The Seven Deadly Sins - Acedia (Sloth)

I’m going to begin this morning with a wee clip from Zootropolis which some of you might have seen with the children or grandchildren.

Policewoman Judy Hopps wants to track down a car from its registration plate as quickly as possible. But she’s not best pleased when she finds out who’s staffing the desks at the DVLA!

(CLIP)

Now that’s funny. But it’s not sloth! At least, not as the Desert Fathers would have described it.

In our culture, sloth almost always means sluggishness or laziness, and the Bible certainly has something to say about that, especially in the book of Proverbs: 

As a door turns on its hinges, so a sluggard turns on his bed.

The sluggard buries his hand in the dish; he is too lazy to bring it back to his mouth. (Prov 26:14,15)

A sluggard does not plough in season;

so at harvest time he looks but finds nothing. (Proverbs 20:4)

So laziness is certainly a part of sloth; but it’s only a part of it.

The Desert Fathers, those early monastics who took themselves out to the desert in search of a purer life, used the term ‘acedia’ rather than sloth, and I’m going to follow suit today because as we’ll see ‘acedia’ is a much more nuanced and comprehensive word.

I pulled this image

together from my reading for today and straight away you’ll get a sense for what the monastics meant by acedia - they were speaking about:

listlessness, apathy, a lack of focus and purpose, indifference, ‘checking out’ – deciding that you can’t be bothered and aren’t going to try any more.

ennui, boredom, torpor, drudgery, dissipation – a sense that your energies are being wasted.

resignation, sadness, depression and cynicism – because you despair of any change ever being possible.

Some of the other deadly sins target the eye, or the stomach or the heart or the mind. Acedia throws a wet blanket of malaise over your whole being. It brings everything down.

As one writer puts it - “Envy thinks that if it can only get hold of the thing that is envied, it will be satisfied. Sloth is beginning to think that satisfaction can never be found.”. And when that thought settles into your heart, you’re in a bad way.

The Desert Fathers held that the source of their temptations were malign spirits, trying to lure them from the right way, and Evagrius has this to say about Acedia. 

“The demon of acedia – also called the noonday demon – is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all. He presses his attack about the fourth hour (10am) and besieges the soul til about the eighth hour. (2pm). First of all he makes it seem that the sun barely moves, and that the day is fifty hours long. Then he constrains the monk to look constantly out of the windows, to walk outside his cell (room), to gaze carefully at the sun to determine how far it stands from the ninth hour, to look now this way and that for distraction.

Then he instils in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself, a hatred for manual labour.

He leads him to reflect that charity has departed from among the brethren, that there is no-one to give encouragement.

The demon drives him along to desire other places where he can more easily procure life’s necessities, more readily find work and make a real success of himself.

He leaves no leaf unturned to induce the monk to forsake his cell and drop out of the fight.

It all sounds very old fashioned, on first hearing, but when you boil it down it’s as relevant today as ever. We get bored. We look for distractions. We start to hate the situation we’re in; start dreaming of that mythical place where the grass is always greener and everything always goes well. We kid ourselves that we can find it. And so we leave the place we are, only to discover – in time - that the next place is just the same. Because the people we’re with are just the same. And we are just the same.

Living with acedia is like being in a kind of exile where things never feel quite right and we can’t find any peace. We become so listless that time, and even life itself, become burdensome.

The closest description of that in the Bible comes in the book of Deuteronomy. At this stage in their history, God is giving the law to the people of Israel, making a covenant with them as they travel through the desert. And with the covenant come blessings if they keep their end of the bargain, and curses if they don’t. And at the end there’s a warning of the state they’ll find themselves in if they turn their backs on God. They’ll end up in exile, far away from home and everything that makes for peace. 

“…you shall find no ease, no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the LORD will give you a trembling heart, failing eyes, and a languishing spirit. ⁶⁶Your life shall hang in doubt before you; night and day you shall be in dread, with no assurance of your life. ⁶⁷In the morning you shall say, “If only it were evening!” and at evening you shall say, “If only it were morning!”—because of the dread that your heart shall feel and the sights that your eyes shall see.”

So if this is the terrain of acedia , it’s little wonder that our gut reaction is to try and escape from it. And as we’ll see later, that may not be the right thing to do. But classically, we try to escape the pain of acedia in two ways. We leave, physically, or we leave mentally.

