Envy, Children, and Spray Paint: An "Intergenerational" Sermon

Pentecost 17 B, Proper 20                                                                              September 20, 2015

James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a

Mark 9:30-37

  Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Be honest now, kids: who enjoys getting their brother or sister in trouble? They’re just asking for it, aren’t they? They get way more attention than they deserve. You just want to get your fair share once in awhile, right, even if it’s at their expense? Maybe you can identify with the big sister in Judy Blume’s book, The Pain and the Great One:

"[My little brother’s] got to be first/ To show Mom his schoolwork./ She says ooh and aah/ All over his pictures/ Which aren’t great at all/ But just ordinary/ First grade stuff…. And I would really like to know/ Why the cat sleeps on [his] bed/ Instead of mine? Especially since I am the one/ Who feeds her./ That is the meanest thing of all.”

Or maybe you feel for the little brother as he fusses about his big sister: “She thinks she’s great/ Just because she can/ Play the piano/ And you can tell/ The songs are real ones … My sister thinks she’s so great/ Just because she can work/ the can opener. Which means she gets to feed the cat./ Which means the cat/ Likes her better than me/ Just because she feeds her.”[1]

I’m not so sure that the cat really loves one child better than the other. But I can sure identify with these kids just the same! Can’t you? Even as an adult, I always have my eyes on other people, just to be sure that nobody has it better than I do. And when I convince myself that they do have it better—boy, does that turn me bitter and unhappy inside! Look at that colleague with every church pew full every Sunday! He has bad theology, and one day he’ll get his comeuppance. And the lady on the treadmill at the gym who runs for 30 minutes while I get tired just walking? It sure served her right when she pulled her hamstring. And the neighbor who just got back from the Bahamas while I was working and shoveling snow from my driveway every day? I’m just going to dump all my snow in front of his mailbox so he can’t get his mail. He’ll never guess it was me, and that inconvenience will sure take him down a peg. Yes, grown-ups and kids alike suffer from the sin of envy: “dissatisfaction with our place in God’s order of creation, manifested in begrudging [God’s] gifts to others.” [2]

Sometimes, we're just coveting. Coveting is wanting things: We covet somebody’s designer purse, or his fancy car. When we envy, however, we are worried about how we measure up with someone else. We feel bad about ourselves, and so we don’t want anyone else to have it better than we do. We want to make them miserable, too. My favorite joke about envy goes something like this: An Englishwoman and a farmer find a bottle with a genie in it. They are each given one wish. The woman tells the genie about a friend of hers who has a beautiful cottage. “I want one like that,” she says, “except with an extra bedroom and a fancier garden.” The farmer tells the genie about a neighbor who has a cow that produces rivers of rich milk, milk that makes tons of wonderful cream and delicious butter. “I want that cow,” says the farmer “… dead.”[3] The farmer suffers from envy.

Envy, because it is so filled with bitterness that it seeks the harm of the other party, is a dangerous sin—one that can result in hatred, murder, and violence. Recall the story of Joseph in the Hebrew Scriptures. His older brothers think that their father loves Joseph better than he loves them. They envy his position in the family. But they don’t just rant about it. They lure him into a pit in the desert, where they leave him to be stolen away as a slave in Egypt. In today’s Epistle, James warns us sternly about the dangers of envy: “For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind,” he writes. 

Jesus’ disciples aren't any better than we are when it comes to envy. In today’s Gospel, Jesus is trying to tell them important things about his approaching death, and they aren’t listening. They can’t concentrate on what their teacher is saying, because they are too preoccupied with their own ambition and envy. Like the brother and sister in Judy Blume’s book, they might have been grumbling things like: “Peter thinks he’s so great and strong just because Jesus calls him The Rock. It so served him right when Jesus yelled out, 'Get behind me Satan!' the other day, when that 'Rock' dared to protest the strange talk about our Lord dying. Maybe now Jesus will think that I’m the strongest one?” Or “Could you believe it back there in that town when somebody recognized Matthew as a former tax collector and started throwing rotten garbage on him? I thought that I would fall down, I was laughing so hard! Maybe now that Matthew has been disgraced, I’ll get to have more respect around here from the others.”

