Silent Night, Holy Night

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Matthew 1:18-25:

At the last church I served, our piano player fell and broke her hip on Christmas Eve. That is not, obviously, the ideal time to lose your main musician, and on top of that it also meant that I had to make a hospital visit that afternoon and the hospital was more than a half mile away. Now we did have an organist, but she was 92, and not as good as she once was. But one of the advantages of it happening Christmas Eve was the fact that most people know most of the songs that we will sing because they are ones we have been singing them seemingly for hundreds of years, so having someone play along is not as crucial. In fact, I would guess we could probably sing most of those songs acapella easily. But, obviously, it’s still not ideal, and it made me think of how Silent Night, Holy Night, came to be created.

Joseph Mohr was a Roman Catholic priest serving a small town in Austria. As an illegitimate child, Mohr did not have an easy life growing up and even had to get special permission to join the priesthood because of his birth status. But in 1816 he composed a poem that we all know today, although he didn’t actually use it until 1818. According to legend, on Christmas Eve Mohr walked three kilometers through the snow, I think it was uphill both ways, to present his poem to Franz Gruber, a musician in the next town, and asked him to write music for guitar for his poem. Gruber composed the tune that has only changed slightly in the 200 years since he wrote it in just a couple of hours. But, the story says, and this may only be apocryphal, that Mohr asked Gruber to write the music for guitar because the organ at the church that he served was broken, and thus they needed music that could be played on a guitar for the service, which they did, with Silent Night being performed that evening for the first time. A less than ideal circumstance.

Silent Night has gone on to become one of, if not the, most famous Christmas hymns. During the famous Christmas Truce of 1914 when British, French and German soldiers, of their own accord, stopped fighting and exchanged gifts and greetings with each other across the front lines, the one song they could all sing together was Silent Night, and in some places, it was one of the sides beginning to sing this hymn that started the truce. One of my favorite parts of the Christmas Truce story is that it only took place in 1914, because after it happened military leaders on both sides issued strong messages against fraternization, which basically said, “how dare you shake the hand of the person we want you to kill.” Peace on earth and good will and all that stuff.

But as much as we love Silent Night, and I do have to mention that we broke the tradition of it not being sung until Christmas Eve this morning, does Silent Night actually match reality, of our lives? I think that’s an important question to ask because it’s human nature to compare ourselves and our lives against others, and against what we hold us as the ideal. And so we hear Silent Night, and we imagine it with all the lights out and the candles glowing and everything is peaceful and beautiful. It’s calm and bright, silent and holy. We have this image in our mind and when we compare it to our lives, with hectic schedules and running around, and perhaps all the noise, both literal and proverbial, that surrounds Christmas we wonder what we are doing wrong? How come our Christmas is not like that? Perhaps we even beg for a time when everything might be silent, even for just 5 minutes. Or perhaps we have the exact opposite, that the silence of not hearing the voices of loved ones we have lost is oppressive. We long for the silence to go away. We long for just a moment to hear the chaos and the tumult of a house filled with loved lost and of Christmas’ past, and we wonder how come our Christmas is not like that? Not ideal circumstances.

But is Mohr’s famous song even a reality for that first Christmas? Was everything calm? Was everything silent? I highly doubt it. First let’s start with the reality of birth. Ladies, for those of you who gave birth naturally, and even for those who used and epidural, or had a C-section, was your birth quiet? Was it calm? Uh, no. It was anything but that. Now we also have to add onto that, that according to Luke, but not Matthew, that Mary had just walked 90 miles to Bethlehem, which can’t have added to her happiness, and the Bible says nothing about her riding a donkey, and since they were poor, the greater likelihood is that they didn’t have a donkey. But once in Bethlehem they would have been surrounded by barn yard animals and all the noises, and smells, they make.

Now maybe after the baby is born, and laying gently on your chest, or in the bassinet, there was some calm, and that glow that surrounds the entire moment of birth, was there. And perhaps that is what Mohr is talking about when he says “Holy infant so tender and mild, sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace.” Or something that occurred to me this week, as I was thinking about when my girls were infants, was that perhaps the last line was Mary’s prayer that every parent has made with an infant at some point of saying/praying, “Oh for God’s sake would you please go to sleep, please because I’m too exhausted to keep going, please sleep like an angel so I can go to sleep.” Now since he was a Catholic priest, Mohr never had any children of his own, so maybe I’m just reading that into the lyrics, but that’s what we get to do.