The temptation for a monk in acedia was to physically get up and leave.”I’m dying here. This place is a dead end, and these people are a dead loss. I’m going to go and find a better community where things come more easily and I can flourish and be appreciated.”

And that’s what some of them did. But of course, they’d never last long in their new setting because before long, something else would offend them, they’d get disaffected, and the whole cycle would start all over again.

They had a word for that kind of monk in the old days – ‘gyrovagues’ they were called. Monks who could never settle but just wandered from place to place looking for the perfect community; not realising that they had about as much chance of finding that as they had of finding the end of a rainbow.

Do you know anyone like that? Someone for whom satisfaction always seems to be out of reach? They’re always chasing after a new partner, or a new job, or a new setting in the hope that it will make things right, but they never seem to settle down and be happy. It’s a symptom of our age, I think. The false belief that if we only up sticks and leave where we are, then we’ll find happiness.

The Desert Fathers’ advice to us on that is simple. Abba Moses put it this way: “Stay in your cell (your little room), and your cell will teach you everything.” Centuries later, the great mathematician Blaise Pascal echoed that thought: He said

“I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact. That they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”

Stay in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything. Stay in your cell, in your situation, and you will eventually encounter yourself.

The path that leads to life doesn’t take you away from your present circumstances, it takes you deeper into them as you start to unpack them with God and begin discover the truth about yourself. You can’t do that work if you’re constantly running away.

That’s why St Benedict, in starting a new monastic community, introduced a vow of stability alongside the existing vows of obedience, chastity and poverty. He knew that if you run when things get difficult, you never learn. If you leave in a huff, you don’t grow. If you storm off because of others’ imperfections, you never do the harder work of facing up your own imperfections.

Acedia tells us that in order to make a life for ourselves, we have to get up and leave. In most circumstances, though not all, that’s the very thing we must not do.

Stay in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything. That’s the advice of the Fathers.

But as I suggested earlier, the noonday demon has a second mode of temptation up its sleeve. If it can’t make you leave your situation physically, it can encourage you to leave it mentally, and I have to say this – I think – is one of the strongest temptations of our age.  The temptation of distraction.

Distraction is an analgesic for the pain of acedia, and depending on your temperament, distraction can take one of two forms.

Those of us inclined to laziness tend to distract ourselves with things that amuse, a word that literally means without thought A-muse. You can binge on Netflix. Watch whole series over the space of a couple of evenings. You can check your mobile every couple of seconds; see what’s new on Facebook. That’s one of my temptations – especially when I’m at the PC supposed to be writing a sermon! You can follow the click-bait ads at the bottom of a webpage because you really want to find out how amazing Michelle from Eastenders looks now. Anything to distract yourself.

And if all else fails, you can sleep. Sleep and acedia often go together; and that’s less about laziness than it is about escaping the demands and the disappointments of life in a few moments of blissful forgetfulness.

When life feels routine and boring, amusement offers us an easy way out.

I’m reading a brilliant Stephen King series at the minute. It’s unputdownable. I fall asleep at night with the book in my hand, usually halfway through a chapter. And very recently, a little voice in my head has been encouraging me to take the book into the study and finish off the chapter in the morning. And, I have to confess to you, that’s what I’ve been doing. Because distracting myself, a-musing myself means I can delay settling down to the real work I should be doing – the work of prayer and spiritual reading, which demand more of my heart and mind.

Some folk find amusement distracting. Others distract themselves by throwing themselves into work. They keep busy so they don’t have to think. And that’s why the image of the lazy sloth isn’t always helpful - because acedia can sometimes manifest in hyperactivity.

Pascal writes: “Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness.”

In other words, when we cease working and sit alone in the silence of our cell, it’s then that we sense our creaturely need – the very thing which can open us up to God! But we’re so scared of facing it that we’d rather keep ourselves busy with a thousand other things. It helps keep our mind off troubling thoughts about ourselves or about God.

Is that you, I wonder? Would you know what to say to God if you sat still with him for ten minutes in a quiet room?

Once again, Pascal hits the nail on the head when he says:

“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries. And yet, it itself is the greatest of our miseries. For it is this which hinders us from reflecting on ourselves and makes us insensibly ruin ourselves.”

