December 30, 2008 by djackson.

I once read (I can’t locate the quote) that it is almost impossible to give a dog an ulcer. It is, however, apparently possible to make one envious.

Austrian scientists (possibly because all the good experiments were taken) decided to see what happened to canine behavior when the subject figured out that a colleague drew better pay for the same work. They took several dogs and taught them to shake hands. Predictably enough to anyone who has ever owned a dog, the animals happily repeated the trick time after time with no reward necessary beyond an occasional “Good boy!”

Next, they introduced a parallel set of pooches who, upon performing the same command, received a treat. Very soon, the first group of mutts grew sullen and stopped offering their paws on command. The trick that had been so much fun before, an end in itself, its own reward, suddenly lost its appeal. Understand, the first group of dogs didn’t lose anything, they weren’t getting any less for their trouble; it was just that someone else was getting more.

Theologians refer to this as the deadly sin of envy. Classically there are seven deadly sins, marked down from the eight first proposed by the desert father Evagrius. Gregory the Great (so-called to distinguish him from Gregory the Pretty Good and Gregory the Downright Average) combined “sorrow” and “discouragement” to get “sloth,” thus reducing the lineup to a nice Biblical tally. If you’ve ever perused a roster of the Big Seven, you might have been puzzled to note that the standard setup includes both greed and envy. This might seem redundant, but it actually reflects an important distinction.

“Greed” translates the Latin avaritia, as in avarice - wanting more stuff. “Envy,” on the other hand, is from the Latin invidia. It gives us a word in English, invidious. We don’t use that word very often, which is a shame, because it is very useful. It has the idea of hostility, but with the refinement of hostility expressed by trying to reduce the relative worth of its object. An “invidious comparison” attempts to relate one person or thing unfavorably to another. I don’t so much harm the object of my jealousy as put it in a bad light. Both words, by the way, envy and invidious, come from the root verb “to look.” This is exactly right: the dogs in the experiment didn’t pout until they saw what another animal received.

Thomas A. Nelson, in his book How to Avoid Hell, defines greed as “an inordinate love of worldly goods and material things.” By contrast, envy, he writes, “is distress of soul at the success or prosperity of another.” Ed Young, Jr., in Fatal Distractions, explains envy as “a consuming desire to have every other person be as unsuccessful as you feel.” Greed wishes I had more; envy wishes you had less.

This is not, by the way, a matter merely for dogs and 5th century monks. A couple of Harvard economists recently found that the majority of people would rather make twice as much as their coworkers rather than half as much, even when twice as much is only fifty grand and half as much is 100K! British economists have discovered that most of us would give up money if, by doing so, we can finagle someone else into giving up even more. We will take vows of relative poverty, in other words, if doing so causes someone else to take a vow of greater poverty. One French economist says that a job layoff won’t bother you as much if all your neighbors get laid off as well, and that an unemployed spouse is happier if his mate is also out of work.

U Cal Riverside psych prof Sonja Lyubomirsky argues in a recent New York Times op-ed piece that this explains why Americans are not more panicked about the current economic downturn. We don’t mind being tossed in the deep end if Wall Street financiers and Detroit CEO’s dogpaddle alongside of us. A rising tide may or may not lift all boats, but as long as an ebb tide sinks ‘em, everything’s copasetic. The real root of theodicy, it seems, is not, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” but “Why do good things happen to other people?”

Now granted, envy, like all the Seven Deadlies, is not necessarily the worst of sins. These kinds or rankings are sort of like the BCS - somewhat arbitrary at best. For instance, how did disco music get left off? Or putting beans in the chili? Granted, the final muster has papal authority, but if you’re an Evangelical or a Mainliner, that doesn’t settle the matter. Still, the construct has held up remarkably well for a millennium and a half. Remember that theologians also call these the “capital” sins, as in the caput, or head, like the headwaters of a river from which the rest of the stream takes its origin. Nelson explains that these vices “are not sins in themselves . . . but the conditions or inclinations within us from which sin arises.” (emphasis original) They are stem-cell sins, the raw material from which our sin nature fashions all the refined and specialized acts that pollute our souls and harm those around us. The counterpart would be the Seven Cardinal Virtues, where “cardinal” comes from the Latin word for the hinge of a door - everything else pivots on these.

