Exodus 20:17
“Window Shopping”
May 12, 2002 - Ascension Sunday

         You stroll through the mall together after dinner, looking into store windows and point­ing at items that catch your eye. You have absolutely no intention of buying anything, but are simply enjoying a bit of “window shopping.” You imagine how you would look wearing that peach colored blouse, or what your living room would be like with that blue wingback chair in it, or how it would feel behind the wheel of that shiny black convertible on display in the space between the shops. It all seems so innocent and natural. But you may be cruising on the edge of deadly sin.

         I think the last of the Ten Commandments was meant to catch us off guard. At least at first glance, the other nine commandments deal with externals, relatively easy to check off one’s spiritual inventory: “Well let’s see, I’ve kept the Sabbath, I’m good to my father and mother, I haven’t murdered anyone, haven’t committed adultery, haven’t stolen any­thing, haven’t lied. So I’m in pretty good shape.”

         However, in case we haven’t listened to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and figured out that the commandments deal with more than our actions, the final commandment takes a different tactic altogether. Instead of forbidding an action, it forbids an attitude. It leaves the clear realm of what we do and enters the murky waters of what we feel. As William Barclay says, number Ten is the hardest to keep, the most difficult commandment of all.[1]

         Part of the difficulty of the Tenth Commandment is that it is far and away the easiest one to hide. Because it deals with the internal state of your soul, you can appear to others to be an honest, decent, upright Christian in every way, but still be completely eaten up with the ugly sin of covetousness. Unless you confess it out loud, no one will ever notice your sin and call you to account.

         I remember being fascinated as a boy with accounts of giant tape worms being re­moved from people’s digestive tracts. These hideous creatures can grow to twenty and thirty feet long inside a human being, parasitically stealing the nutrition which should be going to your body. Coveting is like a tapeworm of the soul. It can live and grow in you for years, invisible and undetected.

         To “covet” merely means to desire something, to want it. Desire is not wrong in and of it­self. In fact, Scripture occasionally commands desire. In I Corinthians 12:31 Paul encour­ages us to “eagerly desire” the greater spiritual gifts. Desire is good when we desire good things. Coveting is desire gone wrong.

         In particular, this commandment zeroes in on our tendency to desire wrongly by desir­ing what is not ours. It is not wrong to want a wife or a house or a car. But it is absolutely forbidden to want your friend’s wife Julie or your boss’s 3,000 square foot Cape Cod or your dentist’s new BMW. When our desiring crosses over into territory which belongs to our neighbor, then it becomes coveting. It becomes sin.

         The danger, then, in window shopping, or in going through the Sunday newspaper ad­vertising flyers, or in watching commercials on television, is that you will be tempted to move from merely desiring a thing to noticing the fact that someone else has it and you do not. Then you begin to resent that difference.

         Leonard Sweet describes our inclination toward all sorts of “window shopping” in the twenty-first century. He says that we no longer shop for what we need. Instead, we shop to find out what we need. Shopping like that is spiritually perilous because it opens a window in our soul to desire gone wrong, to coveting what is not ours.

         The Tenth Commandment was given because it is so easy for our desire to go wrong. Thomas Aquinas taught that this is because desire is essentially boundless. It knows no limits.[2] And when limitless desire is directed at limited things, it can destroy us.

         A short story by Leo Tolstoy[3] tells of a man named Pahóm, who owned property and desired some more. Passing travelers told Pahóm of vast lands held by nomadic tribes peo­ple called Bashkírs who would sell for almost nothing. So he set out for this country. Ar­riving he found beautiful flat farmland with dark rich soil. “What will be the price?” he asked the Chief of the Bashkírs.

         Tolstoy tells us the Chief replied,

“‘Our price is always the same: one thousand rubles a day.’

Pahóm did not understand. ‘A day? What measure is that? How many acres would that be?’

‘We do not know how to reckon it out,’ said the Chief. ‘We sell it by the day. As much as you can go round on your feet in a day is yours, and the price is one thousand rubles a day.’

Pahóm was surprised. ‘But in a day you can get round a large tract of land,’ he said.

