Boundaries… when I read the commandments about coveting I think about boundaries.
These commandments are so vital, because obviously none of us can come away
from them feeling justified. All of us covet things—we all want things we can’t
have. Often these are silly little desires, easily forgotten, but sometimes
these things gnaw away at us, and other times they wreck us completely.
There are a lot of tricks to deal
with coveting, which runs hand-in-hand with addiction. Some of these methods
are good: prayer, meditation, service, and accountability groups to name a few.
But, at the end of the day, you have to figure out a way to erect healthy
boundaries between you and the thing you are coveting or you will fail, every
single time.
I can’t tell you how often I’ve
heard people tell me they just need to be strong, just need to get through this
rough stretch, just need to work harder. Inevitably, they come back feeling
like a failure. The heart is not so easily conquered by our willpower. You
can’t combat your deepest, darkest desires on your own. You just can’t. Believe
me, I’ve seen plenty of people try.
Coveting is so insidious, because it
makes us make all sorts of excuses about a thing. It’s that little devil on our
shoulder telling us exactly what we want to hear. It’s not about the truth,
because the truth is that road leads only to more pain and suffering down the
road, but it feels like the truth.
More than that, it feels good.
However, the commandment doesn’t
just tell us not to follow through on our coveting; it tells us not to covet in
the first place. A person can take this two ways: 1. It can feel like an
impossible burden, because how do you stop the coveting before it happens? Or
2. It can feel like an incredible relief, because it forces us to look for the
thing that will actually save us from these feelings that are completely out of
our control.
It’s about boundaries.
Occasionally, as part of my job, I’m
required to attend Boundaries Workshops. These are awfully important, because
the history of pastors and violations of boundaries is long and awful. The
Catholic Church has been dealing with this publicly in the last couple decades,
but it’s true of the Lutheran Church and every other church or civic
body—anywhere where people are in authority over others. Leaders need
boundaries most of all, because with power comes the capacity to abuse that
power.
So, I go to these workshops, which,
frankly, anybody with any authority should; not just pastors. Then, I come back
into daily life in ministry and I see all the places where this gets impossibly
messy. You set boundaries—hard boundaries—and then circumstances come up and
you are faced with difficult choices, because every relationship requires
breaking some boundaries, no matter who you are. The most insidious part of
boundary-breaking is that so many of us have different weak spots, and so
legislating boundaries for you is very different than legislating boundaries
for me. So, these workshops talk about specifics that may or may not be needed
for you, but they are important to keep anyway.
Sure, maybe money isn’t a weak spot for you, and you could
count offering on your own, but we don’t know that—not really. Sure, maybe
overworking isn’t a weak spot for you, but we don’t know that, and if you don’t
set aside intentional time off then you might find yourself working every
waking moment of your life.
There are so many examples of poor boundaries that many of
us don’t even see in our daily lives. Instead, when the subject of boundaries
comes up, we default to the thing that tempts us the most: Is it drugs? Money?
Sex? Power?
Coveting
is unlike the other commandments, because it is so wide-open. There are so many things a person can want that are
unhealthy and not just the usual things you might expect. Here’s a list of a
few that came to mind that you might not think of at first: Some people covet
being right (they can’t stand any suggestion that they might be wrong); some
people covet being the best (they can’t stand anybody having a better anything
than they have); some people covet being busy and they want you to know how
busy they are; some people covet winning (they can’t stand any suggestion that
they might occasionally lose); others covet things, overs covet people.
At the end of the day, if you ask yourself “Why do you want
something?” and your answer is “Just because” or “I just need it,” then perhaps
that is the thing that you are coveting.
The first hard part is identifying what you are actually
coveting; we are terrible at lying to ourselves about these things. Many of us
will convince ourselves we absolutely do not have a problem; even when
everybody around us knows differently, even when deep down we know ourselves.
The second hard part is figuring out what to do when we have identified
something we covet.
The
human inclination is to try hard to fix it.
When that fails we establish boundaries, or in some cases the civil law takes
over and sets boundaries for us. Ultimately, though, we only fix coveting the
way we fix everything broken in this world: We die to it.
What do I mean by that?
Well, the problem is that we are
trying to heal the sin. Every attempt at fixing the problem will fail, because
this coveting is a fatal disease. 100% fatal, no exceptions. We have to die to
it by walking the way of the cross. This is a painful process and, for most of
us, it will only really happen when we physically die at the end of our lives,
because the pull is too strong and we will keep trying to resist by our
willpower, because we trust ourselves too much.
But we can still see glimpses of it
in this life. Typically, this happens by giving up everything, by throwing
yourself on the mercy of God, and admitting, “God, I just can’t do it.” That is
the first step.
Whether it’s a twelve-step program,
working with a trained professional, or going on a pilgrimage, the process is
much the same: giving up one desire by giving up your old self. Regardless, you
will never heal the disease. It’s still there, still fatal. At best, it may go
into a kind of remission, but that old sinner will still be there, hanging on.
The monster never dies until we do.
Yet, here’s the twist. Jesus Christ
came not just to heal but to resurrect. He came to drag us through death and
into new life, so that, when we baptize we baptize into his death, so that, no
matter the things that we covet—the things we can never fix—Jesus has it in his
hands, dealing with the things we cannot.
We get so ashamed by these things,
frustrated that we cannot fix them. So, it becomes easy to first give up and
then give in—give up, because we can’t do it, and then give in, because we
imagine that the thing we are coveting is easier than fighting it. Both of
these are lies we tell ourselves, because nothing inside of us is so dark that
God cannot bring it to the light. Yes, it will be painful, but it will be
anyway.
The good news of the Gospel of Jesus
Christ is that your coveting will not condemn you. It might hurt your
relationships, it certainly will hurt you, but it will not separate you from
the love of God. As it says in Romans, “All have sinned and fallen short of the
glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift ... For we hold
that a person is justified by faith apart from works” (Romans 3:23, 28). You
are saved far apart from whether you covet, or follow through on your coveting,
or not. You are saved by grace as a gift.
These commandments remind us why we
need it. Nobody gets away unscathed; all of us are in it together. All of us
are busted, all of us fail, yet all of us are saved by the grace of God that
far surpasses even our worst failures.
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