The Seven Deadlies - Gluttony

Philippians 3:17-21 [NRSV]
Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us. For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.

Gluttony. You know, I’ve been raising my hand here every week and it is getting a little embarrassing. You would think that, as your pastor, I might have at least one of these seven deadlies licked by now. But I hope you know by now that your pastor, like all of us, is on the road to perfection but is not there.

I have to say that I didn’t know what I was getting into when I started this sermon series. Faye Sandsbury and I were talking about possible study groups for the spring and she suggested a series she had done on the Seven Deadly Sins and I thought, “Yes. What an intriguing idea. Why not spend the season of Lent looking at what sin does to us?” But I wasn’t sure how useful the seven deadly sins would be for looking at that. After all, it’s a very old list of sins going back some 1500 years. And is it really true that one sin is much worse than another? Is it helpful to categorize sin in this way when, really, it comes in so many forms?

But there is some wisdom in these old categories. I had a professor once who used to argue that we could revolutionize psychotherapy if we started diagnosing mental and spiritual problems using the sins and virtues that Thomas Aquinas set down in the 13th century. I actually think there’s great value in using the insights of psychotherapy, but there is something intriguing to me about listening to someone and saying, “Yes, I do believe you’re struggling with sloth and it is a spiritual problem because you are blocking your God-given propensity toward joy. How can we unlock your joy?”

At the very least, if we started using medieval Christian therapy, we would start to see how the things we now call diseases also have spiritual roots. We may not be comfortable with the language of sin anymore, but do we suffer any less than we did when we were using the word? Maybe if we used some spiritual language for what was going on we’d take some new steps to get at the deeper problems that plague us.

This week I had someone, a friend who is not involved in church, say to me, “You know, Alex, I like you…I love your church…when you stop talking about sin I’ll be there.” She’s not alone. For many, many people, sin is their impression of what churches have to say – either because that was their actual experience in church or because it is the impression they get from media images and images we project ourselves.

This weekend I went to see the movie, Bridge to Terabithia, based on Katherine Paterson’s book, which was playing up in Belle Haven. A great movie for all ages. But one scene that really struck me was when the three main characters, all children, go to church together. A brother and a sister had taken a new friend, Leslie, to church, even though she had not been before. As they are singing a hymn, The Old Rugged Cross, Leslie has a holy experience as she watches the light come in through a stained-glass window. She opens up her small purse to capture some of the brilliant light streaming in on them. But as they are leaving church and she is talking about what she was feeling, she is surprised that the message the smallest child has been getting from her time in church was much different. For little May Belle, the message is one of fear. “If you don’t believe in the Bible, God will damn you to hell when you die,” is the primary message she hears. Leslie was captured by the love and the holiness and Jesus. May Belle’s language for it was one of obedience and rules.

I think about folks like my friend who is turned off by talk of sin, and of youth, like the character of Leslie, who are captivated by the mystery and the beauty of the story of Jesus, but who are mystified by what we mean when we talk about sin. I don’t think the answer is to stop talking about sin. I think our long experiments with watering down the language of the church to make us more acceptable to the culture around us have been a miserable failure. To coin a phrase from Garrison Keillor, people don’t come to church to hear about how Adam and Eve were forced from Eden because of a tragic failure to communicate. We know somehow, don’t we?, that the cause of our problems is much deeper than that. We know that if the church is going to be meaningful, it has to speak in its own voice. We have to use the language we know. We have to talk about grace even through it’s not a familiar term. We have to talk about redemption even though some folks don’t know they’re enslaved. We have to talk about salvation even though there are folks who don’t know that they need to be saved. And we have to talk about sin because it is at the heart of what it means to be human. It’s not a category that makes sense for dogs and cats and the duck-billed platypus. Sin is a core problem for human beings alone.

Orthodox writer Jim Forest tells the story of a priest in the 1970’s who became infatuated with the book entitled, I’m O.K., You’re O.K. Those of you who lived through the 70s will remember this book. Its premise was that if we could learn to accept ourselves by building our self-esteem we would recognize how we could love others. This priest thought this was a great message and he preached on it one Sunday. As he was greeting people at the door following the service he asked one older parishioner what he thought of the sermon and the man said, “I haven’t read the book. If what you say is true, it’s better than the Bible. My only problem was that I kept thinking of Christ on the Cross saying to those who were watching him die, ‘If everybody’s okay, what in blazes am I doing up here?’”[i]

Sin is one of those things that seem unavoidable when we start to really look into the depths of our souls. The church has been guilty of talking about sin to the exclusion of grace. We can tell the story of sin in such a way that people hear only condemnation and not the word of life that is offered to us in Jesus Christ and the cross. But as I told my friend, I don’t know how to talk about what it means to be human without honestly addressing those places in my soul that are still crying out for transformation and liberation.

