Obstacles to Grace: Envy

1 Samuel 18:5-9; James 3:13-18

March 30, 2011

Do you look good in green? Kermit the Frog does. The Irish, they of the “Emerald Isle,” love their green, especially on St. Patrick’s Day. Green is the color of environmental responsibility: Reuse, Reduce, Recycle. Kermit the Frog, St. Patrick’s Day, environmental responsibility. What’s not to love about green?

Unless green is the color of your complexion, and then you are not feeling well at all. Unless green is the color of the sky, and then we’re talking tornado time. Unless the grass of your neighbor’s lawn is greener than yours is, and then we’re talking envy. I love a green, green lawn all year long. That’s why at our house we still grow fescue instead of bermuda or zoysia, which would make a lot more sense in South Carolina. I want a green lawn all year long because I want the grass to be greener on my side of the fence. To envy—or to desire to be the object of envy—is an insidious and ugly obstacle to grace.

Frederick Buechner calls envy “the consuming desire to have everybody as unsuccessful as you are.” Dorothy Sayers says, “Envy is the great leveller. If it cannot level things up, it will level things down.” Let’s look at how envy works.

In the Old Testament book of 1 Samuel, King Saul and the young warrior David were allies in arms against the Philistines. Saul welcomed David into his own home, and in the service of Saul “David went out and was successful wherever Saul sent him; as a result, Saul set him over the army.” But one day, something changed in Saul. It happened, we are told, “when the women came out of all the towns of Israel, singing and dancing, to meet King Saul.” But when they met King Saul, listen to what they sang: “Saul has killed his thousands, and David his ten thousands.” Hmmm. That’s when the screw of envy turned in Saul. Saul became “very angry. . . . He said, ‘They have ascribed to David ten thousands, [but] to me they have ascribed [only] thousands. . . .’ So Saul eyed David from that day on.” “Saul eyed David” (1 Samuel 18:5-9).

On one level, envy is a sin of the eye. It is an optical and perceptual flaw by which we objectify others on account of what they have that we perceive ourselves to lack. On a deeper level though, envy is not in the eye at all. Envy is rooted in our deepest insecurity and discontent with ourselves. Envy is an expression of the most anxious place in our self and our self-image.

Consider this. Saul didn’t envy David for his shepherding or for his harp playing. He didn’t envy David on account of the love of his son Jonathan for David or on account of the love of his daughter Michal for David. He didn’t even envy David for his military exploits. Saul did fine with David’s success in love and war until the women began to sing; that’s what touched a nerve in Saul’s insecurity and wounded him in his most anxious place. The self-tormenting discontent that is envy always originates in the most insecure and anxious place in each of us.

Preachers don’t envy engineers for their analytical acumen, but another preacher’s deft turn of phrase and the ability to draw a congregation in turns a preacher green. Bankers don’t envy a violinist’s virtuosity. The recent collapse of financial institutions all over our country was driven not by greed as much as it was by the personal and professional insecurity of hollow men consumed by the thought that the other guy had a bigger . . . bank. The billion-dollar business of elective cosmetic surgery is predicated on women’s envy of the size of other women’s . . . lips. Where we are most vulnerable and insecure is where envy grows.

So where do we turn to be healed of our own evil eye?

First, get over it. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. It’s a scientific fact. In an article published in 1983 titled “‘The Grass is always Greener’: An Ecological Analysis of an Old Aphorism,” James R. Pomerantz showed how optical and perceptual properties of the human eye make a mass of grass at a distance appear greener than grass nearby with its differentiated blades (Perception 12 [1983], 501-502). Of course their grass over there looks greener to you than your grass over here does. It’s an optical and perceptual fact. Don’t torment yourself because your distance from another person’s particulars makes their life look better than it really is up close. Get over it.

Second, no matter how green it is, sooner or later, “the grass withers, the flower fades” (Isaiah 40:8). Perhaps the saddest thing about the endless anguish and self-torment of envy is that it doesn’t even obsess over things that are lasting. There is nothing in the world to envy that does not fail, fall, wither, shrink, or sag sooner or later. Instead of envy, which leads to “disorder and wickedness of every kind,” James 3 says, we set our eyes on “the wisdom from above” that is everything that envy is not: it is “pure . . . peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace” instead of tormenting themselves and others with their envy (James 3:17-18). “Wisdom from above” is lasting; the grass, no matter how green, withers.

