A Gluttonous Grace

Gluttony-4It’s good to be back with you all after nearly two weeks away at the United Methodist General Conference in Tampa. I wish I could tell you that I had plenty of opportunities to enjoy the Florida sun, maybe get to the beach, come home with a little tan—but actually the whole time was spent almost exclusively indoors in a huge convention center, sitting in the newsroom where I was writing blog articles and Tweets or sitting in the main plenary sessions in the huge hall (where the Republican convention will be in a few months).

Note the emphasis there on sitting. Whenever I go to something like this, there’s a perfect storm of things that conspire to expand one’s waistline. I don’t know about you, but one of the things I notice when I travel is that restaurants don’t generally have a ton of healthy choices on the menu. Even if they did, you have to eat so fast in order to get back to work that you hork down the food. It kind of reminds me of being on the rifle range in basic training where we ate standing up at long tables and slide our food while we ate. When you got to the end of the table, you were done.

So, it’s been easy for me to think about today’s Deadly Sin of gluttony after feeling a little more expanded over the last few days. Indeed, when you look out over a sea of pudgy United Methodists you can see that there’s a collective need to push back from the potluck. If we’re representative of the whole country, then it’s evident that the CDC’s statistic that 35.7% of American adults are obese isn’t that far off.

Of course, you knew that already. Everyone is telling us that our national obesity problem is hurting us, resulting in everything from heart disease to diabetes and host of other health issues. Our United Methodist health insurance rates are insanely high mostly because pastors don’t tend to care for themselves real well. Many of us and many of our neighbors are losing the battle of the bulge.

But if that were all that gluttony was about we could make this a really short sermon—the kind of sermon you hear on all those late night infomercials. The cure for obesity is pretty simple—eat less, exercise more. Take everything in moderation. Monitor your weight and your diet. Get out and walk. Don’t go to long conferences without taking your work out clothes and actually putting them on and using them (I am pleased to report that I did so). Gluttony would seem to be the deadly sin whose solution is the most obvious.

What’s interesting about this deadly sin, however, is that it’s the only one of the seven that Jesus himself was accused of. We read that today. When John the Baptizer was dunking people in the Jordan, people thought he had a demon because he didn’t eat bread and wine. His diet was locusts and honey.

 Now, on one of my trips to Israel, I learned that “locusts” here probably doesn’t refer to bugs but to the pod-like fruit of the carob tree which grows wild in the region. Carob is highly nutritious and the pods they come in look like locusts, thus they were commonly referred to as locusts trees. That puts things in a different light, doesn’t it? But, still, it’s not exactly a five course meal. People thought John was a little crazy because of his weird habits.

But they thought Jesus was even worse—not crazy, not having a demon (though he was accused of that elsewhere), but something perhaps even worse. In first century Israel, to be accused of being a glutton and a drunkard meant something more than the fact that you had bad habits. The company that Jesus kept made him guilty by association, even if he never overindulged himself.

Here’s where context helps us. In the Torah, the law of Israel, gluttony and drunkenness (the two are often paired together) were connected to disobedience of one’s parents—a violation of the fifth commandment to honor your father and mother. In Deuteronomy 21:18-21, for example, it says this:

“If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father and mother, who does not heed them when they discipline him, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the gate of that place. They shall say to the elders of his town, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death. So you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel will hear, and be afraid.”

I know what you’re thinking—what was college like in ancient Israel, where getting stoned had a very different connotation? But seriously, this was major stuff and was certainly in the back of the mind of those who saw Jesus hanging out with tax collectors and prostitutes and a wide range of other rebellious folks who had somehow gotten on the wrong side of life. To his critics, Jesus looked very much like a rebellious son who had broken the law and deserved to die.

See, in the biblical context, gluttony wasn’t just thought of as overindulging, it was actually just a symptom of an even bigger sin—a sin we might call “waywardness.” When we’re not satisfied with our lives, we search for things to fill the emptiness within and we’ll even leave behind those who love us in order to get what we think will satisfy us. It doesn’t matter what we try to fill the emptiness with—food, drink, money, sex, material goods, you name it—because the truth is that no matter how much we consume, we will never be satisfied. The more we consume, the emptier we feel.

Most of us carry with us the signs of that waywardness. We can see it in each other, but we rarely see it in ourselves.