Which brings me to gluttony. You might say to yourself, “We are really ending this series in a whimper. Pride? Envy? Greed? Lust? I see people’s lives destroyed by these every day. But how many times is gluttony the cause of someone’s downfall? Am I really putting my soul at risk by sneaking down to the ‘frig in the middle of the night to claim another piece of chocolate meringue pie? Tell me again who suffers because I blew my diet on the second day by ordering a double thick burger with cheese and fries? What’s wrong with daydreaming about Laura Dennis’ caramel cake? Not that that ever happens, but still, what’s the big deal with gluttony?”

It’s true that we don’t talk about the dangers of gluttony in the same way today. The desert monks of the fourth-century were much harsher on the sin than we are today. Evagrius of Pontus said that “Gluttony is the mother of lust, the nourishment of evil thoughts, laziness in fasting, obstacle to asceticism, terror to moral purpose, the imagining of food, sketcher of seasonings, unrestrained colt, unbridled frenzy, receptacle of disease, envy of health, obstruction of the (bodily) passages, groaning of the bowels, the extreme of outrages, confederate of lust, pollution of the intellect, weakness of the body, difficult sleep, gloomy death.”[ii] Plus it gives you bad breath. There was something fearful about this sin that just seems strange to us.

Some of us begin to suspect that there was just some bad body image stuff going on back in those days. That maybe, in the same way that Augustine had some notions about sexuality that seemed to despise that part of our lives, perhaps these ancient Christians despised the fact that we take pleasure in eating and drinking. The earliest biographer of Francis of Assisi, one of our great figures of sainthood, said that he used ashes for a spice so that he wouldn’t be able to enjoy the taste of his food.[iii] That’s pretty extreme.

It’s also contrary to our biblical heritage. The scriptures are full of language that tells us to “taste and see that the Lord is good” [Psalm 34:8]. In that first garden, the first man and woman were given trees full of fruit that was good to eat and pleasant to look at. In religious festivals, such as the Passover, the central event of remembrance is a meal where the qualities of the food are essential to its meaning. In Isaiah’s vision of the holy mountain there is rich food and wine. When Jesus tells the story of the return of the Prodigal Son, it is a feast and a fatted calf that is prepared for him. When Jesus describes the kingdom of heaven it is like a wedding banquet. When Jesus turns the water into wine it is of the highest taste and quality. And when Jesus prepares his disciples for his death, he does it, once more, around a table.

When I asked you, at the beginning of the service, to tell a story of the best meal you can remember, I wasn’t setting you up. The things you remember may have had something to do with the excellence of the food, but I imagine there was more going on there as well. Maybe you talked about the people who were around the table with you. Maybe you recalled a time of special importance for your family. Maybe it was just a good meal after a long period of hunger. Some of my primary images of heaven are from my grandmother’s house. Coming in after a long drive on a Friday night after my folks got off work. Sitting shoulder to shoulder around a small table in her small kitchen, but feeling like it was a room as large as creation itself for all the love and warmth it held. The cornbread fried up out of white corn meal. The collard greens with ham hocks. The fried chicken. The potato salad. And, yes, the caramel cake. The temptation to gluttony was certainly there. But what it meant was so much more than what it was.

I don’t think that, if the Apostle Paul had been there, he would have objected, to tell you the truth. When he spoke to the Christians of the city of Philippi, I don’t think he was concerned about their joy in eating together. What concerned him were those who filled their bellies because they could think of no other way to be filled. Paul had the same conversation with the Corinthian Christians. In 1 Corinthians he quotes a group that says, “Well, food is meant for the belly and the belly for food,” so how can you object to our eating or to our following other bodily inclinations? But Paul reminds them that as Christians they are now part of something bigger than themselves. It’s not just their bodies that they have to concern themselves with, but Christ’s body, of which they are now members. So…Paul says, glorify God with your body. [1 Co. 6:13-20]