Third, stop counting. The most popularly prescribed antidote to envy is “Count your many blessings, name them one by one.” But the problem is that antidote assumes the very same thing that envy does: that your contentment and satisfaction are grounded in how much you have instead of in how good God is. Contrast that popular prescription with the discovery of the apostle Paul who says that at the very place of his greatest insecurity and anxiety—he called it “a thorn in the flesh”—he heard God say to him, “My grace is sufficient for you” (1 Corinthians 12:9). “My grace is sufficient for you.”

Envy is an obstacle to grace precisely because it denies the goodness of God that that fills our weakness with God’s strength and replaces our insecurity with God’s love when with the Psalmist our “eyes are ever toward the Lord” (Psalm 25:15) instead of roving about looking at whoever we see as having more or bigger or better than we.

The antithesis and the antidote to envy is not in adding up our blessings but in letting go of our insecurities and anxieties. It’s expressed in one of the most overlooked psalms in the entire Psalter, the quiet and unassuming Psalm 131. It’s overlooked because it runs counter to our cultural obsession with more, bigger, better. Psalm 131 reads, “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother.” Satisfied, content, calmed, and quieted. “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high.”

Satisfied, content, calmed, and quieted. Centered, not in how much you have but in how good God is.

Photo by Timo, used under license of Creative Commons.

This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.

An Old Testament Lenten Journey: To an Unknown Land

Genesis 12:1-4a
Second Sunday in Lent 2011

One day this past week, I realized that I was humming a familiar tune. It was a song from my childhood, long forgotten, but apparently long remembered also. Once I recognized the tune, I put with it the few words that I could remember: “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we fight our country’s battles in the air, on land and sea.” I have no idea why I learned the United States Marine Corps hymn when I was a child.

The melody is taken, more or less, from an aria in a French comic opera, but it wasn’t the melody that brought it back to mind for me. It was the “shores of Tripoli” that triggered my memory. That’s a reference to the battle of Derne in 1805 during the First Barbary War, the first land battle that U.S. forces ever fought overseas. There were actually only 8 Marines and two navy midshipmen involved in leading a mercenary force of some 400 Arabs, Greeks, and Berbers in an operation that included a 500-mile march across the Libyan desert and a pretty remarkable exercise in interfaith management as the commanding officer worked to keep the Muslims and the Christians in his army on the same side in difficult circumstances.

More than 200 years later, American forces are once again on the shores of Tripoli. Someone will tell me that I’m wrong about that, but if the last fifty years of American military tactics are any indication, there are more American special forces personnel on the ground in Libya this morning than there were marines and midshipmen involved in the battle of Derne in 1805 that has been immortalized in the Marine Corps hymn.

Earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown, the spread of radiation, and new hostilities in North Africa to go with operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are heavy times, befitting the season of Lent and the shadow of the cross. For some of us, though, the weight of the season is not grounded in foreign affairs or military actions or tectonic shifts or waves or particles. The weight of our season is closer to home in grief, in guilt, in loss, in illness, in uncertainty, in loneliness, in despair. Some of us don’t need international headlines to weigh us down; we’re carrying our own weight of the world on our shoulders, thank you very much. The words we’re singing aren’t the Marine Corps hymn but “The pathway is broken, the signs are unclear. I don’t know the reason you brought me here,” wherever here may be.

This morning’s Old Testament lesson from Genesis 12 is the second passage in our Old Testament Lenten journey. It marks the beginning of the journey of Abraham and Sarah to an unknown land. To understand the shape of their journey—and our own, we need to understand the place of Genesis 12:1-4 in the book of Genesis. The great German Old Testament scholar and Lutheran pastor Gerhard von Rad saw in the first 12 chapters of the book of Genesis an amazing pattern that he characterized as the increasing visible power of sin and the increasing hidden power of grace. The increasing visible power of sin and the increasing hidden power of grace.

Here’s what von Rad saw. In Genesis 3, you may recall from last week, the first man and the first woman violated the one limitation that God had put on them in creation. In Genesis 2, the Lord God said to the first human, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Genesis 2:16-17). Von Rad points out that when the man and woman sin by violating the one and only commandment in creation (besides “be fruitful and multiply,” but that’s another story), God does not, according to Genesis 3, carry out the death sentence that was hanging over their heads but expels them from the garden instead. Sin entered in, but grace prevailed.

