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The Spiritual Poison of Schadenfreude

24th Sunday : 15 September 2013  : Luke 15: 1-10

Take a look at any magazine stand in dairies and supermarkets these days and the most eye-catching publications on display will tend to be the ones that specialise in the private lives of entertainers, television personalities and movie stars. While some of these stories are of the "Woman’s Day" type, many focus on the spectacular life style pratfalls of the glitterati. Bad behaviour in public places, tales of drunkenness, drug addiction, and admissions to drying out and addiction clinics are reported in abundant detail, as are marriage break-ups and expensive palimony payouts. And of course these takes of folly and personal misery are illustrated in lavish detail with intrusive photos taken by the paparazzi. All this unwanted attention in the lives of its victims is in part because of the cult of celebrity that has become so powerful in western societies. Those who push themselves into the limelight in the hope of immortal fame must also pay these kinds of penalties. But there is something else at work here that is rather more sinister, and I shall be directing our attention to that in a few minutes.

Politicians too have these times of public humiliation by media exposure. In recent weeks Shane Jones has been obliged once more to apologise again and again for the motel blue movie incident of some years back, though as ever he often brings self-deprecating humour to his perspective on why some labour party women members have a problem with him. But his difficulties are as nothing compared to Anthony Weiner, the former democrat congressman, whose aggressive bid for the New York mayoralty has been torpedoed by repeated sexting scandals. Having done public penance for sending compromising photos of himself on his cell phone to women, he then pushed the self-destruct button once more, and did it all over again. Now he has had to withdraw from the mayoralty race. We could reflect that American politics often has high entertainment value, but there is something else at work here that I will deal with in a minute.

A motley crew of keen disciples, disreputable characters trying to get back on side with God again, and of self-righteous, judgemental religious people who, in a striking phrase I heard recently, had been too long in the church, often surrounded Jesus. He had a liking for that middle group and often sought out their company. His rapport with them conveyed an unusual message – if you think of yourself as lost then you are high on God’s list of priorities, and he wont just wait for you to come to him, he will come looking for you, and will accept you on an as is where is basis. The joy of repentance follows on from this as the lost, filled with gratitude and relief, delighted at the opportunity to start all over again, make amends and whole heartedly turn to the God who has been good to them.

There is a message too in all this about the healthy balance that Jesus would like to see in the communities that will bear his name and continue his work. He hopes that they will contain a mixture of those who are making their way back into the grace filled community, as well as those who have been within it for quite some time. Somehow the recently repented, for all their rough edges, bring a breath of fresh air into the household of God.

For those of us who have been in the church for some time there is a particular spiritual danger that is offered for our consideration in this morning’s lost and found stories. I have called this sermon, "The spiritual poison of schadenfreude."

Schadenfreude – gloating over others sins and failings, rejoicing in their discomfiture and disgrace, taking delight in what has gone wrong for others. It goes hand in hand with loving to hear ill spoken of others, being hyper critical and judgemental in our assessment of those around us, and failing to give others the benefit of the doubt. Somehow the longer we have been in the church, and the more we have progressed up its stairway of responsibilities, the greater the temptation seems to be. It can be a besetting sin of the clergy, who when they come together love to gossip about one another, often hoping to hear of colleagues failings and discomfiture.

What underlies schadenfreude is a lethal cocktail of pride, malice, and that lack of humility that fails to discern our own blind spots. We rush to judgement, forgetting the common frailty that trips us all up in our own particular ways. We forget that we are all under the judgement and mercy of God who has often accommodated himself to us in his patient forbearance of our irritating little ways, as indeed do the people who love us and who live in close proximity to us.

That theme of our common frailty came home to me a few years ago when Bishop Roger Herft of Waikato Diocese came down to be our guest speaker at the Christchurch clergy school. Clergy sex abuse cases were much in the news then, and he was asked about that. "Yes, we have had several of those in our Diocese," he said, "and in every one that I had to adjudicate in I finished up reflecting that there but for the grace of God go I."

Something else that we might like to reflect on as we try to keep at bay the oh so seductive temptation of engaging in schadenfreude is some of the examples of God’s analysis of human sinfulness as we see them in the Bible. Take, for instance, Saul and David.

I have often felt a lot of sympathy for Saul who didn’t want power for himself, who had the Kingship pushed on him, and whose mistakes often seemed inadvertent, almost accidental. By contrast David is a bold sinner who commits adultery, judicial murder, and whose self-indulgent parenting of Absalom brings civil war to the Kingdom. Yet paradoxically God approves of David rather than Saul.

There is fearfulness in Saul, a withholding of self, a failure to fully inhabit his new role. He is so busy trying to keep his nose clean and his head down that he falls into crevasses of self-regard, while trying to dodge the more obvious traps of life at the top. By contrast David is as whole hearted in his repentance as he is in his sinning. There is decisiveness in the steps he takes to rebuild his relationship with God. There is no small mindedness or pettiness about him. He takes God seriously, and relates to him directly and courageously. There is a lot about David that God can work with.

The paradoxes that flow from the judgement of the Lord who truly sees the heart of each one of us, and who alone knows what is in it, might give us pause for thought before we rush to judgement. There is a radical equality that we share in the household of faith, because the joy of repentance is something we are invited to share in every day. None of us has got their act together so well that we don’t need to come to the Lord for repentance. And when we do, it is as though the world has been made anew again. It is as though we have started out again on the first day of our walk with Christ after our conversion.

I will leave the last word to Paul from his letter to Timothy:

’Here is a saying that you can rely on and nobody should doubt: that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. I myself am the greatest of them; and if mercy has been shown to me, it is because Jesus Christ meant to make me the greatest evidence of his inexhaustible patience for all the other people who would later have to trust in him to come to eternal life. To the eternal King, the undying, invisible and only God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen’