Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Let us pray.
Almighty God, pour out upon us the spirit of wisdom and understanding that being taught by you in Holy Scripture, our hearts and minds may be opened to know the things that pertain to life and holiness through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
We have two scriptures this morning.
The first one is From Genesis, the first chapter, verses 26 through 27.
Then God said, let us make humankind in our image according to our likeness.
And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and upon every everything that creeps upon the earth.
So God created humankind in his image.
In the image of God, he created them.
Male and female. He created them.
Our second scripture is from the 17th chapter of Luke, verses 11 through 19.
On the way to Jerusalem, Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee.
As he entered a village, 10 lepers approached him.
Keeping their distance, they called out, saying jesus, master, have mercy on us.
When he saw them, he said to them, go and show yourselves to the priests.
And as they went, they were made clean.
Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice.
He prostrated himself at Jesus feet and thanked him.
And he was a Samaritan.
Then Jesus asked, were not ten others made clean, but the other nine? Where are they?
Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?
Then he said to him, get up and go on your way.
Your faith has made you well.
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Good morning.
[00:02:39] Speaker B: So leprosy may not be the first thing that comes to mind when we think about envy, but hopefully we'll get there this week. I have not been thinking to myself, be careful what you ask for.
I have been thinking about, be careful what you give. I did give Matt the book on vices, and here I am before you, having to wrestle with the sin of envy, which often we think of being green with envy, and it's some repulsive thing that other people struggle with.
But here in blue, envy is maybe more familiar to me than I had realized.
So I will try to not overshare today. But this is coming from deep places in me.
As Matt mentioned, I did intern here back in the day, and that day was actually almost 30 years ago. I was an intern when I finished my M. Div. At Fuller in 1997. How is this possible? Former deans faculty My strategy is preaching has always been pick aar when all the theologians are out of town because my dominant discipline is psychology.
But here we are in July, and darn it, some of you are here.
Rascals.
So I'm saying this is a little bit of a confession because I'm coming at this sermon, both with my background as a Presbyterian pastor with some theological training, maybe not as some of my other colleagues, but also as a psychologist.
And I had so many ideas and so many, many things I wanted to say and have been working very hard to pull it together. So I'm going to be a little closer to manuscript than usual, so we can get out of here for lunch.
But in those last 29 years, I have continued as a student at Fuller and have been on the faculty at Fuller.
And much of my life's work has been around understanding theologically, biblically and psychologically, what does it mean to be fully alive. And so when this book called Fully Alive came out, I was curious and then I was really intrigued that it was about the vices or the seven deadly sins.
And then as I thought about it and read the book, which is fantastic, and I highly recommend Liz Oldfield's book, Fully Alive, I thought, this is so clever.
Another theologian talks about glittering vices.
And vices can be kind of alluring. I mean, gluttony and food, lust and sex. But envy, that's not terribly glittering, but they are enticing.
And I realized, actually this sermon has been meaning me even longer than I was at Knox my freshman year in college. This is Stanford fun, 1980s.
Our whole dorm, 90 of us, were in the great works of Western culture, which is probably not even taught anymore, but which meant we all read Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradisio together. And in conclusion, we had a dorm party.
A three story dorm is, of course, I was in the only dorm on campus that was more women than men. First floor was a sandwich dorm. First floor, third floor, women, men on the second floor. First floor was Inferno. Second floor was Purgatorio, and there were seven rooms set up and each one hosted one of the deadly sins. There was some nasty green cocktail that was served in the envy room. And I was a good Christian and I was under 21, so I witnessed but did not partake. For better or for worse, I'm not even sure, as a developmental psychologist, I might have missed some growth opportunities there, but my floor, Paradisio, we dressed like angels and, you know, not as many people came to our floor. I think Purgatorio, with the seven deadliest activities was more glittering and captivating.
But here we are.
So questions of what enables us to become fully alive, really drive me and motivate me. And over the years it's become simpler and simpler and of course, course, more complicated. But we are made for love from birth. We receive love from our parents, from our caregivers.