Gluttony is not just a desire to eat and drink or, to think more broadly, to consume anything. It is an inordinate desire to consume more than one requires. Eating, drinking, even consuming, is basic to human life. We have to do it. More than that, we enjoy doing it. But because we don’t know how to eat and drink in the right way…because we don’t know what eating is for or what it represents, we end up with the messed-up ideas of consumption that we have in our society today. Francine Prose, who wrote a book on gluttony, says that “though gluttony appears to have become the least harmful of sins, it may well be the most widespread. Precisely because of our inordinate interests, our preoccupation with sampling the trendiest dishes at the costliest new restaurants, and our apparently paradoxical, obsessive horror of obesity, we have become a culture of gluttons.”[iv] Maybe eating trendy dishes is not our obsession around here. But we know how eating gets out of whack, even here. Eating disorders like anorexia are a byproduct of our unhealthy, contradictory attitudes toward eating and thinness. The massive all-you-can-eat buffets that have become the norm of eating out in some places, much as they attract me, are another sign of trouble. Our continuing problems with alcohol and substance abuse are signs. Our tendency to eat alone even when we don’t live alone is another sign of trouble.

There is a great Mexican proverb that I learned when I was staying with a family in Mexico on a mission trip once. They would place all this food in front of me and say, “barriga llena, corazon contento,” which means “full belly, contented heart.” And when I could not eat one more thing I would say, “No, no, I really can’t eat anymore. No puedo.” To which they would respond, “mas llena, mas contento” – “if you are more full, you will be more content.” This is the dangerous seduction of gluttony – that somehow if we just get full enough we will finally be contented.
But in that same letter to the Philippians, Paul quotes an early Christian hymn which talks about how Christ, in coming to live among us in human form, emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. When Paul says later, that the Philippians should imitate him in imitating Christ, there is some of this message there. To be truly full requires emptying ourselves. It’s the same contradictory way of talking that Jesus had. To gain your life you must lose it. If you lose your life you will find it. If we let go of the inordinate desire to fill ourselves with the things this world provides, maybe we can see what gifts God has for us.

So gluttony does not mean that we should go buy ashes for spice or that we should take no pleasure in what we eat or drink. But if we are not eating in ways that occasionally remind us of the kingdom feasts Jesus talks about…if we do not find ourselves eating with the others God gives us to love…if we do not find ourselves eating with a mindfulness of how we are in fellowship with the poor…perhaps we are gluttons who need to learn our manners before we return to the dinner table. Because we do not live on bread alone and our citizenship is in a kingdom where we eat differently.

Fellow sinners, I invite you to offer yourselves with me to a life that looks different from that of the world around us. God knows we need each other if we are to truly confess these deadly sins. But God has also given us all that we need to break free from their power. God has given us life in Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God.

[i] Jim Forest, “Confession in the Age of Self-Esteem,” 11/7/2002, http://www.incommunion.org/forest-flier/jimsessays/confession-in-the-age-of-self-esteem/
[ii] Quoted in Francine Prose, Gluttony, [New York: Oxford University Press, 2003], pp. 9-10.
[iii] Ibid., p. 28.
[iv] Ibid., p. 41.

The Seven Deadlies - Lust

2 Samuel 11:1-15
Now when the spring of the year came, at the time when kings go out, David sent Joab out with his servants and all the Israelites. They destroyed the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah, David remained in Jerusalem.

One time, around sunset, David got up from his bed and walked around the roof of the palace. From the roof, he saw a woman bathing and the woman was incredibly beautiful. So David sent and inquired about her. The inquirer said, “Isn't this Bathsheba, daughter of Eliam and wife of Uriah the Hittite?”
So David sent messengers and brought her. She came to him and he lay with her. (She had just purified herself after her period.) Then she returned to her house. The woman conceived so she sent word to him saying, “I am pregnant.”
Then David sent her message to Joab, “Send me Uriah the Hittite.” Joab sent Uriah to David. When Uriah came to him, David asked how Joab was doing and how the people were doing and how the battle was going. Then David said to Uriah, “Go down to your house and bathe your feet.”
So Uriah went out from the palace and a doggie bag from the king was sent after him. But Uriah lay down at the palace entrance with all his master's servants and he did not go down to his house. When it was announced to David that Uriah did not go down to his house, David said to Uriah, “Haven't you just come from a distance? Why didn't you go home?”
Uriah said to David, “The ark and Israel and Judah remain in rough shelters and my master Joab and my master's servants are encamped in open fields. Am I to go to my house for eating and drinking and lying with my wife? Upon your life and as your spirit lives I will not do this thing.”
David said to Uriah, “Stay here another day and tomorrow I will send you back.” So Uriah stayed in Jerusalem that day and the next. David invited him and he ate with him and drank and David got him drunk. But in the evening he went out to lie down in his bed with his master's servants and he did not go home. So in the morning David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it by the hand of Uriah. In the letter he wrote: “Position Uriah to the front in the face of the worst of the battle. Then, turn back from behind him so that he will be struck down and die.”

