Anger & Envy & the 7 Deadly Sins | Vices & Virtues

We are continuing tonight with the seven deadly sins and the seven cardinal
virtues that correspond to them.
And I don’t know,
I have mostly bad news tonight.
We are thinking about those sins that sort of point outwardly.
Some of the deadly sins affect us internally,
well they all affect us internally,
but some of them we act out outwardly.
And we sort of have one of each tonight, anger and envy.
And we’ll start with anger because in some ways it may be the most
universal of the seven deadly sins.
It is probably one that we’ve all encountered,
if not personally, which is a little hard to imagine.
We certainly encountered it in someone else.
It is again one of those sins that at some level is
difficult to think of as sinful.
I mean again we probably think generally
speaking that if our anger leads us to a point we lash out,
we understand that’s not good.
But just the idea of being angry does not seem particularly sinful
to us.
In fact,
the people who look at this stuff,
the monks and such scholars
point out that anger is really the only sin on the list that has a positive element.
There is righteous anger.
We see Jesus get angry at times.
There is a sense in which anger can be a motivator.
Anger can even push us in some good directions.
That before we work for change we usually find ourselves upset
by the injustice or the wrongness that we then aspire to change.
And I do think
that makes anger unique on the list.
Also makes it a little tricky because given
that there’s justifiable anger,
we all tend to justify our own anger.
We all kind of think,
“Yeah, well of course I have righteous anger.” All my anger is righteous anger,
which probably isn’t the case.
Yeah, so as I start,
obviously my voice is not a hundred percent right.
So if I squeak,
we can all laugh
together.
It’ll be great.
But that said,
an image that comes to mind is the story of Jesus.
He comes into Jerusalem in Holy Week.
What’s the first thing he does
after getting into the city?
What’s the first thing Jesus does?
What?
That’s right.
He goes to the temple with a whip.
You don’t go with a whip to make friends.
He goes with a whip and he turns over tables.
And in that image we see Jesus
showing anger.
That is the Son of God,
God in flashed,
expressing real anger in the
middle of the temple.
Now we could have a conversation about what that means in
terms of the religious context and the ways in which they were abusing the
worship of a holy God.
All of that we would talk about.
But to Clint’s point,
to make it very clear,
there’s a scriptural case to be made that there is such a thing as justified,
righteous anger.
When that anger is leveled against a thing
that separates people from their holy God.
The problem is that as we begin to
look for ways in which we ourselves are complicit in sin in these capital vices,
we discover that our anger is almost never directed towards the wholeness of
us.
It’s not to say it’s not.
But most of the time,
if we’re willing to put it in a
constellation, a frame of the other vices,
we discover that they become a motivating
factor for the anger.
So we’re going to talk about envy in a little bit.
It’s easy after years of envy for that to turn into full rage when the moment makes itself clear.
In those seasons of that envy growing,
anger merely becomes the end
point, the justified outcome of the thing on the front end.
And so that being example,
we like to think we’re Jesus in the temple getting it right when far more
likely we’ve given into some other vice that’s grown in the background.
Yeah.
And one of the clearest litmus tests of that is that when Jesus got angry,
it had nothing to do with him.
Those money changers had done nothing to him.
He wasn’t a victim.
He wasn’t responding to something that a person had done.
He was responding on another’s behalf.
And and one of the very baseline evaluations of our anger is simply,
am I mad about something that is like that?
Or am I mad about something that
has happened to me?
And I would guess that I’ll only speak personally,
but somewhere around 99% of the time,
I’m on the wrong side of that equation.
My anger has to do with something that has happened to me.
It’s not on behalf of another.
It’s a reaction to something that I’ve experienced or heard or seen.
And it is, it is self centered anger.
It is, it is based in my own wishes,
desires,
disappointments,
etc.
Now we probably also should say that if you have the benefit of being one of those people that doesn’t
really throw things or doesn’t really get,
you know, break things on accident.
Yeah, that was,
that was a joke.
I’m not saying that has happened too often, but it,
you know,
you might be thinking,
well, okay, I’m not, anger is not really a thing.
But if we think about anger in its,
all of its expressions,
we have resentment.
We have grudges.
We have, we don’t always have rage.
Anger doesn’t always mean that moment of lashing out.
Sometimes anger means the things that we sit on.
Sometimes it means that person irritated me and I’m not speaking to them for a while.
There are lots of ways to express anger and not all of them are explosive.
In fact,
some of the most dangerous are probably subtle.