Do you sense a touch of acedia in yourself this morning?

“How would I know” you ask!

Try asking where in life you’re feeling bored, or listless, or sad just now? Where are you tempted to give up? Where do you find yourself having daydreams about how things could be different, ‘if only’….

That’s your cell. The place you are, but the place that part of you is tired with. It could be a marriage, or a lack of marriage; life with children, or without children. It could be a job, a relationship, a responsibility you carry, a group that you belong to. And there are times when you wish you could walk away to where the grass seems greener.

If that’s ringing bells this morning, then the advice that the Fathers give is simple – don’t flee. Stay prayerfully in your cell. Let it show you yourself. Let it teach you. And don’t give in to your distractions. Little by little God will help you, and little by little, things can and will change.

I’ll end with this story from the Desert Fathers:  “A certain brother came to Abba Arsenius, his mentor, and told him that he could not fast and he could not pray and he could not work. Being the kind who could hide himself in busyness, he asked to be allowed to go and visit the sick, arguing that that was an equivalent good work.

Though this was indeed a good work, Abba Arsenius recognised that the devil had been sowing seeds and said to him ‘Go. Eat, Drink, Sleep. Just don’t leave your cell.’. He was well aware that it is endurance in the cell that makes a monk what he ought to be. So for three days the brother did just this. And then he was overcome with acedia.

But he found some little palm leaves and he started trimming them. The next day he started braiding them. And when he felt hungry, he said ‘here are some more palm leaves. I’ll prepare them and then have something to eat.’ He finished them and then he said. “Perhaps I’ll read a little bit before eating”. When he had done some reading he said ‘now I’ll sing a few Psalms and then I can go and eat with a good conscience.’

And so, by God’s help, he went on – little by little – until he had indeed become what he was meant to become.

Amen – and thanks be to God for his word.

The Seven Deadly Sins - Anger

“It’s been a long time since we had one of your poems on a Sunday”, somebody said to me a couple of weeks ago.

And shameless attention seeker that I am, that was all the encouragement I needed…..

Now I wouldn’t dignify this bit of writing by calling it a poem because it pays absolutely no attention to metre or rhyme; though apparently that’s fine these days if you’re writing what’s known as ‘free verse’!

No – I’m reading it not because it has any literary merit, but because it’s a good illustration of the subject matter for today which is anger. Or more specifically, the anatomy of anger. Where does it come from. How does it manifest. What do we do with it?

The events you’re about to hear happened exactly as written, almost exactly ten years ago to the day. This is called Eggs.

Eggs

First day out on the road bike.

Tanking along towards Potterton

gaining speed after the hilly slog

through Ardo to the Tarves road.

Surprised, for all the indoor training,

How tired my legs feel.

  

Young idiots crawl up behind me

In an orange Polo.

Woolly hatted,

Woolly headed,

And the passenger hollers right at me

As they speed past,

Yahooing into the distance.

Scared the life out of me.

Took a moment to steady myself

Before the anger took hold.

The thoughts that race through your mind!

I got the registration.

I remember it now! P40 FOR.

Could I call the police, make a complaint?

Would there be a satisfying knock on his door?

Would his smug face turn ashen grey as he opened it?

Better still – could I trace the car, find out where he lived.

Teach him a lesson of some kind?

Revenge daydreams still circling in my mind

as I turned into Panmure Gardens;

And saw the car sitting there.

Suddenly all those dreams became possible.

I could break off a wing mirror.

Stop, and let his tyres down.

I could return in darkness

And do a drive by with eggs,

Or even paint.

I freewheeled past, but all the while my mind was turning over.

And still, a day later, the anger smoulders.

I looked in the fridge late yesterday night,

Found a whole box of eggs.

Checked the time – well past midnight.

No-one around.

Nobody would see.

But actually, somebody would see.

And that alone,

More than anything else,

Stayed my hand.

This parish is small enough that I bet some of you know who was driving P40 FOR that day! And if you do, tell them from me they had a lucky escape!

But I share that wee story with you because it’s a text-book case of anger.

There I was, minding my own business, when these young guys bellow in my face and nearly make me fall off my bike into a busy road.

