THE SUPERFICIAL SAGA: PART III
Does anyone remember the name Vicki Van Meter? Vicki Van Meter was a sixth grader at East End Elementary School in Meadville, when she made national headlines in September of 1993. She flew an airplane from Augusta, Maine to San Diego, California…thereby becoming the youngest pilot ever to complete a solo flight across the United States. Nine months later she became the youngest pilot ever to complete a trans-Atlantic solo flight when she flew from Augusta, Maine to Glasgow, Scotland.
These achievements propelled Vicki Van Meter on a nationwide celebrity tour. She appeared on numerous television talk shows, including The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. She was a guest of Bill Clinton at the White House, and even had her picture on display at the Smithsonian. Vicki Van Meter was the toast of the town. She was a national celebrity. Yet she was vilified, ridiculed and tormented by many of her classmates at school. Vicki Van Meter ended up battling depression for much of her life, which ended all too soon. Why do you suppose that was?
Our former associate pastor, Travis Webster, had an interesting take on phenomena such as this. He called it, “crabs in a bucket.” I believe it was a South Carolina euphemism. When he first said that to me, I said, “What do you mean, crabs in a bucket?” He said it’s like this. Say you go out on the beach and you pick crabs and you put them in a bucket. What are those crabs trying to do? They’re trying to get out of the bucket, of course. And every once in a while one of those crabs manages to peek its head up over the rim of the bucket. What do the other crabs in the bucket do? They reach up…and they pull that headstrong crab back down to the bottom.
There you have it: crabs in a bucket. It was Travis Webster’s down-home way of describing the green-eyed monster we call jealousy, or envy. Envy can provoke people to do some pretty rotten things. Keep that thought in mind as we move on.
This is the third in a series of sermons entitled, The Superficial Saga. It’s a sermon series on the seven deadly sins. We poke a lot of fun at sin these days. Truth be told, I don’t think we take sin very seriously. Yet God takes sin seriously. In fact, God takes sin so seriously…that he sent his Son to die on a cross in order to overcome it. Sin is not a matter to be taken lightly, as though a person could saunter into God’s presence at any time, in any mood, with any sort of life behind them…and at once perceive God there. No, the sense of God’s reality is a progressive and often laborious achievement of the soul; the soul that takes sin seriously and earnestly tries to dispel it.
Like I said, The Superficial Saga is a sermon series on the seven deadly sins. The seven deadly sins are as follows: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. Yet along with the seven deadly sins there are what we call the seven holy virtues or the seven cardinal virtues. The seven holy virtues are meant to counteract the seven deadly sins. For example, the opposite of pride is humility. The opposite of envy is love. The opposite of wrath is forgiveness. The opposite of sloth is diligence. The opposite of greed is charity. The opposite of gluttony is temperance, and the opposite of lust is chastity…or purity. You see, the way to conquer sin…is to replace it with something better.
Last week we examined the sin of pride. There we determined that pride was a sin basically because Jesus said it was. The secret to overcoming pride is humility. We determined that the key to humility is to approach God not as the big, self-sufficient, self-reliant adults we pretend to be. Instead, we approach God as little children – frail, empty and dependent – needing a gracious and loving God in the worst possible way.
Today we tackle the second of the seven deadly sins; the sin of envy. What exactly is envy? Webster’s dictionary defines envy as a painful or resentful awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another, joined with a desire to possess the same advantage. I think the Oxford English dictionary’s definition is even better. It says that to possess envy is to be gripped with a feeling of mortification and ill will in thinking of another person’s life…when compared with your own.
In other words, envy causes us to seethe and to stew in resentment over the good fortune of another. From a theological standpoint this is to say that God made a mistake in creating us as we are; in giving us the gifts we have been given; and, by implication…in giving our neighbors the gifts that they have been given. Our envy is evidence that we were not created the way we wish we had been created. Thus, envy is evidence of our perception of certain mistakes we believe to have been made by our Creator.
Sins like lust and anger and gluttony have a warm-hearted, hot-blooded, all-too-human quality about them. Envy, on the other hand, is cold-blooded and cruel. Consider a first cousin of envy, what the Germans call Schadenfreude. Schadenfreude is defined as a perverse delight in the failure or misfortune of another. That’s why a philosophical friend of mine named Bob O’Shea has observed that you should never complain about your troubles in life. He says 90% of the people don’t care what’s going on in your life. The other 10% think you’ve got it coming!”