We receive love and grow in our understanding and experience of God's love throughout our life. And as that love is experienced, it takes root in us and we become increasingly capable to give that love.
We draw near others, we seek their good, we desire their flourishing.
Love has a flow, a reciprocating movement. One of my favorite words, we receive love and we give love.
And the psychological research actually bears out when there is this flow of both leaning into love and receiving love and experiencing, experiencing love. We also experience it by returning it and giving to others.
And so, as the Name of Thrive's podcast says, we become fully ourselves. We thrive with and for others.
We don't thrive, become successfully or just fully ourselves, but it is with and for others.
And this is how I've come to see virtue.
Virtues are habits of love.
They are ways of becoming. They are patterns of becoming the kind of people who live love more freely, more consistently and more fully. Not just by ourselves, but with and for others. And this summer, we're not talking about virtues, we're talking about vice.
So I also see vice through this lens of flow of love.
Vices are patterns. They are habits we cultivate that disrupt this movement of God's love through us and outward, the experience of human love, receiving and giving.
Vice disrupts the movement of love.
And when love is not adequately received, trusted, internalized or practiced, that natural reciprocal movement of giving and receiving is broken.
When our love receptors might be a little off and our givers, our capacities to give are off, we get a little weird about love. We start grabbing and hoarding and groping for love.
It disrupts that inward and outward flow.
Augustine will talk about sin being understood as love turned away from God and curved inward toward ourself.
So it's like our love mode naturally gets stuck and it becomes curving inward.
Loving oneself is not bad. That is so important and part of the journey. But when it gets stuck on us and can't allow for intimacy and authentic knowing and connection in desiring the well being and flourishing of another, that's disruptive. And vices do that. We could run through the vices and think pride is enlarging the self, so I might be more seen and get more love or greed securing resources for myself, I feel better about possessing.
Sloth can be seen as disengaging the self from responsibilities or engagement in love.
And envy.
Envy is really complicated.
Envy sees you, but for my sake.
Envy is a distortion of our perception of what our beholding. I might see your good, but it becomes a threat to me.
Experiencing you in your fullness makes me feel smaller.
So I would say envy is a distortion of beholding.
It distorts not only how I see you, but it eventually distorts how I see myself.
At its most basic, envy could be understood not just as. So here's the psychologist, a cognitive appraisal, a thought. I see good in you, but there's a feeling. There's pain, there's sorrow, there's insecurity.
Your flourishing, rather than being a joy to me, is a threat. It's a pain, which is really strange.
So there can be envy over something specific, like the precious socks or shoes.
But envy is more than that. It is a posture. It is a pattern of seeing and desiring something in another that makes us feel worse about ourselves.
So when I see you're good, I feel less.
And I'm no longer seeing you clearly.
You've become functional. You serve as a way to see me.
I use you as a measuring stick.
And then I don't get to see myself clearly either.
I am measuring my worth by your success, your family, your influence, your calling in your life.
I'm looking at you, but I'm really focused, focusing on me. And that's that perversion of love turned inwards.
Love should move us outward towards authentic connection to true knowing and desiring the good of another.
Because love is with others, and it is for the sake of others.
It moves outward. But envy turns in. I look at you and everything is really redirected back at me.
When we behold each other, truly behold and see each other, then we can really cherish the uniqueness, the glory and the gore of one another.
But with envy, the person loses that status that Toby read about as made in the image of person, God.
And they serve as a mirror to see myself.
So we often think like, oh, I envy the car. I envy the Tesla. I envy the vacation. I envy that. But we can envy really good things.
So you might be really feeling great about your life until your colleague gets a promotion or you feel good about your work, until someone else's book came out or till their fund got funded or their ministry started growing.
Perhaps you were really proud of your child's activities, their spelling bees, their sports, their performances, until someone told you about theirs.