Some, you know,
I think any one of us in
our family story probably has some episode of so and so and so and so got crossways and didn’t
talk to each other for two years,
five years, 10 years, whatever that looks like.
Sometimes it’s not the explosion that is the most damaging thing that anger can do.
So maybe you’re still
off the hook and if so,
great for you.
But anger usually finds a way into most of our experience.
Well, if you’re still out the hook,
let’s see if I can get you.
So to be self-reflective here,
when I started with the anger section of my reading,
I felt pretty good about it because
anger is not really very close up in my list of responses to things just as a personality.
So I thought anger,
that one I can probably feel pretty good about until until I came to an author who
suggested that anger wrongly applied is wrong.
Choosing or avoiding anger in a situation in
which it is right and justified is also wrong.
And that got me because there have been times
I step back from a situation where I should have stood up,
where I should have responded,
even emotionally to say this is not right,
this should not be,
these people should not be hurt
in this way.
I mean, this has happened in my lifetime and I realize that anger is of course
wrongly applied explosive.
In fact, one author said that when a police officer makes a call,
that likely the most dangerous call is the one in which anger is present,
in which there is emotion and explosive possibility.
So the reality though is not everyone finds themselves in that camp.
For those who don’t,
I think it’s a very poignant question to ask.
Have you compartmentalized things in your heart and your soul such that when it is time to let those emotions flourish
in a positive, meaningful way that you’re able to do so?
Yeah. And unlike Michael, anger and I go way back.
We’ve been tight since birth.
We know each other well.
And that is another
kind of struggle, right?
Because we justify that based on our own experiences,
our own opinions.
So as a person who kind of gets something of anger,
I found a couple of quotes that
sting a little,
but I think are helpful.
So Winston Churchill said,
a man is as big as the
things that make him angry.
So if getting cut off in traffic makes me angry,
I have to think, well, how big,
how big a thing is that?
Ben Franklin said, anger never lacks a reason,
but it seldom a good one.
The Buddha said holding anger is like throwing a hot coal at another.
You also get burned.
And I think my favorite,
there’s an author, a woman named Anne Lamott,
who said anger is eating rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.
So and interestingly enough,
interestingly enough, there are medical studies on the effects of anger and anger does have biological impact.
People who commute and deal with road rage,
people who are
kind of prone to explosive anger,
they have a sort of self-imposed set of health conditions
that often happen to them,
blood pressure, heart issues.
I mean, if you think of that
sort of explosion and you do that repeatedly over a course of many years,
that is going to,
it’s not surprising that that has an impact,
not only on our spiritual health,
which is where we’re focused,
but it has a physical toll as well.
And I,
again,
I bet we all
know somebody who was pretty explosive in their anger.
And I bet we don’t say,
to result in closer connections with other people.
In fact, one of the notable aspects
of anger is its isolating nature.
And we know that intuitively,
a person who’s angry can’t build
deep relationships with other people because in,
well, that’s not to say they can’t build it,
but it’s to say that in the midst of that relationship,
there’s innately a lack of trust.
What will happen if I say this or if I do this,
especially anger at its farthest edge.
And what we,
as Christians, look to see as we start thinking about the virtue is that fundamentally,
the only way for us to find a healthy way forward is to recognize that we must practice social
relationships in which we turn the focus from ourselves,
from however,
whatever mechanism we use to justify our action onto the legitimate concern and care for another.
And that we need
to slow down.
We need to literally let time play out because we discover over time that our reason,
our ability to consider that action or that response then becomes able to kick in and we’re
actually able to intuit or interpret what is justified, what is right.
Right.
And we will get to the virtue and we want to do that with a quiz.
So be thinking about that.
But there is a Christian scholar,
is a Catholic scholar in the 1200.
His name is Thomas Aquinas.
We’ve quoted him before.
He said a really helpful thing about anger.
He said anger has three basic problems.
So these are sort of anger tests.
If you find yourself convicted by these,
Aquinas would say
it’s worth thinking about.
So the first one is to be too angry.
The idea of disproportionate anger,
right?
A little thing goes wrong,
which results in a big explosion,
right?
Maybe you’ve had that experience where somebody is genuinely mad about something and you’re thinking to yourself,
I do not understand how this thing could produce this much anger.
So if you’re a person who’s
prone to overreact to get,
this is the bad thing and this is the anger response that goes with it,
Aquinas says that’s worth thinking about.
The second one is that if you’re angry too often,
if you’ve worn down the rut that goes immediately to anger and you end up being angry a good bit of the time,
Aquinas says that is likely a problem.
Anger leads to more anger.