For example, weren’t some of us just a little bit pleased at the demise of Martha Stewart, a fabulously wealthy woman who kept her house just a little bit better than we keep ours? The taking of delight in another’s demise is Schadenfreude at its best. Ladies and gentlemen, enjoy the feast while you can. For one day we may wake up and realize that our celebration of Martha Stewart’s demise…just might reveal as much of our moral weakness as it does hers.
Jesus outlines his position on envy in the passage we read from the gospel according to Matthew. There we see that a landowner hired laborers to work in his vineyard. He agreed to pay them the usual day’s wages. For the sake of argument, let’s just say he agreed to pay them eight dollars an hour…not a bad wage for a laborer. Thus, those individuals toiling out in the hot sun all day would likely have brought home about ninety-six dollars. Chances are, they put in a good twelve-hour day.
Three hours later, he hired more laborers. Three hours later, he did it again. Then three hours after that, he did it one more time. And finally, two hours later, he hired the last of his laborers. For those of you doing the math at home, let’s get this straight. Some laborers worked twelve hours. Some worked nine hours, some worked six hours, some worked three hours…and some worked only one.
When it came time to settle up accounts at the end of the day, the laborers who only worked one hour got paid ninety-six dollars. It was the same way all down the line. Even the laborers who worked for twelve hours got ninety-six dollars. Let me tell you, they were not the least bit pleased. They grumbled against the landowner. But the landowner said, “Hey! I gave you what we agreed upon this morning. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous? So the last shall be first and the first shall be last.”
The lesson here is clear. God is the landowner…and we are the laborers. God bestows his gifts upon us and God is free to bestow them as he chooses. It remains for us to trust that God knows what he’s doing. It remains also for us to realize that there will always be Mozarts, and there will always be Salieris. There will always be someone just a little bit better than we are…no matter how hard we try.
When I was twelve years old, I was the third baseman for the best Little League baseball team in Sioux City, Iowa. I worked hard at baseball – probably harder than anyone else on the team – and I desperately longed to be the star. But there was a boy on the team by the name of Mike Courey who was just better than I was. Mike Courey ended up being a first team All-State short-stop in baseball, a first team All-State guard in basketball, and a first team All-State quarterback in football. Such a feat had never been accomplished in the history of Iowa sports. He received a full-ride college scholarship to Notre Dame. He backed up a guy his first two years of college by the name of Joe Montana. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. And by the time he was a senior, he was the starting quarterback for Notre Dame.
Some of the neighborhood kids – who we played against and beat – referred to us as a one-and-a-half-man team. I don’t suppose I have to tell you who the half-man they referred to was. Mike Courey was just better at baseball than I was, no matter how hard I worked. Like I said, there will always be Mozarts…and there will always be Salieris. We can envy those people all we want, yet some people just have the gift. They are just destined to be better than we are. God bestows his gifts upon us and God is free to bestow them as he chooses. It remains for us to trust that God knows what he is doing. How do we come to do that? I think Jesus sums it up when he says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength and with all your mind. And you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Therein lies the secret. It has to do with how we love our neighbors.
As the Eskimos have eleven different words for snow, the ancient Greeks had four different words for love. They are: eros, philos, storge and agape. Eros is passionate love, like that which might exist between a husband and a wife. Philos is the love of friendship, like that which might exist between best friends. Storge is the love of parenthood, like that which might exist between a mother and a daughter. Agape is often simply described as Christian love…and that is the love to which Jesus refers in the gospels. We are to love our neighbors with agape love.
Agape love is hard to define. So let me try to explain it as best I can. To love someone is to wish what’s best for them. Actually, I think that definition applies to all four kinds of love. To love someone…is to wish what’s best for them. And when we do that, the green-eyed monster goes out the window. We let the more adventurous crabs…climb right out of the bucket.
So you see, to love someone is – at least in part – a conscious choice. It is the conscious choice to wish what’s best for them – not for us – but what’s best for them. Try it some time. Take the time to intentionally wish what’s best for someone else. And in the process, you just might find what’s best for you as well. Amen.
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