“An Attitude of Gratitude”

Exodus 20:17

I will be quoting at length this morning the words of Andrew Greeley. It’s not that I can’t say what he said in my own words; it’s just that he says it so well that I might as well use it.

Who is Andrew Greeley? When his name is mentioned what comes to most people’s minds is a Roman Catholic priest who has written a series of semi-theological, mildly racy novels. What most folks don’t know is that the Reverend Mr. Greeley is also a noted sociologist who has written some decent non-fiction. In one of his non-fiction works, The Myths of Religion, he deals at length with the Ten Commandments.

Let me clarify the meaning of “myth,” using Greeley’s own words: “I mean by [myth] not a fairy tale or legend, not make-believe or fiction, but rather a story that points to itself and gives meaning, purpose, and direction to life… When I call these stories ‘myths’ I mean that in addition to their historical truth, they carry deeper and broader meanings, an explanation of what human life means and how one ought to live that life.”

The Ten Commandments are obviously this sort of “myth.” They do give meaning, purpose, and direction to the lives of believers. They quite directly tell us how we ought to live.

The short version of the Tenth Commandment is “You shall not covet.” The complete version, as rendered in The Message, tells us, “No lusting after your neighbor’s house – or wife or servant or maid or ox or donkey. Don’t set your heart on anything that is your neighbor’s.” In other words don’t, as the Hebrew is most literally translated, “lay plans to take” what doesn’t belong to you, no matter how much you admire it or wish that it was yours.

Greeley expands upon that thought: “If one’s neighbor has a surplus of goods or a beautiful wife, it is not sinful to admire his possessions, nor is it necessarily sinful to wish that one had equally desirable possessions. [The Lord’s] stipulation rather is that we do not permit ourselves to be so attracted by a neighbor’s wife or goods that we lay plans to snatch them.”

Being the sinfully selfish, insecure human beings that we are, it isn’t that hard for the Devil to plant seeds of covetousness in our hearts. Forgiven, redeemed sinners are still sinners. Good Christian people can be just as covetous as anybody else.

The real problem isn’t that the Devil plants his seeds. The real damage is done when we allow those seeds to take root and grow. Simple desire devolves into envy that devolves into the kind of lust that drives us to self-destructive thoughts, and if we’re not careful, leads us to actions that hurt other people. That’s when we fall into the traps of greed, theft, adultery, and in extreme cases murder. That’s why God commands us to not covet.

Behind that reason is a deeper reason. Scripture tells us that God will provide. That’s the flip side of the Tenth Commandment. We don’t have to covet – or even worry or be anxious – because if we truly believe that God is our God and we are his people, then we’ll trust him to take care of us. Instead of coveting what other people have – lusting after those things we don’t have but think we deserve – we are to be thankful to God for what we do have.

If Jesus Christ truly is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords of our lives, we will serve and worship him and him alone. We will not make idols out of possessions – they will not possess us. Nor will we turn our lives over to that false god called consumerism. We will be happy with enough, wasting our frantically pursuing too much. To quote Walter J. Harrelson, “Those who covet can never be content with what they have, with what they have been given, or what they have earned. It is never enough.”

There are many moral and ethical dimensions to the Tenth Commandment. There is also a deeply spiritual dimension. When we covet we end up envying what others have and despising what we have. Thus we reject God’s providence, which is just another way of rejecting God.

When we covet, we are most definitely not trusting God. We are instead allowing the Devil to play on our insecurities, listening to the siren calls of the gods of this world; believing their message that we need more stuff, better stuff, fancier stuff, newer stuff.

Thus we allow ourselves to be defined by what we have instead of who we are. Rather than delighting in our identity as God’s people – as those whom he has created a little lower than the angels – we measure our worth against the world’s definitions of success, power, and social standing. Along the way we commit the deadliest of all the deadly sins, pride. In doing so we assume power over our own lives, leaving God out of the equation.

Jesus had a few things to say about being possessed by our possessions. From today’s Gospel Lesson, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.” There was also his teaching about storing up for ourselves treasures in heaven. Why? Because whatever treasure we might accumulate on earth can easily be destroyed or taken away from us. We cannot depend on possessions for either salvation or security.

There is also his encounter with that rich young ruler. Here Greeley’s commentary about that: “… the point made by this story is that the young man’s problem was not so much the refusal to give up his possessions as it was the refusal to give up the personal security that the possessions provided. Indeed, Jesus’ warnings against the perils of riches were not so much against material abundance in itself as rather the illusion of security that material abundance can give…”

All of this – pride, assumptions of self-sufficiency, seeking security in things – goes back to not trusting God. Again I quote Andrew Greeley: “Covetousness is a symptom that a man has not really put his trust in [the Lord]; he still puts his trust in himself. He covets that which is his neighbor’s even to the extent of planning to take it from his neighbor because he is not confident that [the Lord] will honor the terms of the covenant and therefore believes that he must provide for himself.”

And then Greeley writes: “If covetousness is defined as the conviction that we must depend on our own efforts, not merely to eat and stay alive but also to justify the worth, dignity, and value of ourselves as human beings, there can be no doubt that covetousness is indeed a besetting problem for mankind, particularly in modern, industrial societies, where one’s worth is measured by wealth and success… We covet because we are not sure of [God’s] gracious love, we also covet because our value and reputations as human beings depend upon the effect of our covetous behavior.”

It is somewhat ironic that this sermon on coveting comes the Sunday after Thanksgiving, a Sunday that this year falls within our stewardship season. This irony is not accidental. Events in the life of Grace Church over the past few months have made it necessary to finish this series of sermons on the Ten Commandments today rather than a week ago. The timing of today’s sermon is, I truly believe, providential. Today is the day God knew that this sermon needed to be preached and heard.

Truly thankful people do not covet. Truly thankful Christians are secure in the knowledge of God’s providential grace. As 21^st Century American Protestant Christians we sometimes forget how blessed we are. We start taking our blessings for granted, sometimes even assuming that we are entitled to them. Surrounded by culture that measures human worth with dollar signs, we begin to hunger for more than what we need, for more than what we have. So we covet.

There is a better way. Rather than living lives that are driven by covetousness, we should live lives that are defined by an attitude of gratitude. We should be thankfully content with what we have. We should take seriously the historic Reformed belief in simplicity and non-ostentatiousness, de-cluttering our lives in ways that make it more difficult for our possessions to possess us. Taking seriously the Apostle Paul’s admonition to “not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let [our] requests be made known to God.” The words that follow are important, so pay attention: “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

I close with a quote from an article in The Presbyterian Outlook that was written in 1987 by a former editor, George Hunt: “Gratitude is at the heart of our faith and so is at the heart of our worship. The Lord’s Supper is a Eucharist, an act of thanksgiving…”

If we are to truly worship God in spirit and in truth, we must do so with an authentic attitude of thanksgiving. Let us not covet. Let us find our true security in our Savior Jesus, through whom we find that peace of God that passes all understanding. Amen.