We wear down those
pathways in our brain and it becomes our go-to response.
And finally,
Aquinas said if you are angry too long,
so if you can off the top of your head remember the thing the person did six years ago?
I can tell you that five years ago on Pioneer Beach Road,
an old guy in a big Chevy
truck tried to run me off the road and I still haven’t forgotten him and I keep hoping I see him again sometime.
So Aquinas said if we hold our anger too long,
if we don’t find a way to let it
go, and I’m mostly joking about that,
it is a tendency,
it is a temptation to hold that.
And if we hold it,
then Aquinas says it begins to poison our soul and it doesn’t feel like an explosion.
It doesn’t feel terrible.
It doesn’t feel volatile, but it’s there.
It’s under the surface.
It’s the thing we haven’t forgiven.
It’s the thing that we carry with us.
And I think to be too angry,
to be angry too often,
or to be angry too long is a helpful framework to think
about what is my own relationship with anger?
And does it indicate that I may need to put some effort
on the other side of the fence,
which is I think where we’ll transition now.
If we were to ask,
we didn’t put it up tonight because I think maybe this makes a fun quiz.
If I was to ask you,
what do you think the counter virtue is?
In other words, what’s the opposite of anger?
What do you think the corresponding virtue would be?
Joy,
kindness?
Yeah,
it’s patience,
which seems surprising to me until I realized I don’t know
any angry patient people.
I’m certainly not one of them, right?
I mean,
yeah.
When you stop and you
think those two things never go together.
And so the monks had this idea that patience,
that word means long suffering,
the ability to wait is the opposite or the other end of the spectrum
from anger.
I find that really fascinating.
I find it convicting,
but I find deep wisdom in it.
Yeah, the old philosophers did a lot of writing about the interplay between head and heart,
the idea between reason and gut.
And so the idea of anger being a gut response and reason being a mindful one.
You might think that what they would write would be that the mind should control the
heart or that the mind should be chief and that the heart should be subjugated.
But ultimately,
that’s not generally where they went.
They generally said it’s far more like a dance.
It’s one checking the other and patience literally requires giving time for your better faculties to be engaged.
If you immediately move to a response because it feels right,
you take away the opportunity to actually interpret what is right.
Yeah, which we kind of get,
right? Because what do we tell kids when they get mad?
Count to 10.
We sort of instinctively know that if we can
insert some time to diffuse,
maybe that’s a good thing.
And I think, surprisingly enough,
children’s lessons are good for adults.
If we find ourselves being angry,
it is an opportunity
to be patient.
It is an opportunity to endure.
The word even has connotations of suffer,
to wait and not think that it is up to us to take revenge or to hold to account.
You know, vengeance is mine, says the Lord.
The idea in anger,
I put myself in the place of the one who punishes.
I put myself in the place of the one who judges and who holds accountable.
And that’s not my place.
And so patience reminds me that that’s not my place and encourages me
to step back into my rightful role,
which is guy trying to be patient instead of thinking
that I’m the judge.
This is Wilhelmin who writes,
I decided then and there that depression is often
the result of anger turned inward,
anger inappropriately expressed,
anger suppressed.
And I do think that,
as is the case in medical science,
as best as my simple mind understands it,
that often a symptom is related to a cause far deeper and somewhere else.
And I think
if we do have a fire of rage inside of us,
if we really believe,
and this is now framing this once
again, maybe an Enneagram conversation would help us here,
but framing this, if you’re a person
who seeks validation outside of yourself and your inability to achieve that causes you to be angry
with yourself, then fundamentally at some point that will create a symptom that will be destructive to your soul.
So maybe that’s not fired by anger at its root,
maybe it’s fired by another cause,
but if that’s the thing that keeps it burning,
it will burn you up.
So I don’t think I disagree,
but I do think it has a kind of destructive power if it’s allowed to live inwardly.
I think one thing we forget,
and I find myself telling people this more often than I think I ever would have thought,
I encourage people often to turn to the Psalms,
to find in the Psalms what’s already there real anger.
I mean real frustration.
If you read the Psalms,
you will blush, right?
And I think if
we are unwilling to express anger as if God couldn’t take it,
then that anger will destroy us
because we were unwilling to give it up to the one who can redeem it.
Yeah, I think that’s well said,
I think that’s wise.
It makes me think of the other question
that comes up sometimes,
is it okay to be angry with God?
And I often think when we say angry in
that circumstance, what we mean is disappointed.
Generally,
our anger at God is not because we
think God should be doing,
but it’s because we had an experience that we feel like doesn’t square
with our idea that God loves us and cares for us.