So what’s so deadly about envy? Ed Young, Jr. says it well: “Envy kills our ability to be part of the party.” Two parties, actually. First, envy bars me from the celebration of my own blessings. Like the dog in the lab, I lose the raw joy of a simple pleasure because I resent the fact that someone else might be getting more out of it. Second, envy bare me from the celebration of another’s blessings. I miss the opportunity to whoop it up with friends and family because I can’t be glad when a friend or family member has something about which to whoop it up. One of the saddest scenes in the New Testament is the elder brother as he stands self-exiled from barbequed beef and a good game of Uno simply because he’s not the birthday boy.

So what do do about envy? Well, like all dispositional sins, this one does not respond well to direct confrontation. Clenching your fists at a colleague’s promotion and repeating, “I will not be envious” just plays into its hands. Envy is like a judo champion - it redirects that kind of energy, reflects it back on its source to tie our hearts into knots. No, the better strategy with envy is a flanking attack that aims to cut off its lines of supply. Let me suggest a couple of guerilla tactics that might help.

First, shake hands for free. In other words, obey the voice of your Master in a setting where the only possible reward is the New Testament equivalent of “good boy” - “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” Perform some hidden act of worship or service - sing “Amazing Grace” when you’re all alone with only God to hear; mow someone’s lawn when he’s out of town. You get the idea. Soak up the joy of the act itself and pour it on envy like salt on a slug.

Second, do the happy dance for someone else’s good fortune. You may want to handle this one long-distance so there’s no danger of throwing in a left-handed compliment to undercut the kindness. Send a card of congratulations to a promoted coworker. Say something nice about someone behind her back with no qualifying clauses and without crossing your fingers behind your back. Such a small action is more a pin than a broadsword, but a pinprick can deflate the biggest beach ball in a matter of seconds.

Envy - it’s deadly. And if it can corrupt the pure soul of a puppy, imagine what it could do to you or me. Don’t envy; be happy.

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December 18, 2008 by djackson.

A local church invited me last week to be guest teacher in their young adult Sunday School. They invited me to choose my own topic or text, so I decided to submit myself to the lectionary, specifically the Old Testament reading, Isaiah 65.17-25. I thought I might pass on in this forum a few of the thoughts that struck me as I studied.

Note, first of all, the PLACE of this promise. “I create new heavens and a new earth.” In the next verse, and in the one after that, the prophet locates God’s peaceable kingdom in Jerusalem. For those of us reared on notions of Heaven as a place we go to, this language invites the contemplation of Heaven as a place that comes to us. For those of us reared on the notion of Heaven as a place we create, this language invites the contemplation of Heaven as a place made for us.

Trevor Carpenter, pastor of Baptist Temple in McAllen, Texas, delivered the final chapel address of the semester here at the South Texas School of Christian Studies. We’d been talking about Christian responses to death and dying and I asked Trev to take us one step beyond - to God’s ultimate response to those temporary interlopers. He took us to Revelation 21 and I couldn’t help but notice how John invokes the imagery of Isaiah: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away . . . . And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.”

For fundamentalists, who often think of earth as ultimately expendable, Scripture here reminds us that God loves all he creates and will address its groans with ultimate healing, a redemption somehow bound up with our own (Ro 8.22-23). For liberals, who tend to think of Heaven as a sort of Earth 2.0 with all the bugs of the beta version purged, Scripture here humbles us with the assertion that every attempt to reach Heaven from the ground up simply recreates the cacophany of Babel.

So that’s first - the place of the promise. Notice next the PROMISE itself. At least three things mark the community of glorified creation. The first is longevity - a zero infant mortality rate and youth ministers catering to centegenarians. But the idea here is more than mere time. Our society has already come perilously close to achieving extended biological function. I wrote recently about the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, or “NICE,” an outfit that recently determined a man dying of cancer wasn’t worth the money it would take to prop him up for another half-year or so. One reader emailed to ask me if I meant to imply that a privatized health care system would show more compassion. I admitted that I do not; an Oregon man recently heard that his insurance company wouldn’t cover the cost of his cancer treatment but would gladly pop for the assisted suicide drugs available to him by law.