          And what does Jesus do when he overhears his disciples arguing and putting one another down in order to raise themselves up? He grabs the nearest child and takes her up in his arms and says to his envying band of followers: "Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me." What does he mean? Why a child? Why not a leper, or a blind beggar?

          Children, I need a volunteer to help me now. I need at least one child to come up here so that I can welcome you in Jesus’ name! [I will have arranged beforehand to get at least one child up here!]  …. OK, so if I’m going to truly welcome _______, if I’m really going to make her feel God’s love right now, what am I going to have to do? If I stand straight and stiff up here and stick out my robed hand and pat her on the head, that’s not a real welcome, is it? If she’s going to feel wanted and loved, I’m going to need to get down here on the floor, aren’t I? [Sit down on the floor and make a production of it]. I’m going to have to climb down out of my fancy perch in the pulpit, and bend my creaky knees, risking getting stuck down here or sliding around ungracefully on our nice new hardwood floor. I’m going to have to put away the safety of my manuscript, and look her in the eyes on her level if I’m going to welcome her.

          In choosing a child, Jesus lifts up to us the silent ones, the least and littlest, the vulnerable outsiders. But he does more than that. He also forces us to change our positions. We cannot truly welcome the vulnerable unless we ourselves become vulnerable—unless we bend down low, unless we lay aside our rigid frameworks about how the world works and move outside of our comfort zones.[4] [send kid/s back to seat.]

          On Friday, I joined about a thousand other Louisvillians at the River Road Islamic Center, where unidentified vandals had spray-painted hate-filled red graffiti across the back wall of this mosque. Having read today’s lessons, I wondered how many of our hate crimes are at least partly fueled by envy. Doubting that we have a place in God’s creation, we want to be sure that no one else has one, either. Doubting that we matter in this world, we want to let everyone know that some other group doesn’t matter, either. Empty and bitter, we lash out secretly in ugly words and destructive acts. As I stood there in the hot sun, getting bit by mosquitoes and listening to politicians instead of working on my sermon, I could imagine myself being drawn down onto my knees. I wasn’t bending down to welcome a child, but I was bending my comforting routine. I was bending the stiff joints of my Friday schedule. I was looking at the world from behind a mosque, a foreign architectural form. I was standing with Jews and Muslims, black and white, in a common cause that was outside of the formal structures of my own religion. The day wasn’t about me; it wasn’t all about my church, my religion, my special causes. It wasn’t all about any  one of us standing there. It was about the love of God for each of us. The outpouring, unending, overflowing love of God for each of us, just the same.

          The sin of envy dogs us when we do not believe that we are loved. If Jesus loves a child, a child without accomplishments, without status, then Jesus loves each of us for who we are deep within, not for what we do. There is nothing that we have to do in order to earn that love. There is nothing that we can do to lose it. In order to feel that love, all we have to do is to bend down, lay down our armor, put away our red spray paint, and hold out our hands, too, to the least and the last, to our brother and to our sister. In our mutual gaze, we will find envy replaced with love, as we look into the very face of God.

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[1] Judy Blume, The Pain and the Great One (New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2014).

[2] Rebecca K. DeYoung, Glittering Vices (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press), 51.

[3] Ibid., 48.

 [4] For the idea of bending down, thank you to the Rev. Dr. Brad Wigger in his Convocation address, “A Little Child Shall Lead Them,” Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, February 6, 2014. Found at http://www.lpts.edu/docs/default-source/about_us-chapel_sermons_text/wigger2-6-14.pdf?sfvrsn=2

Danger: Words ahead!

Proper 19, Pentecost 16, Year B                                                                    September 13, 2015

James 3:1-12

O God, because without you we are not able to please you, mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. 

