Series: Seven
Sermon: Gluttony
October 1st, 2006
Intro
Well today we continue our series on the Seven Deadly Sins and we only have two more left in our series. Today we’re looking at gluttony. Now for many it’s hard for us to think of gluttony in the same light as pride, or anger. We reason it’s not one of those bad sins like adultery or stealing. All gluttony does is make you soft and huggable. It’s a cute sin.
The reality is that gluttony can make you do things you would never do normally and it can have terrible consequences. An old man and a young man worked in office next to each other. The young man had noticed that the older man always seemed to have a jar of peanuts on his desk. The young man loved peanuts.
One day while the older man was away from his desk the young man couldn’t resist and went to the old man’s jar and ate over half the peanuts.
When the old man returned the young man felt guilty and confessed to taking the peanuts.
The old man responded "That’s ok since I lost my teeth all I can do is lick the chocolate off the M&Ms."
Once more, as I did my research for this sermon, I’m stunned at how this sin too has gripped our society. It seems that every other week we’re hearing some statistic about the dangers of being overweight, how we’re raising a generation of overweight children, how fast-food is contributing to the crises is health care. And then I came across this. (play Video - I downloaded and edited for length the promo video from the International Federation of Competitive Eating website http://www.ifoce.com/)
Perhaps more than any other, of all the Seven Deadly Sins, this may be the one which the church is least vigilant with. One statistic I came across said that 60% of all professing Christians are overweight and out of shape because they are mastered by their appetites. Apparently the path to the potluck supper table and the path to sanctification lie in opposite directions.
Its easy thought to see how eating can get out of control. Between the ages of 20 and 50, the average person spends about 20,000 hours – over 800 days – eating. And it is really the first pleasure that we experience in life. All we had to do was cry, kick and scream loud enough and we were rewarded with sweet, warm milk. Almost all of our attention was focused upon that one pleasure. Soon we began to grow and we’d hear compliments from our Aunts like, “Oh my, he’s such a good eater” and our Uncle would add, “You’re certainly getting to be a big boy now.” And of course our reward from Grandma and Grandma for being so cute and eating all our supper was candy and desserts. Now all of a sudden everything is different.
Now, don’t get mislead regarding all this talk about food. The Bible is very positive about food. In fact the word gluttony is scarcely mentioned in the Bible and the bible encourages us to enjoy food as much, if not more then they warn us against it. Right in the first book of the Bible we’re told that Eden was planted with “every tree that is pleasant to sight and good for food.” In the final book of the Bible we are told there is “the tree of life, with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month.” In the Song of Solomon the lover takes the beloved to “the banqueting house.” The great climax of history will be celebrated at the “marriage supper of the lamb.” And Jesus Himself taught us to pray for our “daily bread.” Even the way we are encouraged to remember the death and resurrection of Jesus is around a meal. No gluttony is not primarily about eating.
Defining Gluttony
Gluttony like all the other Seven Deadly Sins has to do with our hearts attitude. It is not about appearance. As one author put it external dimensions are no predictor of internal rebellion. There are many thin people who are overtaken with the sin of gluttony.
A glutton is a person debased and excessive in his or her eating habits. It is not primarily concerned with food itself and certainly we have a need to eat, it has to do with how we go about our eating and in the thought we give to our eating. Perhaps the fact that we don’t think of it as being that bad shows that gluttony has already taken a greater hold of our heart than we would like. Oh sure, we may think its bad for our waistline but a sin which destroys our soul? I’ll have to think about that one over a coffee, maybe a slice of cake too, even though I know I probably shouldn’t.
Some of the Ancient fathers who wrote on this particular sin recorded several evidences of gluttony. Would you like to know what they are?
