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 Orson Welles 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 to a 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

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 that harm 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 2

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 3

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 - parents getting 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 4

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 refrigerator door 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 wanted me 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.

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 after Thanksgiving 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 real point - 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 6

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 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.