Maybe you felt really faithful in your Calling until you looked over and saw that someone else on the other side of the pew was having more influence.
Nothing in your life changed.
But it's the way you're seeing someone that changes the way you feel about yourself.
We can envy things like not just Tesla's, which I just sold mine.
We can envy calling, impact, health, apparent ease in life, a good marriage, spiritual depth, someone's beautiful prayers, someone who can sing well, but for whatever reason that goodness makes us feel less.
Does any of this ring true to you? Is there a soft spot of something that might be resonating with you that maybe there is a little under there?
Well, the psychologist in me wants to share that envy is not just an idea in your head. It is actually embodied. You do experience it.
Neuroscience helps us understand that envy can feel so powerful because it's actually usually proximal or close to us.
We generally envy something good in people close to us in our life.
And it becomes really intense when another person who's closer to us, their advantages touch an area important to our own identity.
That's what research call researchers call self relevance.
So I'm not particularly threatened by World cup soccer players, but I am a little activated around some of the ref's decisions and actions. And I might have a few words to say.
But soccer is not central to how I see myself, even though a large part of my parenting has been an identity as a soccer mom.
But another professor publishes a book called I wish I had written.
Another podcaster gets an interview I was hoping to have now you're good is messing with me.
That's deeper.
So in a really important study by Takahashi, they found that when people encountered someone superior to them in an area that's personally relevant to their identity, envy is actually associated. Or there's activity in the brain regions involved with processing or experiencing pain and conflict.
So this is real, what you feel with envy, it's activating the parts of your brain that allow you to experience pain.
In fact, the title of the paper in science is called when your gain is my pain.
And when your pain is my gain, our brain actually does this.
So we're made in the image of God. We are made to rejoice when others rejoice, to weep when others weep.
But envy curves those attempts of love back to us.
Your gain gets experienced by my pain when I'm captivated by envy.
And eventually your pain is my gain.
I think if we're honest with ourselves, we've all found ourselves in a situation where we might gloat, find a Little peace, Feel some sense of retribution.
When someone gets what we might perceive as their due, that doesn't feel great. But it's easy. Like, yeah, they didn't deserve that, or they're the wicked, as we even read aloud.
But we might use that moral superiority to mask what actually could be a bit of envy.
So sometimes your good is often becomes information to me. So we're going to get personal. Here we go. Okay, so the confessional. I'm so glad we're not Catholic and we keep our confessions to ourselves, but I'm going to try and be here, okay? So those of you who know me, this will be no shock. Kate Bowler is a professor, a podcaster, and an author of many books. I so admire her work, and she recently published a book on Joy.
I asked her to be on my podcast, and actually she said no because she was writing her book on Joy.
The last sermon I preached here six years ago was on Joy. On Joyride.
I wrote a whole manuscript before COVID It's still on a file on my computer.
When that book came out, yeah, part of me was excited for her. Really excited.
And part of me was really bummed.
I confess. I bought the book and it sat there. I couldn't pick it up.
And I was like, this is really weird, Pam. What is going on? Like, this is really strange.
So then I'm preaching on envy. Thank you very much, Matt.
Thanks for not giving me lust. Thanks for giving me envy.
But I bought it. I look at it, I'm holding it. Nothing's changed about my calling, but I feel totally different about myself.
Something about her goodness, her rise, her beautiful offering, her humor, her authenticity made me feel smaller.
I began to lose my ability to see Kate clearly. And I was not seeing myself clearly either.
I turned Kate into a mirror.
I started her book last night, spent a good week working on the sermon.
But I could begin to see her again and appreciate her and, oh my gosh, her intellect, her clarity, her honesty.
It's riveting and wonderful.
You should read her book, Joy. Anyways, she has become an inspiring example again, rather than evidence against Pam.
So the evil queen in Snow White looks in the mirror, right? To discover who she is.
She doesn't even see herself.
She sees someone else.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?
Envy turns people into mirrors in which we try and find ourselves.
