"The Deadly Sin of Envy -
Mirror, Mirror"

Sermon:

I've been 'buked and I’ve been scorned! Here I am on the sixth of the seven deadly sins and this week the pope comes along and adds seven new sins – without even asking me. The new sins include taking or dealing in drugs, polluting the environment, and engaging in "manipulative" genetic science, as well as pedophilia, abortion, and social injustices that cause poverty or "the excessive accumulation of wealth by a few". I would arm wrestle him over a couple of those, but most of them certainly are deadly enough.

I say if the pope can add sins then so can we. On May 18th I plan to give a sermon on the 8^th deadly sin, and I would like you, instead of the pope, to decide what that will be. You can drop your suggestions on the candle table as you leave or give them or email them to me, and I'll narrow them down to three that we can vote on at the next Deadly Sin sermon on April 20.

“Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?”

Remember those words by the wicked queen in “Snow White”? How can we ever forget! I like the cartoon that shows a not-so-beautiful woman looking into a magic mirror while asking, “Alright then, smarty pants - who is the 1,596th fairest in the land?” This is the image of envy, isn't it? And it's what we all do at some level. We may ask, “Who is the most beautiful, intelligent, compassionate, creative, athletic, or just darned best all around?” And we always hope the answer will be, “Why, you are, of course.”

We can't help comparing ourselves with others and wishing that we could be not only more than we are but more than they are. It's good to want to grow into our possibilities, but the danger comes when we judge our abilities and character not by our own internal standards but in comparison with those around us.

I was recently at a conference for Unitarian Universalist large church ministers. I love being with my colleagues, learning from their experiences and sharing our joys and frustrations together. One of the greatest perks of being a UU minister is the outstanding colleagues and good friends I have made. But they can also be incredibly aggravating. They're just so good at what they do. Our ministry has great intellects, charismatic leaders, eloquent preachers, and compassionate social justice advocates. I often feel inadequate when we get together, but it helps that many of my colleagues have confessed to feeling the same way. My personal envy trap is that I don't compare myself to just one colleague but to all of them rolled up into one. I forget that all of us have outstanding skills that have enabled us to become ministers of large churches, but we also have weaknesses that challenge us to grow.

Our meetings have improved over the years. It used to be that ministers would compare the size of their steeples, so to speak, bragging about how many members they had, the vast sums in their budgets, and their many superior accomplishments. Since the significant increase in the number of women in our ministry, that particularly nasty habit has almost disappeared, at least on the outside. On the inside, I'm sure many of us are still measuring steeples in one way or another.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the best minister of them all?”

The writer, Ann Lamott, in her book, “Bird By Bird,” tells about a bad bout†with jealousy and envy that she went through when a writer friend was doing extremely well in her career and not being one bit shy about announcing it. “I would sit listening to her discuss her latest successes over the phone, praying that I could get off the line before I started barking. I was literally oozing unhappiness, like a sump.”

Lamott went to her therapist who told her that jealousy is a secondary emotion, that it is born from feeling excluded and deprived, and that if†she worked on those age-old feelings, she would probably break through the jealousy. Lamott says: I tried to get her to give me a prescription for Prozac...” A friend read her lines by a Lakota Sioux: Sometimes I go about pitying myself. And all the while I am being carried on great winds across the sky. That is so beautiful, I said; and I am so mentally ill.”

The words did create a crack that opened wider when another friend told her that the problem was trying to stop the jealousy and competitiveness, and that the main thing was not to let it fuel her self-loathing. When she saw a documentary on victims of AIDs and the suffering they went through she finally realized the superficiality of her envy.

My wife, Terry, a writer herself, tells me that writers are susceptible to envy -- though certainly not her -- but I imagine it's not that different from any profession. I like the “Non Sequitur” cartoon showing a couple outside the door of a building with a sign reading, “The Association of People Better Than You.” There's a guard at the front door and a welcome mat that says, “Not Welcome.” The man says to the woman, “I'm repulsed, offended, and want to know how to join...” Don't we all feel that way sometimes, disgusted by those who we see as being above us and yet secretly wishing we could be them?

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the top dog of them all?”

Behind the mirror of envy is a terrible fear of failure. In our competitive society there is little room for failure. Some of the competitiveness we practice is constructive, but much of it is neurotic. It’s neurotic when we consistently measure ourselves against others, and when we not only want to be better but "the best." And it's neurotic when we cannot accept the mistakes we make or tolerate the mistakes of others.

This kind of competitive spirit might bring about material success for some, but is this really success? Can we legitimately call someone successful if they have gained status and wealth but have failed to be compassionate and caring? Isn't this why people like Eliot Spitzer, the now ex-governor of New York, are so vulnerable to self-destruction? Spitzer is the latest poster boy for the famous and powerful people who have fallen from their pedestals because they were envious of those with so much power they could have anything they wanted.† They've been taken in by that fantasy.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the most powerful of them all?”

