Dorothy
Sayers once described sin as a “deep interior dislocation of the human
personality.” Sin makes us out of joint deep within our soul.
And just deleting sin from our vocabulary will not get rid of this bad
stuff or improving our education and graduating more therapists will not
heal this deep interior dislocation. I want us to discover
how Jesus Christ can put our joints back together and heal us deep
inside.
This morning I want us to consider what has been called the “nastiest,
the ugliest, the meanest” of the seven deadly sins, the sin that no one
confesses. If we’re red with anger, purple with rage, then
we’re green with ____. Green is a gorgeous color, but when
it’s your complexion, green people just aren’t real healthy.
Did you ever wonder where the phrase “green with envy” comes from?
Maybe it stands for dollar bills that we all envy. Or emeralds.
Or the green grass. Actually, this phrase goes all the way back to
BC times in Greece. Greeks speculated that envy made the liver
work overtime, producing excess bile and adding a slightly greenish tint
to one’s complexion. Envy convinces us that the grass is
greener on the other side.
Make no mistake. Envy is not just a little white sin. It is
deadly. The writer of Proverbs says “a healthy heart is life to
the body, but envy is rottenness to the bones. If we don’t
confront envy it will consume us, it will rot our soul.
Envy is not just looking over the fence at the greener grass, it is
wanting to torch our neighbor’s lawn if we can’t have just as green of
grass as they. If envy were to write a bestseller, it would be
called The Revenge of Failure. That’s why Frederick
Buechner describes envy as “the consuming desire to have everybody else
as unsuccessful as we are.” Envy does not just want
something that someone else has; it despises others who have something
they don’t have. In fact, it rejoices when others do badly or make
mistakes. The Pennsylvania Dutch have their own word for envy.
It’s Schadenfreude. Schadenfreude is the malicious joy at
someone else’s misfortune. Schadenfreude is secretly smiling
when the school prom queen shows up at the 25th reunion with
60 extra pounds and her third husband.
Envy imprisons people so that they can’t
celebrate the healing stories of Tom Merroth and Phyllis Tursack that we
heard this morning. Why? Because envy insists that they
should receive the same treatment from God as Tom and Phyllis.
The
movie Amadeus is a good example of how dangerous envy is.
Antonio Salieri is the court musician to the King of Austria. . .