In Genesis 4, the sin in creation escalates to murder when Cain kills his younger brother Abel. But when Cain is sentenced by God to “be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth,” the killer of his brother cries out to God, “My punishment is greater than I can bear! Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me.” The Lord’s response to Cain is an inexplicable act of grace. “Then the Lord said to [Cain], ‘Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.’ And the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him” (vv 13-15). Instead of allowing the threat of blood vengeance to run its course, the Lord God provided Cain with a protective mark so that no one would kill him. Why? Sin entered in, but grace prevailed.

You may also recall from last week that I said Genesis 6 begins with a strange little piece of ancient folklore about the cohabitation of “sons of God” and the daughters of humans that created a race of legendary hero-warriors (verses 1-4). This disruption of the created order was more than a moral God could stand, and so we read in Genesis 6:7, “the Lord said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” But immediately after the divine determination to make an end of all flesh in a creation run amok, the very next verse reads, “But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.” So instead of making an end of all flesh, God provided for creation to begin again on the other side of the inundation. Why? Sin entered in, but grace prevailed.

By Genesis 11, the human beings are up to their old tricks and are attempting to become like God by building a temple tower that will reach into the heavens to secure their fame and their future. In Genesis 11:6, God looks out on the situation and says, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them”—and that means they will have become like God. So the Lord says, “‘Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’ So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.” Von Rad points out that finally in Genesis 11, for the first time in creation, God did exactly what God threatened to do in punishment. Destruction and confusion and scattering and alienation are the threat and the penalty, one and the same: “The Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.” This time, there is no amelioration, no grace.

Until the beginning of chapter 12, that is: the journey of Abraham and Sarah. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. . . . and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:1,3). The call of Abraham, the theological ancestor of Jews and Christians and Muslims alike, is God’s act of grace that expresses God’s intent that destruction and confusion and scattering and alienation are not God’s will for creation. God’s will for creation is always blessing (Genesis 1:28; 12:4).

Buried in Genesis 12:2 is a small and often overlooked turn of phrase that is at the heart of the journey of Abraham and Sarah. NRSV translates the end of verse 2 this way: “so that you will be a blessing.” But the final phrase in verse 2 is not a result clause at all, as it is usually translated. Instead, weheyeh beraka, as it reads in Hebrew, is an imperative; it’s a command. “As for you,” it says, “be a blessing.” That’s the journey of Abraham and Sarah: to “be a blessing.” Sin enters in, but grace prevails. “In you, all the families of the earth will be blessed.” That’s the journey of the church and of every member of it: “be a blessing.” The apostle Paul wrote, “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise (Galatians 3:29): “In you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” That is your reason for being; that is our reason for being.

That is why whenever we are faced with the weight of the season or the weight of the world either one, when “The pathway is broken, the signs are unclear; I don’t know the reason why you brought me here,” still we sing, “I’m gonna walk through the valley if you want me to.” We don’t know where our journey will take us or when, but the shape of our journey is to “be a blessing.”

Thomas E. Murray, Jr., was a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission from 1950-1957. In 1954, Murray published an article titled “Don’t Leave Atomic Energy to the Experts” in a journal called The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In that article, Murray argued that far too few people in the military, in politics, and in the general public fully understand the implications of nuclear science and technology. “Leaving it to the experts,” as he put it, portends what he called “a tragic price” (February 1954, p. 48). More than a half century later, experts and non-experts all over the world are scrambling to reassess the price of even peaceful uses of nuclear power. But listen to the conclusion of Murray’s article.

“After attending a large-scale nuclear explosion, one can never forget the sudden deafening angry roar of tortured nature as energy escapes, in a fraction of a millionth of a second, from its ancient confinement in matter. [Human beings] too have gigantic energies captive in their minds, needing only the compression of circumstances for release into the most varied forms of human activity. In its highest form, this release of energy joins with God’s grace. . . . What our world needs most now are architects of survival—those blessed peacemakers of the Sermon on the Mount. They exist—just as surely as that energy exists which when released produces the incredibly giant explosions that are now shaking the world” (p. 50).

When Murray calls us to “the gigantic energies . . . of human activity” that “joins with God’s grace,” he is singing Abraham and Sarah’s song singing God’s song: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” “Be a blessing!”


Photo of a Tripoli beach at sunset sunset by Faris Haider Al-Ftasy, used under license of Creative Commons.

This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.