And the first reaction to that is purely instinctive. The primal brain responds to that kind of idiocy with anger. When someone deliberately scares you and puts you in danger, you can’t stop getting angry any more than you can stop your heart racing or your breath quickening. It’s out of your control. And there’s nothing wrong with that aspect of anger. It’s a hard-wired defence mechanism that we all share.

But once the brain’s got some of its equilibrium back, it moves onto the next stage of anger. It rationalises what’s just gone on and becomes angry at the injustice of it all. I was just out on my bike for a quiet ride! I wasn’t bothering anybody, I wasn’t in anyone’s way. It’s not fair that these guys noised me up! Did they even think about the danger! What would have happened if I’d ended up in the middle of the road?

And again, that aspect of anger isn’t sinful. We have genuine grievances in life, and we shouldn’t pretend them away. Injustices happen, and anger, rightly harnessed, can be a powerful motivating force for change.

Around the same time I was making that bike ride, some of us were preparing to oppose a quarry development right on our doorstep. And part of the motivation for that was anger – anger at the injustice that these millionaire developers could come in and completely disrupt the lives of some of our neighbours. One couple were going to have to have a fifteen foot earth bund placed on two sides of their property to try and minimise the effects of dust and noise, completely obscuring their views and depriving them of daylight. And on the third side of their house there would be a queue of lorries every morning, belching out exhaust fumes while they waited for the quarry to open, and scores more coming and going throughout the day.

It’s not just that a couple at that stage of their lives should be threatened with that level of intrusion. And it’s not just that an area of outstanding beauty like this corner of North East Scotland should be peppered with more of these kind of unsightly developments.

Sometimes it’s entirely right to be angry. As children of a God who cares about justice, children made in his image, there would be something sorely amiss if we weren’t angry when folk are exploited, or abused or persecuted or ignored.

 “Do not take advantage of a widow or an orphan. ²³If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry. ²⁴My anger will be aroused.” (Exodus 22:22-24) says God.

Some anger is completely unwarranted. The rage that makes a young guy kick a stranger’s  head in on a Friday night in Union Street just because he can.

But there is such a thing as just anger. And that kind of anger, in itself, isn’t sinful. It’s actually godly in that it reflects something of God’s passions and God’s concerns.

But this is where we come to a fork in the road, because there are two ways to go with just anger. You can take things into your own hands and start plotting your violent revenge. Kick off the wing mirror. Find some eggs. Check out what paint sprays you have in your garage. Do you see where your mind takes you when you follow that path? Into disproportionate retribution. An endless spiral of violence. Your anger may be just, but your response to it isn’t. It’s wrong. It’s sinful.

The better way is to own your anger; not to lessen it by one iota, but to vocalise it to God, and ask for his help – in whatever form that help may come.

I’ve been using a trivial example this morning to illustrate my point. But now I’m going to jump to the other end of the spectrum. I’m going to ask Meg Duncan to read Psalm 137 to you. You’ll know the start of this Psalm well. I doubt that you’ll know the finish.

Psalm 137

¹    By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept

    when we remembered Zion.

²    There on the poplars

    we hung our harps,

³    for there our captors asked us for songs,

    our tormentors demanded songs of joy;

    they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

⁴    How can we sing the songs of the Lord

    while in a foreign land?

⁵    If I forget you, O Jerusalem,

    may my right hand forget _ëits skill_û.

⁶    May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth

    if I do not remember you,

    if I do not consider Jerusalem

    my highest joy.

⁷    Remember, O Lord, what the Edomites did

    on the day Jerusalem fell.

    “Tear it down,” they cried,

    “tear it down to its foundations!”

⁸    O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,

    happy is he who repays you

    for what you have done to us—

⁹    he who seizes your infants

    and dashes them against the rocks.

What an appalling thing to find in scripture.  A bloody death-wish for the babies of Babylon. And of course, people will point to texts like that and say – ‘there you go – that’s the problem with religion. That’s the kind of thing that their God sanctions.’

But let’s not be too hasty.

Firstly, just because it’s vocalised, written in the Psalms, it doesn’t mean that God agrees with it. What we’re hearing here is the Psalmist pouring out everything that’s in his heart, unfiltered. God understands what he’s saying, but it doesn’t mean that he necessarily approves of it.

