Lenten Reflection on Envy

 

He is probably one of the “most popular” Conference youth leaders in the North Carolina Annual Conference.  I often watch as youth holler out his name…laugh at his jokes…get excited when they are in one of his groups…and would line up to be in his “movie group.”  I would see how easily he would act wild and crazy and cut up, not caring one bit whether the youth or other staff might think him a fool.  Ideas seem to flow out of him like water of Niagara Falls.  Everybody loves him, I mean they even named a Conference youth dance after him that everyone gets excited about when we prepare to dance it at Pilgrimage during one of the breaks.  I have to confess that I cannot tell you how many times that I have sat quietly in the back of the room as staff are introduced or simply while he is on stage in the midst of a skit or monologue and think, “I wish I was like him.  Why didn’t God gift me to be like that?”

How many times do something like that?  How many times do we look at how well someone sings and declare that we wish could sing like that?  How many times do we see how someone can do carpentry, repair a car, teach a class, cook a meal, or even perform some act of great charity, and rather than celebrate what they were able to do with the gifts that God had endowed them, we allow ourselves to become green with envy—wishing we could or wondering why we can’t do those same things.

Maybe it is something that we can do—and yet for some reason someone else receives an award or a special recognition or maybe even a prize, and we were passed over and rather than congratulate them, we stew over why we weren’t the one praised.

Maybe it has nothing to do with skills and abilities…maybe it is something even more basic.  Maybe it is stuff.  Maybe a friend moves into a new house or buys a new car and all we can do is wish it were us, because the house we have lived in for thirty years and was happy with the day before is now suddenly falling apart, or the car that we just paid off that hasn’t been in the shop even once, suddenly is the worst driving care we’ve ever owned.  Maybe were’ technology freaks and our spouse gets a new phone and or our best friend gets a new laptop and suddenly ours, that we’ve only had six months, just isn’t good enough anymore. 

We can go on and on with the ways that we suddenly aren’t satisfied because we want what someone else has—wither it be stuff or skills or recognition—we are envious, we are jealous, we are, dare we even say it because we often forget or want to overlook that last commandment, we are coveting what someone else has or does.  This green-tinted attitude, this violation of the tenth commandment is an attitude among those bad things that we need to give up for good.  We need to let it be nailed to the cross and left there, allowing Christ to free us from its plague on our lives.

What makes envy/jealousy/covetness so bad?  The biggest part of it is that in succumbing to jealousy, we are suggesting that we know more than God what we truly need.

It is denying that God has blessed us with the skills and abilities needed to fulfill the calling that he places on our lives.  This has been an ongoing battle among the people of God—a conflict that Paul had to address with the church in Corinth when he talked about each of us being individual members of the Body of Christ—and just as the hand, foot, eye, ear, and every other part of the body is essential to the full function of our bodies, every person within the church and their gifts are essential to the full function of the Body of Christ.  Something that I have had to remind myself of many times when comparing myself to that colleague—realizing that since the youth invite the staff to serve, that if I was not meeting the needs of youth and God did not have a purpose for me in these events, I would not be invited to serve.

When it comes to “stuff” or “things” to enter into envy/jealousy/covetness is denying that God has provided exactly what we need in order to be happy and content and thrive—actually it is questioning the provision of God.  Jesus, when he is telling folks not to worry about what they have and don’t have, says that God knows what we need, and He will provide it—all we have to do is seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and we will see exactly that—not because it is a magic formula to get what we want, but because when we seek God’s Will first rather than anything else, we will find that God has blessed us more than abundantly with all that we truly need—enabling us to say, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

When we start questioning why we can’t do what Joe can do or don’t have what Sue has, we need to hear the words that Jesus spoke to Peter when he questioned what was going to become of the beloved disciple, “what is that to you?  Don’t worry about them.  Follow me!”

In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.