And so as we navigate that,
I think that’s a good
insight on Willamans part that anger,
if it’s born in disappointment,
and if that disappointment is
repeated over and over again,
that will produce a certain sickness in us.
I will say some of this is just maybe growing up and realizing that other people in the world
aren’t you, right?
We can’t be in other people’s heads.
But if you watch closely,
you will see
people,
maybe especially people close to you,
respond in circumstances in ways that completely puzzle you.
Why did they do that?
That makes no sense.
And when you take a lens like anger,
and you admit some people,
anger burns quicker and brighter and longer.
And then you realize,
oh,
they’re angry a lot.
If that’s not you,
you have to empathetically learn it.
You have to learn
that’s another person’s experience.
Ironically, where we’re about to go is what beat me over the
head with a bat this week.
So I’m my yeah,
I think that the thing that is worth knowing
is when we when we think about the struggles that we know that others are having in their own life,
if anger is one of them,
and that’s not your go to,
then you need to understand spiritually,
that, that loving and being patient and investing in looks different,
because that that fire burns differently than what it might for you.
Yeah. And let me try to finish up anger.
I’ll tell a very quick story.
And I’ve said this in the sermon.
So it may sound familiar.
But I once had a supervisor, a ministry supervisor, who in the course of conversation,
we were talking about
something and anger came up and he said,
Clint,
I would like to see you get angry.
I said, you you wouldn’t.
And he said, No, I think that’d be good.
And I said, I that would definitely not be good.
And he said, What, what do you mean?
I said, Well, the first thing I do is throw your desk through your window.
And he said,
I would call that rage.
And I said,
Huh?
And,
and he went on
to explain that, that anger is is a dial.
Well,
I thought of anger as a switch on or off,
right?
And so it was very helpful learning again,
the idea of patience,
because my young self saw anger as the
dragon I had to slay.
And how did you slay it?
By being angry at it by hating it and keeping it choked down,
which is not only unhelpful, it doesn’t work.
It’s self defeating.
And so I have
held on to a quote for a long time by a man named Aristotle.
And this is about three and a half
centuries before Jesus.
Aristotle said this, and I’ll just let this be our final anger word.
Anyone can be angry.
It is easy.
But to become angry with the right person to the right degree
at the right time,
for the right purposes,
in the right way,
is not easy at all.
And he might as well have said,
Clint,
no, I mean, when I read that,
I felt like Aristotle wrote that with me in mind.
And so I think,
you know,
what we are trying to do tonight
is to set some signposts.
And I would encourage you,
if anger rings some bells for you,
the quote by Aristotle is a helpful one to keep in mind.
Anger is easy.
Managing anger,
less so,
far less so.
I think one could make a case that
we live in a culture that rewards anger and doesn’t reward patience.
I mean,
and if there’s any truth to that,
then what you describe is not surprising.
I mean, it’s probably pretty predictable, actually.
To your point,
viral, by definition,
involves no patience,
right?
The idea of viral,
something that speeds up and grows and becomes bigger.
The idea is it happens quickly.
So you show me a patient person offering thoughtful words.
Right?
This podcast, let’s say that this works out to an hour and 15 minutes.
No hour and 15 minute video goes viral.
Why?
Because nobody’s going to listen to that.
Right?
So I mean, I think the mediums in which we live our lives,
they reward, to your point, they reward quick action,
they reward gut instinct,
they reward emotion, which,
by the way,
I mean, you know, someone like Martin Luther King Jr.,
you know, on the Lincoln Memorial, speaking passionately,
changes the world.
We need someone with fire.
But the idea that that fire is
channeled, you know, we’re very susceptible to deception and the belief that what we’re doing
is righteous, as opposed to being sucked into our own sinfulness.
Sure.
And from a secular perspective,
anger works.
You scream out enough,
sometimes you get your own way,
you get a refund,
you get your free meal,
you get a second dessert, whatever, you know,
but from a spiritual perspective, it doesn’t.
I’ve always been convicted that I would have been one of the first people
in the building when Jesus showed up with the whip.
Like I would have been on staff at the temple,
like I would have got paid by the temple to be there.
And this guy with the whip comes in,
I would have been the guy cleaning up the tables after he left.
But it’s always struck me that when
Jesus expressed anger, he did so in the place where we try to get it right.
And, you know, for me, that’s once again, a very cautionary tale that like,
it’s actually within the church that the
people who literally care,
I mean, we care about doing what God calls us to do,
being who God calls us to be,
that we are most tempted to put ourselves on the other side of Jesus’s anger.
