Fully Alive: Envy - from Status Anxiety to Belovedness

Today we continue with our worship series Fully Alive, based on the book of the same title by Elizabeth Oldfield. We are each searching for meaning in our lives—searching for wisdom. And there’s millions of places for us to find it. In Fully Alive, Elizabeth Oldfield reminds us of the wisdom that our Christian faith tradition holds. Within Christianity, there are signposts that show us how to become the kind of human this world needs. In a world that is rife with division, pointing fingers, selfishness, and ecological destruction, we can be part of the solution—someone who is living “fully alive” and not wasting this one wild and wonderful life. Oldfield does this by using the framework of the seven deadly sins: how they show up in our lives and what it would look like to move towards more positive, life-giving virtues. Sin is anything that causes disconnection between ourselves and others, us and the natural world, or us and God. It is something that needs to be met not with judgment, but with grace—both in ourselves and others. Because sin does not define us—our worst choices do not define us. Sin is simply part of the human experience—to have these temptations pull us in one direction when often, we truly want to do another way. And this series is meant to help us bring awareness to our own sins—not how “those people sin”—but to acknowledge how these temptations show up in our lives, and then think about how we want to move forward in the world—with or without them. This week, we focus on the sin of envy and it's opposite, belovedness.