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The Second Sunday In Lent
O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from thy ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of thy Word, Jesus Christ thy Son; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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The Second Sunday In Lent
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A Sermon by
Fr. Stafford
✛
The Seven Deadly Sins: Envy and Greed
As the rector stated a few moments ago, this is the second meditation in a four-part Lenten sermon series begun last week, entitled “the Seven Deadly Sins.” Previously, Fr. Andrew, the rector emeritus, told us about lust and gluttony; two of “seven warts upon the soul” he called them; and, subjects, about which, he declared himself a “stated expert”! His expertise is, I think, not unique. Regarding sin, each of us should be able to speak from personal experience; sin being part of the nature of human identity: who we are — the people, places, things, and events of life in the kingdom of this world; a world dependent upon fear, violence, and death; which is what sin is, our trust and reliance on fear, violence, and death as a way of life: which makes of sin something more than repetitive bad behavior.
The topic I have been assigned is envy and greed. I shall be brief. And, about envy and greed, I want to avoid moral-ism, as well as, any sense that we can feel good about wrong. The best teacher about any of the seven deadly sins, is as I have alluded to earlier, one’s own life; the spiritual task being to recognize the log that is lodged in one’s own eye before trying to address the speck in the eye of someone else. Failure to keep to personal moral inventory of one’s self on a daily basis, as I believe is necessary for spiritual growth/sobriety, helps explain society’s interest in scandal and gossip, which appeals to people who prefer to inventory the lives of others in a world in which we are conditioned to constantly compare, looking for those whose suffering is worse (or, whose suffering we can make worse) than our own and upon whom we can cast judgment, marginalize, and over and against whom we can define ourselves; for example the recent obsession with the life and death of Anna Nicole Smith.
Writers like Dickens, Flannery O’Conner, and John Milton, and dramatists like Shakespeare, Moliere, and Sheriden instruct us about the dangers and pitfalls of envy and greed, casting their stories with characters caught up in the antics and intrigue of sin and contrasted with men and women of virtue; the vain and greedy Miss Haversham and her indulged ward, Estella, for example, are set against the innocence and vulnerability of Pip in Dicken’s Great Expectations. These authors, from a long list of many, know that vice, has its appeal; being more colorful, more alluring, more exciting than goodness: for example, Milton’s Lucifer is far more interesting a characterization than his depiction of God in Paradise Lost. So, in a peculiar way that I do not wish to romanticize, our sins make us interesting! And, as the history of the Church proves, some of the worst sinners make the best saints/priests!
Regarding what the Church terms our “sinful nature,” of which envy and greed are a part, I am reminded of a Robert Mankoff cartoon in the New Yorker of a patient lying on the psychiatric couch speaking to his analyst. “`Look” [he says],”… call it denial if you like, but I think what goes on in my personal life is none of my own damn business’” (cf., On the Couch, p. 80). Apply the need for denial to sin, and we can also say that sin is one of those areas of life’s muck into which our feet can and do sink but into which we don’t like to probe. We are creatures who prefer and are invested in keeping sin “…none of our own damn business” as Mankoff states: like Pilate at the trial of Jesus, we prefer in this life our sincere delusions, a no fault attitude, in which we proclaim our hands are clean, free of any sinful culpability. Yet, delusion, no matter how sincere, does not keep consequences from piling-up; like clutter accumulating in a closet, we don’t attempt to order it until we are forced; a reminder that regarding envy and greed, we deal with it only when we can’t get around it anymore.
Another Mankoff New Yorker cartoon comes to mind that tells of our desire to have religion exonerate us from sin; God, for example, co-opted as our good buddy in crime or enabler. The cartoon is captioned the “Mob Psychologist.” A gangster is lying on the couch, and the analyst says, “`So, while extortion, racketeering, and murder may be bad acts, they don’t make you a bad person” (ibid., p. 89). In other words, we may do whatever we willfully do, be as envious and greedy, for example, as we might be, but we don’t want to be judged, by God or others, as having done wrongly. But, before God, some actions need judgment, especially when other people are harmed or suffer. Remember, for example, Adam and Eve and how the shame of their wickedness made them hide from God? They could deceive one another, but they could not deceive the Almighty. God could not be co-opted into their sin. God, I am saying, and you can trust me on this, knows the difference between a pickle and a cucumber; whereas we might not! Being wrong, according to Christian tradition and practice can be forgiven. But forgiveness is impossible if one is never (or, conversely, always) wrong!
