Gluttony Versus Those Who Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness

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

One of the accusations that was leveled against Jesus, both by opponents, and even somewhat by supporters was that he was a glutton. This accusation was especially true when compared against John the Baptist. We are told that John was living an ascetic lifestyle wearing a camelhair cloak, which wasn’t very comfortable, and that he ate locusts with wild honey. I’m thinking the honey was a dipping sauce. That is a very different picture than what we see of Jesus, and in fact John’s disciples come and ask why it is that they are fasting while Jesus and the disciples are not. To which Jesus says that someday they will fast, but they should feast while the bridegroom is still with them. The accusation that Jesus was a glutton was a slur used against him to try and denigrate him and his message, more than a reality. But, it does appear that it was fun to be around Jesus, at least most of the time, and as I said in this week’s newsletter, we have lots of stories of Jesus eating with the disciples and with others.

Eating, breaking bread, was important to Jesus and a part of his witness about the Kingdom of God, and we still talk about the feasting that Jesus is preparing for us, and yet what we see in that is the judgments about his behavior could be made. We still see that today because of the seven deadly sins, the one that many people feel comfortable making a judgment about, especially when it comes to others, is the sin of gluttony. Most people just assume that people are overweight because they are gluttonous, and while gluttony does have something to do with overeating, it doesn’t really have anything to do with obesity. The two are not necessarily connected. You can be gluttonous and skinny. And we have to remember that when it was the poor who were skinny that having a little meat on your bones was said to represent divine favor, virtue and nobility. Oh how things change.

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.