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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 8, 2015
Rev. Meg Barnhouse finishes her ongoing sermon series on the Ten Commandments. The tenth commandment has to do with greed and desire.
Call to Worship
The Summer Day
Mary Oliver, The House Light Beacon Press Boston, 1990.
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean– the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down–
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention,
how to fall down into the grass,
how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed,
how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Reading
Ellen Bass
The thing is to love life,
to love it even when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
Sermon
We have reached the end of our series on the Ten Commandments. This last one is the one that forbids coveting anything that is your neighbor’s. I was halfway through the work on this sermon before I realized I was going in the wrong direction. I was writing about how our US consumer economy is built on coveting, how advertisers work to make you want things you didn’t even know about, things you don’t need. I was writing about how we have lost our sense of “enough” and how that is the root of addiction, how people wanting more than their share is pillaging the planet.
Then I read the commandment again and remembered that it wasn’t about wanting. It was about wanting things that belong to someone else. If you just want something you can plan to save to buy it, or make something like it. Coveting, wanting things that belong to other people can drive you crazy.
Tenth Commandment
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.”
You can’t save up to buy that particular thing. It’s your neighbor’s. In this passage it talks about your neighbor’s wife like she’s a thing, and in those days the wives did belong to their husbands, as did the children. The commandment never could have read “don’t covet your neighbor’s husband.” Number one, that would be talking to women, which they would not have done, and number two, it would have sounded wrong to them to speak of a man in a list of animals and things. I’m enough of a 21st century person so that it sounds wrong to me to speak of a spouse as belonging to their partner. People do drive themselves crazy all the time, though, wanting a person who is in love with another person. People should be with the ones they choose to love. That’s just my opinion, and that’s another sermon.
Coveting, wanting something that is someone else’s doesn’t only make you eat your heart out, It sets you up for wishing something bad to happen to your neighbor, or it makes you think about how you deserve that thing and they don’t, all encouraging an adversarial dynamic rather than a compassionate or cooperative one. It can create bad feeling between you, guilt and anger and sorrow. The community is damaged. In a coveting situation, you are damaged and/or the community is damaged.
TEARING THE FABRIC
My friend Pat Jobe says he knew a woman who would see a nice car or a beautiful house, and she would say, “Ooooh, I wish that was mine and they had one better.” That’s how she got around the sin part of coveting. UU professor Philip Simmons is the author of “Learning to Fall” and speaks about what he’s learned while living with Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Writes that any wrong-doing tears the fabric of being. He points to our seventh principle, that we promote the view that everything is connected in an interdependent web of existence, and says that web, of which we are a part, sustains damage when we act destructively.
“All world religions place wrongdoing in this larger context. Papa-krita, the Vedic Sanskrit word that comes closest to our “sin,” denotes any action not in accord with the cosmic order. In Taoist philosophy, Tao refers both to the fundamental nature of things and the way of being in alignment with it. The Hindu and Buddhist concept of karma acknowledges that actions… not in alignment with the order of things, affect us both in this life and lives to come.”
Simmons urges us “to acknowledge that what we think and say and do matters in ways beyond our ordinary understanding. And so the sacred work of healing is harder than we thought: we confront our sins to heal not only ourselves and our relationships but the universe.”
Our lives are rooted in that connection, in oneness of all existence, and it is our religious practice to see that connection, to practice behaving as if it were real, to let the implications ripple through the living of our days.
Even if we are above wanting things, we UUs, in our passion for self improvement, can covet other people’s good qualities to the point that it makes us slide in to a spiral of despair and disappointment in ourselves. Forest Church, long time minister of All Souls UU in NYC wrote a great piece where he says that reading prescriptions for happiness is often so depressing that he thought he would try to point people in the direction of happiness by writing about how to be unhappy. “Advice on how to make yourself miserable could brighten your day. In this spirit, let me offer three bits of miserable advice that almost everyone can follow to his or her own detriment.
If you are anything like the rest of us, I expect you have developed a surefire talent for undermining your confidence by selectively comparing yourself to others. For instance, you have a co-worker who is enormously creative. Overlook the fact that she has just broken up with her fifth husband, has a “little” problem with alcohol, and is on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Forget all that. Simply measure your creative capacity against hers and weep.
Then there is that friend who is always the life of the party. You know how immature and insecure he is. No matter. He is always the life of the party. What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you be the life of the party sometimes?
And how about your rich second cousin? Just look at him. He has everything anyone could want. Admittedly, you’ve never seen him smile and he barks at his dog. But how happy you would be with only half his money!”
Make a composite person, he advises, someone with all the kindness of this one, the beauty of that one, the health of this one, the money of that one, the happy family life of this other, and then compare yourself to that composite person. Then you can really be miserable!
Whether it’s coveting our neighbor’s house and garden, their money or their health, their ease with people or their loving parents, their vacation home or their sunny disposition, we all do it. It’s in our natures, for many among us. If you ever eat your heart out over someone else’s height or weight or complexion or their relationships or their personality or their talent, know that you are human. I understand that’ it harms the community for us to be coveting, but we do it. What now?
Philip Simmons gives us this wisdom:
“We do not heal ourselves by scourging or rejecting our sinful parts but by drawing them into a circle of holiness made large enough to include them. There’s nothing our demons enjoy more than a good fight, nothing that confuses them more than our embrace. Our goal, always, is to transform evil through love.”
Let’s lay aside the semantics of whether coveting is sinful or evil, and just agree that it can do damage. Can it be embraced in a way that helps?
How can we embrace the “demons” of coveting and jealousy?
Julia Cameron is a therapist who works with artists. In her first book, The Artist’s Way, says that jealousies can point you toward what you are being called to bring into your life next. When you list the things you are jealous of in other people, you have a “map” of where you need to go next.
One artist who did this laid hers out in a grid: Who I’m jealous of. Why. What action does this indicate? She blogs at bluedogbarking.com
| Her ability to organize, get things done, and accomplish the goals she sets for herself | Start working | |
| Everyone gushes over her blog posts | Get real. Quit looking for validation through blog comments and appreciate the comments I do receive. | |
| Her incrediable intelligence, memory, and ability to articulate. | Listen closely and learn from her. |
One of my spiritual teachers, Martha Beck, would say “do you really want more comments? How would you feel if you got them? Warm, validated? What then? You would be empowered to keep going? Confident? What is it you’re really after?
Coveting is reality. We all do it. It just causes you suffering to think you shouldn’t, because it causes suffering whenever your thoughts argue with reality. Even if I could, I don’t want to hammer you into making yourself quit wanting things other people have. If you want to quit wanting, there is a way. You meditate, you learn to be still a lot, you practice being grateful for what you have. Meditation will help you grow in your spirituality, which will help you with craving and wanting. Gratitude is a powerful spiritual practice, which I wholeheartedly recommend. To supplement that, in the meantime, when you covet, when you are jealous, when you want something someone else has, write it down. Ask yourself why you want it. What do you imagine it bring to your life? What is the lack you are really feeling? What could you do to fill that lack? Coveting is an indicator of where you need to go. Use that energy for good. Use it to move yourself toward wholeness. Demons love a good fight. See if you can embrace them instead, turning their energy toward the good.
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