The Chief laughed. ‘It will all be yours!’ said he. ‘But there is one condition: If you don't return on the same day to the spot whence you started, your money is lost.’

         The story tells how Pahóm spent a restless night then got up early the next morning to claim his land. He chose a low hill for his starting point. The Chief set his fur hat on the ground and Pahóm put his money in it. He was to carry a spade and dig up a bit of turf whenever he wanted to mark a corner of his new property. He began to walk. As he did, the land just looked better and better. So he moved more quickly.

         Pahóm went a long way before making his first mark. Then he turned and headed off at a right angle. He would have made the second mark sooner, but he spotted some rich territory just ahead and went on for another couple miles to include it. His feet were hurt­ing, and he was tired and hungry, so he ate and rested after making his second mark. Then he turned again, noticing that the sun was starting to get low. The starting hill was barely visible in the distance. He soon realized he would have to cut the third side short and have his property lopsided in order to get back before the sun set.

         By this time Pahóm’s feet were bruised and bleeding. He was suffering from the sun. Tolstoy writes:

        He longed to rest, but it was impossible if he meant to get back before sun­set. The sun waits for no man, and it was sinking lower and lower.

        ‘Oh dear,’ he thought, ‘if only I have not blundered trying for too much! What if I am too late?’

        He looked towards the hillock and at the sun. He was still far from his goal, and the sun was already near the rim.

        Pahóm walked on and on; it was very hard walking, but he went quicker and quicker. He pressed on, but was still far from the place. He began running, threw away his coat, his boots, his flask, and his cap, and kept only the spade which he used as a support.

        ‘What shall I do,’ he thought again, ‘I have grasped too much, and ruined the whole affair. I can’t get there before the sun sets.

        And this fear made him still more breathless. Pahóm went on running, his soaking shirt and trousers stuck to him, and his mouth was parched. His breast was working like a blacksmith’s bellows, his heart was beating like a hammer, and his legs were giving way as if they did not belong to him.

         The Bashkírs came out to cheer and shout him on. As he ran up the hill the sun seemed to have set behind it, and he gave up hope. But then he realized that from the top there would still be a sliver of light left. He had time! Finally, with his last bit of strength, he came in sight of the hat, but his legs gave way. He collapsed and fell. He just managed to reach the cap with his hands. He had won the land!

         But it was too late for Pahóm. He never got up. Tolstoy ends the story: “His servant picked up the spade and dug a grave long enough for Pahóm to lie in, and buried him in it. Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.”

          Pahóm’s race is what coveting invites us to run every day of our lives. Desire that has no boundaries calls us to seek just a little more and a little more until we go too far and bring on our own collapse and ruin. Like all the commandments, “You shall not covet” is for our own good, God’s rule to save us from spiritual destruction.

         You might think, then, that the way to answer this commandment is to control or even eliminate desire. And that can be helpful in the short run. Two great spiritual traditions have adopted this approach to human happiness. Both Stoicism and Buddhism have taught human beings to curtail desire and so find a more satisfying way of life. Want less and you will be happier, healthier and more fulfilled. That philosophy produced a great Roman emperor and some admirable people like the Dalai Lama.

         What Stoicism and Buddhism cannot reckon with, though, is just how hard their pre­scription is to follow. It is no easy thing to quit wanting, to stop our desiring. It is a path for individuals of iron discipline, for hermits and monks. It is not a way truly available to ordi­nary human men and women who go window shopping all the time. We will always keep trying to encompass and limit our unlimited desires and will always fail.

         That is why Thomas Aquinas explains that the only proper aim for our boundless, unlimited desire is a boundless, unlimited object. Human desire was created with an infi­nite capacity because it was actually meant to rest in something infinite. As Augustine said, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” God made us for Himself by giving us an infinite desire that can only be satisfied by His infinite goodness.

         So the problem with coveting is not that we desire something or even that we desire too much. C. S. Lewis said it best:

…Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like a ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.[4]

God made us for Himself. He made us to want Him. We fall into coveting other people’s spouses and houses and possessions not because in the end we want too much but only be­cause we are pleased with too little. The desire God has placed in us is too big to be satis­fied with anything but Him.

