During my senior year at seminary, we had something called “racial reconciliation day.” It involved, among other things, attending a rally at the college that the seminary was attached to, wearing a ribbon or a tag or label - I don’t remember exactly what - to announce to the world one’s repentance for racism, and a worship service in the chap-el featuring a speaker by one of the few black professors at the college. I had been looking forward to hearing him speak, because I had heard him during my first year and was deeply moved by his love for God and his commitment to society’s failures and outcasts.
But, unfortunately, during the intervening year there had been some ugly incidents at the college, attacking this man and his family, vile illustrations of the bigotry that still occurs even now, even among people who call themselves Christian. It was shocking to most of us, and this day of reconciliation was an attempt on the part of the administration to come to grips with the ongoing reality of this ugliness and to promote dialogue and self-examination and - ultimately - healing.
And so this once godly and compassionate professor, whose name I have forgotten but will call Dr. Chapman, had become bitter, and angry, and accused the mostly white audience of complicity in the events. The gist of his speech - I can’t call it a sermon, because it was neither Christ-centered nor Biblical - was that, if you were white you were a racist, and if you were black anything you did to get your own back at the oppressors was justified. At the end of the service the congregation was invited to stand in corporate acknowledgment and repentance of our sin. I could not, nor could some others. I was not willing to confess to something I had not done, and I was deeply distressed by the total absence of any mention of the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ to overcome this evil, to break down walls and to make two people one.
I talked to Dr. Chapman afterwards. I hoped that somewhere between his pain and mine we could communicate, but it was not possible. He said that as a member of a privileged class I could neither understand his viewpoint nor absolve myself of guilt. The privilege of my white skin gave me an edge, an advantage, so that just by existing I oppressed those not so gifted. At no point did he acknowledge how distressed his colleagues were about the events, and how supportive they were of him. He rejected their attempts to reach out to him, and cherished his pain, and stoked his anger.
I thought about this for weeks. I even went to the black pastoral counseling professor on the seminary staff, a friend of Dr. Chapman, to try to explain why I had been so distressed, and why I thought that the worship service, rather than help achieve reconciliation, had actually made things worse. I wound up weeping all over his shirt front (he was a lovely man) but he didn’t understand what I was getting at. I eventually gave up.
And the reason I am telling this story is because what lies behind it is a violation of the tenth commandment.
Dr. Chapman was not able to find common ground with me, because he couldn’t forgive me for having something he wanted. He coveted my so-called privileged status because he believed that it would have made him safe from injustice, safe from slander and spite and harassment. He coveted my complexion.
He believed - although I rather doubt that he would put it in these terms - that my white skin was a bigger privilege than his Christian upbringing. He had been raised Christian, in an intact and loving family, and yet he believed that I, raised atheist in an abusive and ultimately broken family, was luckier - just because I was white.
How sad, how self-destructive that is.
It’s self-destructive for a lot of reasons, but two are most important.
First, when Dr. Chapman put me in a box marked “white = oppressor”, it became impossible for us to develop a relationship, a relationship that should have been natural and easy because of our common allegiance to Jesus Christ.
Second, as long as he looks at my skin color - or anyone’s else's - as a bigger gift than the gospel, he will never know the peace and wholeness that is the result of receiving Jesus Christ.
And yet Dr. Chapman’s point of view is a common one, and has become endemic in today's society..
It is also a thoroughly understandable one, in the light of the suffering he and his family - and far too many other black Americans in this country - have endured. It is natural to be angry when one has been hurt. And it is easier to stay angry, even when the anger is misplaced, than to renounce the anger in favor of a more constructive re-sponse.
But this isn’t a sermon on anger.
It’s a sermon about envy.
What’s the connection, do you suppose, between anger and envy?
Envy usually comes from a sense of injustice.
And sometimes the injustice is real, real injury may have been done, a real grievance might exist. But anger turns to envy when you start to identify something the other person has as the source of the injustice. It might be wealth, power, beauty, education, or skin color. Whatever. Anger turns to envy whenever you say to yourself,
“If I had that job, that degree, that gift - they wouldn’t have hurt me. It’s not fair that so-and-so has it when I don’t. I should have what they have. I can’t be happy until I have what they have.” That’s envy.
