Gluttony

 Friends, we’re up to week 5 of this sermon series I’ve put together for Lent about the ancient Church’s teachings on the seven deadly sins. So far we’ve talked about pride, greed, envy, and sloth. One note of housekeeping: this sermon series ends next week, on Palm/Passion Sunday, with the sin of wrath. I’m cooking up quite the sermon about “lust”, but because it’s so important to me that you’re in the right headspace to hear that message, and that you’re hearing it by your own choice, instead of delivering that one from the pulpit, I’m posting it next weekend to my Substack, as well as to Facebook for those accustomed to reading my sermons there. 

Today, a day when we are NOT having a big lunch after service, we’re talking about gluttony.

What on earth is gluttony? Our first impression is that gluttony has something to do with food. Our pedestrian understanding is that it’s the Cookie Monster sin. And sure, Cookie Monster is impulsive, and he’s smashed a few plates in pursuit of his favorite dessert over the years, but is he really so bad that he should be the poster child of a deadly sin?

As I’m told the most gluttonous among us might say–let’s dig in.

Like last week’s sin (sloth) gluttony is much deeper than our surface level assumption. The term itself comes from the Latin word “gula” meaning “to gulp”, and the 7th Century monks who first suggested the evil that could come from “gula” certainly had food in mind. But they didn’t think this sin had to revolve exclusively around food, and the Church, since then, has taught that this sin is bigger and deeper. 

I took great care to research all of these, but with this one, I wanted to be extra precise because we can wield this word as a weapon to inflict shame in a way that the early Church never wanted. We aren’t “gluttons” on our birthday, when we have an extra big piece of cake to celebrate the gift of life. We aren’t “gluttons” when we catch up with an old friend for a nice dinner, stuff ourselves with lobster, and go home in an Uber because we got a little tipsy on the wine menu. We aren’t even “gluttons” on Thanksgiving, when we make a huge spread, and compete for who can eat the most rolls. We’re bordering on uh oh behavior on Thanksgiving, culturally…but for a different reason.

Gluttony isn’t about shame. It’s not about shaming our appetites for desiring nourishment, nor is it about shaming our families and friends for bonding over food. Jesus did that all the time. And, most of all, gluttony isn’t about shaming people for their bodies, looking at them and making assumptions about their portion sizes and relationship to dieting. 

Gluttony is about excessive consumption, of anything. As with the sin of lust, we don’t call gluttony a sin because we think it’s bad to act on an instinct. The sin comes in lacking boundaries, in ignoring reasonable limits, and, most of all, in doing harm. 

But our American culture’s relationship to food, alcohol, eating, and drinking is so warped and toxic that we’re all literally being fed the worst, most contradictory messages. Go get some McDonalds. Those golden arches illuminate the way to happiness. They look just like french fries for a reason! And those aggressively bright red and yellow colors are scientifically proven to make your brain nervous, and your nervous brain will cope by stuffing a ton of food in your mouth as fast as possible. Don’t forget to supersize it! That is, if that one documentary didn’t ruin that for you. But didn’t that guy kinda get outed as a fraud? Eh…but now that you’re driving down the other side of the street, with the burger and fries in that greasy bag, you’re seeing advertisements for the local gym. And for GLP-1s, and all the weight they can make you lose! You go home, and flip through a magazine–especially the kind that caters to women–and the pretty lady on the cover promises to tell you all her dieting secrets. Spoiler: it’s not her diet, her picture was majorly photoshopped to make her look unattainably attractive. She represents something you can never be, and the pain will drive you to buy lots of magazines. The altruistic article on page 10 tells you to “be your own best friend”, whatever that means. Then the next page gives you a step by step guide to this week’s fad diet. Then the next page is a cake recipe!

We’re chronically confused. We’re distressed. On the whole, we’re pretty unhealthy in this country, and a lot of us would be healthier if we lost a few pounds and exercised our bodies a little more often. But gluttony isn’t about me putting down that sandwich and getting on a treadmill. Gluttony isn’t about the day to day, individual decisions that I make when preparing meals. 

