St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church

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The Sins of Envy and Anger

Matthew 20:1-16

March 19, 2006        (Click this link to see the bulletin)

1. How are you doing with your sin? Don’t get me wrong! I do not mean "Are your sins coming along fine? Did you find an inventive way to offend God this week?" Nope! None of that! What I mean is this: "Since I’ve been focusing my sermons on sin, what difference is that making in your life? Are you seriously thinking about what you do from day to day? I hope so, because my prayer for all of us is that we might be as close to God as we can be! To help us, I’ve dusted off Pope Gregory’s "Seven Deadly Sins." After all, they’re about 1,500 years old! Lots of dust! Gregory the Great developed them to help his people become closer to God. He dubbed them "deadly" because these seven sins are fatal to our relationship with God. It seems a bit morbid to me, though, so to make them a little less grotesque to grasp, I’ve called them weeds in the garden of our lives, and given them weed-like names. However, that does not in any way diminish the very serious nature of human sin! Not at all!

2. Last week we identified the very worst sin-weed – the Pride-bane. It is the worst sin-weed in our garden because all of the rest of these deadly sins grow directly from the sin of PRIDE. Pride-bane, the weed, has a head too big for its stem, and the stem and leaves are painfully prickly. By definition, the sin of pride is "self-worth that has turned haughty with an over-inflated sense of its own importance." It’s no real surprise, then, to discover that Pride generates the deadly sins of ENVY and ANGER, or, in my pseudo-botanical terms, Envy-ivy- and Anger-lion.

3. Envy-ivy, as you might imagine, is very green. It grows wild once it gets started, and the slightest contact makes it victims itch all over, much like its counterpart, poison ivy. Envy-ivy poisons our attitudes like poison-ivy poisons our skin. You know how it is when you want something new? You get an "itch" to buy it, whatever IT is that you HAVE to have. The purchase itch is like the poison ivy itch. How many of you have ever gotten "bit" by poison ivy? Boy, I have! I was cutting back the overgrowth along the fence, and thought blackberry vines had intertwined with wild roses. I pruned the "blackberry vines" so the wild roses could grow. What a mistake! That’s when I learned the importance of knowing the difference between a good vine and a bad vine! In the same way, we need to know the difference between interest (good vine or good situation) and envy (bad vine or bad situation). The Parable from Matthew’s Gospel shows us this difference. Notice that everyone was interested in the work the landowner offered – the morning people who lined up early, all the way to the night people who didn’t even wake up until noon. Interest was not a problem! But when the landowner paid everyone the same, that’s when the morning people turned green with envy-ivy and began to itch all over!

4. William White claims that Envy has four identifying characteristics: (1) It is highly competitive, always comparing itself to whomever it thinks has more or better, or does more and does it better. (2) It is always making sounds of discontent and dissatisfaction, because somebody else has more or better or newer, or does more and does it better. (3) Envy cannot see its own gifts, because it is always looking at what other people have, or do. And (4) Envy creates sadness. It completely crowds out any sense of thanksgiving and joy. Envy: Highly competitive, discontent, blind to what it already has, and sad. Does that sound like you or anybody you know? It just might be a case of envy-itis. The only known cure is to eradicate it! If you touch it at all, the poison will get started. Round-Up is about the only way to get rid of poison ivy. We can’t actually spray Round-Up on ourselves. But we can do the next-best thing. We can delete "WANT" from our vocabulary, at least as far as it pertains to wanting more than we need. There is a hokey truism that isn’t really that hokey – "The only way to have more is to want less."

5. Envy poisons us and turns us green. Anger, on the other hand, enrages us and turns us red, beginning in the vicinity of our faces. You’ve seen what happens to an angry person’s face? The word that Moses would have used for anger literally means nose. Nostrils flare, nose and face turn red. Anger happens! The Bible is full of stories about anger, but the ones that really get our attention are the stories about God and Jesus getting angry. God and Jesus angry? How, then, can anger be a sin? Since God and Jesus get angry, how could Gregory the Great have suggested that anger is one of the Seven Deadly Sins? The answer to that question depends of what it is that’s making us angry, and what we do with that anger. Anger-lions grow in the garden of life just like dandelions grow in our home gardens. Anger can be good; dandelions can be good, too. A few in the yard are kind of pretty, with their long green leaves and deep yellow blossoms. Even the white puff-ball of a dandelion gone to seed has its own beauty. Dandelion leaves are delicious in salads; dandelion roots, when roasted, make an acceptable substitute for coffee [so I’m told – I’ve never actually tried it!]. Dandelions can be good! Jesus became angry when the money-changers set up their tables in the Temple and cheated the poor people who came to buy animals for their sacrifices. That was good anger! God became angry when the people refused to do the things that would make their lives happy. That was good anger!

6. Anger can be good, but anger can also be bad. Many years ago in Lithuania, a gentle old woman lived alone in the woods. On the rare occasions when she spoke to people, it was always in proverbs that either baffled or irritated them. She was particularly caustic to a rich man who lived in town, for she thought him to be lazy. When she saw him sitting in the sun, she said, "As a door turns on his hinges, so a sluggard turns on his bed." He hated that old woman. One day she came upon him while he was embroiled in a fierce argument. She moved between the two shouting partners, pointed her finger in the rich man’s face, and said, "A hot-tempered man stirs up strife, but he who is slow to anger quiets contention." He was furious and vowed he would get rid of that meddling old woman. The next time she visited town, he was ready! He baked a cake filled with poison. After talking with her in a friendly fashion, he offered her his gift. "Please take this delicious cake home with you! You have never tasted cake like this before." The old woman’s only words to him were, "One day you will find yourself." As she walked down the road with her cake, the man muttered to himself, "And today you will find yourself in the arms of death." Now, it happened that, on that very same day, the man’s young son participated in a hunt in the woods close to her home. He and his friends lost their way and soon found themselves outside the hut where she lived. She hadn’t been back very long when the young man knocked on the door and told her how hungry and thirsty they were. Immediately she invited them in to have a piece of cake [which had not even been touched] and a glass of milk. The young man fell to the ground dead after the first bite. His friends left immediately to bring his father to him. As he knelt beside the body of his son, tears streamed down his cheeks, and the old woman spoke again, "The man who makes holes falls into them himself.

6. Anger can become a "deadly" sin, a hole into which we fall, when it takes over the garden of our lives. Statistics in Tulsa agree! Listen to this: By the end of February, 15 people had already been murdered in Tulsa. Of those 15, 11 of them were murdered by someone they knew. Anger can be deadly, deadly to the spirit and deadly to the body. Jesus told his disciples that being angry with someone had the very same impact as killing that person (Matthew 5:21-23). If you’re going to be angry, get angry with injustice.

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