For example, consider the story of Simon the sorcerer/magician recorded in The Acts of the Apostles (8.9ff). Simon offers money, an archetypical symbol of greed and envy, to the disciples of Jesus “…that on whomsoever…[he] lay hands, …[they] receive the Holy Ghost” (9.18). In other words, Simon wants God’s power; and, like many a New Yorker, is willing to pay to acquire it. To this request Peter responds, “`Your money perish with you, because you have thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money’” (9.20). Peter then tells Simon to repent, which Simon obediently does (9.22-24). The moral of the story being not only is God’s grace free to the sinner, but also, that repentance, or turning/surrender to the power of God, is the Christian response to being wrong; a response that makes forgiveness an on-going contrite action.
But, a more important story predates this Christian account, and I don’t want to overlook it, because of its significance. Greed and envy are a long, common thread of sin found throughout the record of Judeo-Christian Scripture. And, the earliest example of these two sins, which religion would term, covetousness, is recorded in Genesis (4.1ff); Cain slaying his brother Abel. Here, in history’s first recorded murder, is a testimony of our predisposition, more aptly, our captivity to fear, violence, and death as creatures in the kingdom of this world. In the intimate matrix of sibling rivalry, more specifically in Cain’s idolatrous desire to have what Abel possesses, i.e., the Lord’s blessing, innocent blood is shed. Cain is envious. His pride is wounded, and the hurt festers into resentment; our number one spiritual offender, which fuels in Cain a blind, murderous rage enacted upon Abel. The destructive process of covetousness is unveiled as subtle, powerful, consuming, and deadly.
Theologian, Rene Girard (cf., I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, p. 83), terms this fratricide the founding murder of civilization. In other words, envy and greed/covetousness in Girard’s hypothesis, pit have and have-not, even brother against brother, the victimizer against the innocent, in blood feuds, jealousies, and revenge re-enacted by nations as well as individuals throughout the course of human history, a history distorted and dedicated to violence, false sacrifice, and illusion; the un-truth and falsehood of sin. Perhaps, in our modern world, this hypothesis is evidenced most obviously in the example of oil: the world’s envy and greed for it; who has it and who wants it; and what lengths and price the human desire for it will take us.
At this time of the year, the Church sets before us a season in which we think upon the Cross and Passion of our Lord; a story, which ironically parallels Cain’s murder of Abel; but a story with a whole new twist. What I mean is at the cross Jesus is the innocent Son of God, whose sacred blood, we, like Cain slaying Able, shed, because we wanted a blessing we thought we could not have, therefore doing to God what we do to one another. By putting God on display on the Cross, we made a victory of envy and greed, our pride and self-will a deadly triumph of covetousness in a kingdom devoted and perishing to fear, violence, and death. Yet, by raising God up upon the Cross, and by the unique death and resurrection of the crucified one of God, is the fulfillment and realization of the Christian proclamation not only of humanity’s direct participation, like Cain, in a culture of death but in something greater; that something greater being the forgiveness of God. “…The whole purpose of raising Jesus from the dead” [says Dominican theologian and author James Alison] “…was to make forgiveness possible…” (p. 118, The Joy of Being Wrong). In Christ, Allison is telling us, we are not only wrong about God, but we are wrong about ourselves. We discover we are sincerely deluded about our captivity to fear, violence, and death. And, each year at this time, the Church sets the wrong of this awful captivity before us, not that we should be punished, but like Simon the Magician, that we should be called to repentance. This is because, at the cross, surrender, compassion, and forgiveness are revealed as the new and transfiguring reality of an eternal kingdom come amongst us, the kingdom of heaven; a kingdom hidden in the life and blood of the Crucified Son of the God in whom there is no fear, no violence, no death – a Mystery in whom there is only what the Church calls “Love,” the Word Made Flesh, and the Christ in whom we are invited “…to live no longer unto ourselves, but unto him who died for us and rose again” (BCP, Preface for Lent).
Repent, for this kingdom is at hand!