1. Gorging ourselves and not savoring a reasonable amount of food.
2. Eating at any other time than the appointing hour, in other words snacking.
3. Anticipating eating with a preoccupied, eager longing.
4. Eating excessively costly foods.
5. Seeking after delicacies.
6. Paying too much attention to food, this would include the over attentiveness of dieting.
I don’t know how you feel after hearing that list, but I know how I felt. But the intention of this sermon and all of the sermons on the Seven Deadly Sins is not to make you feel guilty. It’s to help us examine ourselves to find out what might be keeping us from a deeper fellowship and walk with God. You see I believe that we gather here on Sunday because we really do want to know the God of the universe in a closer more intimate way and Satan knows that an inordinate concern for food can create an idol in our hearts that will keep us from the fellowship and intimacy we long for. This is why Paul, in Philippians, speaking about some who are enemies of God says, “Their god is their stomach…”
Gluttony seeks to ruin your knowledge of God’s love that’s why one of the harsher verses in the Bible, in Proverbs 23:2, it says, “…put a knife to your throat if you are given to gluttony.” Its power to destroy your soul is as real as that of pride, lust or anger. It’s why a 19th century Russian Monk wrote, “Wise temperance of the stomach is a door to all other virtues. Restrain the stomach, and you will enter paradise. But if you please and pamper your stomach, you will hurl yourself over the precipice of bodily impurity, into the fire of wrath and fury, you will coarsen and darken your mind, and this way you will ruin your powers of attention and self-control, your sobriety and vigilance.”
Not only does a gluttonous attitude keep you from God it limits the power of God that can be at work in you and through you. Sin, in all its forms, quenches the Spirit of God.
At the root of a gluttonous heart
So what is it that is going on when we allow our desire for food to exceed our desire for God? Besides the fact that food is pleasing to taste, and that we have to eat it, and that eating and enjoying food is not wrong, there is often other things at work which influence our attitude towards food and causes us to abuse it. Often abusive eating is a response to emotions.
Let’s face it life at times can be tough and it’s so unpredictable. Things can be going so well and then out of no where WHAM, something happens that knocks you to the ground or sends you stumbling. And the problem with life is you can’t just hit a pause button in order to recompose, analyze, do a little positive self-talk and recover. No once you begin to stumble life doesn’t stop to see if you’re okay it just carries on and says catch up when you can. At times like that we can wonder if life is really that much of a friend. You know what I mean don’t you? You get established in a routine, things finally feel like there getting under control and then all of a sudden your child is diagnosed with something, your boss calls you into the office and informs you the division is closing, your driving down the street and get t-boned by an inattentive driver, you make an innocent comment that’s taken the wrong way and you find yourself in the middle of a verbal World War III with your friend, child or spouse.
In times like those you feel powerless, you feel like a victim. And as the evening winds down and you begin to reflect on just what kind of day it’s been and you realize how your hopes have been crushed, and your desires unmet, and complicated, compromising, disappointments of your day sink you down into your lazy boy, you think to yourself, “I may not be able to fix the problems at work, I may not be able to go back in time and take back what I said, I may not be able to re-prioritize my decisions, but I am darned if I can’t make that back of chips in the cupboard know who’s boss.” And our overeating and snacking becomes a secret, habitual way to reassure our self that we are not completely powerless.
Perhaps, some of you aren’t buying that, but there are other inner motivations that trigger our gluttony. For some it’s boredom. A constant stream of same old same old every day, it would be barely endurable if it wasn’t for that bag of licorice and diet coke to keep me going. And if you’re not using food to medicate your boredom settings, it might be stress or loneliness.
Sometime it is not an emotional trigger, sometimes it’s just faulty, irrational thinking. We see a certain delicacy and we think thoughts like “I may never get another chance to eat any of that.” Or “I haven’t had any of those in ages.” Or “that is probably the most perfect looking cream puff I’ve ever seen, it must taste better than any I’ve ever had before.” Of course most of those thoughts are irrational but we take the bait – literally.
Another interesting twist on conventional wisdom was a study done by Susie Orbach. She found that many women especially, are afraid of being thin. According to her research she said that while woman may desire to be thin, their perception of what being thin would be like was negative. They associated it with being cold and un-giving, self absorbed, burdened with other’s expectations, the object of unwanted desire from men and uncomfortable jealousy from women. On the other hand they perceived their fat self as relaxed free from unwanted sexual attention and the need to compete and able to talk comfortably with others.