But secondly, it’s worth remembering the context. This psalm was written while Israel was in exile. Babylon had laid siege to Jerusalem  for two years and thousands had died of starvation. Thousands more were killed or raped when the Babylonians finally entered the city – looting and destroying God’s temple, burning the palace and tearing down the defensive walls. They captured King Zedekiah, slaughtered his sons in front of him and then gouged out his eyes before leading him and his people off to Babylon as slaves.

Simple question - If they did that to you and your people, what would you wish on them in return?

If you’d seen soldiers dash your children’s brains out against the rocks, what would you want to do to their children?

This kind of text isn’t in the Scriptures because it shows us what God wants. It’s in the Scriptures to show us that whatever bitterness and anger rages within us, we can pour it out to God undiluted. Because God doesn’t want propriety! He wants our honesty. He wants us to acknowledge what’s really in our hearts, because it’s then, and only then, that he can start to help us deal with our anger. Help us find another way.

Because there always is another way. Another option to revenge, though it’s usually a far harder path to take.  You can choose to break the cycle of violence. You can choose to fight evil not with more evil, but with courage, with non-violent resistance, with moral authority; maybe even with forgiveness. All this becomes possible when we take our anger to God, rather than holding onto it for ourselves.

The Psalmist, understandably, wanted to dash babies’ heads against the walls. God, through Jeremiah, offered a different way to come to terms with exile. “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper. This is what the Lord says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfil my gracious promise to bring you back home.” Jeremiah 29: 4-10.

When we are justifiably angry, we’re not sinning. But we do find ourselves at fork in the road with a choice to make. Will I let my anger deafen me to anything God might say to me, and take my revenge? Or will I pour out all the pain and injustice to God, and let him help me deal with it?

We always have a choice. Reflecting on his release from prison many years later, Nelson Mandela wrote - 

“As I walked out the door towards the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.”

Are you imprisoned by your own anger this morning? Maybe you were treated unjustly, and it still rankles. Maybe you were mis-represented, spoken ill off when you’d done nothing wrong.

I know, says Christ. They did that to me too.

Maybe you were actually hurt; physically, emotionally, spiritually. Maybe you still carry the scars of that conflict, even though it might have happened years ago.

I know, says Christ. They did that to me too.

Maybe you want to call judgment down on their heads, to repay them double for all that they’ve done to you.

I know, says Christ. I could have felt like that too. But I chose the better way. I chose to leave it all in God's hands.

I don’t know your circumstances, or the justice of your cause this morning. But I do know this. If your anger is just, you have a choice. You can take things into your own hands and make them worse, or you can swallow hard, pour out your heart to God and find the freedom that comes with knowing that justice and judgment is in his hands, not yours.

Amen, and thanks be to God for his word.

The Seven Deadly Sins - Envy

There’s a story told about a poor farmer who was visited in a dream by an angel. And the angel said ‘I’ve got good news for you, my friend. God has decided to bless you. He’s going to give you three requests, and within reason you can ask for whatever you want. There’s only one condition. Your neighbour will get a double portion of everything that’s given to you.”

When he woke up, the farmer told his wife what had happened and she said “well, we’ll have to put this to the test.”

So together, they prayed – “Lord, you know we’re only poor farmers. But if we had a hundred head of cattle, life would be so much better – we’d be able to make a good living. Can you please see to that for us? Amen”.

They’d no sooner finished their prayer than there was mooing and bellowing from outside the window. And they went outside to find a hundred good sturdy beasts grazing on their land.

Naturally they were overjoyed and thankful, and they spent the next couple of days making provision to cope with their new herd and praising God for his goodness. But while he was out putting up some new fences, the man happened to look up to his neighbour’s land and there he counted 200 head of fine cattle.”

He’d forgotten that part of the bargain. And as he trudged back home through the animals that just an hour earlier had given him such satisfaction, a spark of envy began to burn in his heart.

“Never mind” said his wife. “There’s more to life than cattle. What about children? Maybe if we ask the Lord, he’ll help us conceive, even though we’ve not managed to, these past ten years”.

And so they made that prayer. And sure enough, in time they were blessed with a healthy son to carry on their name and their line. And after all of that waiting, they couldn’t have been happier….

Until they turned up at Church to have the boy baptised and found their neighbour there as well. “Sure there must have been something in the water nine months ago” he said. “God’s blessed us with family too!”. And indeed he had. Twins. A boy and a girl.