         The answer then does not lie in the Buddhist direction of seeking to eliminate desire from our lives. As Buddhist philosophy admits, getting rid of desire is ultimately accom­plished by getting rid of yourself, by achieving a state where you forget your conscious ex­istence as a human being. Christian faith, however, deals with desire by inviting you and I to discover who we really are, to desire the very best, to become more and more human by wanting the things for which we were created.

         That is why even as Jesus talks about how disordered our desires are, how full of lust and greed and envy our hearts are, He offers us something in their place. Anyone who has ever quit smoking or broken free of alcoholism will tell you that you cannot simply quit wanting that next cigarette or next drink. The only way to overcome a strong desire for something harmful is by cultivating a stronger desire for what is good.

         Last week I bought a pair of socks. I couldn’t help but notice that the young woman who rang up my purchase was really jittery. She told me she had quit smoking two weeks before. “Good for you,” I encouraged her, “hang in there!” She said, “I went to work out yesterday and on the stair-step machine I discovered I can already breathe so much better. I just have to keep telling myself how good that feels.” She was absolutely right. Bad de­sires need to be replaced with stronger good ones. To learn to stop coveting, you and I must learn to want and enjoy a healthy relationship with God even more than we want all the things we covet. We need to remember that Jesus offers us abundant life.

         The Ten Commandments are like a finely woven tapestry. The ten threads are twisted together so that they are all connected. Breaking one commandment inevitably leads to breaking another. Steal and you may become a murderer. Commit murder and you will al­most surely begin lying. But because coveting is a matter of the heart and desire, its con­nections are even stronger. You may become an adulterer or thief if you covet your neighbor’s spouse or possessions. Or you may break the Sabbath to earn them. Covet money too much, Jesus pointed out, and you will even refuse to help your parents.[5] Ulti­mately, coveting will cause you to break the first three commandments and offend God Himself. As an opera villain says of the woman he desires, “Tosca, you make me forget God.” That is what coveting does to us.

         Our only hope in it all is remembering God. Desiring what He gives can hold off our other desires. It’s why we are here, you know. As we sit and stand, sing and pray, read and listen, thinking about God, talking to God, praising God, part of the blessing of it all is that we can’t shop at the same time. The ads from the Sunday paper are lying at home. No commercials are playing. No merchandise is on display. The whole hour or so is devoted to wanting something else, something better than what we usually want.

         In our Gospel lesson, Jesus was praying for us. He prayed for us as we live in this world, surrounded by all the shiny distractions we covet. He didn’t pray the way a Stoic or a Buddhist might, asking for us to be removed from it all. Instead, He asked God to protect us here, while we’re still in this world. Part of what He meant was certainly protection from our own hearts, our own desires. Jesus asked God to save us from wanting too much those things which can never make us happy, to save us for something better.

         When you trust the grace of Jesus Christ to save you, then you may count on having everything you want. When your heart’s desire is Jesus, it doesn’t matter how much you want. You will find that He is enough to make you content, however big your need for Him is. In Christ our coveting can rest. We can be content with what we have.

         The story is told of an early Methodist named John Fletcher. He was one of a gentle band of Christians who helped everyone, gave to the poor, visited prisoners, and even sat compassionately beside condemned criminals riding to be hanged. Fletcher did much for his town, but he was poor. So the mayor decided he deserved a gift from the government. They put a few pounds in an envelope and sent them to John Fletcher. When he saw what it was, he handed it back to the messenger.

         When the money came back, the mayor figured the amount was too small and had in­sulted Fletcher. He added more and sent it back. Again it was refused. So they put even more in the envelope and took it a third time. But when it arrived, Fletcher said, “You don’t understand. I don’t want it.”

         The mayor’s representative was exasperated. “You must want something,” he said, “What can we give you?”

         “No,” replied Fletcher, “…but, well there is one thing I want.” The man got out a note­book to write down the request. Fletcher said, “I only want more grace.”[6]

         By the mercy of God may we be content with what we have, like John Fletcher. The grace of Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, are the things to want. There is no lack of them. Let us give grateful thanks that God has poured out these blessings on us. We have no need to covet anything else.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj