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The Life You Wish You Had
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis September 4, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Habakkuk 2:1-14; Zephaniah 3:1-5 Romans 7:7-13
"'Thou shalt not covet,' hardest of the commandments/is listed last so the others won't be neglected," begins poet Carl Dennis. "An hour a day of practice is all that anyone/Can expect you to spare, and in ten years' time/You may find you've outgrown your earlier hankering/For your neighbor's house, though his is brick/And yours is clapboard, though his contains a family./Ten years of effort and finally it's simple justice/To reward yourself with a token of self-approval." The tenth commandment, according to Luther, is "addressed not to those whom the world considers wicked rogues, but precisely to the most upright-to people who wish to be commended as honest and virtuous because they have not offended against the preceding commandments….Such is [human] nature that we all begrudge another's having as much as we have," he wrote in 1529. "Everyone acquires all he can and lets others look out for themselves. Yet we all pretend to be upright." How ironic, then, that the command not to covet is up this morning as Katrina has thrown us back this week upon the lives we actually have and hold with an admixture of gratitude and guilt. Covetousness does not avail when you have spent your days watching house and wife, man-servant and maid-servant, ox and ass and everything that is our neighbors', in the words of the psalmist, being "carried away as with a flood." How much lighter our grasp is on the things still in our life from the grip we thought we had when last we were gathered. Curiously God has been spared the usual and ubiquitous question "Why?" that resounded in newspapers and from pulpits on the Sunday following the Tsunami. I think this is because we know why. We know that much of the suffering, in New Orleans at least, might have been prevented had we chosen to pay attention to a city whose population was at risk on countless economic fronts. By the complicity of our apolitical lives, we have chosen for years the politics that feather our own nests. We have chosen the life we wished we had, the life promising more and better, over the destinies of our neighbors purposed by God and given into our common keeping. Even Fox News says as much I am told! Play these same human choices back and back and back all the way to Sinai, and slowly we begin to understand the final and overarching freedom commanded by God in the tenth place: the freedom to live the destiny given us by God to live... together. First, however, we need to do business with the commandment's original context. The question debated by scholars is whether the command is addressed to our subjective and individual state of mind or to the objective and societal action of unjust acquisition. By the time Paul quotes the command in his letter to the Romans, he omits the objects not to be coveted in favor of "all kinds of covetousness" produced in his heart through the limit the law has imposed. Translated into our well-heeled heads, covetousness finds us imagining the life we wish we had: coveting the spouse we wish we had married, the job landed, the degree earned, the children raised, the savings amassed, in short, the destiny put in our minds by a market economy. That is why, on a hill such as ours, Paul's words are happily heard to address our subjective state of mind with its "sinful passions, aroused by the law, at work in our members to bear fruit for death." We simply want too much stuff, our neighbor's stuff, his house that is brick and filled with a family. Luther was right: we are honest and virtuous. This desire of ours is no crime. In fact, it is downright necessary for the common good if that "good" is ever to trickle down! But this week our merely subjective context has been carried away as with a flood too, and the prophet rather than Paul reminds us of the objective consequences of our failure to obey God's tenth word. "Most of biblical law is based in favor of the 'have-nots,'" says Marvin Chaney, Old Testament professor at San Francisco Theological Seminary, "not because they are morally superior, but because of their greater vulnerability and lack of power to defend their own vested interests. When understood as entirely subjective," he writes, "the tenth commandment almost inevitably gives aid and comfort to the "haves" over against the "have-nots." Zephaniah and Habakkuk will have none of this! By their words we are turned to the objective social context of the tenth commandment. Both prophets in the late seventh century…they behold a desperate political situation and with fury name the gaping divide between the haves and the have-nots that has become institutionalized. Seeing their world through the biblical narrative, we trace their judgments through the repeating story of what Czech theologian Jan Lockman has called the "side-long glance": "the envious comparison we make between ourselves and others, the suspicion that the other person is preferred, privileged, has an unfair advantage." This is the glance of Adam and Eve when told by the serpent, "Eat from the tree forbidden by God, the tree that God's limit has made you covet"; or the glance of Cain toward his brother Abel that found him denying before God the destiny that made him his brother's keeper; or the glance of Ahab toward Naboth's vineyard; or the glance of David toward Uriah's wife