Who's your mirror?
Who might you be looking at sideways? You may not even realizing it. A glance of comparison, a little bit of intake measurement. How am I Doing?
Who is that mirror for you?
What do you see when you look at them?
What do you feel?
And the longer we stare sideways like this, the less clarity we see either the other person or ourselves.
And this is not how we were made to know who we are.
Genesis tells us that we are created in the image of God.
We are precious creatures made in God's image. And that is the deepest identity that should secure us. Not our looking sideways, but looking at God.
When I am in touch with that, that I, Pam, am created by God, I am seen by God. I am beloved by God, and so are each of you. I am able to let that reciprocal flow occur more naturally and easier.
I am freer to see you for who you are as God's beautiful creation.
I can take you in. I can genuinely wish and hope for your well being in Flores and flourishing.
But envy distorts how I see you and it distorts how I see myself. And eventually it distorts how I see God.
Because beneath my resentment, there's often deeper questions. God, why them, huh?
Why not me? Why Kate? Why not me?
Why Cynthia? Why not me?
Can only tease the ones you love.
I become so riveted by the gift of another. It's like a tractor beam. It draws you in, your brain is activated, you're feeling it.
That we lose sight of the gifts that we have received.
And ultimately we can become so entranced with the gifts of another that we do lose sight of our gifts. And worst yet, we lose sight of the giver.
So with envy, I lose sight of who you are, I lose sight of who I am, and I lose sight of whose I am.
That is envy in the I, in the person of the beholder.
So let's talk about leprosy.
There's 10 people standing at a distance as Jesus makes his way to Jerusalem.
The condition of leprosy carried devastating. Not just physical wounds, but also had social and spiritual consequences.
These men were marked as physically, socially and spiritually unclean. They were forced by law, by Jewish law, to live at a distance from community and that skin disease or diseases actually required them to warn others away and yell, unclean, unclean, stay away.
Imagine your identity if you are constantly telling people, unclean, stay away, I'm bad, stay away from me.
Their condition not only shaped how others saw them, but how they saw themselves.
Now, envy is not leprosy, but it does have a separating power.
Proverbs says that envy is like rottenness to the bones and it rivets our gaze sideways, it hijacks what should be an eternal and expansive horizon of love flowing outward. And the sharp knife of comparison cuts that horizon off and boomerangs the attention back to ourselves.
Comparison locks us in, not in a good way.
It leaves us preoccupied with another person's good and an inability to see them and ourselves.
I think envy covers festering wounds beneath the surface.
Longings, insecurities, fears, places we might feel overlooked or diminished.
Liz Oldfield, the author of the book, describes envy as a small, seething septic wound, embarrassing and painful.
She says envy stems from shame and insecurity, a deep seated sense of enoughness.
What if we took envy as an invitation to wonder about our sources of not enoughness, but envy in all that, in using others as mirrors, as using others as wis ways to experience and see ourselves, it separates us.
It separates us from each other. It separates from ourself and from God.
And envy might be green and terrible and for other people that don't come to church on Sunday, but another woman I sometimes envy, Nadia Volz Weber, sent an email yesterday. Sinas, see you in church.
This is where we belong, because this is where we can be honest about our wounds.
This is we can get real about ourselves with those things that fester.
So here we have 10 on the side of the road that Jesus comes across in his journey.
And Luke tells us something really simple but profound.
Jesus saw them before, they are healed, they are seen.
And maybe that's part of the healing process of envy.
And then later in this narrative, we discover that one is not just a leper, but a Samaritan.
In Joel Green, former provost of Fuller, in his commentary on Luke, points out that this revelation, this being doubly marginalized with disease and as a foreigner of the wrong descent, he should be bearing so much weight. And the fact that Jesus sees him in his illness, in his outsider status, and does not shame him and does not blame him, but meets him with mercy reminds us that Jesus claims us also in our festeringness.
And I do think this is where healing with envy begins.
