Sermon: Envy and Gratitude

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Envy and Gratitude^[i]

By Charles Rush

July 11, 2010

[ Audio (mp3, 6.3Mb) ]

recently came across a sample of children's letters to Santa that are instructive. Take this one from Jenny. “Dear Santa, Please give me a doll this year. I would like her to eat, walk, do my homework, and help me clean my room.”

Or this from Ricky, “Dear Santa, “Thanks for the race car last year. Can I have another one, only this time one that is faster than my best friend's race car?” Or this, “Dear Santa, I wish you could leave a puzzle under the tree for me. And a toy for my sister. Then she won't want to play with mine and I can have it to myself.” Cassie. Finally this, “Dear Santa, could you come early this year? I've been really super good, but I don't know if I can last much longer. Please hurry. Love, Jordan.”[ii]

You wonder where our kids get this? The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

When it comes to an imaginative understanding of success, none of us gathered here are particularly creative. For the most part, we adopted the model we were given as kids and succeeded at it. We wanted to be smart and we did well at school and if we didn't, somehow we figured out a way to rebound through graduate school.

We used the connections from family, school, and friends; we played our breaks and when we got our foot in the door, we were willing to put in the time and the effort; we learned how to please the people we worked for. We were willing to do almost anything if it was necessary for success. We figured out where the big revenue stream was and we positioned ourselves to take advantage of it.

We colluded with our spouses and we bought the dream that was given to us by the previous generation. And somewhere along the way, we started fantasizing about ONE DAY. One day, out there, we are going to realize it… One day when we get the second house…. One day when we get the second house paid for. One day when our kids graduate from better schools than we did… One day when we finally get to run the show ourselves… One day when we retire early and move down to Tortolla and teach sailing…One day after we survive the next downturn and get through the lay offs… One day when everyone knows us and respects us… One day when we can afford to do whatever we want and we can just do it… somewhere out there, then we will be happy, if we can just get there.

And then, we will have time for family, then we will love our spouses, then we will catch up with our friends, and, and, and everyone will be happy. We all bought the dream…. and it is a spiritual dream…., make no mistake.

Spiritually speaking, one of the real limitations of the dream is that it has no place for loss or disappointment. That is not part of the deal and it doesn't have to be part of the deal because we haven't actually experienced much loss. We did better in school than they did. We got the job, they didn't. We squeaked by and, by hook or crook, we got the breaks. It wasn't all down hill but we made the system punch out the perq's better than most, certainly better than most everyone else in our family.

Spiritually speaking, we believe in competition. We like that. After I had a knee surgery that retired me from football and basketball. In my early 20's my doctor was trying to console me with the number of wonderful ways to stay in shape- swimming, riding a bike. I looked at him and said, “I don't play ball to stay in shape. I play to win. I want to beat somebody and be on a team that beats somebody.” We love competition.

And we are always looking over our shoulder. That is why we loved Ed Koch when he was Mayor of New York. His honor was constantly asking people, “how am I doing? He was just more honest and open about his insecurity than most of us. But we are constantly sizing ourselves up with other people. We have somebody out there that, in our imagination, we are trying to become. And we have other people around us that we are trying to beat. We want them to do well but not too much better than us. More often than not, some of them are pretty close to us. In fact, if they weren't close it really wouldn't bother us too much.

Nothing is quite as annoying as your best friend from High School driving up to the reunion in a Ferrari as you are stepping out of your mini-van. That is close… too close. For a moment, you touch your forehead to see if that L is showing again. Nothing is as irritating as your older sister remarking that your house is ‘cute'- like it was something she would put in her back yard for her kids to play in. That is close… too close.

No, it has to be close to home for real envy to set in and get hold of us. The odd thing about envy from the outside is that it doesn't easily correlate to what you actually have or need. When you are envious, close friends will say to you, “Come on, look at what you have”. From a distance, your friends and family are likely not to get why you feel as envious as you do. That is largely because envy is not actually out there, it is inside us. And it is not largely about stuff, it is about our anxieties about how we exercise power. Envy is driven out of our lower fears, in this case it comes from the part of us that is never really sure we belong here in the first place. Envy comes from the same place in our psyche's as those awful dreams where everyone has on the same outfit and you don't and there is no way you can leave…

Envy fundamentally highlights spiritual lacunae in ourselves. We can't deal with that, so we project on to other people. That is why Envy is so profoundly negative. I believe it was Oscar Wilde who said that envy is “the consuming desire to make everyone around us as miserable as we are.” The Parson in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales called Envy “the foul sin” because it sneers “against all virtues and against all goodness.” The color of Envy is green, illustrating as it does the presence of sickness. The Latin word for Envy is invidia, literally, “the evil eye”, because it means to look on others with malice. [iii]

Our scripture this morning depicts envy in mythic/primordial proportions. Over the years, I've come to conclude that this is one of the great sagas of scripture. It is the second sin in the fall of humanity, underscoring the fact that it not only affects us all, but is not easily educated out of us either. It doesn't go away with advanced civilization. In fact, our propensity to envy grows as we ascend the steps of self-realization, prosperity, and success.

There is this wonderful dimension to this story, the introduction of the arbitrariness of God. Why does God accept the gift of a slain animal and not the gift of harvested grain? Does God just prefer hunters to farmers? What is all that about anyway? It has spurred a debate in itself, but from the point of view of us humans, the presence of the arbitrary is important on a primordial level. To us, whether or not we get the divine blessing rarely seems fair.

