Scripture
Reading James 3:13-4:3,
7-8a
Who is wise
and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by
deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom.
But if you
harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about
it or deny the truth.
Such “wisdom”
does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic.
For where you
have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil
practice.
But the wisdom
that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate,
submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere.
Peacemakers who
sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.
What causes
fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that
battle within you?
You desire but
do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so
you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God.
When you ask,
you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may
spend what you get on your pleasures.
Submit
yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from
you.
Come near to
God and he will come near to you.
Here ends this reading of the word of God
for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Prayer for Understanding
Send us your Holy Spirit, O God, so that your Word will shed light on the path ahead. Help us understand the way we should follow. May your wisdom bear fruit in us so that we may bear your light into the world around us. Amen.
The tenth
commandment in the ancient 10 Commandments says:
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not
covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or
anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
We shall not
covet anything that belongs to our neighbor.
We should not yearn to possess or have anything that belongs to our
neighbor or another person.
As James writes in his letter:
“For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you
find disorder and every evil practice.”
This kernel of
truth, this advice from our Christian and Jewish forbearers, this advice from
our God, is pretty much the opposite advice that the rest of the world
constantly gives us. Both the 10
commandments and St. James advise us not to covet or envy or yearn to possess
what others have; much of what we are told by the world is to strive to have
bigger and better and that we should “want” what our neighbors have and more…
We are inundated with encouragement
form the secular world to not only envy and covet what other people have, we
are advised to rush out and buy what
they have. We must keep up with the
Jones’es. We are told to work out or diet or have plastic surgery to look the
way they look, or how an idealized and perfect person looks. We are told to buy
a fancier car, and a bigger home, and all the trendiest furniture as soon as it
is available. In one quick scroll
through facebook, I saw advertisements for yogurt, meal kits, jeans, hair dye,
and lottery tickets (so I can win money to buy more stuff). We are constantly bombarded with
encouragements to envy, and those encouragements are then supposed to propel
and motivate us to buy and spend. We
apparently aren’t perfect enough as we are, and must therefore acquire the
things we need to reach perfection.
But James said: “For where you have
envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice.”
I don’t know if advertisers are
consciously encouraging evil practices, but often-times, evil results from
their encouragement. Definitely
insecurity and self-loathing results from their work. And, I suspect instances of crime are
motivated by their work – if we interviewed young people caught shoplifting or
selling drugs, part of their motivation may lie in the desire to have the things they are encouraged to
want but are financially out of reach for them.
It is difficult for us to break-free
from the temptations of the world. It is difficult for us to tamper down our
envy. It is difficult for us to free ourselves from unhealthy ambitions that
encourage us to use other people to get what we want.
But, when we work to follow Christ,
and live as God’s people, we are freed from the need to listen to the unhelpful
demands of the world. We don’t need to buy into the advertisements that
encourage our insecurities. We don’t need to buy all of the products they
command us to buy. We don’t need their
fancy yogurt and hair dye. We don’t need any of it.
Instead, our faith teaches us that
the true wisdom that comes from heaven calls upon us to be pure, peace-loving,
considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial, and
sincere. God doesn’t encourage us to be envious
or selfishly ambitious. God calls upon
us to be other-focused, not me-focused.
As Christians, we are encouraged to
live lives that are based on God’s wisdom and God’s teachings. We are called to
work to get along with other people….not to be envious of them…not to climb
over them to get but we want…but to work to be in healthy relationships with
other people. We are called to be gentle and reasonable. We are called to be
merciful towards people who don’t have enough of what they need – to forgive people
their debts, to share our extras with people who don’t have enough, to support
the work of organizations like the Daily Bread Food Pantry who strive to help
feed the hungry and care for the victims of floods.
True wisdom come from God, not from
the media, not from marketers, not from people who get something out of us spending
money on their products. God cares about how we treat each other. God doesn’t
want us to be jealous and envious of what others have; jealousy and envy are
negative emotions, not positive actions. We must work to resist the pull of the
world that is working against us being in heathy and harmonious relationships
with each other. Instead, we must seek to be peaceful, forgiving, gracious and
full of mercy. May we be so. Amen.
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