And, and Wilhelmin makes the case,
and we’ll make this point here,
is that on the cross,
Jesus is hanging on the cross.
In that moment,
what the gospels literally says that he could have called down a
legion of angels, right, this idea that he could have showed God’s power to those people,
he could humiliated them.
But in his choice to die a painful, humiliating death,
he proved that God’s
willingness to die trumps our desire for vindication.
And so therefore,
when we try to
get vindication, which is only God’s to get,
we now cross the line into sin,
as opposed to righteous anger.
So, you know, once again, all that’s covered with a long road of humility, but yeah.
Yeah. So,
again,
something that we all manage,
I think something that we all experience,
and something that I think the monks are helpful.
Our history is helpful,
reminding us that has
danger to it.
I mean, there is a spiritual risk of letting anger be our guide.
And yes, Jesus got angry,
but my experience is,
I don’t know about yours,
but my experience is when I’m
trying to compare myself to Jesus,
I’m generally on thin ice.
So when I’m justifying my own anger,
oh, Jesus would be mad about that too.
Yeah,
it’s likely I’m working too hard at that point.
I don’t usually end up on the favorable side.
Okay.
Well, that takes us to our next topic tonight, which is envy.
And Michael and I may have had opposite experiences this week,
because I knew anger was going to hit me between the eyes.
But I thought envy,
I thought I’d kind of sit back on this one.
I, I don’t, I’m not a, I’m not a stuff guy at cars,
money houses.
They’re great, but I don’t, I don’t naturally compare myself.
It’s just not one of my struggles.
I have tons of other struggles.
And oh man, what I found out is,
uh, I didn’t escape.
Um, envy is bigger than I thought it was.
Uh, interesting.
A couple of fun quotes.
One of the authors said,
envy is the only one of
the seven deadly sins that is no fun at all.
Even, even to start with,
it’s no fun.
Envy is sad
right from the jump,
right from the beginning.
Envy doesn’t have that.
Oh, I’m probably doing the wrong thing, but I’m enjoying it.
Kind of thing that the other sins have envy is, is lonely.
It is the, the sin historically that we’re least likely to admit,
which I found surprising.
Uh, the, the literature suggests that envy is the thing that Christians have the hardest time confessing, which,
which I find fascinating.
And, uh, one of them said,
you know, envy seems to be
its own punishment, which I think as we,
I hope that will make some sense as we unpack this.
So,
and the is a innately social sin and the exists in the realm between me and you and
recognizing that as humans,
since the very beginning,
if you look to Genesis at the very
beginning, we’ve always been reaching for the next step, right?
Uh, the promise that if you eat that
fruit and you too will have the knowledge, right?
And the idea behind envy is not just the kids
version, right?
And we know that for kids, right?
My friend, Billy,
he got a new skateboard.
I want a new skateboard.
Uh, you know, of course that, that scales as we get older.
My friend, uh, Mr.
Rogers, uh, he got a new boat.
I want a new boat.
Like we understand that we understand that the
consumerism side of envy, the wanting another,
but the sin aspect is far deeper than that.
It reaches to our identity and motivation.
So if your soul,
we mentioned, um,
we mentioned St.
Augustine,
I think a few conversations back,
this idea of the heart that’s not at rest.
If your heart is not at rest,
then one of the chief temptations of envy is to believe that if you could achieve or if you
could be, or if you could,
uh, be recognized for fill in the blank,
that that would change something about your identity.
That you have not heard the final word that you are beloved child of God.
You’re he read up into a few more books than I did,
but the, the things I did read all mentioned one particular movie.
Um, and a famous composer who was a contemporary of Mozart who,
uh, it sounds like lived his entire life in Mozart shadow.
And the idea being that,
uh, because of the mere time
that he lived, he was a great composer,
but he was never going to make it right.
I mean, it’s you versus Mozart, Mozart wins.
And this, this man lived his entire life with a kind of, um,
fiery envy of not being able to be that kind of musician.
And he bothered with God and he,
he sought, uh, ways to undercut Mozart.
And, and that’s, I think what makes envy so insidious is it’s not fun to start,
but then it starts to grow and it starts to evolve.
And envy never leads to you encouraging
or accepting or, um,
uh,
praising another.
It almost always inevitably leads to you sabotaging
the other because you’re not looking for their thing.
Really?
Well, what you want isn’t the status
or the power it’s for them to not have it.
And envy that has gone to seed becomes destructive
of our social relationships.
It violates the second golden commandment,
love your neighbor as yourself.