Envy says, “They don’t deserve it. But I do.
Envy says, “I can’t be happy without it.”
But the tenth commandment says, “You shall not covet your neighbor's wife; and you shall not desire your neighbor's house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor's.” D’you hear that? “Anything that is your neighbor’s.” You shall not covet your neighbor’s bank account, his education, her job, his car, her children, his golf swing, her health, his ethnic heritage, her color. You shall not.
But we do, don’t we.
Where do you think the old saying, “The grass is greener on the other side of the fence” comes from, if not from that universal propensity to think the other person has it better than we do?
What is it that makes us keep looking over at the other person’s life to see if it’s better than ours?
When I started working on this sermon I was operating under the assumption that envy arises from unsatisfied hunger. I started out thinking that it’s about some need we have not being met. But that’s not it.
Coveting - envy - isn’t about ourselves at all. It isn’t about what we have, or what we don’t have. It’s about other people. It’s about whether anybody else has something better. It’s about having to be first.
I read a story once about a little boy, I think his name was Timmy, who desperately wanted a bicycle for Christmas. His family was poor, and they couldn’t afford to buy a new one. So his father got a beat-up rusty old one-speed, and worked for months patiently sanding off the rust and hammering out the dents and replacing the bolts and so on. Timmy was in ecstasy - until he rode it to school the next day, and saw Alex, the town rich kid, with his shiny new ten-speed. And Timmy never rode his bike to school again. All his joy in what his father had made for him was ruined. But what he didn’t know was that Alex’s dad had been in New York “on business” over the Christmas holidays, that his secretary had bought the bike, and that the gift tag was typed. Timmy thought - not knowing the whole story - that what Alex had was better than what he had, and so all his joy in his father’s gift of love was tarnished.
My sister Kathleen and I were pretty close growing up, in a peculiar sort of way. She fought fiercely whenever anyone was mean to me, but was pretty tyrannical herself when it was just the two of us. She was tidy, I wasn’t, and since we shared a room it drove her crazy. She used to kick my clothes under the bed. There was only 21 months difference in age, and we were only a year apart in school, so there was some rivalry. The way we dealt with it was to divide things up. She took science, I took art. She took sewing, I took cooking. She took sports, I took drama. She did everything she was supposed to, straight through to marriage, a Master’s Degree, and a son, while I dropped out of college and had disreputable adventures for several years. Anyway we sort of got out of touch after that except for duty letters, until I started traveling for my company, mostly to New York and Connecticut, and wound up being able to spend weekends with my sister. And what we discovered was that we had both been ferociously jealous of each other. I envied Kathleen her athletic ability, she the fact that I never had to study for my grades. We had this whole list of things that we envied about each other. And what we wound up realizing after we had cried and hugged each other and cried some more was that the things I envied Kathleen for, she took for granted, and I took for granted the things she envied me for.
We see what other people have more clearly than what we have.
We see what we lack more clearly than what we have.
We see other people’s faults more clearly than we see our own.
So when you put those things together, there we are looking at people whose sins are - if not larger than life then certainly larger than ours, and whose possessions outshine ours by a country mile, and, well, what you get is a resounding “It’s not fair!”
Sometimes the imbalance is real, sometimes it’s just perceived. Sometimes the imbalance is due to injustice, sometimes it’s not. But either way, coveting is not the answer. Speaking against injustice is good. But trying to get what other people have, or resenting them for having what you lack, is not the answer.
Why is it, anyway, that we spend more time envying people who have more than we do than being grateful that we have more than most? The poorest among us is rich-er than most of the other people in the world. The poverty level for a single person is an annual income of over $12,000, and that doesn’t factor in benefits like housing sub-sidies, food stamps or Medicaid. Eighty-four percent of the world lives on less than that. Many on much less.
What do we get out of coveting?
Is it just that we can’t see beyond the surface of things?