But it actually turns out that Mohr’s lyrics are not so silent themselves, because in the second verse we are told that the angels are quaking at the sight as the heavenly host, surrounded by beams of light are singing “alleluia.” I do not think they were doing this quietly, as if you are saying “God be praised” it’s something that we do loudly, we do it joyfully, we do it exuberantly, well maybe not all of us, but that’s how we should be doing it. There’s an exclamation point after it, for heaven’s sake, so it has to be done enthusiastically, and certainly not silently. And then in the fourth verse we are asked to join in with the angels in their singing, join in singing Alleluia! To our King. Again, this is not something we should be doing quietly, or melodically, or reverently, this is something we should be shouting from the rooftops. Praise be to God! Come here the good news! Christ is born! For us has been born in the city of David, a savior. The sky opened up, rays of light burst from the heavens, and the angels sang the song we are called to join, Alleluia! Christ the savior is born! Christ the savior is born!

We might say it’s a holy night, but we cannot, or should not say that it’s a silent night, because in this moment the world has been changed, the world has been turned upside down. This is not the time to be calm, this is the time to be filled with excitement. Now I’m not trying to ruin this hymn, and I don’t know what Mohr’s original thinking was, but I do want us to pay attention to the imagery that Mohr uses to understand his message and the message of Christmas, and that is the imagery of light. The shepherds are quaking, not just because of the singing of the angels, but more importantly because the darkness has been shattered by the sight of the glories streaming from heaven afar. This glorious light shining down on them as the angels appear. And in the fourth verse it’s the wondrous star that shines on us as we sing along with the angels.  But it’s the third verse that holds the theological punch. Mohr says “Son of God, love’s pure light, radiant beams from thy holy face, with the dawn of redeeming grace, Jesus, Lord, at thy birth, Jesus, Lord at thy birth.”  The incarnation is God being made flesh and coming to earth, not as some triumphant king riding a mighty steed, but as a baby, being born in manager, to poor parents, in less than ideal circumstances, and yet in that moment the world is changed because the light has come into the darkness.

In Isaiah, which we will hear several times in the next week, Isaiah tells us that “for those who have walked in darkness have seen a great light, those who lived in a land of deep darkness— on them light has shined. For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” (Isaiah 9) As I said on the first Sunday of Advent, we don’t have Christmas because everything is calm and sunny and bright, if the world was like that we wouldn’t need Christmas. We have Christmas because our circumstances are often far from ideal. Our lives are noisy and chaotic and messy, or perhaps it’s too quiet. Life doesn’t go as planned, and we walk in that darkness and need the light to overcome the darkness, that light we find in Christ, and because of that we come not to be silent, but to shout alleluia!

In a poem entitled, Not a Silent Night, Debbie Wallis, says

It was not a silent night. Men were questioning what this strange starlight meant.
Others, roused in the midst of their watch, no longer questioned.
For their night was split with the shock of a choir of angels
Shouting “Glory to God, the Christ child comes!”

It was not a silent night. It was a noisy, confusing night. The city was congested,
Tempers were short, the inns crowded – all of them!
And Mary and Joseph – what did their hearts cry when the saw the lowly birth bed?

It was not a silent night. His coming tore a woman’s body. Hid coming was hard –
dreadfully hard for everyone involved.
His coming was not a mythical anesthetized 20th century dream.
It was hard and cold. It was heavy

But it was not silent. He forever split our darkness with the proclamation of angels
That the Light of the world was shining.
That for all ages to come we could know that heaven is not silent.
For God has spoken. He has come.

That first Christmas was many things, but silent was not one them, because the angels were singing, and the cattle were lowing, and the heavens rejoiced that Christ was born, for you and for me. So, as we think about that night let us remember not the silence, but of the light, the light come into the world, the light that came to overcome the darkness, the dawn that breaks the night, and let us not remain silent ourselves but instead join with the heavenly hosts in singing “Alleluia! Glory in the highest heaven, and on earth peace and goodwill to all.” May it be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.

