded life is not an accident.  It’s a well-designed system.  And it feeds off of you being stuck in a place of discontent. 

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It is hard enough to manage this tension as adults, but let’s think about this from the perspective of a child just becoming a teenager.  A child who is stepping into the land of social media and targeted advertising for the first time.  A child who hasn’t fully developed their own sense of self-worth.  A child who begins to think instructions for how to live and what to wear come from the influencers online with the most followers.  From an early age, outside influence benefits from keeping us and our children in a perpetual state of feeling inadequate as we are.  

This is a problem. 

When our children receive the majority of their influence from people who profit from their insecurity, they potentially become victims and not just of advertising but of predatory behavior.  This includes everything from subtle software design that make apps and video games addictive and hard to put down to deceptive marketing that tries to convince under-age children that dangerous behaviors are really cool.  We live in a society that often feels like it’s okay to do this to children because… that’s the way of the world, a world controlled by people interested more in power and money than our children as humans and beloved children of God.  If it’s hard for us as adults to fight the insecurity, how much worse is it for our children? 

Feeling inadequate is a difficult and even dangerous place to be.

When any of us, children or adults alike, stay trapped in a cycle of inadequacy, we never see ourselves as content.  We are not able to be satisfied with what we have.  We always start from a place of deficit.  “If only I was better. If only I worked harder. If only I had more.  If only [fill in the blank]… and my life would be better.  We long for deliverance. 

But we’re looking in the wrong place.  

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I originally titled this sermon: “De-influencing Yourself.” Because the glowing, glimmering expectations are unrelenting and it’s time to just stop.  It’s gotten so bad that there are even “Influencers” who now specialize in “De-influencing.”  Like their content is all about how to thrift instead of buy new and make homemade butter instead of buying that brand name butter.  There’s nothing wrong with this, but the problem remains: we still look to outsiders to model for us how to be content.  We keep scrolling and consuming the content.  The goal post just shifts.  

So, I decided “De-influencing Yourself” was the wrong title and Paige can be my witness in how much of a headache it causes to change your sermon title after the bulletin is drafted and the PowerPoint made.   

But to me, the better approach is not removing the idea of influence, but examining the source from which we get our influence.  The way through all of this mess of insecurity and inadequacy is to remember that our worth isn’t defined by what the internet tells us or how many wrinkles we have or how new our car is or how fancy our Thanksgiving turkey turns out.  God wants to change the nature of the game altogether.  God wants to turn the world’s expectations upside down.  God wants to dig deep inside of our fragile outer shell and find the beloved human inside that is now and always has been enough, just as we are.  This is a different kind of influence.  This is a remembering of who we are.  A re-influencing of ourselves.

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I’m not gonna lie, our scripture readings today are a little apocalyptical.  I bet you were wondering when I was going to get to that.  They are both the lectionary for this Sunday and they both have something in common.  They were written during times of low morale.  Isaiah wrote to people in exile from their homeland, prisoners of a war that had lasted more than a generation.  Jesus in Luke is preaching his last sermon before he himself is killed by the state for being too loving.  Both passages have this eerie quality like… world is ending.  And that’s because it really felt like it was.  

But the scripture is clear in both cases: the status quo of what seems inadequate and not enough is not the future God has planned.  Not only is it possible to want a better future, it’s God’s vision.  A world where there is no shame.  A world where there is no hierarchy.  A world where there is no deception.  A world where there are no predators.  A world where there is only the testimony that you will give when you stand up and proclaim that you are enough.  

That last part is important.

God can’t make this new world happen without our testimony, though.  Because it takes all of us believing that we are enough to fight back against the culture that thrives off our inadequacy.  It takes parents telling their children every single day that they are strong and beautiful and smart, just as they are.  It takes a sense of levity to see that most everything we see on TV ads or our social media influencers have only their own self-advancement in mind, not ours.  It takes a healthy amount of restraint on our part to realize that spending more money and having the latest and the greatest will not bring us our happiness. 

Where our truest happiness comes from is our recognition that we already have everything we need and, in fact, probably more than we need.  We’ll be happiest when we put down the social media feeds and actually look at the people around us.  Or have a whole day for the whole family where phones are only used for calling.  Maybe you can regain some morsel of contentment by pressing the mute button during every commercial that comes on the television.  Turn the noise off. 

Maybe your secret weapon to reclaiming your own self-worth is by saying to yourself one thing every night before bed one thing you love about your life, just as you are.  And if even this is hard, find someone you trust who you can talk to.  If we’re going to stand up to the narratives of fear and scarcity, we’re going to have to all be in this together.  

Grace and Peace, 

Pastor Anna