Envy by definition means that you are unable to love your neighbor because you’re unable to see
them outside of your own selfishness,
your own, uh, inward turn.
And I think if you’re willing
to step back and see envy as a very unfortunate counterfeit for our identities,
then it becomes a very powerful and convicting idea.
And because, because envy is inherently comparative,
in other words, it lives in comparison with others.
Not only can you not fulfill love your neighbor,
you can’t feel love yourself because you implicitly believe you lack.
If you had that thing,
if you had their talent,
if you had whatever fill in the blank,
you would be better, but you’re not.
And you feel that gap in your soul.
And so not only can you not love others,
you can’t love self.
You can’t keep either side of the golden rule because an envy is inherently
self-destructive, not in a way that implodes,
but in a way that erodes.
It just takes
over time and grinds you down.
So Envy’s favorite phrase is, why not me?
Or it’s not fair,
right?
Listen to a kid.
It’s not fair that this kid got to do that and I didn’t.
Why?
Well, because it’s not, I want that.
I want that, right?
Socrates called it the ulcer of the soul.
And at its worst,
envy is not only we want to have,
we want others not to have.
We want to elevate above others.
And this is the true edge of envy and the most destructive expression of it.
We not only want to compare ourselves with others,
we want to take from them.
We want what they have and we want them not to have it.
We don’t want to be even.
We want to be ahead.
And we believe that having those things.
And so the envious look constantly through comparison,
through evaluation,
through the idea of it’s not fair.
It’s not just.
Sometimes people wrestling with envy will be obsessed with the idea of justice,
of what I deserve and what
that person doesn’t deserve.
And if you think, yeah,
you know, I don’t do that.
Envy, nah, I’m fine.
I’ve got, I’m doing good.
So here’s where envy caught up with me this week.
Kids and grandkids,
right?
Your kid gets a 22 on the ACT and the knucklehead kid next door got a 26.
It’s not fair.
That kid doesn’t study.
Little Johnny got to start at the football game.
My little Billy works twice as hard as Johnny.
He doesn’t even get to play.
Right.
Envy.
Envy always has to be comparison in which I want to take what someone has and I want that experience.
I want that possession.
And we sometimes,
I think I’m beginning to suspect that one of the places
envy shows its head most often is in our experiences as parents.
I think that sort of
comparative unfairness kind of rhetoric is extremely popular in some of our relationships
through others, through our family members.
Yeah.
So,
you know, I have lots of hobbies.
We all have
I doubt that you are particularly envious of the professionals.
If you’re a golfer,
I doubt that you look at the PGA folks and really feel envy.
I mean,
maybe, you know, you laugh or you’re amazed at a shot that they make,
right?
But not true envy.
You have to be
comparatively close enough that you could imagine that to be true for yourself for envy to actually work, right?
If it’s so far out of league,
there’s really nothing at stake for you
and whether or not they succeed.
Willaman,
to make this point,
says this, I found this really
thought inducing.
He said,
envy is a small town sin,
a byproduct of living so close to a set of
people that one is constantly tempted to make leveling comparisons.
Now, me being me,
the thought that that spurred was every time I open up Facebook and it delivers me my small town,
the group of friends they think that I want to see,
they’ve delivered to me the seed bed of envy.
When I open Instagram and they show me the 20 people,
they think I’m most likely to hit the
heart button.
That is literally 20 handpicked people to grow envy.
It strikes me that when we
consider that envy is a way that our soul is trying to make things right.
We do the comparison
because we believe ultimately that we’re the hero and that the outcome should benefit us.
It is our fundamental belief and if that’s the case and leveling with another person would achieve that,
then now you’ve innately violated the second commandment because you will take from a neighbor
for the sake of your own advancement.
The only healthy Christian mature response would be to
ultimately live in the awareness as a child of God.
There is nothing that can be added to your
life which will give you more value.
But envy sneaks in every back door,
side door, open window because fundamentally whenever we look at someone close to us,
we will discover in that close to
something that we think needs fixed.
And the danger in that right is that we begin,
it begins to erode our trust.
We look at the life we have only through the lens of what we don’t
and we begin to question is God doing the right thing?
Why isn’t God making me what I think I need
to be?
What I want to be?
Why does God give those people those things and not myself?
And it is very
difficult for envy and trust to both find a place in our hearts.
We will have one driven out by the
other and we learn envy fairly early again.
I don’t want to beat up our culture all the time,
but this is not from a Christian.
This is from an advertising executive who said if it wasn’t for right.