The farmer smiled through gritted teeth as the children were baptised. But somewhere inside, that spark of envy grew into a flame, consuming his happiness and making him angry not just at his neighbour but at God as well.

Fool that he was, he kindled those fires instead of trying to douse them. And by the end of the week he was ready to make his last, terrible request of God.

But you’ll have to wait til the end of the sermon to find out what it was!

Of all the seven sins we’re going to look at in this sermon series, Envy is unique because it’s the only one which doesn’t bring us any pleasure at all. 

Pride makes you feel good about yourself; greed bolsters your sense of self worth and security. Sloth lets you check out and bury your head in the sand; anger lets you vent your fury at someone. There’s fellowship and enjoyment to be had in gluttony, illicit pleasure in lust.

But envy offers nothing by way of compensation. As Billy Graham once said “I defy you to show me an envious person who is also happy person”.

Strange, then, that something which offers so little should still exert such a big hold over us. But we’ll get to that in due course.

The eighth-century monk and theologian John of Damascus says that ‘envy is discontent over someone else’s blessings’ while Thomas Aquinas defined it as ‘sadness at the happiness or glory of another’.

But my favourite definition is this one  – “Envy is the art of counting the other fellow’s blessings instead of your own.” Exactly the mistake the farmer was making in the story I was telling you.

Envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that’s directly addressed in the Ten Commandments. We’re told in the last of the ten not to covet our neighbour’s home or partner or possessions. 

And when, as sometimes happens, people go through the exercise of trying to update the ten commandments for use in our secular society, they drop all the ones relating to God, but the one about envy always seems to stay in there. People still know that there’s something profoundly destructive and ugly about envy.

The novelist Zadie Smith puts it this way:

That the concept of envy as a sin should retain its weight despite the present debilitation of the church and God himself is, I think, a part of our contemporary self-centredness. We don’t mind being seen to be angry or lustful or even lazy, but we dislike being seen as envious. It is unattractive. And our vanities superseded our virtues some time ago.

And yet it’s exactly that vanity which makes us so susceptible to envy. The desire to look good, to have whatever makes us look good, to be associated with whatever makes us look good is a huge factor in human motivation, and one that’s played on mercilessly by the advertising agencies as they strive to sell us the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Is a £35 designer T-shirt really that much better than a £5 one from Markies? Are the £150 trainers that much better than the £40 ones?  What are you paying for? The brand. The image. Because you want to look good, and society tells us that owning these things, wearing these things will make you look good.

It’s best not to play that game at all, I think. To rise above that kind of superficiality. That certainly seems to be Jesus’ way  – “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. Life is more than food, and the body more than clothes. But seek first God’s kingdom and these things will be given to you as well”.

The best option is not to play those kind of games at all. But the worst option is to be taken in by them and end up looking on enviously at those who seem to be doing better. To live in a constant state of unhappiness and anxiety because others – according to the world’s standards – are doing better than you. That’s just a recipe for misery.

And so in our times, we find this strange dichotomy at work. Whether religious or not, we all agree that envy is a bad thing. And yet so much of our society and our economy positively encourages envy, because it’s easier to sell things to people when they’re jealous of what other folk have.

It’s a modern problem, but its roots are ancient. Right back there in Genesis 4. If pride is the original sin, then envy is its grumpy younger sibling and we first see it manifesting in the life of Cain, the oldest son of Adam and Eve.

Cain tends the land, his brother Abel tends the flock, and when it comes time to sacrifice, Abel’s offering of a firstborn lamb is accepted by God, but Cain’s offering of grain isn’t.

And there’s no explanation given for that in the story; why was one sacrifice acceptable and the other wasn’t?

Well, we can only guess, but given that elsewhere in the Bible God seems quite happy to accept crops as well as animals in sacrifice, I don’t think it can be what was offered that was the problem. It’s more like to have been how it was offered. Was it given generously, sacrificially? Or was it given grudgingly? Was it the best of his crop Cain offered, or the leftovers?

In verse seven God tells Cain “If you’d done the right thing, you would be smiling, but because you have done evil, sin is crouching at your door.”

The issue is with the heart of the one making the offering, not the fact that it was grain rather than a live animal.  God seems to sense some ingratitude or holding back within Cain, and he’s not pleased by what he offers.

And that, we’re told, makes Cain furious. But who’s he furious with?