Come Thou Long Expected Jesus

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Matthew 3:1-12:

I don’t like to wait. I’ve been known to leave stores when I see that the lines are too long. I don’t like the waiting and I don’t like the frustration that comes with waiting and I especially don’t like it when it seems like all the other lines are going faster than the line I have chosen. And waiting can be even harder when there is some urgency or expectation to the waiting. Do you remember when you were a kid at Christmas? That time between the beginning of December and Christmas Day seemed to take forever. It proved the point that time is not a constant. Now that time goes quicker, because all time goes quicker, and yet there can also be times in which it goes excruciatingly slow, like while waiting in lines. Because there is good waiting, and there is bad waiting. We have been to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade several times. Where we have watched the parade, it arrives around 10 am, but to be able to get a seat up front so you can see everything, you have to arrive around 6 am. That’s four hours of sitting in the cold on a sidewalk in New York City. That can be hard time or easy time. The first year we were there, the police officer who was there I guess to protect us from ourselves, led us all in singing and chanting back and forth to the other side of the street, and it was a lot of fun. It was easy time. The next time, the officer was just there leaving us to our own devices. I spent the time going through French flash cards so I could pass the French reading exam that Harvard required for graduation. That was some hard time. But both times, the wait was the longest just at the time in which you could hear the parade, but could not see it. It was right there and yet it was so far away. It was there and yet the expectation and excitement of it coming, because it’s not there, were heightened and the wait was hard. That’s advent. A time of knowing that Christ’s coming is here and also knowing it’s not here, and so our series on the songs of the season continues by looking at Charles Wesley’s classic hymn Come Thou Long Expected Jesus.

Last week we found ourselves in exile crying out for God to send deliverance and remembering the promises that God has given to the people, given to us, especially the promises that we find in the prophet Isaiah, but not knowing when it would all come about. This week, not much has changed, except that we are now in the wilderness and we have John the Baptist making a proclamation of repentance as the one who prepares the way for the coming of the Lord. That means the time has come, but it’s not quite here. It’s the time in which you can hear the bands in the parade but you can’t see them yet. You know they are there but the closer it gets, the farther away it seems and the harder the waiting becomes. We know that Christmas is right around the corner, we know that Jesus’ coming is right there, the one who is more powerful is coming but when? When will it be? How much longer will we have to wait? When will the promises be fulfilled?

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Matthew 24:36-44:

Every year around this time we hear from a certain segment of the news media about a war on Christmas, and how come stores won’t say Merry Christmas. That entire argument misses the point entirely because there is not a war on Christmas. There is a war on Advent, the time of preparation. Christmas does not begin until December 25 and then runs for 12 days, so just when we should begin to say Merry Christmas is the very time in which Christmas is taken down and put away in a box until next year.  If we want to talk about a war on Christmas let’s get serious and talk about returning to the 12 days of Christmas that start on Christmas day, not the 30 or so days before Christmas even arrives. And the last piece is that this year Christmas falls on a Sunday, and we will be holding a worship service, and here is my rule, if you are not in worship on Christmas Day, either here or some other church where you are, then you never get to say “Let’s keep Christ in Christmas” ever again. There is not a war on Christmas there is a war on Advent the time of preparation to get ready for the coming of Christmas. To get ready for welcoming the Christ child into our lives once again. A time to get ready to welcome Jesus into the world, and to recognize, as we have talked about for the past few weeks, that Christ is here and yet Christ is not yet here as well. He has come and he has yet to come.

Now I do have to confess my own hypocrisy here and that is that I start listening to Christmas music before Halloween even arrives, and as soon as Linda will allow me to put up Christmas decorations they are going up, so I have my own personal war with advent. But that has never stopped me from simultaneously emphasizing the importance of Advent, as a time of preparation, a time of slowing down and appreciating and also a time of expectancy and of desire. And so, we are going to spend the next few weeks trying to do that, and approaching this season, both of Advent and Christmas, by looking at some of the most famous songs of the season, what they mean and why they matter for our faith, and we start with the hymn O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.