Friends, hidden beneath the distorted motives of our heart and the twisted thinking of our minds, that fuels gluttony, there is spiritual child who feeds on faith and is nourished by trust in God, and it is at this deeper level, at the spiritual level that we find the real root of gluttony. You see gluttony is primarily a spiritual ailment, it is a lack of trust in God who has promised to provide all of our needs, it is a compromise in our belief that man does not live on bread alone, it is doubt in the teaching that doing the work of the father is true food that satisfies the deepest longing of the heart. “A glutton” said Frederick Buechner, “is one who runs to the icebox for a cure to a spiritual malnutrition.” Fear pulls our strings and our hands reach for the snack bowl.
You see, the Seven Deadly Sins feed into one another, they play off of each other, like bumpers on a pinball machine and you are the metal ball being bounced from sin to sin, gaining speed and force allowing chaos to reign. You hear about the advancement of another at work for a position you are qualified for and you get envious, it triggers your pride and before the day is over you’re seething with anger, you walk through the door and wolf down some comfort food to sooth your hurt emotions and all the while you resist and fight the calling and urging of God’s Spirit in our hearts telling us, “Cast your burdens on me.” “Come apart with me a while.” “Learn from me, my yoke is easy.”
The sins are deadly to the soul, God longs for us to know the joy and peace of His presence ruling in our hearts, satisfying us in places that exist deeper than our stomachs. The ascetic theologians, those monks who lived in monasteries, wrote about an abiding sense of peace and joy that comes from the full harmony of the passions. They taught that this deep experience of calm that holds in check disordered cravings can become a habitual state developed through spiritual disciplines.
Do you understand what’s being said? It means that just as we are expected to allow the leadership of Jesus over our life, to control what we say and do. So also this leadership needs to be encouraged over our thoughts and over our emotions. We are not the victims of uncontrolled ideas that won’t go away, our feelings do not have power to chart the course of our heart and steer us into rebellious or sinful behavior. Christ has set you free from their control and though the struggle to exercise that freedom is not easy, we should not be surprise, lose heart or grow weary because the fruit of our surrendered inner life to Christ’s control is the deepest satisfaction of God’s unshakable kingdom in our hearts and a greater demonstration of the kingdom’s power in our life and witness to others.
A Discipline that defeat gluttony
So what are some of the disciplines that help us to defeat the pull of gluttony? I won’t explore all of the disciplines that are encouraged for the development of a healthy soul, I’ve preached on that at other times. But I will mention perhaps the most obvious and the one which is seldom exercised in modern Canadian Christianity; it is the discipline of fasting.
The early church saw weekly fasting as normative. So much so that in 315 A.D. Epiphanius, an early church bishop could ask the rhetorical question, “Who does not know that the fast of the fourth and sixth days of the week are observed by the Christians throughout the world?” Unlike the practice of dieting, which is driven chiefly for a concern of ones appearance, although certainly not exclusively and that is not to say one should not be concerned about their appearance, but fasting is driven by a desire to become closer to God, develop a healthier balance of gratitude, trust and contentment in our lives and become more useful in our service to God.
You see just a full stomach makes you dull and tired, and inactive physically, it has the same effect spiritually. All of the books which I have read on fasting speak about how this exercise sharpens your spiritual sensitivity. John Piper says, “Christian fasting, at its root, is the hunger of a homesickness for God.”
Friends, could it be that the one who wants to be remembered by the bread and wine was actually suggesting that His presence and life within is more satisfying than food? Could it be that the one who defeated Satan’s spiritual assault in the desert wilderness, by refusing to satisfy his physical hunger and turn stones into bread, was teaching us how to defeat Satan’s attacks in our own life. Could it be that every time we say no to the lure of gluttony’s assault on our appetites we’re reclaiming our humanity that was stripped of it’s dignity when we as humans refused to say “no” when we took the bite from the forbidden fruit in the garden. Could it be that God wants us to take the influence of this Deadly sin more seriously so that we might experience a satisfaction, and depth of intimacy with Him that cannot be known any other way?
Let’s pray.