When I was a young reporter for WPED Radio – a station that spanned the nation with 3 powerful watts – one of my first news stories was on a new Environmental Protection Agency program to address the dangers of Leaking Underground Storage Tanks. I interviewed several gas station owners about the costs of the program and what it was going to entail for them. Then I put it all together in an expose that I cleverly titled after the acronym of the program – Leaking Underground Storage Tanks – L-U-S-T. I began the story by saying, “The EPA is trying to wipe out LUST.”

If you came this morning thinking that that's the kind of lust I was going to be talking about, you're going to be sadly disappointed. But I don't think that's what you did expect. Today's the day we tackle one of the biggies of the Seven Deadly Sins. Beliefnet.com, an online site that offers articles and other faith-based information, has had a running poll going on which of the seven deadlies we struggle with the most. Greed is way down at the bottom of the list (despite the ways we explored it last week), but guess what comes in at number one? Far ahead of all the other sins, lust checked in as the primary problem for 30% of the respondents.

But in the same way that we struggled with how greed has gone mainstream in our society so that there are people who believe that greed is good for us, we could also say that our culture encourages us to think of lust as a good thing, too. After all, some would say, without lust none of us would be here. And after Dr. Freud, how can we ever look at our sexual desires in the same way? Lust is not something optional in our make-up, Freud says, it is a primary motor for our whole being. When we go looking for why we do the things we do, sublimated desire is always a prime suspect.

So Christians have some explaining to do when we say that lust is something that has its downsides, its dangers...even its deadliness. Jesus pointed us this way in the Sermon on the Mount. There, amongst all the other things that he taught, he went beyond the Ten Commandments in saying that there was something deeper in us than the temptation to adultery – there was lust and it could lead us astray. Sexual sins don't take up a lot of Jesus' time in the gospels. He is far more vocal about the problems we have with money, care for the poor, and humility, but when he does talk about our sexual lives he uses this dramatic language. “You have heard it said,” he says, “that you shall not commit adultery, but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman [and there's no reason to think he wouldn't have said the same about a man]...everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart” [Matthew 5:27-28]. O my goodness. It's time to raise our hands again. After admitting to all those other deadly sins, who's got a problem with lust?

O.K., let's get straight what's at issue here. First, what is lust and secondly, why does Jesus hold up this incredibly high standard for us in relation to it, especially when it seems so at odds with the standards presented by most every automobile ad or music video we've ever seen (to take just two common examples)? First, as to what it is – we might say that lust is an exuberant, excessive approach to any number of things. We talk about a lust for power or a lust for gold. John Wesley, in encouraging his Methodists to sing, says that we should sing lustily. You can find the directions right there in the front of our hymnal.

But let's be real. Nobody's gonna look askance at you if you sing lustily – unless you're REALLY off-key. We're talking about something else here. Lust, as we're talking about it today, is about our sexuality. Simon Blackburn, who has written a book on lust, says that lust is the “enthusiastic desire, the desire that infuses the body, for sexual activity and its pleasures for their own sake.”[i] That's a pretty fair definition and it's territory that most of us are familiar with. But what is it about this well-known neighborhood that makes it a danger to us?

That brings us to the second part of the problem for Christians. Why does Jesus warn us about this? Desire is no stranger to human nature. In fact, it's there in Genesis when God tells Eve that her desire will be for her husband. It's there in Song of Songs when the lover desires his beloved. Isn't there an element of lust in these stories? Isn't it part of the way God created us that we should take pleasure in one another?

To that last question we have to say, yes. Marriage was instituted by God, not only as a means of procreating and allowing for the multiplication of the species – it was also designed to allow two people to enjoy one another, to share intensely and deeply, and that includes a sexual life. The church has not always said this very clearly. At times the church has seemed suspicious or even hostile to sexuality. Even some of my favorite ancient writers, like Saint Augustine, had some notions of sexual relations that were downright weird. But the affirmation of the goodness of this desire is right there from the beginning when God says of the man and the woman that the two should cling to each other and become one flesh [Gen. 2:24].