General conferenceBeing a General Conference for the last two weeks, one of the things that became very clear to me is that the United Methodist Church is nearly irreparably divided, and the way we deal with differences is by voting. Every single decision that the delegates made was a based on a yes-no vote. Every vote meant that there were going to be winners and losers. With the stakes that high, people on both sides of the tables approached the debate in a way that pointed out the flaws, the brokenness, the hunger, the sins of the other. It was nasty and manipulative in a way that makes me never want to go back again.

What was missing in all of the wrangling and arguing was a sense of self-awareness—that before we can speak of the sin of the other, we have to be willing to admit that we, too, are empty. We want to tell others what they need to believe, what they need to do, but we don’t remember that we’re just as empty and wayward and clueless as they are.

I have known a lot of people who came to a point in their lives when they realized their emptiness. Anyone who has been in a 12-step group gets this—that the first step toward healing is to realize that you have a problem, that you’re empty and whatever it is that you’re addicted to isn’t going to fill you up. I sat in Tampa thinking that we need a church-wide twelve-step group because we’re addicted to an awful lot of unholy stuff.

You know, in some ways, I think that what Jesus was doing with these sinners around the table was really a kind of early 12-step group. Jesus hung out with wayward people—people who had left everything behind to try and fill the emptiness. Jesus joined their parties. He was at the cafes and back alley dives where the wayward hid from the world and medicated their emptiness with all the wrong things. His critics thought he was just like them—the kind of person that Proverbs 23:20 warned about when it said, “Do not be among winebibbers or among the gluttonous eaters of meat; for the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty and drowsiness will clothe them with rags.”

Jesus was guilty by his association with all of these empty gluttons and winebibbers. What his critics didn’t get, however, was that Jesus’ presence at the party wasn’t about the gluttons and winebibbers rubbing off on him, but rather the other way around. For Jesus, parties were not about indulging, but about filling the empty with his presence. Rather than condemning those at the table for their empty waywardness, Jesus offered these sons and daughters a way home.

Later in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus deals with this accusation again—that he is a wayward son who eats with sinners and in response he tells a story about…a wayward son. A young man takes his inheritance early, basically acting as though his father is dead, and heads off to try and fill his emptiness and desire with food, money, sex and anything he could get his hands on. But gluttons aren’t generally known for being frugal—so the money ran out, to the point that the only way the young man could eat was to nibble on the pods that the pigs rejected. The gnawing emptiness becomes a raging hunger—physically and spiritually.

The young man realizes that his only option, the way to survive, is to turn around and go home. That plan is fraught with difficulty, particularly because he knows the law in Deuteronomy—the wayward son deserves nothing by a hail of stones.

ProdigalSon returnsBut in a shocking twist, as the wayward son comes up the driveway, empty and broken, the father doesn’t pick up a stone—instead, he runs to meet his son. In first century parlance that was even more shocking—men, especially patriarchs, avoided running as something undignified. The father embarrasses himself with his running and his grace. He meets the boy and throws his arms around him, kisses him. The boy, who has nothing, asks forgiveness. The father responds with—a feast. The empty one is filled.

Someone has said that there a three things people want to hear most:

The first one is, I love you. We just don’t hear that enough. The church just doesn’t say that enough to the world. Who was the last person you said that to? Who was the last person you heard that from? Our gluttony of things is largely a result of being starved of real love. Jesus’ presence at the table was first and foremost an act of love for the people everyone else sees as unlovable. It is an embarrassing, wildly reckless love with which the father loves his wayward children.

The second thing that people most want to hear: You are forgiven. This is huge. Our emptiness is also a result of believing that we are worthless—that what we’ve done and who we are will never be good, will never measure up. When we’re stuck in that kind of thinking, we don’t believe God can forgive us. As result, we can’t forgive ourselves, let alone forgive anyone else. We talk a lot about sin, but very little about forgiveness.

Can I tell you today that you are forgiven? No matter what you’ve done, no matter who you are—you are forgiven. And you are welcome to come home. 

And third, Dinner’s ready. When you hear that, you know that you have a place at the table. You don’t have to gorge yourself in secrecy and silence, you don’t have to scrounge around for something to satisfy your emptiness. No—you are welcome at the table.

It’s no coincidence that when Jesus wanted to give his disciples an ongoing remembrance of who he was and what he did, he gave them a meal—a meal for sinners, a meal in which the grace and love of God is broken and poured out through his own broken body and his own shed blood. We come to this table empty—our sin makes us so. But even though we receive only  small piece of bread and taste of the cup, it is enough to fill us inside with the fullness of Christ. He ate with sinners and changed them, and he is still doing so today.

I love you.

You are forgiven.

Dinner’s ready. 

 

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