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The Sins He Died For: Gluttony
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis March 7, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Deuteronomy 8:1-10 John 6:25-35
Like lust, its sister transgression, the sin of gluttony reflects a constellation of complex attitudes toward the confluence of necessity and pleasure,” writes Francine Prose in her little book on this surprisingly deadly sin. Unlike the other five, “lust and gluttony are allied with behaviors required for the survival of the individual and the species,” she notes. “One has to eat in order to live; [and] presumably, the race would die out if lust were never permitted to work its magic. …Religion [therefore] has no choice but to acknowledge …these self evident realities.” That being said, I am left to wonder, when compared to all of the other destructive activities into which human beings are prone to fall, how it is that gluttony made the short list. The maker of the list, Gregory the Great, wrote that gluttony was characterized by our partaking “too soon, too delicately, too expensively, too greedily, too much…. Sometimes,” he wrote, “it forestalls the hour of need; sometimes it seeks costly meats, sometimes it requires that food be daintily cooked; sometimes it exceeds the measure of refreshment by taking too much; sometimes we sin by the very heat of an immoderate appetite.” True! But is this really a deadly sin in the sight of God? Ancient biblical scholars believed gluttony, in literal fact, to have been the first sin, noting that Adam’s assent to Eve’s apple was surely the beginning of the end of paradise. Gluttony was thus said to be the direct cause of our exile from God’s presence. Definitely deadly! Had Adam only practiced abstinence or moderation, they counseled after the fact, human beings “would all still be gamboling naked, enjoying the fruits of the garden, and naming the animals of Eden.” Early theologians argued that gluttony led to worship of the senses in general and of the sense of taste in particular, thereby turning the attention of God’s creatures from “holy things,” food becoming a “substitute for the worship of God.” Furthermore, they identified gluttony with the weakening of moral defenses, paving the way for lechery and debauchery. Said Thomas a Kempis, “When the belly is full to bursting with food and drink, debauchery knocks at the door.” Hence, “we cannot be mindful of God or of our final end or even of our human nature or moral responsibilities when, carried away by gluttony, we are behaving like the animal that came to symbolize the sin—that is to say, the pig.” To these two original and deathly consequences of gluttony, the mention of animal behavior reminded me of a third. In his reflections on “Grace and Gratitude,” the Scottish preacher and theologian John Baillie declared that “there was no more significant difference between a man and a brute beast than that, while dogs and pigs attacked the food presented to them with greedy and unreflecting taste [not all dogs, I might add], human beings will often be observed to bend their heads for a moment before setting to, and that in that little inhibition, that moment of pause, our sole human dignity resided.” Presumably gluttony renders the glutton incapable of that little inhibition, that moment of pause: renders us as ungrateful beasts before the God by whose hand we are fed. What to do? For Augustine, the solution was to avoid temptation altogether—a feat he managed to pull off a bit better when food rather than fornication was in the offing. In the tenth chapter of his Confessions, he admits that we must eat (the confluence of necessity and pleasure, you remember, which the church must acknowledge) and so understands food to be the means God has given us “to repair our bodily decay, in a kind of daily race with Death.” He notes, however, that the line is finely drawn between the “bare minimum necessary for health” and the amount that brings pleasure. Here I love Augustine, for he admits endearingly, “‘But full feeding sometime creepeth upon thy servant.’ …Who, Lord, he asks, has not been tempted to eat a little more than he needs?” Finally he counsels the distinction between what one eats and the spirit in which one imbibes: “I fear not the uncleanness of meat, but the uncleanness of desire.” Augustine encourages moderation but admits delight. The solution closest to our own theological tradition—that of the Puritans--rests on an assumption similar to Augustine’s but finally more austere: that “the element of sin enters in only when we allow ourselves to relax and enjoy satisfying the needs of the body. We are allowed to eat and have sex as long as we do not like it.” The Calvinists in Babette’s Feast, you will remember, huddled in their little church before they sat down to consume an astounding repast prepared by a strange French interloper to their town, whose winning of the lottery had landed them in the sauce, so to speak. No doubt the continuing distain of serious Christians for the arts, for the beautiful, for the sensual pleasures of human existence, for good wine, for anything other than plain fare has followed this alleged cure for our gluttony generation upon generation. Of course, the solution rejected by Protestants as papal, whose long history in the Bible and church history surely has something to recommend it, is the practice of fasting. “Here,” writes Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, “is Brillat-Savarin, two of whose great-uncles swooned with delight when, after the deprivations of Lent, they watched the carving of a ham, the breaking of a pie crust.’ Strict observance created one pleasure, ‘which is unknown to us today: the end of fasting, the de-lenting, at the first meal of Easter…If we look closely,…we see that our pleasures are based on the difficulties, privations, and yearnings we suffer to attain them. All of this was apparent in the act which broke the Lenten abstinance,’” and addressed, at least for a season, the sin of gluttony. Still, church fathers and ancient exegetes notwithstanding, I remain unconvinced of the eternal gravity of human gluttony except as one person’s gluttony results in another’s hunger, one nation’s gluttony in another’s famine. Without question, the corporate and global consequences of our common eating disorder deserve a morning other than this one for the full fury of God’s judgment upon us! Though even if we bracket the prophetic in favor of the pastoral dimension of this second sin of seven, we are led to a consequence far greater than the mere swelling of our girth. For I finally can only take gluttony as a metaphor for the human propensity to fill ourselves and our days with that which can never fulfill our lives. No doubt, lust and greed are close contenders for the known point of poetic comparison in this metaphor: filling our barns and indulging our libido until we are senseless with ourselves. Yet food is only the most tangible of those things with which we stuff our souls, and so gluttony the most visible and ironic manifestation of our essential emptiness. A post-modern psychological analysis of the metaphor would be that the sin is a sin of “compulsion, illness, self-destructiveness, the desire for self-obliteration,” whose subsequent solution, of course, would be dietary or therapeutic. “We live in a time largely devoid of ritual,” Barbara Grizzuti Harrison observes, so that “dieting is the ritual of the secular cult of fitness. It has this disadvantage: it has no end.” I rather am persuaded by the theological judgment that the “sin” of gluttony, that about gluttony which separates us from God, is the presupposition that our life is our own to sustain. Therefore we are kept in life, we are sustained by what we take in rather than what we relinquish, by what we acquire rather than what we give up, by what we claim as our own than by the Christ who claims us as His own. Ironically, the more we take in, the more we crave. We work, in other words, in Jesus’ words, for the food that perishes, missing the food that endures to eternal life: missing the God whose presence with us would fill our lives with all we desire, if we but had room within. To wit: Giovanni Bernardone, who was to be renamed St. Francis, was born into a family of acquisition, to parents who indulged his every whim. “No one loved pleasure more than Francis,” says one biographer. “He had a ready wit, sang merrily, delighted in fine clothes and showy display.” A close brush with death at an early age,” we read, caused “the emptiness of the life he had been leading to come to him.” But as is the case with most of us, his return to health returned him to excess. It was not until one day, while crossing the Umbrian plain on horseback, that he unexpectedly encountered a poor leper. At first, he was repulsed and instinctively retreated until something in him turned around, reversed directions, if you will. He dismounted, came to the man, embraced him and gave him all that he had. From that day, this man whose life was full to the human eye became empty, this man whose soul was empty to the eye of God became full. “Whoever comes to me,” said the Christ who came to St. Francis in the leper, “will never hunger.” Now with the abundance of gratitude evident in a life freed from the work of acquisition, the movement of taking in…with the peace that is given one who trusts completely in the hand that upholds our life in this world, St. Francis began to move about the Umbrian countryside, hand outstretched in the relinquishment that is praise: sowing love where there was hatred, pardon where injury, faith where doubt, hope where despair. Though even more, for with nothing—no thing—between his life and the abundance of God’s love all about him, he was awash in grateful astonishment and delight before the beauty missed by those too full of themselves to notice and bow down. So he sings praise to Brother Sun, Sister Moon and Stars, Brothers Wind and Air, Sister Water, Brother Fire, Sister Earth, singing even unto his end, “All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death,/From whose embrace no mortal can escape./Woe to those who die in mortal sin!/Happy those She finds doing your will!/The second death can do no harm to them./Praise and bless my Lord, and give him thanks,/And serve him with great humility.” Amen! |