I don’t mean to criticize medical professionals devoted to fighting disease, and I don’t mean to act as if difficult ethical choices are in fact simple. I mean to contrast our blundering efforts at extending life with Scripture’s promise of eternal life. I think that what God promises here is not just extended biological function but life, and a community that knows how to value it.

The second part of the promise is prosperity. Again, notice that this is about more than just everybody having lots of stuff. In fact, abundance of stuff isn’t even the issue. What we have is a connectedness, an organic relationship between what one does and what one has. True enough, no more Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and no more Grapes of Wrath. But it goes deeper: the homeowner builds his own house, whether with his hands or his labor; the one who eats has some understanding of the origin of the food. This implies not just a right amount of material possessions, but a right relationship to them.

In my last post I quoted Martin Sorrell, CEO of the advertising firm WPP. Asked about the current financial crisis, he observed that “the real world won’t change for the better until 2010 when greed has overcome fear yet again.” That’s the world’s economics: a needle-point adjustment between greed and discouragement, two of the seven deadly sins. In fact, the recent presidential election (like all presidential elections; like all elections) can be viewed as an argument over which candidate can best walk that tightrope. Set aside which of the two had the better plan. The essence of each campaign was a claim that their man could keep us just frightened enough to behave ourselves but just aquisitive enough to feed the beast.

And what troubles me is that, to watch how we operate, that’s the best that many Christians think we can do until Jesus comes again. This is what Dallas Willard, in The Divine Conspiracy, calls a “gospel of sin management,” in which

the Christian message is thought to be essentially concerned only with how to deal with sin: with wrongdoing or wrong-being and its effects. Life, our actual existence, is not included in what is now presented as the heart of the Christian message, or it is included only marginally.

Contrast this with an observation - really a confession of faith - made recently be a Benedictine monk from California. After the Tea Fire in Santa Barbara wiped out his monastery Brother Joseph Brown told a reporter that “One of the hazards of monasticism throughout the centuries is we become attached to what we have or where we are. This is simply a reminder that what we are called to is not our stuff. This is a cleansing by fire.”

One tradition of Advent, by the way, is to give one’s home a thorough cleaning, including setting aside unused items for donation to those who can actually use them. Brother Brown does not actively construct his abbey’s devastation in this light (the fire actually hit toward the end of Ordinary time), but I can’t help see the connection. He and his brothers let go of greed, and in turn found themselves freed from fear. This sounds to me a good deal more like Kingdom economics than Mr. Sorrell’s formulation.

Third, the passage promises a sound ecology: wolves grazing with lambs instead of on them, lions and oxen eating straw instead of lions eating oxen. “They shall do no evil or harm in all my holy mountain.” Whatever all of this says about animals before the Fall or animals after the Second Coming (for some interesting speculations on both, see C. S. Lewis’ chapter, “Animal Pain” in The Problem of Pain), it says that a restored world will know perfect ecological balance. And notice that the animals come last - after humanity has its act together.

As I write, rebels in Congo slaughter gorillas and sell their body parts on the black market to fund the war. The rangers who once protected these endangered primates now languish in refugee camps, driven from their posts by the fighting. The United States Supreme Court recently ruled that the Navy can continue to test sonar off the California coast despite the danger such high decibels pose to various species of whale. Again and again, our inability to live with one another comes at the cost of creation’s inability to live at all. When Our Lord finally plants the flag of peace in the rebel heart of humanity, all creatures will feel the change.

So the place and the promise; look now at the PERSON on whom it all rests. If the language of Isaiah 65 sounds familiar, it is because the prophet quotes himself, reprising an old sermon the way any preacher would do. Isaiah 11.6-9 gives an extended vision of the Peaceable Kingdom of God’s Holy Mountain. Note a couple of things about this fact. First of all, the original version comes in the first major section of the book, chapters 1-39, that deals with the eighth century BCE and the coming Babylonian judgment. The reprise comes in the latter portion, chapters 40-66, which speak to the restoration from captivity, a century and a half later. Indeed, so complete is the distinction that many scholars believe this second section to be the work of a different person, a prophet of the Isaiahic school who lived during the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. Whatever the truth of that theory, I am more concerned here with the similarities than the differences in these passages - one similarity, really. Isaiah 11.1-5 contains one of the clearest prophecies of the coming of Messiah. Isaiah 65 makes the same connection. When Messiah comes all will be set right. Now, consider a couple of things.

Before the fall of Jerusalem, Isaiah looked to the coming of Christ to make all things right. After the fall, Isaiah looked to the same source. All the horrors of history and the failures of God’s people only deepened his faith in the One who was to come. Then suddenly, in Mark 1.15, we have Jesus announcing, in Greek perfect tenses, that the time and the kingdom have arrived in him. In Luke 4 the Lord strolls into the synagogue at Nazareth, quotes one of Isaiah’s messianic masterpieces and declares that “today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

And then what? Two millennia march by. Professing Christians with crosses on their shields spill blood bridle-deep in the Holy Land. We underfeed the poor and overheat the planet. We confess with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Christmas day, 1863 as the wholesale slaughter of the Civil War raged around him, “And then in shame I bowed my head. / There is no peace on earth, I said, / For hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, good will to men.”

So what’s to be done? Well, we remember that Advent looks two ways: we remember that the Christ has come, and we remember that the Christ is coming. And we dare to imagine the world he brings and to begin living in it today. So the real question, the honest theodicy of Advent ceases to be questions about why the Lord permits untimely death and economic injustice and ecological disaster. The question instead becomes,

Whose life have I lengthened, whose being have I strengthened, today in light of the Lord’s return?

Whose prosperity have I increased, what oppression have I decreased, today in light of the Lord’s return?

How have I nurtured God’s good creation today in light of the Lord’s return?

If your response to any of these seems too small, rejoice - we’re told we can’t get the job done anyway and must rely ultimately on God’s promise to complete it. If your response seems unimportant, beware: having seen the world that comes to replace this present one, we do well to learn to live in it.

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December 12, 2008 by djackson.

“Brevity is the soul of wit.” - Hamlet, Act II/Scene 2

Reading the business section of last Tuesday’s New York Times I came across the following in an article about how the recession has affected advertising revenues. Martin Sorrell, CEO at WPP, a national marketing firm, declares that “the real world won’t change till 2010 when greed has overcome fear yet again.”

Well, it’s nice to know, at this Advent season, that there’s hope!

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December 4, 2008 by djackson.

He predicted postmodernism in his musings on the medieval cosmos. He foresaw the meltdown of the neat scientific constructs of Newtonian physics and the origins of life. Now from yesterday’s newspaper comes new evidence of C. S. Lewis’ remarkable prescience.

I know that Jack did not dabble in ouija boards and crystal ball-gazing; that would be contrary to his Christian faith and his good sense. I do not believe that he received visions of the future; that would be to demean his remarkable intellect and imagination. It’s more like Brother Eusebius, the fictional second century pastor and narrator in Calvin Millers’ hillarious book The Philippian Fragment. After hearing a narrative of how several previous ministers left after they ran afoul of a powerful congregant, Eusebius guesses that his immediate predecessor also tangled with this man. His informant, impressed, asks if he has the gift of prophecy. “No,” Eusebius replies, “but I can sometimes see trends.” Jack Lewis was a man who could see and extend trends.

Perpend: The New York Times for Wednesday, December 3, contains an article detailing the case of a British citizen who needs a particular cancer treatment. It won’t save his life but will extend it. British health authorities, however, have decreed the drug too expensive. Twenty-two grand American for an additional half-year’s survival isn’t considered a sound investment. The game, in short, isn’t worth the candle.

Now here’s the payoff: the agency that makes such rulings, and whose decrees influence other socialized health care systems world-wide, is the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, more frequently referred to by its acronym: the NICE.

Lewis buffs are already way ahead of me on this one. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis warned that “what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” He fleshed out this thesis in narrative form in his science fiction novel That Hideous Strength. In this story, Lewis imagines a government-funded agency designed to bring the power of science to bear on the messiness of humanity. This British Babel goes by the name of the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, or, for short, the N.I.C.E.

Now, I don’t for a moment mean to imply that the actual NICE goes about vivisecting bears or playing mind-games with prisoners or re-animating the heads of executed uxoricides to use as the mouthpiece of Hell. That’s as may be. But it does strike me as a little chilling to find such a real-time cognate to the fictional construct of a government agency that decides whose life makes financial sense, and that makes such decisions based on financial, not human considerations. To paraphrase Wordsworth,

LEWIS! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee

To say nothing of the rest of us.

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