It's not by seeking our own self worth, trying harder measuring sticks with other people to see ourselves hopefully more fully this time. Or conversely, my tactic is self shaming for feeling envy that is not going to get us anywhere, but allowing ourselves to be seen by God.
Envy teaches us it makes habits of. Of looking sideways to discover who we are.
But we need to turn to God, not others, and allow Jesus to see us. Because Jesus sees us differently. He sees us wholly in wholly who we are and as holy. He sees Those longings, the festering, the insecurities that we protect.
But he sees us as his wonderful, fearfully made creation, worthy of love. And he sees you as so capable of giving love in very unique ways.
So the lepers, they're taught to cry out, stay away.
But they use their voices differently. They say, jesus, Master, have mercy on us. They cry for mercy.
What if we use envy as an invitation to cry out differently as well?
What if we use it as an invitation to understand what's threatening us, to consider why we're feeling unseen or unclean, clean, insignificant or left behind?
What if we cry out, jesus, Master, have mercy on me.
Jesus sends the lepers to show themselves to the priest, and they go.
But before they get to the temple, they are cleansed.
But only one says, when he saw again this vision, when he saw that he was healed, he turned back.
And Joel Green mentions the seeing isn't just sight, it's insight.
One leper saw, had recognized he was clean and had insight into what that was.
He notices that he's been healed by God and received mercy by God. And so he turns, his gaze, is reoriented, he returns to Jesus.
He praises God with a loud voice, and he falls at his feet and glorifies God and gives him praise.
At the beginning of the sermon I quoted, especially in my field in Christian circles, a very quoted quote of Irenaeus, the glory of God is humankind fully alive.
But I left the second line off.
Irenaeus goes on, and this is often not included.
And the life of the human is found in beholding God.
For Irenaetus, beholding God is not just simply saying something we do.
It is responding to God revealed through the Word in Christ. It is seeing Christ. And this is the source of life.
So the leper sees Jesus for who he is, the master, God's kingdom. In breaking through the person of Jesus Christ, he goes right to the side source and sees Jesus for who he is. How do we do that in our lives?
How do you do that in your life?
How do you find space to behold who God is?
For some of you, that is singing historic hymns.
For others of you, that is singing newer songs, studying scripture, designing, creating, beholding God's creation.
How do you behold who God is? And how do you let God's love for you transform you?
When we are allow that love flow to be reignited, I become freer to see you, to rejoice when you rejoice, to weep when you you weep, to seek, actively, purposely seek your good that allows love to move outward again. Envy prohibits and prefers love. Moving out.
I'm going to close shortly.
Give you less reasons to envy me in a second.
But I. The last couple weeks have been a little challenging.
Personally, my family at Fuller, as my kids would say, I'm going through it kind of from all directions.
And as I said with that neuropsych study, like, when we get activated, our brains change, we get dysregulated, we feel hard feelings. My internal world has been like inside out, all the bad, hard emotions. And I can use all my psychological skills to try and calm them and neutralize them, bring up joy and get rid of envy and sequester anxiety. And it's hard.
And I've been at a place where, like, I don't know how to do this. It doesn't make sense. There's so much going on at one time.
So usually when you preach, you like to pick an example that's distant, far away that you've wrestled with. My apologies were a little fresh. So I can tell you, my therapist this week, a few days ago, said to me, pam, you started to get choked up.
My favorite teacher in high school.
We'd be in class, kids are crazy, loud, out of control.
And Julia, this is where I'm going to need your help.
I she, instead of trying to beg for their attention, instead of yelling, he would just softly start singing.
Come let us adore him O come let us adore him O come let us adore O come let us adore him
[00:37:15] Speaker A: Christ
[00:37:19] Speaker B: alone.
And that is what the leper did.
In the face of an embarrassing, gross, painful disease, in the reality, in the overwhelm of living isolated from others, cut off, unclean from God, the leper came and adored Christ as Lord, let us do the same. Amen.