Bathsheba. Counter-intuitively, it is the side-long glance of the rich toward the poor, the white toward people of color, the powerful toward the vulnerable such that Israelite society, like our own, was steeped in the social consequences of covetousness. Habakkuk cries to God asking why: "Why do you look on the treacherous, and are silent…You have made people like the fish of the sea, like crawling things that have no rulers." God answers him in the only words most people recognize from this seldom read book of the Bible: "Write the vision; make it plain on tablets…If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay." Sounds like the head of FEMA to me! But the word of the Lord goes on, turning the prophet to "Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them…They open their throats wide as Sheol; like Death they never have enough." Enter, says Chaney, the tenth commandment and the prophet's condemnation of a people who have forgotten God's command. For Zephaniah it is the honest and virtuous who seem to have lost the high ground-the officials, the judges, the prophets, the priests--and who now find themselves directly in the path of the storm; for Habakkuk, it is the rich of Babylon: "'Alas for you who heap up what is not your own!' How long will you load yourselves with goods taken in pledge? Will not your own creditors suddenly rise, and those who make you tremble, wake up? Then you will be booty for them." The looters who have looted the poor are, themselves, looted by God! Chaney imagines the elite of Jerusalem crying, "We are utterly ruined! How can the Lord take away what is mine? Why, he's dividing the fields of our estates back into subsistence plots for the peasants, splintering asunder what we worked so hard to accumulate-calling it 'restoration!' Really! Why doesn't God just stick to spiritual matters where he belongs? What has proper theology to do with this so-called land reform and its unwise interference with market forces?" What indeed I thought as on Thursday of this week as I read the conservative columnist and Media, Pennsylvania native David Brooks, hearing in his words not the voice of the elite of Jerusalem but of the Old Testament prophets: "Floods wash away the surface of a society," Brooks wrote, "the settled ways things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequities." The faces we have watched pleading for help, for water, for food, for medicine, for rescue are the faces of the poor, the elderly, the chronically ill, the faces of color in our society, and this is not by chance. Like the levy that burst, so the limit proclaimed by the tenth commandment to our acquisitive grasp-our sidelong glance-has broken through the surface of our common life. Revealed in the faces of those left behind is the face of him who had nowhere to lay his head, even Jesus Christ. This One who fulfilled the law and the prophets through the way of his love has came to set us free once more. He invites us in these faces of need to draw near to him, calling us back from the life we wish we had to the life we have been given to live together. There are no techniques to be practiced here, in the hour a day we can spare so that in ten years' time we might quit our hankering for our neighbor's house though his is brick. Rather these faces recommend three ancient spiritual disciplines for resisting covetousness. The first discipline is known as memento mori, the contemplation of death. In the faces of the poor, the sick, the elderly, the rejected, we have contemplated death itself this week. "To know the ubiquity of death makes us sensible of the absurdity of putting our trust and our hope" in the life we wish we had, thereby missing the richness of the life we have been given by God before it is gone too soon. "Is it an accident," asks theologian Rusty Reno, "that our society, which so wants our loyalty, hides death from view…?" [No coffins on television please!] "Memento mori remains an apt spiritual exercise." In the second place, the old theologians recommended generosity as the great bulwark against the breaking of the tenth commandment. Letting go of the acquisitions which own us is a step we may take, by God's grace, toward the freedom of the life we have been given by God to live. Reports are that the money is pouring in, we are letting go within limits, but the old theologians would have us go a step further into what they called "irresponsible charity." "The nobleman is not just to set up a poorhouse. He is to throw a banquet for all…an act of celebration that cares not for the morrow." Finally to counter the side-ward glance, the old theologians counseled an upward one. Look up to the heavens, they said, for "only if we nourish a love of the kingdom of God can we sustain a [critique] of the world that does not decay into despair or cynicism." This is the turn that tragedy often effects in us as we seek to abide in him who is the help of the helpless. their faces so various and vexed, we are turned not toward our failed politics or institutions, but toward God's kingdom breaking in at the place of our greatest fear and weakness. With our eyes turned upward in order to seek that kingdom first, the rest of our treasures, to use Jesus' take on this commandment, will follow! "'Thou shalt not covet,' hardest of the Commandments," says the poet, "is listed last so the others won't be neglected/An hour a day of practice is all that anyone/Can expect you to spare, and in ten year's time/…Ten years of effort…finally it's simple justice…" Thanks be to God. Amen. |