So this idea,
Jane and I were on the way to Minneapolis yesterday and we got,
I pulled up on an SUV that I didn’t recognize and so I Googled the logo.
Do you know Bentley makes an SUV?
Starts off at 160 grand and it looked really nice.
I found myself wanting one,
but it’s unlikely it seems.
So I just, I got angry about it.
Honk.
No,
no. Because as Michael said,
what do we envy?
We envy what we see.
We envy the people we see.
Yeah, Bill Gates has a bazillion dollars.
We’re not real envious of Bill Gates,
but our neighbor that redid their house
and built a new shed and bought a new truck.
Envy works within our vision and that’s part
of what makes it really dangerous.
You want to move to the.
Yeah. So,
you know, I think fundamentally
we need to take very seriously digging beneath.
Like I said, I think there’s nothing wrong with
the kind of childhood conception of what it means to be jealous or have envy,
but I think we need to move beneath it.
If we’re going to be spiritually mature to understand
that the thing that makes envy so dangerous is that when we are unable to love our neighbor,
we are therefore despising the God who loves that neighbor.
We’re, we’re breaking a relationship
with the very one who created them and knows them by name.
And so I think practicing
the active virtue as it relates to envy becomes essential then.
Yeah. So again,
let’s do the quiz.
What do you think of as the opposite of envy?
Contentment, gratitude.
Those are all good guesses.
And I think all good practices,
but actually the corresponding virtue is kindness.
And that, that may seem counterintuitive,
but what is kindness,
but an outward act,
right?
Envy turns us in.
So what does kindness do?
Kindness takes us toward another person
instead of separating ourselves with jealousy and with coveting.
We move toward them with an act of kindness,
an act of service.
And so while I think gratitude is a very good way to combat
envy,
the virtue that has been identified historically is kindness.
And I think understood
properly, it makes some sense because kindness forces us out.
We can be grateful without
interacting with another one.
Kindness forces us into a relational moment with another person
where we give to them,
not want to take from them.
And I think there is a,
I think there is a certain,
certain profoundness in that.
Yeah.
I think kindness is a practice that we pursue
that lives in the hope of who we desire to become.
We may not yet embody like we do with children.
You know, we, we try to help them do the right thing,
even though the truth is they’re not
motivated by the right motivation yet.
They may not understand the thing behind it, but
you still need to be respectful in the way you spoke to your mother,
right?
As it relates to kindness,
though we may not feel like we should treat this person this way,
the practice of doing so begins in itself to be the salve to our souls.
It begins to create new
paths in our hearts.
And I think that’s a really helpful point, Clint,
because envy has a way of
really diminishing our soul.
We begin to become fragile people,
the more that we practice envy and kindness.
Every person I know who’s truly kind,
not just, you know, Midwest nice,
people who are truly kind,
who look outside themselves and see the kind of God value and other people,
those folks are strong.
They’re full and robust people that they have big worlds.
And that I think is the antidote to envy.
Envy is a shrinking circle,
but kindness enables a person to grow out.
Yeah.
Envy isolates us and kindness connects us.
And kindness also pushes us toward that lack that envy has of trust because in kindness,
I trust God to be at work.
I give up the idea that I am the judge,
that I need those things.
I have a moment,
I have an opportunity and I take advantage of it in the name of goodness
to practice Christ likeness.
And that moves me away from thinking I need something else to be complete.
It empowers me to act as Jesus would to those that Jesus loves,
taking focus off of myself and what I think I lack or what I think would make up for what I lack.
And it is not one that I would come up with,
but again, as I look at the list,
I’m pretty impressed with the thoughtfulness and the process that got the monastic people to say,
we think this is the right answer to this struggle.
And it seems to me that
they kind of nailed it.
I think it’s pretty good.
I think that envy is deceptive
because at its start,
it doesn’t feel like a sin.
It just feels like an inner
pang,
a kind of,
huh,
I wish this was another way.
I think this is really practical.
I apologize to start.
I’m going to make this really short,
but video game example.
So
today, the biggest games that kids are playing are games that you don’t need to pay for
to get the game.
You can download it for free.
The way that they make money is they let you give
them money so that you can have cool outfits.
So it doesn’t affect the game.
It doesn’t make you
better or worse or anything.
It’s just like you get to wear a Superman costume in the game
and you’d think, well, that’s stupid.
And I tell you,
it’s a multi-billion dollar industry
where people give hundreds of millions of dollars per game on outfits that have no impact on the game itself.
Why?
Because they see other people wearing the cool outfit,
right?
And that’s a stupid small example.