        “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me!” My mother taught me that rhyme the first time that I came home in tears from some kindergarten meanness. I was supposed to repeat it as a jaunty reply that would put the bully in her place. I don’t know if I actually ever used it, but I do think that knowing the rhyme brought me a comforting sense of power over my tormentors. We have all heard this little phrase, so common on the playgrounds of America. We learned it from our parents and our teachers. But it is a lie. And the power that it gives us is illusory. Words do hurt, sometimes more than sticks and stones and even broken bones. They wound, and they lead astray. They exaggerate and tear down. Turn on the TV and listen to our politicians, even to some of our preachers. Listen to the twisted words on the tips of our own tongues. Today’s Epistle from the book of James cries out to me a stark truth that I do not find in the well-known playground rhyme.

James starts by addressing teachers. As a teacher and a preacher, I am well aware of the precarious position that I take every time I stand before you, my throat wrapped in the white collar of divine authority. The prayer that I say before every sermon is probably my most heartfelt of the entire week, because I know all too well the likelihood that my words might wound, that they might cut too close to someone’s heart, that they might damage someone’s faith in God, or at the least, that they might roll flat and useless under the pews. I bet that there isn’t one of us here today who can’t remember both the pain of some cutting, stinging word from a priest or teacher as well as the bright joy of a life-giving word from such a mentor. One of my worst parenting failures happened in my role as a teacher at the school my children also attended. Part of my job was to teach the eighth graders how to write their first research papers. When my daughter Maren was in the eighth grade, she had chosen to do her paper on some aspect of Shakespearean drama. I had gathered the whole 8^th grade class into the auditorium, where the librarian had arranged a variety of books and resources on the stage. I was waxing eloquent on how to choose the right materials to begin research when I spied a book on Shakespeare in the pile before me. I quickly grabbed it, talking a mile a minute, and exulted, “Maren, here’s a book for YOU!” Unfortunately, the whole title, which I hadn’t taken the time to reflect upon, was Shakespeare for Dummies.  The whole class roared with laughter, and my daughter, who suffered already from the pangs of fourteen-year-old insecurity, was wounded to the core. I hadn’t meant to insult her or to embarrass her, but my foolish and hasty words on that stage carried a sharp edge that my later protests and excuses could not soften. “We who teach will be judged with greater strictness,” indeed.

Gossip, too, is a less public weapon, but equally impossible to withdraw, once it has escaped our mouths. There is such a fine line between sharing news and sharing judgments. It is so easy to let those harmful little stories and rumors float past our lips: at Coffee Hour, in the kitchen, around the water cooler, in the parking lot, at clergy gatherings.  The Church, despite our good intentions, is so often a breeding ground for gossip. 
I’ll never forget the sermon scene from the film Doubt. The priest tells about a well-known gossip who is directed to go up onto her roof with a feather pillow and a knife. Slashing open the pillow, she watches as thousands of feathers fly up into the wind and fill the sky above her head. Her priest then directs her to go and pick them all up and put them back into the pillow. “That’s impossible!” she gasps, “They’re everywhere.” “Such is gossip,” answers the priest. “You can never take the words back once they’ve spread.” Flying feathers ... just like James’ tongues of flame leaping wildly from tree to tree in a forest fire—Such images make clear the destructive and unstoppable force of our most poisonous words.

What are we to do with our words, then? Where is the good news in James’ rant against the human tongue? Are we supposed to remain silent, perhaps? When my son Alex was in preschool, the teacher approached me with concern about my son’s delayed speech. Surprised, I asked what was wrong. His speech seemed developmentally on track to me. The teacher, with the kind and patient voice used for parents in denial, informed me that Alex almost never spoke, instead using sign language and pointing to get his needs across. “What is he up to?” I wondered with relief, since he talked constantly at home. Later, I asked Alex why he didn’t talk at school, and he looked up at me with big, worried eyes and confessed with a sigh: “I’m afraid that if I open my mouth, bad words will come out.” Apparently another child had been getting in trouble for using inappropriate language, and the teacher’s reaction had made a big impression on my sweet 3-year-old. Is my young son’s guilt-stricken caution what James is asking of us?