Gluttony is about our greater society here in the developed world. It’s about a colonialist, post-Industrial Revolution people who devour every resource we can get our hands on, with no end in sight, because we think if we can get our hands on it, we should devour it. Not just use. Use up. Even if we’re wrecking our bodies and lives. Even if we’re wrecking our environment, and depleting resources much faster than the earth can create them. Even if we’re overproducing food to have overstocked, appealing grocery shelves, and then throwing a bunch of that food out, unused…while our neighbors go hungry. The Church has always maintained that gluttony also has to do with drug and alcohol consumption, a phenomenon that Methodists have historically been particularly disturbed by.

When I looked for scriptures to pair with gluttony, the OT passage that made the most sense ended up being the passage the revised common lectionary recommended anyway–Ezekiel 37, and those bones, those bones, those dry bones. 

No singing, I promise.

But in this beloved passage, this favorite among preachers, God is showing the priest-turned-prophet Ezekiel the full consequences of gluttony. Ezekiel and his neighbors had once lived in the Southern Kingdom of Israel, and God had spent decades warning the Judahites through the prophets, that doom was coming if they didn’t change their behavior. They didn’t listen, and Babylon conquered them, destroyed their home and Temple, and took many of them as prisoners of war back to Babylon. It’s there, in Babylon, as a prisoner of war, that God first began delivering prophetic messages through Ezekiel, who was long used to service to the Divine and to the Temple, but who had never worked in this kind of role before. God shows us through Ezekiel that, even after much destruction, there’s hope for a new beginning.

Ezekiel was a deeply visual prophet. So God revealed to him an undeniable image, one he would never forget: a valley full of bones, from people and animals that were long dead. The aftermath of the Judahites’ destructive living. Profound overconsumption, as they did what they believed was right in their own eyes. And then the violence and death that followed those binges.

From Ezekiel’s perspective, there was nothing left of his home. He didn’t know if he would ever see it again. But God told him, there was a way. All was not lost. Everything that was destroyed could be reconstructed. But it would take hard work, and obedience to God.

The hard work and obedience is echoed by Paul, in his letter to his church in Galatia. He had warned them about their own gluttony a few verses before–their overindulgences in food, alcohol, and partying. Paul warned Galatia: that lifestyle destroys and kills, and y’all don’t want to die. Y’all want to live, and create the Kingdom of God. Y’all want to build a loving and just world. And that loving, just, moral world will come about because we lean into what Christians call the fruits of the Spirit. From another lens, what Paul teaches the Galatians is also what Aquinas taught us, about the virtue that leads us back to wholeness after we’ve consumed everything in our path in a gluttonous spiral. And that virtue is temperance.

History buffs in this room might recognize that word, temperance, because of the Temperance Movement that took off in the United States in the 19th Century, that evolved alongside the Women’s Rights movements of that same era. Those two causes were companions to one another, and both found strong support among Methodists. While the greater Women’s Rights movement fought for the rights of women to vote, own property, and work, the Temperance movement was most concerned about the private home lives of women who were married to men who drank too much and then turned abusive. The relationship between alcoholism and domestic violence was one of John Wesley’s deepest concerns for the people he preached to, and it was the biggest reason why he urged both his congregants and the preachers he trained to abstain from alcohol.

Centuries have passed since the heyday of those movements, and now we need to make our own personal decisions about whether or not to consume alcohol, and how much. We need to make our own personal decisions, in general, about how much is too much: whether that’s about alcohol and drugs, or nutritious food, or junk food, or screen time, or social media, or online shopping. And then, as a society, we need to do our parts to influence decisions we make together about industrial farming, and fracking, and fossil fuel usage, and consumer waste, and fast fashion, and recycling, and pollution, and military spending, and the feeding of the War Machine.

How much is too much? How much is living life, protecting ourselves and one another, having some fun, and making the most of our time on this earth, and how much is so much that it becomes destructive?

Aquinas taught us: find a limit. Know when to stop. And I argue it’s easier to find the limit if we listen to Paul. Are our choices informed by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? Do those qualities describe us? Whenever we start to spiral, when our society starts to spiral, and when we look around and see nothing but dry bones, those qualities are what bring us back, and what make those bones live again.

Amen.