Well it’s possible that he’s angry at himself. We all know that when we get caught doing wrong, there’s a part of us that wants to kick ourselves for being found out. But the human ego being what it is, we always manage to find a way of pinning the blame of someone else.

Cain’s shame at his poor offering turns to envy and anger at Abel’s acceptable one, and so poor Abel – who’s done no wrong - finds himself in the firing line. Cain envies his acceptance by God, resents it. Possibly even thinks it’s unfair. And though he wouldn’t dare say it, God’s in his firing line too for humiliating him in this way; for exposing the paucity of his gift and embarrassing him in front of his younger brother.

But even as Cain fumes and scowls, God still leaves the door open for reconciliation. Cain can still make things good. He has choices.

He can ask God where he went wrong. He can repent and offer a better sacrifice. He can swallow his pride and learn his lesson. He can still do the right thing.

But he does none of those. Instead he turns his back on God and walks away. The envy festers and spills over into anger, hatred and murder.

Cain kills Abel, but in doing so, he manages to destroy his own life at the same time. God places him under a curse and sends him away from the land for good; though even in God’s anger there’s still room for mercy. Even as he sends Cain away, he has some sympathy for him and places a mark on him so that no-one will be tempted to kill him.

It’s a salutary tale; and it goes some way to explaining why the Church Fathers took envy so seriously. It’s dangerous not just for what it is in its own right, but for the more serious sins it can lead to if left unchecked.

In a world like ours, there will always be occasions for envy. We’re always confronted by the glass that’s half empty and half full at the same time. We’ll always have opportunities to be grateful for what we have, or resentful for what we don’t have – and bitter that others should have more than us, or have done better than us.

Like Cain – we too have choices, when we feel envy beginning to take hold.

So how do we fight back?

Well the ancients suggested three strategies.

When we find ourselves getting angry at God because of what others have – the health they enjoy, the breaks that seem to come their way, we do well to remember that God isn’t a cosmic puppeteer – pulling all the strings all the time. Much as we would like him to, he doesn’t seem to reward the good and punish the wicked, in this life at least. In this life, he seems to send blessings and woes on both. This is how things are.

You can’t look at the good things your neighbour has and wonder why God’s blessing him and not you. And you can’t look at your own problems and think they’re all sent by God to test you. Life doesn’t work that way, and it doesn’t help to think that way.

Secondly – we need to train ourselves to value the right things. If the culture we live in values things that are superficial – celebrity, wealth, possessions - we need to keep reminding ourselves of what really matters. That’s why getting to church, keeping in prayer, reading the scriptures, being in fellowship with others who think the same way is important.  It keeps you grounded in God in a culture which tells us that God’s an irrelevance.

The apostle Paul says that only three things last forever – there’s nothing else we can take with us when we go  - only faith, hope and love. It’s a wise man or woman who invests in those commodities.

And then, thirdly, remember that the secret of contentment is to have something that cannot be taken away from you and cannot be bettered. And we have that in Christ.

Do you remember the story Jesus tells about the man who’s out digging in a field and finds a hoard of treasure. He goes and sells everything he has to secure that field, and make the treasure his own. And when the deal’s complete – he’s over the moon, because he has his heart’s desire and he knows that nothing will ever better it.

It’s just the same with a man or a woman who’s decided to risk everything on following Christ. You only make that choice if you’re already convinced that it’s the best possible choice for your life. That everything else pales into insignificance beside the immense joy and privilege of knowing him.

If we are in Christ, we don’t need to envy anyone anything, because we already have what matters most.

I have a story to finish, don’t I?

I need to tell you about the farmer’s final wish. The one he made when he was almost totally consumed by envy.

“Lord”, he prayed – “I want you to pluck out my right eye. I’d gladly go through life half blind for the satisfaction of knowing my neighbour will never look again on all that he has”.

There was a long silence, and then a voice from heaven said “No. This shall not be. Only sin could turn an offer of blessing into an occasion for evil. What you are proposing is the devil’s work, my son, not the Lord’s”.

 The Jewish folk have a saying – “ as rust corrupts iron, so envy corrupts the human soul.”

Friends, don’t give envy any space in your soul. Your jealousy may not hurt others, but I can guarantee it will end up hurting you.

Amen, and thanks be to God for his word.