Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, June 13, 2021, at 8:00 and 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher
The Three Causes of Suffering
II: Envy
God, today help me set aside everything I think I know about you, everything I think I know about myself, everything I think I know about others, and everything I think I know about how life works so I may have an open mind and a new experience with all these things. We ask these things in Christ’s name. Amen.
“A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the soul” (Proverbs 14:30)
“It is a good thing to give thanks to the Lord, *
and to sing praises to your Name, O Most High;
To tell of your loving-kindness early in the morning *
and of your faithfulness in the night season.” (Psalm 92:1-2)
Everybody wants to be happy. I take this as a given. And yet the puzzle is that many of us claim that we are not happy, even perhaps that we have never been truly happy, or at most only fleetingly. Is happiness something we have to search for and acquire, sometimes as a result of hard work? Is it something out of our sight and out of our grasp? And if so, where in heaven’s name do we find it; and if we are lucky enough to find it, how do we keep it?
A lot of questions, that’s for sure. I would love to hear from you on this topic, because I think you agree with me, that happiness is a prize possession. But we can get quite confused as to how to get it and how to keep it.
Last week we started a series of meditations on the causes of suffering. I started our exploration by suggesting that the first, and perhaps foremost cause of suffering is our difficulty or refusal to accept life exactly as it is. Our non-acceptance of what happens in our world and what happens to us is the chief impediment to contentment. Keeping an open palm and loosening our clenched fist can be difficult, but I think we might agree that it is the pathway to peace and contentment. Happiness and acceptance are inextricably linked.
Today, I want to look into a second cause of suffering, perhaps little more than an example of non-acceptance. Like pride, pride heads the list of human failings and all the other six deadly sins are examples of pride. The other causes of suffering I want us to consider could be viewed as variations of our difficulty in accepting.
I am referring to the phenomenon of envy. The second cause of suffering is envy.
What exactly is envy? It seems to me that envy is a lot broader, deeper and more pernicious that we might suspect. It is the desire to capture something outside our situation? We want something from someone or from the universe that we just do not have.
- I wish I had so-and-so’s good looks.
- Boy, if I had half of so-and-so’s income!
- Look at all those gorgeous homes in Upper Saddle River. What I wouldn’t give to have one of those.
- So-and-so gets all the breaks!
Of course, there is a huge difference between admiring someone for their gifts and feeling a resentment for what they have and consequently feeling lesser than because of what we lack. It is one thing to admire what someone has. We need our heroes and our moral and spiritual examples to live up to. It is quite another to resent someone for those very gifts.
Envy has a way of putting us in places we are not, living lives of people we are not, of wanting things we do not have simply because we want them.
Envy has one hilarious and fatal flaw. It is a total waste of time. Because what we envy is by definition forever out of our reach. We will never look like the Hollywood heart throbs. We will never be as rich as Jeff Bezos. We will never live on the Riviera in a mansion overlooking the Mediterranean. Sure, if we enjoy an occasional pipe dream, fine. But the problem is not just the futility of such dreams: they sully the places where we are now; they can sour us and make us ungrateful and bitter.
These trips to nowhere through envy are creations of our minds. Today I’m upset because I don’t have money to travel to exotic spots abroad. Tomorrow I will have forgotten about that and long for that lover that slipped through my hands oh so many years ago. One thing after another. We can get lost in regrets, memories, envies like this and come, alas, even to enjoy these numbing mental roadtrips. Might we liken the trap of envy to a mental illness? We wouldn’t be far off, would we?
Did you hear about the two neighbours, one is rich and the other is poor.
The poor had a magic lamp. Every morning, he wiped the lamp and a genie came out and said, “Ask what you want,” and the poor man asks for a cup of tea.
The rich neighbor, envious of the magic lamp, said to the poor man, “I’ll give you my car and my house in exchange for your lamp.” The poor accepted the deal.
The rich man wipes the lamp and a genie comes out and says, “Ask what you want.” The rich man asked for a very big house and a better car.
The genie replied, “Sorry, sir, I only serve coffee and tea.
One little aside about perhaps the darkest form of envy, namely, jealousy. Jealousy can take envy to near murderous levels. We hear about it acted out on a daily basis with crimes of passion. I can’t have you; you have betrayed me and run off with someone else. So I decide to eliminate you and your new lover. This is the stuff of operas and crime dramas. Too bad that those in the grip of jealousy (and I’d wager that most of us have fallen into that trap at one time or another) can’t settle down a moment and consider this: if the one I am so obsessed with doesn’t want to be with me any longer, does it make sense to rail against this rejection by harming or killing him or her? Sure, we are hurt; it takes time to heal this wound. But does it make sense to take vengeance against what is? As your therapist might be so bold and tell you: “Get over it; get on with your life!” This may be bad therapy, but it might keep us out of prison!
Envy can lead to a loss of gratitude and the creation of bitterness. For instead of being happy and grateful for what we have now, where we are now, what we are doing now, our minds project someplace else and dwell there. This is a major recipe for suffering.
We all seek happiness, but I believe that we are already surrounded by happiness. Everything sits exactly where it does, inviting us to stop and appreciate it is just as it is. Sure, there are beautiful things at our finger tips. It’s nice to surround ourselves with things we think beautiful. Some like classical music, some like rap. What gives happiness to one person may not to another. Whatever it is, wherever we are, yes, that is where happiness lies. Of course, there are ugly, sad and troubling things all around us as well. Some are just a nuisance; others impinge on our well-being and health.
All things are exactly where they are and are, in that sense, neutral. They invite us to accept them just as they are, wrinkles and all, warts and all, glories and all. They invite us to accept them and they invite us to love them. Isn’t it better to love what is in front of us than to pine and fantasize about loving something that is not in front of us. The land of envy is the land of make-believe.
And God must want us here, must love us right here. Why? Because we are not anywhere else! This is it. This is my life, right here, right now. No other place, no other time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson put the love of living now perfectly:
“These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. . .. But we tend to postpone or remember; we do not live in the present, but with reverted eye lament the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround us, stand on tiptoe to foresee the future. We cannot be happy and strong until we too live with nature in the present, above time.”
A recipe for happiness. Loving where we are, right here, right now.
Amen.