That’s part of it, of course.
But I think that the root cause of coveting, just like the root cause of all the other sins that are uncovered when we look at the ten commandments, is alienation from God.
The moment we broke away from God at the dawn of creation we pulled the plug on the source of our deepest satisfaction. The moment we broke away from God we cut ourselves off from any possibility of spiritual fulfillment. From that time on, our lives have been characterized by gnawing dissatisfaction, a sense that we’re missing out on something, a sense that things are not what they’re supposed to be. C. S. Lewis puts it this way:
“The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality...”
That chasm that yawns between us and reality...
That sounds like the brokenness I’ve been talking about, doesn’t it?
God is the ultimate reality, the reality for whom our souls long; as St. Augustine said, "there is a God-shaped vacuum within each one of us."
We fill this longing with tawdry things, temporarily assuaging that indefinable ache. But the hunger pangs strike again, and when our eyes light upon a luxury that we haven’t seen or owned or experienced there’s something in us that says, “That’s it! That is what will satisfy my hunger.” Or someone is mean to us and we think, “If I had X or were X, I would be safe.” Or we see someone happily and busily fulfilled with their life and work, we think to ourselves, “Oh! That’s the path to fulfillment.” And then we try to turn aside from our own path to try to follow someone else’s.
And that is what envy is.
That is what coveting is.
It’s measuring our lives by what other people have and do, rather than by our re-lationship with God.
It’s a sign of being out of touch with God. And it can happen to Christians, too.
It even happened to the apostles.
D’you remember the story John tells of after the resurrection, when Jesus ap-peared to the disciples by the lake in Galilee and ate breakfast with them. And he asks Peter, “Do you love me?” and Peter says, “Yes, Lord, you know I do.” A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” and Peter says, “Yes Lord, you know I do,” probably by this time wondering what Jesus was getting at, did he doubt him? And feeling guilty, because of course Jesus had reason to doubt him after his be-havior at the crucifixion. And a third time Jesus says, “Do you love me?” and this time, really hurt, Simon says, Lord, you know everything, you know that I love you.” And Jesus gives him his marching orders: “Feed my sheep.” And right then, right after Peter has had this intense and moving conversation with his Lord,
Peter turned and saw following them the disciple whom Jesus loved... When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, "Lord, what about this man?" Jesus said to him, "If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!" [John 21:20-22]
Doesn’t Peter trust Jesus to do what’s right? Doesn’t Peter believe that Jesus loves him as much as he loves John? Somehow it’s not enough for Peter to know what Jesus wants, he has to know what God’s doing with everyone else, too, and one can’t help but think he’s worried that John is going to get a better job, more exciting, more fulfilling, more something.
And in a way he does. Peter is crucified upside down, in Rome, sometime during Nero’s reign. But John lives another 30 or so years, first in Ephesus and later in exile on the island Patmos. And John writes the most beautiful gospel of them all, and the only book of prophecy in the entire New Testament, and on top of that three letters also made it into the canon. All Peter got was two letters. Not even a gospel, unless you count Mark’s, and that doesn’t really count because Peter doesn’t get the credit. It’s not fair.
Do you ever do that?
Do you ever measure your life by what other people have, or do, or are?
If you do, what does that say about how much you trust God with your life? Do you really believe that he will provide for you, do you really believe that he can use you? Do you think you could do more for God if you had more money, or a better education, or different gifts? Do you think God maybe made a mistake in not giving you what you need?
One of my seminary professors used to joke that he kept praying for God to equip him to minister to the filthy rich, but that it hadn’t happened yet. But you see, God had equipped him to minister where he was. And so that’s what he did. And we can do the same, because in Jesus Christ God has given us what we need.
Because God doesn’t measure the value of our lives by externals. God measures our lives by how obedient we are to him. And once we accept that truth, and trust in God’s provision, and begin to build our lives on it, then we are on the way to being able to say, along with Paul,
I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content. I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound; in any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want. I can do all things in him who strengthens me." [Phil 4:11-13]
