Seven Deadly Sins - Gluttony

8/13/2019 Seven Deadly Sins - Gluttony

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John 6:1-15, 25-35

The Most Succulent of Sins

Sermon preached February 16, 2014

Opening

I heard a story about a man named Tom, who was an overweight, cigarette smoking

highly stressed middle-aged male. When Tom went for his annual physical, his slim,

teetotaling, smoke-free doctor let him have it. Unless Tom cut out cigarettes, went on a

crash diet, began exercising and learned to relaxed, he was headed for a massive heart

attack. In fact, the doctor said he was a massive coronary looking for a place to

happen. Finished with his lecture, the doctor challenged Tom with, Now, how are you

going to start dealing with all this? Tom looked him right in the eye and said, Well, the

first thing Im going to do is get a fat doctor who smokes!

I know for some of us that this sermon feels mighty uncomfortable. If were overweight,

we feel like were right in the cross-hairs on this one. As his immensity, the great OrsonWelles said, Gluttony is not a secret vice.

But what you have up here preaching this morning is not someone who is like that doctor.

You have a preacher who has struggled all his life with gluttony. Ill tell you more about

that later on, but for now please know that I preach this message from the standpoint of a

fellow struggler, and not someone who is going to yell at you for taking too many trips

back to the buffet.

What is gluttony?

We think know gluttony when we see it - like the man - this is a true story - who went toa restaurant that was having an all-you-can-eat prime rib special. He went through the

line seven times - but ended up in the hospital, having his stomach pumped. However,

less than a week later, he was back in the beef line at the same restaurant.1

We think we know it when we see it. And the standard definitions of gluttony support

this.

Donald Capps in his book on the Seven Deadly Sins says gluttony is "an excessive

and seemingly insatiable desire for food and drink To be a glutton is to want

more food or drink than is needed, and to want it now, not at some time in

future."2

The parson in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales commented that "Gluttony is an

immeasurable appetite to eat or drink..."3

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But its not quite as simple as that. Its not only a matter of standing helpless before the

open refrigerator...of going back for third helpings...of eating a bag of potato chips at one

sitting...gluttony is complicated. Not all overweight people are gluttons, and not all thin

people are free from it.

For now, heres our working definition of gluttony - gluttony is using food in ways thatharm us. Gluttony is using food in ways that harm us.

The purpose of food

Now God created food to sustain and bless. Food has three purposes:

To sustain life

To experience joy

To build community

Now - sustaining life - thats pretty obvious - animals, as opposed to plants, have to ingest

food rather than manufacture it. But what is amazing, and what points to the goodness of

God, is how food can be so intensely pleasurable, and how food can build human

community.

But God also meant for us to enjoy food. The bible is full of references to this. The text

from Ecclesiastes we looked at in January - there is nothing better than to eat and drink

and enjoy life... The laws of Moses establishing harvest celebrations. The psalms that

describe the joy of the harvest.

The goodness of food points directly to the goodness of God. The variety of food

available on this planet and how amazingly good some of it tastes is extraordinary.

Fresh-picked tomatoes in July...strawberry ice cream...hot coffee...the smoked goose

breast that Scott Mummert fixes - its amazing that every single day, three times a day,

we can sit down to good food that not only sustains life but tastes wonderful, brings great

pleasure.

Why did God make eating so pleasurable? Didnt have to be that way. Well eat most

anything if were hungry enough and God could have designed food for nourishment but

not pleasure. Why did God do this? Because he is a God who wishes pleasure and joy

for his creatures.

And that leads to the third use of food. To build community. Were going to look at this

in some depth during our Lenten Simple Suppers, but in a nutshell, food is used all

through the Bible to build relationships. From Abraham setting out a meal for the angels

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who visited him back in Genesis...to the feasts mandated for the people of Israel in the

law of God...to the parties Jesus attended - like with Zaccheus the tax collector - what

was scandalous about Jesus eating with people like him and other so-called low-lifes was

that in the bible, to share a meal means to enter into relationship, into friendship with

someone.

First way we fall into gluttony is through thoughtless eating

And when we dont use food as God intended it to be used, we fall into gluttony. And I

think there are two major categories of gluttony - thoughtless eating, and emotional

eating.

First, thoughtless eating.

Now remember - God designed food to nourish, to bring joy, to build community.