Christ the King

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text is John 18:33-37:

Today is Christ the King Sunday, the day that we celebrate and proclaim Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords. It also represents the end of the Christian year, so happy New Year, as next Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent, and we begin to prepare the way, again, for the coming of the Christ child. Today sort of encapsulates one of the things that at the heart of our faith, and that is the dichotomy of things that we have to hold in tension, such as loving God with our head and with our heart, which can be opposite of each other. But the other and more important one is holding the tension between this Sunday and next Sunday, that is that Christ has already come, that Christ is already here, and that Christ has yet to come. Or as we say in the communion liturgy, Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. We pledge our allegiance to God who is with us, and cry out Maranatha, which means “Come, Lord Jesus.” But today, we celebrate Christ with us as our King, which concludes the series we have been doing on who Jesus is by looking at the three offices that he is said to hold, which are prophet, priest and King.

All three of these offices are historic positions found in the Hebrew Scriptures, and all of them had huge expectations for someone in each of these positions who would come to introduce, or bring about, the completion of creation, the fulfilment of the law, and the reign, or kingdom of God. When we talked about Jesus as prophet, we talked about the expectation that there would be a great prophet to rise up like Moses or Elijah, but this person would not be just any prophet, or just a prophet, but instead would be the prophet, the one who would fulfill prophecy and be the last prophet. It is clear that those who knew Jesus viewed him as a prophet, but in light of the resurrection it is this role as the prophet that the disciples and the early church claimed for Jesus.  And so in light of that, we should see everything that Jesus says and also what Jesus does as a prophetic witness, as the words of God come to us and to be treated with the seriousness that entails. Seeing Jesus as prophet, or even thinking of Jesus as the prophet is probably the least known and talked about aspects of Jesus’ three roles.

Jesus as Priest

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Hebrews 7:11-28:

Historically, there have been three offices, or roles, that have been given to Jesus, and they are prophet, priest and king. There are three ways in which to understand Jesus, his ministry and his relation with us as disciples. They are also historic roles that act as a continuation of God’s work as found in the Hebrew scripture, but also reestablished and given new meaning because of Christ. Last week we looked at Jesus as a prophet, and if you missed that message I would encourage you to go and watch it. Today we look at the second office and that is Jesus as priest, but not just any priest, but as the High Priest. The role of priest is also one of the historic roles that was found in ancient Israel. In the stories of the patriarchs, the priestly roles were undertaken by the male head of the family, whether Abraham, Isaac or Jacob. They acted as intermediaries between God and their families, which is the historic role of priest: an intermediary an intercessor.

As the society got larger and more complex, the need for this mediator to be moved outside of the family to a centralized leader to provide greater continuity became more important. We can begin to see this in Moses himself as the people tell him, in one of my favorite passages, “We don’t like it when God talks directly to us, so tell God to stop doing that, and instead you talk to God and then tell us what God says.” This could be what we see as the beginning of prophecy in scripture, one person speaking for God, but it is also the beginning of someone acting as a clear mediator between God and the people, although it will be through Moses brother Aaron, who is the first priest of the Israelites, and then through the tribe of Levi, who become the priestly class, that the priesthood truly comes into its own as a separate occupation. But, it should be noted that these are still people who are called into their role by God, like the story we hear in 1 Samuel of Samuel himself being called by God to become a priest, even though he had already been given over by his parents to Eli to serve as a priest.

Jesus the Prophet

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Luke 4:14-24:

Today we begin a new sermon series that will take us through the next three weeks seeking to answer the question who is Jesus? We are doing this because I received several questions about Jesus when I asked for recommendations for sermon topics, but my caveat is that I am not going to be able to entirely encapsulate who Jesus is in only three weeks. In fact, it might be said that every single worship service we are seeking to understand a different element of Jesus and who he is for us, what he means for us, and how we are to live differently because of that. But I decided to try and tackle answering the question of who is Jesus by looking at the three different offices, or roles, that Jesus is said to hold, and those are prophet, priest and king. These are historic roles that have been assigned to Christ going all the way back to the earliest days of the church as they sought to understand Jesus and to give some context to his ministry and message. This is not about Jesus’ nature, but about his functions, and these are not hard and fast offices as there is overlap between the three, but we are going to take each office in kind and today we are going to look at Jesus as prophet.