I don’t think so. Language, after all, is a gift from God. By the power of the Word, God made and still sustains all that is. “’Let there be light!’ God said. And there was light.” “In the beginning was the Word …. And by the Word all things were made.” Made in God’s image, we too are given the power of words, the power to name the rest of creation, the power to testify to what God has given us, the power to bless and even to create. According to James, the trouble comes when we use the same mouth to bless God that we use to curse our brothers and sisters who are also in God’s likeness. God gives us tongues so that we can speak words that build relationship with God and with our neighbors. When we use those tongues instead to tear down relationship and to deny the likeness of God in our fellow human beings, then we are as far from our created purpose as is a fig tree that produces olives, or a spring that flows with both fresh and alkaline water at the same time.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu once explained how even the God-filled words of prayer and scripture were misused by Christian missionaries in South Africa to oppress, rather than to uplift God’s creatures:

When white settlers first came to South Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. “Let us pray,” they said. So we folded our hands, closed our eyes and prayed. When we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land.

Later, in the horrors of apartheid and then in its aftermath, both whites and blacks often turned their words on one another, accusing and attacking and brutalizing. Echoing James, Tutu states that “to dehumanize someone is to commit blasphemy by dishonoring the image of God in that person.”[1] When we turn our words against one of God’s creatures, we have not only harmed our neighbor, but we have blasphemed against the Creator himself. It took listening deeply to the profoundly painful stories unveiled in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the wounds of tongue and flesh in South Africa to begin to heal.

The Suffering Servant in our Isaiah reading would agree. Rather than attack, this Servant “sustains the weary” with his words. Before speaking, he listens. He listens first to God and then to others. He truly listens, “as those who are [willing to be] taught.” He listens even though his listening leads to his own suffering. He remains open and vulnerable with the Other, refusing to hide his face, even from any fiery words of insult that might be thrown at him. Psalm 12 says of God’s Word: “the words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.” I have never seen precious metals being refined, but I know that only intense heat and mighty flame can transform ore, melting it, changing its form completely, and allowing it to float freely to the surface. It is no coincidence that the Word of God, the Christ who creates and gives life, must pass through the crucible of the Cross. It’s no wonder that Jesus preaches in today’s Gospel that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering before he rises. It’s no wonder that he tells us, too, that to follow him, we must deny ourselves and take up the cross. Our best words are those that float upwards through lives that have been tried in earth’s furnace, through lives that have been burned and bruised in the fight against oppression and want. Without lives broken and refined in the service of justice and mercy, open to the pain of our neighbor, our words grasp at a power that they can never truly own.

In a cartoon clip by Brene Brown, a little sad fox with a dark rain cloud over his head is stuck down in a hole. A deer-like creature comes by, pokes her head down the hole, and says all the wrong things. “Uh huh, OK, Want a sandwich?” she chirps, her mouth full. Painting a silver lining around the little fox’s raincloud, she responds, “At least it’s not worse!” And she skips merrily on her way. On the other hand, a friendly bear climbs down into the hole, listens to what is bothering the fox and pictures a similar sadness in his own mind, feeling the fox’s pain. Then he hugs the fox and says, “I don’t have any idea what to say, but I’m sure glad that you shared with me.” It is the sense of connection, says Brown, that helps, not the words that are spoken.[2]

Maybe we should be teaching our kids to chant, “Words can burn and bones can break, but Love holds on forever.”

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[1] Quoted by Desmond Tutu in a conference on “Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective” at Emory University, October 1995 and cited in Don C. Richter, “Growing Up Postmodern: Theological Uses of Culture,” February 22, 2000.

[2] Brene Brown, “The Power of Empathy,” found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw.