The Misunderstood Sin

A sermon based upon John 4: 27-38

By Dr. Charles J. Tomlin

April 10, 2011

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Have you heard about the MOVIE ENTITLED, “SUPER-SIZE ME?”  It’s a movie that shows America’s obsession with “sizing-up” fast food meals from French Fries, to Biggie Fires; from Large soft drinks, to Huge Gulp Drinks; from a single Hamburger to a Double, or Even Triple Burger, with of course the options of Cheese and Bacon.   The movie makes the point THAT IF AMERICANS CONTINUE TO MAKE POOR CHOICES in their diet, they will be one of the first countries in the western, industrialized, world to SEE LIFE EXPECTANCY DECLINE.

I.   GLUTTONY: WHAT EXACTLY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?  

This is NOT A POPULAR SIN to talk about.  When was the last time you heard a pastor preach a sin on Gluttony?  The Alabama State Baptist paper recently found ONLY ONE PASTOR IN THE WHOLE STATE OF ALABAMA who had preached on this subject.

Perhaps one of the reasons we don’t talk about Gluttony is because it is SUCH A MISUNDERSTOOD SIN.  While we may think of it as the sin that shows up on our WAIST LINE; IT MAY OR MAY NOT.  While we prosperous American DO NEED TO CONSIDER WHAT IS A HEALTHY DIET as part of our Christian walk; the sin of gluttony is more about WHAT IS HAPPENING IN OUR HEART than to our waistline. 

In order to help us put Gluttony into a broader context, consider A COUPLE OF BIBLICAL TEXTS that point to the kinds of problems humans can have with their physical appetites.   Remember HOW ADAM AND EVE’S SIN IN THE GARDEN INVOLVED EATING.  But it really WASN’T ABOUT EATING TOO MUCH, was it?  Who ever thought that Adam and Eve wanted the forbidden fruit because they just wanted to eat?    It was just about eating, but it was about GIVING INTO WHAT THEIR DESIRES WITHOUT CONSIDERING THE LIMITS and boundaries God placed upon humanity.

We learn a lot about what is involved in the sin of Gluttony in the original sin.  Like Adam and Eve’s own sin, Gluttony is a SIN AGAINST GOD, not just our waistline.  It is a sin about letting our desires and APPETITES GET OUT OF CONTROL.  It is about giving in to temptation and living on LESSER LEVEL OF LIFE, and just like the original sin SEPARATES HUMANS FROM a healthy, stable and growing RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD; gluttony too, can separate us from having a deepening and growing relationship with the divine.  WHEN WE GET STUCK ON FEEDING OUR STOMACHS, we can forget that might not just be our body, but our SOUL THAT IS HAVING THE HUNGER pains.  

We often think that this is the SIN THAT VISIBLY SHOWS UP ONLY IN THE BODY of the person who’s over-eating.  IF WE ARE SKINNY or underweight, then we also might mistakenly THINK we have NEVER BEEN GLUTTONOUS.  Here we must take care with our assumptions.  Being overweight may have to more to do with METABOLISM, MEDICAL OR GENETIC ISSUES, not gluttony.  INCREASING OBESITY RATES, especially in children, is a major problem that needs to be addressed at church as well as by the world, but overindulgence or POOR EATING HABITS IS NOT NECESSARILY GLUTTONY. 

          Surprisingly, YOU CAN BE A GLUTTON AND EAT TOO LITTLE, just as much as you can be a glutton and eat too much.   Do you REMEMBER KAREN CARPENTER?  She was a female singer with one of the most beautiful MONEY VOICES in human history.  Yet, Karen Carpenter had some serious problems with food and her self image.  She became OBSESSED WITH HER WEIGHT and eventually developed anorexia nervosa.  She was not overweight, but she thought she was.  She continued to lose weight and eat so little that her heart no longer had enough nourishment and it stopped.

You might not think that Karen Carpenter was a glutton.  She was not A PERSON WHO ATE TOO MUCH, but she still had a PROBLEM WITH HER APPETITE and she was a person struggling with her sense of self and identity.  She was so CAUGHT UP IN SUCCESS that she became OBSESSED WITH LOSING WEIGHT and her idea of what it meant to be a healthy person became warped by the Hollywood images around her.  Karen Carpenter did not over eat, but she was a GLUTTON OF A DIFFERENT SORT.  You’ve heard the phrase, “he or she is a glutton for punishment”, which means a person must LIKE PAIN in a crazy, ABNORMAL, ADDICTIVE AND UNHEALTHY kind of way.  Karen Carpenter was a “glutton” for being skinny as she allowed the world TO WARP HER SENSE of what it meant to be LOVED, ACCEPTED and healthy.     

   

II.  THE SIN AGAINST YOUR BEST SELF.  

Let’s take this thought a little further.  Gluttony can be AN OBSESSION WITH ANYTHING THAT DOES HARM to our humanity and TAKES US AWAY FROM OUR BEST SELF and our high calling and purpose.  This definition reminds us that Gluttony is A DIFFERENT KIND OF SIN, say than pride, anger, greed or lust.  With all the other seven deadly sins, someone else gets hurt immediately.  But the sin of gluttony is PRIMARILY A SIN AGAINST YOURSELF.  This is why the church has most often categorized gluttony as A “WARM SIN; with is to differentiate from the colder, more aggressive sins anger, greed, pride and envy which are more aggressive and cold-hearted.

But while Gluttony might be considered a “warm-hearted” sin, the Bible doesn’t see much warmth in it.  Let me take you to couple of places in the Bible where the word “Gluttony” or at least the idea of gluttony appears.

the appearance of “gluttony” in the New Testament is most interesting.  Gluttony is one of the sins Jesus was accused of.  Of course, we know that Jesus was not a glutton, but he was accused of it because he liked to eat with sinners.  He never turned down a chance to go to a dinner party when sinners were there.

The accusation against Jesus reminds us again, that Gluttony is not simply about food.  Jesus was not considered a glutton because of how much he ate, but he was considered a glutton because of who he ate with.  The Pharisees saw Jesus as both a “drunkard and a glutton” because he ate with sinners; with people who where not consider clean by the religious establishment.  This reminds us that Gluttony has not just a bad food choice, but is also about our moral choices in life; about whether or not we are living the best life we can live.  The Pharisees thought Jesus was not living the best life, because he ate with sinners.  While they were wrong about Jesus, not understanding what Jesus was doing, they were right about the nature of gluttony.  Gluttony is mostly about the kind of person we are and about what we choose to do with our lives. 

Let’s look at another text that speaks of Gluttony.  As I mentioned before, Gluttony often shows up in a list of sins other sins, which includes drunkenness and sloth, or laziness.   The wise man in Proverbs says: “For the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty: and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags.” (Proverbs 23:31).   We all know what it means to be an alcoholic?  An alcoholic is much more than just a person who drinks too much?   An alcoholic is a person who abuses alcohol.  What the alcoholic does is become dependent upon a drug, either as a wrong way to gain pleasure in life or as wrong way to deal with the pains and problems of life.   The alcoholic does the same wrong thing a glutton does.  Both the glutton and the drunkard forget their and limits and become dependant upon that which hurts them more than it helps.

There are all kinds of addictions in our times.  Some have even labeled us “a nation of  addicts.”   In our society with so much to come between us and God, we can get addicted to so many things; to drugs, tobacco, to sex, to money, to power, to fast food, and a host of other unhealthy “things” which we allow to possess us.   You can even be a glutton by becoming addicted to good things like exercise, sports, clothing, work and even religion.  Even good things can hurt us if we become possessed by them.  

The core problem with any kind of addictive behavior is not so much the evil or goodness of the substance being abused, as much as it is the question of why you are abusing it.  When you become addicted, negative things happen to you that hurt you; that lessen you and keep you from being the person you can be.  Perhaps the most tragic element in the sin of gluttony is that while we might give in to what we thing we need, at the same time we need it, and it give us what we want, it is also taking life from us.  This sin of gluttony, may just be the sin that does more to steal the joy of life than any other.   When we get addicted, we spend most of our time doing one thing, when there are others things in life that also need our attention.

III.  FILLING UP YOUR HEART SO YOU DON’T FEEL EMPTY?

As we understand that gluttony is a mostly a warm, non-aggressive sin, that keeps us from being at our best self, don’t think for one moment that gluttony is never destructive toward others.  In fact, one of the most powerfully negative images of a human being in all the Bible is the image of a Rich Man, who was so much a glutton, so obsessed with feeding his own needs, wants and pleasures, that he neglected the basic needs of another person---his own neighbor, who was starving to death right under his nose.

You do remember that powerful biblical story in Luke 16 where a rich man is pictured as one who “fairs sumptuously” every day, while the poor man, who sits right outside his gate, is needy, hurting and hungry.   What is important for us to see in this story is not just the contrast between rich and poor, but the contrast that is taking place within the rich man’s own life.  He is not just a rich man, but he is a man who stays rich at everyone else’s expense.  He is a person so obsessed with meeting his own needs and taking care of himself, that he neglects the needs of a hurting person who is right in front of him.  This is what made the rich man a glutton.  It was not the amount of food, but the kind of person he became when he only had time to take care of himself and had no time for others.