Thoughtless eating is when we eat bad food, in a hurry, in ways that dont build

community. And thoughtless eating often - not always, but often - leads to gluttony.

And its like contemporary American culture is specifically designed to promote this kind

of eating - eating food thats bad for us, eating too much of it, eating it in a hurry, and

eating it either alone, or while staring at the TV.

Part of the challenge we all face is that our ancestors were hunter-gathers who had to

gorge to survive. When a hunting party killed a mastodon, you ate until you were about

to explode, you had mastodon burgers, mastodon steaks, mastodon stew, you ate and ate

and ate because there was no refrigeration to store food so you ate it before it spoiled, and

you ate and ate and ate because you never knew when youd eat again.

Today, thanks for modern farmers and the food industry, food is cheap and plentiful.

But the problem is, now we can feast all the time. We live in a culture where for the first

time the primary nutrition problem of the poor - is obesity! Calories are cheap in our

culture. Thats a blessing and curse.

And the curse part is that a lot of the cheap food is mostly bad for us. And then they keep

giving us more and more of the bad food, for cheap. We are encouraged to eat badly, by

how cheap bad food is.

And there has been a big change just in my lifetime. When I was a kid, going to

McDonalds was a treat. And I remember when I was about ten, I got to have not

one, but two, of those minuscule hamburgers because I was a big boy - and they

came with this little bag of fries and a small drink.

But then McDonalds started upping the portions - first there was the Big Mac -

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say the jingle with me - two-all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles

onions on a sesame seed bun; then quarter pounders, then super-sized fries and

drinks, then double quarter-pounders with cheese.

And instead of being a treat, people eat it all the time - go by the McDonalds

drive-thru in the evenings and there are cars lined up out the parking lot - parentsgetting dinner for their families.

The food industry - they are geniuses at getting us to buy their processed food products by

tweaking the fat and salt, by adding flavor enhancers. The processed food products are

pleasurable, to a point, but they are not nutritious, they are not good for us.

And this is how many of us fall into gluttony - thoughtlessly stuffing ourselves with

processed food which may taste good but does not nourish.

Here are some other ways we fall into thoughtless eating:

Snacking all day long.

Eating in a hurry - you microwave something quick and everyone shovels it in and

out the door you go on the way to practices or lessons or meetings, or you manage

to fix some dinner but everyones so busy that you all eat at different times rather

than eat together.

Or you just plop down in front of the TV and mindlessly eat whats in front of you

while devoting your attention to whats on the tube, or everyone brings their

phones to the table and you spend the meal staring at screens rather than talk to

one another.

Theres no joy in that kind of eating, theres no community in that kind of eating.

And it leads straight to gluttony - mindlessly eating too much bad food and the

health problems that causes.

The economist David Cutler has shown that since the mid 1970's the average American

calorie intake has increased by ten percent. But he says its not the result of eating more

at meals, but eating between meals because food is so widely available all the time - so

we snack and graze and nosh. As the article says, Weve become an eat-on-the-run,

absent-mindedly feeding, cup-holder culture. Technology has made calories bountiful,

cheap, and easy to consume, while new patterns of work, residence, mobility, and child

rearing have squeezed the time that we are able or willing to commit to family or

communal meals.4

Eating properly takes time and attention - time and attention to buy and prepare

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nourishing food, time and attention to give thanks for it and eat it slowly and savor it,

time and attention to sit around a table and talk with others.

Heres the thing - if your schedule is so jam-packed that you have no time or

energy to eat good food with joy, to eat together as a family if youre part of a

family, youve got a problem with your schedule. You are trying to do too much.Your priorities are out of whack.

And since our bodies are a gift from God, temples of the Holy Spirit, we have a

responsibility to care for them - and gluttony is a sin against our bodies. And its kind of

ironic that we pray for health and healing in our bodies when our eating habits are

destroying our health.

Emotionally based gluttony

But theres another form of gluttony - where we eat in an attempt to deal with emotional

or spiritual pain. You get stressed or upset or angry and you throw open the refrigeratordoor and out comes the tub of ice cream and before you know it, youre scraping the

bottom of the container.

