It’s not fair! How many times have we said that. Or at least thought it. I’ll give you a moment to remember the last time somebody cut in front of you in traffic or someone declared bankruptcy after racking up irresponsible debt. Do you feel just a bit of anger over the injustice of it all? And if that doesn’t resonate, recall the universal human experience of being scolded by our parents when we bickered over perceived unfairness between ourselves and our siblings or our friends. How many times did we hear (or say) things like “the world is not fair, grow up and get over it.” So we grew up, but…we may not have entirely gotten over it.
Our scriptures this morning witness to the persistent human temptation to envy. The Bible so often holds up a mirror to both the best and the worst of the human condition. And today’s readings, well… they reflect some of the worst. This is, the need to be right, the need to be first, the need to be compensated the best. We have, for example, a story from the well-known book of Jonah. And while we all probably recall the improbable whale that swallowed him, I think the story we heard this morning of his cranky response to God hits a bit closer to home. Lord you told me to tell bad news to Nineveh—which I really didn’t want to do—but then you didn’t destroy them after all, making me look like a fool. And you even took away my lousy bush!
And Jesus—Lord, have mercy—do you really expect us to be content that someone who came late to work got the same compensation that we did? That’s a tough parable to love, but in reality, the injustice usually works the other way. As our millennial and xennial generations remind us. Younger and more recent hires get paid much less, and won’t ever get a defined benefits pension like their parents and grandparents did. That doesn’t seem fair, either, as my public school teacher son points out.
Honestly, who among us wouldn’t be complaining to God if we were sent on a fool’s errand like Jonah thought he had been, or if someone else got an unfair bonus after hardly working at all. Compounding the temptation to envy is that complaining about unfairness has become something of a cultural epidemic. It seems to be permissible even among adults with enormous wealth, privilege and power to claim that “nobody in history has been treated as unfairly as me.” Presbyterian pastor Frederic Buechner wrote in his book Wishful Thinking: “Envy is the consuming desire to have everybody else be as unsuccessful as you are.”
Among this morning’s readings, the Psalm and the Letter to the Philippians offer antidotes to envy. We can remember God’s great goodness and sing of God’s righteous deeds, which is one of the things we come together in church to do. But as our faithful Morning Prayer group well knows, the Psalms include plenty of whining about unfairness. Paul, on the other hand, seems to have recovered from the sin-sickness of envy. But it’s a strong medicine that Paul prescribes. Die to yourself so that you may be fully alive in Christ. Become indifferent to everything else, even to life itself.
This is a scary proposition, but it’s also deeply true. As we come alive in Christ—beginning with our Baptisms—we are invited to let our tendency towards jealousy die away. We can let go of the need to be right, the need to be first, the need to be compensated the best. And we don’t have to white knuckle it or pretend that we’re grownups when we really feel like a preschooler about to hit his brother. God’s slow and gentle work in us—which happens when we seek it out—is far more gracious and full of compassion. As we yield ourselves to the unconditional love of God, we come to realize that it’s the only thing we really want.
There’s a foundational prayer from the Jesuit tradition that asks for exactly this—
The Goal of our life is to live with God forever. God, who loves us, gave us life. Our own response of love allows God’s life to flow into us without limit. All the things in this world are gifts from God, Presented to us so that we can know God more easily and make a return of love more readily. As a result, we appreciate and use all these gifts of God Insofar as they help us to develop as loving persons. But if any of these gifts become the center of our lives, They displace God And so hinder our growth toward our goal. In everyday life, then, we must hold ourselves in balance. We should not fix our desires on health or sickness, Wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one. For everything has the potential of calling forth in us A deeper response to our life in God. Our only desire and our one choice should be this: I want and I choose what better leads To God’s deepening his life in me.
I recall spending days wrestling with this prayer. Ten years ago this very week I began a 30 day silent retreat, and my spiritual director told me to pray this prayer until I believed it.Now some of you may not believe that I could be silent for 30 days—actually I didn’t believe I could be silent for 30 days—but I learned a few important things from the deep immersion in quiet prayer. I learned how much stronger God’s strength is than my own, and how much wiser God’s wisdom. But most of all, I learned how very loved I was.
And that makes all the difference. It’s from the knowledge of God’s unconditional and saving love that are empowered to engage the hard questions of justice and generosity and reconciliation that we are called to as Christians. So, for example, we can reframe the issue of immigration so that it’s not about who got here first, but rather about who needs safety. We can stop worrying about restitution as a question of who acquired land and capital honestly, but rather as a question of who needs enough to live with dignity. Because, as Rev. Rachel so creatively demonstrated in her sermon last week, everything we have comes from God, who gave it to us with radical abandon. Therefore, we can risk giving it to each other. Because we are, as our stewardship theme will explore profoundly during October, rooted in abundance.
In the light of God’s radical goodness and generosity, we don’t even need to compare ourselves to other churches, which—I know for a fact—we Christians have a capacity to do! Now I’m not saying that I hear a lot of that at Trinity: honestly, I don’t. There’s so much about Trinity that it is utterly unique, including each one of you. But I’m really grateful to our Vital+Thriving Team for leading us through a process to uncover the deeply truthful stories of Trinity, both the beautiful and the painful parts of them. Because like Jesus as God incarnate, we too are an embodied manifestation of God’s love, called to Christian witness in this very particular location. And like Jesus who showed his wounds to his friends, we have an extraordinary capacity to empathize with people who suffer. I am so very proud to be part of this church!
Let me invite you to continue building the story of Trinity, as people called to be generous as God is generous. There are so many ways to share the good news! You can volunteer to make our worship more lovely, serve our community more compassionately, care for our children more creatively, and make music more beautifully. Look for some friendly vestry members with clipboards and sign-up sheets! And you can also keep gathering and listening and talking to one another, because that’s one of the principal ways we discern God’s call.
What our Vital+Thriving team calls “God’s promised and preferred future” for Trinity Cathedral, is something we discover together in community. You can join the V+T steering team in our Parish Hall right after worship today, to hear what your fellow Trinitarians have been thinking and hoping and praying about, and to add your own dreams. All this may sound like a tall order, but fear not. We can dream big and be the best church for our community, with God’s help. Because God got here first and gave the most, and—even when things don’t seem fair from our perspective—the Lord continues to be gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and of great kindness.