Now of the three offices, prophet is probably the one that is least covered and perhaps even the least understood. Rev. Richard Rohr, is a Franciscan priest who although known around the world lives here in Albuquerque, says that he has seen lots of statues and stained glass to Christ the King and even Christ the Priest, as well as accompanying celebrations, and we will celebrate Christ the King Sunday, which is the last Sunday of the Christian year before Advent begins, in three weeks. But, he said, he has never seen a celebration or a statue or a stained-glass window to Christ the Prophet, and that, he says, means something’s out of balance. This was even true of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism who, although he said that his preachers should preach Jesus in all his offices, prophet, priest and King, but actually said very little about Jesus as a Prophet. But when we don’t see Jesus as a prophet, it means not only are we not hearing Jesus’ words, or understanding his message with the weight of prophecy, but it also means that we are missing an extremely crucial piece of information about how the early church understood Jesus and his ministry, which was as that of a prophet, but not just any prophet, but of the prophet, and I’ll explain what that means in just a moment.

Envy Versus Persecuted

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Matthew 10:16-31:

Magic trick… When I saw that trick done by an actual magician at the state fair, I immediately thought of this message and the idea of envy, because, honestly, I envied the fact that he could do the trick, and thought how cool would it be to be able to do that in front of you all and have you envy me, except that I can’t actually do the trick because I don’t know how to make the actual coke disappear. And so all I could do was to be envious. Envy can be useful, in that it can lead us to be better, then is my envy of the magician could lead me to actually go out and learn how to do those tricks to, and it’s been said that there is no ambition without a little bit of envy attached, but it can also be destructive. Destructive to ourselves and also destructive to others. And all of us have this sin of envy within us. All of us have been envious of someone else at least once in our lives, and this is a universal trait as I read this week that every known language in the world has a word approximating what we understand as envy.  Envy lies at the root, or at the very least is a part, of many of the other deadly sins that we have spent the last six weeks looking at, and envy is unusual in several ways.

The first is that envy is always directed at someone else, which is not true of the others, because even lust can be directed at an inanimate object, rather than at a real person. The other thing about envy, according to Joseph Epstein, is that “Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.” Now one of the things that I’ve been surprised about in my reading for this series is that although the Seven Deadly Sins came out of the Christian monastic community, and were finalized and promulgated by Pope Gregory the Great, there are a lot of Jewish writers writing on the seven deadly sins.  Epstein is also the one who coined the term virtucrat which he defines as "any man or woman who is certain that his or her political views are not merely correct but deeply, morally righteous in the bargain.” I think that fits well into the idea of how people often think about suffering, as well as envy, because I think the best definition for envy, and the reason I matched it up with Jesus statement that blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, is that envy is sadness at another person’s good fortune. While suffering leads us to ask the question “why me?” Envy leads us to ask “why not me?”

Lust Versus Pure In Heart

Here is my sermon from yesterday. The text was Matthew 5:27-30:

When Moses came down off the mountain with the Ten Commandments, he said to the Israelites, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is I talked God down from 30 rules to only ten, and the people got really excited about that. But the bad news is, Moses said, that adultery is still one of them.

Perhaps, appropriately enough, today we continue in our series on the Seven Deadly Sins and the Beatitudes looking at the deadly sin of lust against Jesus’ statement that blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.  When Donna, who is our office administrator, sawthis week’s topic she said to me, so after everything that happened last week, you’re going to be talking about lust? Who says that God doesn’t have a sense of humor? Maybe God does, or perhaps no matter when we were talking about this issue there would have been something taking place in the news that would point out not only the dangers of lust, but also the hypocrisy that we have when it comes down to the issues that surround lust.  Because while we as Americans have tremendous hang-ups on the issues of sex and sexuality, we also simultaneously are surrounded by it.  Not because it’s being pushed down our throats by uncaring advertisers and pop culture makers, but because they are doing that because it works and will either get them more sales or at least more eyeballs, and thus more money. Lust is a major part of our culture, because lust is about a lot more than just sex because we can lust for lots of different things.

Greed Versus Mercy

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Luke 16:19-31:

“Ladies and gentleman, greed -- for lack of a better word -- is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed -- you mark my words -- will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.” Most of you probably recognize that speech by Michael Douglas from the 1987 movie Wall Street. What might be less known is that the speech was not really the creation of the screen writer of the film, but instead came from the person on whom Douglas’ character was based, Ivan Boesky. Speaking at the graduation ceremony for the business school at the University of California at Berkley, Boesky said, “Greed is alright, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” That was just a few months before he would be arrested by the SEC for insider trading to which he would plead guilty to one charge and pay a then record individual fine of $100 million. But before all that happened, he turned against his former compatriots and while collecting information against them for the SEC was allowed to continue doing insider trading making millions in profits until the SEC had enough information to also indict Michael Milken who was then forced to pay what is still the record individual penalty of $600 million. In response to the actions of wall street in the 80’s, congress passed a law that called for life in prison for certain financial crimes, and if you are wondering how many bankers or wall street execs have been subject to that penalty, the answer is less than one. Who says that crime doesn’t pay, and that greed is not good?

Or at least that’s what we’re told, and at the very least shown. Make as much money as you can, buy as much stuff as you can, exercise or gain as much power as you can. If you are rich, you are good. If you are poor, you are bad. And of course we all know that if we make lots of money and drive the right car and live in the right house and even drink the right beer then we’ll all be happy and will attract the most beautiful member of the opposite sex right? And if you can’t actually afford to live that lifestyle, it’s still all attainable, just buy it all on credit, because no one really knows how much money you’re worth and so if you can show how successful you are through how much stuff you have, how much gold you own, then surely you have to be successful because we do indeed judge people not on who they are, but how much they make and what they own, and unfortunately we judge ourselves the same way. We think our salaries, or lack thereof, are a reflection of who we are and what we are, and there is the crux of the problem of greed, the deadly sin we are looking at today in comparison to Jesus injunction that the merciful are blessed and that they will receive mercy.

Gluttony Versus Hungering and Thirsting For Righteousness

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Matthew 6:25-34:

At the beginning of the Gospel according to Matthew, we are introduced to John the Baptist and are told that he wore a camel hair coat, which was not very comfortable, to say the least, and that his meals consisted of “locusts and wild honey.” I’m hoping that the honey makes the locusts a little more palatable, but I don’t really want to try it to find out. What these statements about John tell us is that he was living the lifestyle of an ascetic, or someone who denies themselves of any worldly pleasures in order to try and contain and control, or tame, the body.  Around the third century, some Christians started moving out into the Egyptian desert to live solitary, ascetic lives, to replicate what John the Baptist had been doing, in the hope of dedicating their full lives to God, and to do that to cut everything out of their lives they thought was unnecessary, or distracting to them. And so like John the Baptist, they limited not only what they ate, but the amount they ate as well. Known as the desert fathers and mothers, they began what we now know as monastic communities.  They were also the ones to talk about the sins that would become the seven deadly sins, which includes the sin of gluttony. It is also then little wonder that it is Pope Gregory the Great who does the final compilation of this list of sins and begins promoting them since he is the first pope to come out of the monastic community and thus had been steeped in their ideas, so that even while he was combining and eliminating different sins that he would leave in the sin of gluttony, the one sin that truly deals with ascetic lifestyles, or the lack thereof.

Now gluttony is probably the hardest of the sins that we will deal with, at least for me. In our new Wednesday’s with Wesley group this week we were talking about Wesley’s advice for Methodists, as well as his general rules, and we were talking about that there are some rules that it’s really easy to say we will follow, but they are the ones that we don’t have any problem with to start. But the rules that actually apply to the things we really do, or want to do, those are the ones we dismiss or say they don’t really apply anymore or we make excuses about why they don’t apply to us, or why we aren’t really violating them. I want to do that with gluttony, as I’m guessing most of you do as well, because whether we want to admit it we are all gluttons at one point or another, although we are much more likely to point out this sin for others.