And this is part of my struggle. Ive fought gluttony my whole life. I have dealt with

emotional gluttony - eating to deal with stress or anxiety or loneliness. Ive dealt with the

the thoughtless kind of gluttony - just eating the wrong kinds of food thoughtlessly

because it was there and I liked it.

And when I was in my mid-twenties, my weight had ballooned to 265 pounds. I wasnt

chunky or big-boned like my momma used to tell me, I was officially obese. I felt bad

and I looked bad and I knew it was somehow a sin, I knew this wasnt what God wantedme to be like. Then one day I saw a picture of myself in all my corpulent glory that

someone had put on the refrigerator. Maybe that was a hint. But something clicked

inside me. And looking back, God a wonderful work of grace in me.

Somehow I found the discipline to begin exercising - walking, then jogging, then running,

up to twenty-five miles a week. But what was even more remarkable was the inward

change that took place. I learned when hunger struck to think of it in a positive way,

almost visualizing my body burning off fat. I learned even to find joy in denying my

body the bad food I craved. I learned to focus on mealtime less as a time to feed my

physical cravings and more as a time to enjoy the company of others. But most important

of all, I began to regard my body as my servant, not my master. And in about a year I lost

75 pounds.

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Scripture passage

Looking back, what that was about, was the next step in my journey to follow Jesus

Christ. There was a deeper level of abundant life that Christ wanted for me, but I was

blocking it through my gluttony.

And that leads into our scripture reading. Its familiar because Gene preached on this

passage a couple of weeks ago and Im going to pretty much repeat what he said.

This is Johns account of the feeding of the five thousand, and the way John has

structured his gospel, this is one of seven signs, or miracles, that Jesus performed that

revealed his glory as the Son of God, and revealed the blessings of following Jesus. What

these signs do is reveal the hidden spiritual reality just out of sight of the physical reality

that we live within.

Now in this sign, Jesus produces bread and fish for this enormous crowd out of a boys

sack lunch. And they eat till they are filled - the Greek word means stuffed, like afterThanksgiving dinner when youve gone back to Mommas house and eaten and laughted

and celebrated with people you love.

But this sign harkens back to the story of God feeding the Israelites with manna in the

wilderness, and reveals Jesus as the new giver of manna. And surprisingly, the people in

the crowd get it - on one level - they say, this is the Prophet who was to come into the

world - they understand that God has come among them. And what John tells us they

want to do is seize Jesus and march on Jerusalem and lead a rebellion in order to make

Jesus kind so they can have all the bread they crave.

So Jesus leaves the crowd. They follow. And he tells them they are missing the realpoint - that he came to provide spiritual food - that he is the bread of life that satisfies our

deepest hungers - our spiritual cravings for love and acceptance and meaning - the bread

of life that gives us a depth of life beyond anything we can cook up for ourselves.

And heres something fascinating - the word glutton is used only three times in the

New Testament. Its used once in the book of Titus where Paul makes the curious remark

that people from Crete are lazy and gluttons (maybe he was in a bad mood when he wrote

that?). And the other two times the word glutton appears - are in the gospels, when Jesus

is accused to being a glutton and a drunkard by the thin-lipped, squint-eyed religious

killjoys of his time.

Why? Because he loved going to parties and feasting and celebrating in order to show

people that the Kingdom of God means is like the best party youve ever been to - and

everybody gets invited, especially the kind of people who never get invited to parties.

You see, following Jesus doesnt sentence you to a lifetime of tofu bacon and bean-sprout

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1. Karl Menninger, Whatever Happened to Sin?, p. 142. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973.

2. Donald Capps, Deadly Sins and Saving Virtues, p. 26. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987.

3. Capps, p. 26.

4. Steven Shapin, Eat and Run: Why Were So Fat, in The New Yorker, Jan. 16, 2006.

sandwiches. Jesus brings the bread of heaven that fills our empty places, and so we can

enjoy rightly the good things of life - like food - without being controlled by sin-directed

appetites.

And my testimony as a recovering glutton, is that Jesus Christ took a gluttonous young

man and made him into the amazing physical specimen that stands before you today.Hah!

Closing

Well, the promise of the gospel is that Jesus Christ feeds us with the bread of life that fills

our empty places, that gives us a depth of life we cant find any other way, that enables us

to enjoy the gifts of God - like food - in ways that bless us. Amen.

Endnotes

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Seven Deadly Sins - Gluttony