In a book titled, “Working With God,” Winnifred Gallagher relates a story told by Rabbi Nilton Bonder. “God tells Moses that if he wishes, he will never have to die. Nonetheless, God adds, Joshua must go on to become Israel's new leader. Moses accepts. After a while, however, he returns before God, saying 'Let me die.'” Describing envy's peculiar destructiveness, Rabbi Bonder says, 'When you're jealous, you want something someone else has. When you're envious, you just don't want him to have it. Your only pleasure is in depriving another of it.'”

Now we're getting to the real sin of envy. Andre Gide writes that, “Sin is whatever obscures the soul.” Moses sin is his wish to die rather than give up his leadership to Joshua. This is like the story of the man “who was told by an angel that he could have anything he wished, with the caveat that his enemy would get double. After some thought, the man said, 'Blind me in one eye.'”

Envy is so seductive that we're usually not even aware we're feeling it. But to defeat it we must not only be aware of it but own our envy, not only so we can abolish it, but so we can know what enslaves us. Ivan Illich writes, “In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.”

This is definitely deadly sin territory. Being enslaved by our fear of failure and our resentment of the successes of others is a violence we do not only to ourselves but to those around us.

This destructive envy disconnects us from our deeper, real selves as well as those we love.

We essentially allow our souls to be stolen from us so that we no longer know who we are or how to be in relationship with others.

This is why envy is not only one of the seven deadly sins but also one of the no-nos in the ten commandments. That's big stuff to make both of those lists.  You remember that commandment, don't you? “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's.”

Covet is an old-fashioned word that means to desire. You may notice that it's not the act of taking something from our neighbor, but simply wanting to have something of his or hers. It's the urge to have something that doesn't belong to us and in the having, to diminish our neighbor so that we may feel superior. You may remember the words of Karen Armstrong when she said that the real reason many people want to go to heaven is so they may lean out over the ramparts and witness those suffering in hell. Envy is this delicious desire for a privileged life, not for its pleasures alone, but so that we may look down upon those who do not have what we have and glory in our superiority.

In fact, this deadly sin of envy is at the heart of much of the violence in our world. This week as we commemorate the fifth anniversary of our country's invasion of Iraq, we need to look in the mirror and realize that we will never achieve peace in Iraq or anywhere else unless the American people dare to see and accept our failures, our arrogance, and our enslavement to privilege. Only then will we no longer look down at those who are poor or of color or gay or of an unfamiliar religion,†and only then will we look them in the eye and see ourselves.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, how can I see the reflection of my enemy when I see my own?”

“Rabbi Bonder tells of a Hasid who complains to his rebbe that wherever he goes, people step on his toes. 'The rebbe says, 'You don't give people room, so they have nowhere to step but on your toes.'” Perhaps envy is the result of not giving ourselves enough room to be us and not giving others the room to be themselves. When we give ourselves the room to be who we are with all of our faults and failures, then we are making room for our own growth. And when we give others the room to be themselves, then we can see them not as paragons of perfection or as inferior beings but as genuine human beings with the same fears and foibles as ourselves.

Anne Lamott admits that she is the Leona Helmsley of jealousy, but she came to believe that “the only things that could relieve or transform her envy were †a) getting older, b) talking about it until the fever breaks, c) using it as material [in her books].” She says: "Also, someone somewhere along the line is going to make you start laughing about it, and then you will be on your way home.” To remind her Lamott†put a quote from the Jewish rabbi Hillel on the wall by her desk: “I get up. I walk. I fall down. Meanwhile, I keep dancing.” “The way I dance is by writing,” she says.

As our dancers showed us this morning, each of us dances in our own individual ways. We dance by accepting ourselves for who we are and always seeking to be more than we are. We dance by loving those around us for who they are and always seeking a deeper relationship.

But it doesn't always work. You might be interested to know that Ann Lamott did tell her successful but bragging friend as kindly as possible that she needed a sabbatical from their friendship. “Life is too short,” she writes. “And finally I felt that my jealousy and I were strangely beautiful, like the men in the AIDS movie, doing the dance of the transformed self, dancing like an old long-legged bird.”

No matter how deadly our sins may be, may we never forget to dance with them.

So may it be.

Questions for Covenant Groups & Others:

1)     Who did you envy when you were child?

2)   Who do you envy now?

3)   Have you had a professional jealousy similar to the one Ann Lamott writes about? How have you handled it?

4)   Reflecting on the story of Moses and Can you think of a time when you would rather sacrifice your own happiness if it meant making someone you didn’t like unhappy?

5)   What do you see when you look in the mirror?

6)   How deadly is the sin of envy, and how do you dance with it?