I’ll never forget something Dr. Fred Craddock said, after he had returned to Atlanta having visited a very poor country.  He was driving down the Interstate outside of Atlanta and saw a sign which said, “All You Can Eat”, $6.95.   Craddock said after being in a country where people were starving, even entertaining the idea in your own mind that you would want to “eat all you want”, when others had nothing, was the worse sin imaginable.  I felt the same way, when I was traveling with my family and my parents several years ago, and we wanted to find a seafood restaurant near Williamsburg, VA.  We entered into a restaurant, like I had never known or seen.  For a cost of $24 per person, you could eat your hearts delight from a tremendously large and tempting seafood buffet.  Since, we were strangers in town and did not know our way around town, I paid for all of us too eat.  But the whole time we were all eating, I felt like something was wrong.  It was not wrong because we all ate too much.  What was wrong was that we had so much too eat and couldn’t eat our money’s worth, even if we wanted too.  That’s the same kind of thing that happens when we become addicted to food or anything else.  We eat, we partake, but don’t feel like we’re had enough.  We can’t be satisfied.   

Throughout Scripture, there is a danger and a warning about giving into the “desires of the flesh”, the “lesser self”, or the “lower person.”  The Bible understands that we humans have physical needs, hungers and we have physical bodies that need care and nourishment.  And the Bible also tells us that we should care for our bodies, which are temples, temples of the Holy Spirit.  When we allow things, possessions, and even good things like food, to control us, and when we don’t maintaining spiritual control over them, too the extent that we only take care of our needs and we overlook the needs of others around us, then we are in dangerous, destructive territory.

So, finally, how do we refocus and maintain control over our physical appetites; which get out of balance in our lives.   If gluttony is more than how much we eat, but why we eat, how we eat, and who we are when we eat; and if gluttony is a that hurts us because we become obsessed with lesser things in life---things that can possess and lead to destructive obsessions which cause us to neglect our own health and to neglect the needs of others?  If this is what gluttony is, then how can we overcome the negative obsessions that do sometimes overcome us and set our lives off balance?

We need to look only at two more Scriptures.  Matthew 4 shows our Lord being tempted by the devil as we all are tempted.  While Jesus is preparing himself for his life mission and trying to prove he had spiritual control of his physical body---we see that the devil comes to him with temptation of food.  “Turn these stones into Bread”.  The Devil tempts Jesus, not to eat too much, but to stop and eat when he had something more important to do.  If Jesus had given into the devil in that moment; if he had turned those stones into bread, setting down to eat a good meal; if he had made food and his physical appetite the priority when there were so many other spiritual priorities pressing him at the moment, he would have given into gluttony.

          Jesus did not give into his stomach, because he had a very full heart.  He told the devil: “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (4:4).  This is the same kind of thing we see taking place in our text from John 4.  When the disciples are trying to get Jesus to stop and eat, he tells them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” (4: 32)  Then he tells them: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.” (4:34).

Of course, there in normally nothing wrong with meeting your physical needs; except when this is all you live for.  If there is nothing more than living, eating, drinking, and satisfying yourself, then what is the point to life?   Life has to be more than about feeding our appetites.  Life is also about God.  Life is about Love.  Life is about disciplining yourself and not taking shortcuts around what is most important.  Life is sometimes about enjoying yourself, but it is also about denying yourself.  As Jesus shows us, life is about having priorities which are much more than feeding our stomachs or our physical appetites.  A life that is aimed only at pleasure, only as satisfying yourself, only at looking after your own needs, is a life rob of the greatest joy and is a life that.  You can’t fill your heart , no matter how much you fill you stomach.

Jesus shows us only way out of our human addictions, when he turned to the devil and said: “Man shall not live by bread alone.  Only when we realize that life is bigger than our own needs; that life has reasons we can’t know only through physical pleasures; and until we accept that life has an ultimate purpose that will only be realized through pain, not avoiding it, and until we can focus on God’s purposes that are bigger than our own pleasures, you can likely get trapped by gluttony and other addictions.

When we can finally say that we all need a higher power to help overcome our physical weaknesses and addictions.   Having a full heart is the only way the sin gluttony is overcome.  When we commit ourselves to God’s purpose, it is then that the lesser and lower appetites have less control us.  They don’t control for the same reason they didn’t control Jesus when he told his disciples, “that he had meat to eat that the world did not yet know of.”   When we feed our greater spiritual hungers; our hunger for love, our hunger for community; our hunger for truth; our hunger for grace; and most of all our hunger for God.; when we fill these greater hungers, we will be so full that the all our other hunger pains will lessen and we can eat to live, not just live to eat.  Amen.