But my point is some kid felt a pang like,
oh, that’s cool.
I want that.
And if we are willing to be vulnerable enough to be self-reflective,
each of us has felt that pang,
probably today.
And the thing I think that makes envy so dangerous is that
it can feel like a motivating force to do better.
Isn’t that a story that we have,
that story we tell ourselves, right?
That,
well,
I didn’t want to work that job,
so I worked really hard so I could work this job,
right?
This is a story we tell ourselves,
that my desire to be in a better station or my desire for a better job or for a better family or whatever,
better health, that it was motivated by an intrinsic desire to be good,
when if we’re honest,
may have been motivated by an intrinsic desire to achieve someone else’s end.
That is where it begins to become very muddy very quickly.
And once again, these are monks, they’re thinking very deeply about the source,
the ground.
They’re not particularly thinking about
you know, the kids saw a new flavor of gum that they wanted to get.
They’re not thinking that,
they’re thinking what’s the thing that motivates this hole inside our souls?
And they came to
envy as the thing that we strive to fill the hole with by leveling ourselves or pulling others to our level.
That social sin.
And yeah, I found that compelling.
Yeah, what’s really interesting, and I do think the origin helps.
I mean,
imagine that our great,
great ancestors in the faith who
got together and said,
let’s live in a community so
we can all focus on our spirituality.
Let’s all have exactly the same room.
Let’s all wear the same brown robe.
Let’s all have the same schedule
and eat the same meals and study the same materials.
Ended up saying, you know what’s one
of the most dangerous things around here?
Envy.
That they still found that they could look at one
another with jealousy and with desire and with,
oh, he’s tall,
which I owe.
That guy reads faster
than that.
Whatever it was that led them to begin not only to want something,
but to hate the person
who had it and to sever relationships,
to damage relationships with one another in a place where
they intentionally tried to do everything they could to isolate themselves.
And now we try to
walk through our discipleship with pages of advertising on every website,
in every catalog, and every time we see it with new models of everything coming out every year.
It’s no wonder that, yeah,
we should probably look out for that.
We should see if maybe that weed is in our
garden once in a while.
If it happened to them,
it most certainly could happen to us.
There was a, I’ll share this with you as we come to close here.
I thought that this was a
very convicting quote.
So I’ll leave this with you.
“In the misfortunes of our best friends,
we always find something not wholly displeasing to us.”
When I first read that,
I thought, “No,
you are wrong.” And then I thought about it,
and I realized,
Clint said this very early in my time here.
I look back.
One of his complaints that he offered
about meeting with pastors is about all of their stupid questions.
And I thought, “Easy now.” No, hold on.
Hold on.
This is coming around.
Yikes.
No.
And I thought it was a little overdrawn.
And then I started going to pastor’s conferences.
Do you know what the first question you get asked every time?
How big is your church?
Yeah.
See?
See? It’s true.
Trust me.
That’s true, right?
Well,
not every pastor, but every conference I’ve ever been to.
Yeah. And that is,
of course it’s insidious,
and of course you wouldn’t want it,
but the kind of pervasiveness of it makes sense that,
you know, even in my seminary cohort, I have friends,
and it’s not all gone well for them.
And though I wouldn’t want it to be true,
if I’m honest and vulnerable enough,
I recognize I’m grateful that I haven’t had that journey.
I’m grateful that didn’t happen to me.
There is a small level of rejoicing.
I wouldn’t want to think
it’s in their misfortune,
but the fact that that misfortune happens communicates to me,
“Well, maybe there’s something in me.
Maybe Michael has some invisible essence that keeps that from
happening,” which of course isn’t true.
But when it’s a measure of identity,
when we’re trying to fill a hole,
then those are the things that will suffice.
Yeah.
So maybe just the last thing,
if we want to continue,
we don’t want to run anybody off,
but we are trying to be conscious
of time and have already claimed a little more than we said we would.
I think Michael leads us
to a good place,
which is the problem,
the fundamental problem with envy is that it leads
me not to compare myself to my best self,
my most faithful self, or my savior,
but to other people.
And therefore, not only is it destructive relationally,
it’s damaging because it inevitably
leads me on the wrong path because it leads me away from who I’m called to be in Jesus Christ
and puts my focus on who someone else is and tries to convince me that that’s who I want to be.
And again,
envy is one of those things that we think,
“Oh, it sounds pretty anemic.”
It is deadly dangerous,
and it really does
have an impact on people who struggle with it.
Thanks for being with us tonight,
everybody.
Thanks for your time, everybody.