The Seven: Envy

“Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all” –The Witch from Snow White

“Love does not envy” –St. Paul

I’m a very competitive person. I always have been. I love to win. I love Jesus. I’m starting to learn those two things don’t go well together.

Here’s why:

When I was a kid, my mom entered me into two competitions at the Saline County Fair in Arkansas. One was the competition for playing musical instruments, and the other was for public speaking.

I won 2^nd place for my brilliant piano performance of Garth Brooks sophisticated piece…“The Dance” And I won 1^st place in the public speaking competition for my riventing talk on Computer Programming.

For my immense talent I was given blue and red ribbons (which I still have) and proceeded to put together my resume for any future jobs in the Country Music/Computer Programming industry.

There was only one problem. I was one of only two people in the musical instruments competition. And I was the only person competing in the public speaking competition.

I learned something very important that day. It is not enough for me to win. In order for it to matter, someone else has to lose.

The Land of Er

Nobody admits to envy.

I’ve been doing full time ministry for about 13 years now, and not one person has ever confessed to me that the real reason they’re being so critical of another person, or the reason that they’re so ambitious is because they’re filled with envy.

One problem with envy is that if we don’t confess it, no one outside of us really knows it’s there, the problem with envy is that we don’t really turn green with it.

But according the Christians who have gone before us, envy wilts the soul.

Think about how this plays out in our everyday lives.

Andy Stanley points out that all of us want to add an “Er” added onto the end of whatever adjectives we want to describe us. We don’t want to just be rich or smart or skinny or cool, we want to be rich-er, smart-er, skinny-er, cool-er.

And it’s not that I want you to have a bad life, I’m fine with you having talent or money or being handsome or gifted. I just want to have a little bit more of all that than you.

I want you to have smart kind funny kids, I just want my kids to have a bit more er than your kids.

C.S. Lewis once said that “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man… It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.”

And if you don’t see this about yourself, than consider this.

Have you ever noticed that sometimes when someone who’s got a bit more er than you, someone who’s got a better job or a better marriage or bigger house, that whenever something bad happens to those people that we feel good?

It’s often even people we know and even care about, and yet we’re still happy about their misfortune. The Germans even have a word for this: Schadenfreude, the joy at others misfortune.

And we know it’s wrong and sick, and we never talk about this part of ourselves, but it’s there. We watch a well to do friend crash and burn and we just close our office door and start quietly Schadenfreuding to our hearts content.

Except it doesn’t make our hearts content.

Misery Loves Competition

Buechner defines Envy as “the consuming desire to have everybody else as unsuccessful as you are.” And when envy has us in it’s vice we begin to be pro-active in helping others fail.

It’s there when you catch yourself gossiping about people just to put them down, thinking it will somehow pull you up. William Willimon says that in his pastoral experience, 80% of all the criticism he’s heard and given has been driven by envy.

And by the way, isn’t it interesting that it’s never the really rich and famous that we envy? It’s the never the Kardashians that I envy. It’s always the ones that have just a little bit more than we have?

Thomas Aquinas called Envy a “Small town sin,” (remember the list of the seven deadly sins were created by people living in monasteries together), and that’s particularly important here. Because envy is a vice that closes in on us when we live in close community with other people.

I think it’s interesting that Hate isn’t in the list of the seven deadly sins, but Envy is. Maybe that’s because hate is too generic and something that’s easy to pretend that only “bad people” have. Envy is more to the point. It’s a version of hate that everyone deals with. But to me rarely feels like hate, envy feels more like sadness.

I think envy leads so quickly to sadness because when we begin to focus on what we don’t have we lose sight of what we do. We begin to imagine and amplify what others have been given, and we stop naming the good gifts God had given us.

William Willimon, who spent much of his life pastoring people in Acadamia, says that, in his experience,

“Envy is found so often on college faculties where professors, living in such limited and confined space, and there being little economic rewards to fight over, must fight over something. So they fight over tenure or parking or titles, anything to suggest that one person is better than another… A professor I know, when hearing of a colleague being given a prestigious history award, said, “I could sell as many books as he, if I didn’t have such high standards for my scholarship.” I recall another academic who, upon learning of the recipients of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, commented, “Sweden is a pitifully small country

I love that illustration. For me, living in a college town with lots of college faculty at my church it’s easy to pick on my friends, but Willimon says that the next group that struggle with envy just as much…are Pastors.

As soon as I read that I knew he was right. I could imagine the different ways we pastors subtly compete with each other.

“How big is your church?”

“What social justice ministries do you have?”

“How many people subscribe to your podcast?”

And it’s not like anyone is keeping score with these questions (aside from Outreach Magazine), or that we’re trying to breed jealousy among fellow ministers.

It’s just that envy is so, well, American.

The problem is it’s just not very Christian. Envy carves up the world into winners and losers, it baptizes pride and fuels greed, it destroys community and it insults grace.

I think it’s fascinating that today envy is so socially acceptable. Freud made it the driving force for just about everything. But the early Christians named it for what it was, a sin, and a deadly one.

A few years ago, Time Magazine named Stanley Hauerwas “The Best Theologian in America”, Hauerwas had done the hard work of the soul and knew what he had to do. So he thanked them for the honor but then told them that, as Christians, we don’t consider “best” to be one of our categories.

What a great way to respond.

I wish I’d thought of that.