The story is about family. Think about family and blessing for a moment. I think of the complex conversations that brothers and sisters have with one another after one of their parents have recently died. Those conversations are even more important after both of their parents have died and the generation is changing hands. Some of brothers and sisters feel that they got the blessing, others do not. Some carried around resentment for years that they felt hobbled them as adults, others are able to let go of their scars. All of them are now mature, even aged themselves usually. They tease one another, cajole one another, huff and puff, whine and throw tantrums over the blessing- usually as they divide the estate, and divvy up the heirlooms and memories. It all comes tumbling out. “Dad always gave you more…”No one can really even remember the original stories exactly anymore. All they are left with is their own memories and perceptions of whether or not they got what they needed from their parents who are now dead.

It all has such a surprising immediacy and depth of emotion to it. It is surprising just how much resentment and disappointment some people carry around for so many years and never can express it until just that time of life. And it never seems fair. It just is what it was. And now is so complex.

Envy is a malformation of that protective part of our ego that is fearful that it didn't get enough and doesn't measure up. It is small. It is ugly. It is perhaps the only deadly sin that everyone engages in and no one will fess up to.

I wish that I could give you a simple formula to vex it but I can't. Spiritual/emotional/psychological stuff is too complex for a simple formula. We all have to ferret out our emotional-family issues and work them through. But on another level, envy is also a straight over the plate spiritual issue on a personal level, dealing with our ego and maturing it.

Jesus taught us that we are all ‘children of God'. That is probably the fundamental message from Jesus. In the Sermon on the Mount, he repeatedly said, “Blessed are…” You are blessed. Now live out of that blessing. He taught us, and he modeled for us the spiritual antidote to envious anxiety. It is gratitude.

Cheryl Crowe, in her latest pop song says, “it's not getting what you want, it's wanting what you got.” Grateful people are able to do that- they want what they got.

I read a story from the early sixties about a kid that lived near an elderly African-American woman in the deep South. She was a woman of spiritual substance who would always pray before eating, even if it was a snack she was sharing with the kids in the neighborhood. One day this kid says to her, “why do you always pray before you eat, you think it changes the food or something?” With the wonderful dignity that women had in that generation, she replied, “Food always tastes better when you are grateful.” Doesn't it though? Likewise, it is possible to be bored and indifferent eating Lobster Newbergh…

Jesus told a parable about a man that hired people at different times of the day, some at 9 a.m., some at noon, some at 3. At the end of the day he paid all of them the agreed upon price, $200/ for the day's work. Whereupon the guys that started working at 9:00 in the morning began complaining that it wasn't fair. They worked longer than the guys that started in the afternoon, but they just got the same money.

The owner says to the men complaining. “Didn't I pay you what we agreed on? I didn't do you any wrong personally, did I?” Long silence. Then he says, “Why do you begrudge my generosity to these other people?” (Mt. 20:13,14)

Spiritually, the issue isn't about justice, as such. They are all getting a fair wage for their labor. The issue is about absorbing the blessing and being grateful for what you got. “Yeah, but they got more than I did…” says all of us and that is always true of a few people. Someone always has more than us… and better. They are out there, they have more and it's not fair.

“But”, says Jesus, “you have more than what you need… You are blessed. Do you see that? Live out of what you got” As it is said, “When the heart is full of gratitude, there is little room for despair or resentment.”

The point of our existence is not about getting; it is about giving. Spiritually, Jesus tried to get us to see ourselves principally as gift givers. When we are full enough of blessing that we can start thinking of ways we can bless other people around us, when we think ‘what kind of gift does this person need (that is not just material)?, what a wonderful transformation takes place. Whereas envy is suspicious, gratefulness trusts; whereas envy tries to take others down, gratefulness builds other people up. And the funny thing is, where envy is worried about the self not getting enough, generally speaking gratefulness starts an infectious circle of blessing that rebounds back to the giver. Jesus didn't quite put it this way, but it is still generally true that the more you give, the more you get back. You unleash the power of blessing. That is living out of your positive spiritual energy.

So much of gratitude is connecting your life (small l) with Life (capital L), with the wonder of being alive, the joy of being connected to children and elderly people, the mystery of the world, the beauty of the season, the romance of loving people, and participating in the fundamental goodness of the Life force that is God.

I noticed, preparing this sermon, that there are a number of web sites devoted to getting each of us to develop our awareness of the blessings that surround us and live out of our gratitude. People who have had a serious encounter with death, through accident or illness, suddenly become more emotionally aware of the blessing of life, friends, loved ones.

I went to visit one of our church members, Marion Parsons in the hospital, after a brush with serious illness. Marion is moving through her 80's and we weren't quite sure how serious her condition was. It so happened that I got to her room just as her grandson Brian arrived. Brian has recently finished his medical residency at Yale, so in comes her grandson, the Doctor and the Minister. She sees us both and says, “Ya'll go on, I'm not that bad… If the two of you are together, it can't be good news.” We talked for a while. I asked her what she was doing before we got there. She said, “I was watching the marvelous morning unfold. I was thinking just how good it is to be alive.” And it is.

As we enter this vacation season, think on the blessings you have received from God, the Life Force, from others around you. Give thanks in prayer. Be aware and live out of gratefulness. Find ways to demonstrate that to others around you. Broaden your spiritual community and include more of your Church in that group as you spread your blessing and grace. Open your pocketbook as well as your heart and I know that is more difficult this year than most. But spread your support financially, emotionally, spiritually, psychologically. We need you and all you have to offer on all levels

Let us recall together the prayer of St. Francis, “Gracious God, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console. To be understood, as to understand, to be Loved, as to love with all my soul. For it is in giving that we receive. It is in pardoning, that we are forgiven. Amen.

[i] Rev Rush preached a version of this sermon on Nov 17, 2002.

[ii] Dynamic Preaching, vol. XXII, no. 4, p. 67.

[iii] Thanks to Stephen Shoemaker, The Jekyll and Hyde Syndrome, Broadman Press, Nashville, TN, pp. 50-51.