But we also know, because it is lived out so often among us, how easily our desires can run us right off the rails. If you’re a young person, you know what I’m talking about. It’s a sex-saturated culture, the messages we receive are all about inciting us to act on our lustful feelings, our bodies are responsive to the other bodies around us, marriage is now something that is often deferred until much later in life, your boyfriend is pressuring you, your girlfriend is pressuring you to give in, there doesn’t seem to be much downside, especially with birth control, and man, is it hard to concentrate when I’m fighting these urges that seem so…urgent. Sound familiar?

Well, don’t think I’m just talking to you today because one of the things I need to say is that lust is not just a problem of the young. It is also a problem of those of us who are older and those of us who are married. There is no age limit on temptation and it is just as easy for an adult to be carried away by desires that aren’t directed in the right ways. How often do we, as married folks, place ourselves in situations where we are alone with people of the opposite sex? The danger is there. Aren’t we just as susceptible to the messages of the culture that tell us that sex is a constant urge so why not give in? Isn’t pornography, especially with the growth of the internet pornography industry, a constant temptation and a ruinous cancer on healthy relationships and understandings of the beautiful thing that our sexual lives should be? Aren’t there stray glances and lingering fantasies that threaten to undo us? I have come to believe that sex education ought not to end with high school. We need it throughout our lives because we know, don’t we?, the dangerous road we tread. Our minds get clouded and we do stupid things and we end up hurt and hurting others. Simon Blackburn is right when he says that “living with lust is like being shackled to a lunatic.”[ii]

Our scripture lesson from 2 Samuel today is an object lesson in the devastating effects of lust, though there are some other lessons here, as well, about power and pride. It’s a story of King David, who is a heroic figure in the Hebrew Scriptures. In other places he is referred to as a man after God’s own heart. But the Bible is not content to let us think that David was above failure. In fact, he was capable of the most monstrous sins. And it all began with a leisurely stroll around the roof of the palace.

It was not unusual for him to be on the roof. That's where most people with wealth went for afternoon rests because the breezes were better up there. But there was another advantage to being on the roof for David. It allowed him to look into the courtyards below and on this particular afternoon it allowed him to see a beautiful woman taking a bath at a nearby house.

Now taking a bath in an open courtyard in David's day was not a sensual act. Forget all the images you have of "Calgon, take me away". It was just something you had to do with whatever water containers were available. Forgive me for giving you this image, but I remember a time when I was in Mexico on a mission trip. At the men's quarters a bath meant standing in a bucket in the main courtyard of the home and pouring two buckets of cold water over you. This is the kind of bath this woman was taking. No bubble bath. No thought of luxury.

But she was naked and this was enough for David to lust after her. David acts quickly. He sends someone to find out about her and they report back that her name is Bathsheba, which is kind of a solemn name since it means something like "Daughter of an oath". She is also married. But the information does nothing to stop David. Then again what could stop David? He is the king. He immediately sends messengers to get her. What David wants, David gets.

What happens next happens in the space of one verse. There is no long seduction. There is no conversation between David and Bathsheba. Not even an introduction. It only takes four words in Hebrew to tell the tale: She came to him and he, to put it simply, takes advantage of her. Then, in the next verse, she goes back home.

That could have been the end of the story. Maybe it could have been a short interlude, at least for David, in which the great king suffered a momentary lapse in righteousness and then regained his moral standing. But, as so often happens, the brief sin leads to more complications and David begins a downward spiral. Before it’s over David has not only committed adultery but he has also added lying, greed, and murder to the list of his sins.

As David’s episode shows, lust is often a “gateway” sin. Having given ourselves over to a desire that knows no reason, that knows no boundaries, we often get dragged further and further away…away from God, yes, but also away from ourselves. We wake up one day and wonder how we got so far from home.

It’s for this reason that we return again to a theme that has run throughout these sermons on the Seven Deadly Sins – we are sinners, yes…God has a remedy for that sin in the redeeming work of Jesus Christ…we have a hard time seeing who we truly are in the light of God’s work and God’s love and God’s mercy…so…we need others to help us…to help us be accountable, to be redirected, to be oriented toward God once again. Now we might be open to having that happening in other areas of our lives. You can ask me about my prayer life, how often I’m attending worship, what I’m doing to help the needy in our community, maybe even how much I’m giving, but when we start talking about this area of my life, well, that’s…un-American! But is it un-Christian?

Lauren Winner is a young woman, now studying theology at Duke, who has written several very interesting books on her faith journey. Her latest is a book on the very un-hip topic of chastity. It’s got a provocative title – Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity. At heart it’s a reaffirmation, from someone who had to reclaim a chaste life, of the value of abstinence from sex before marriage and the joyful work of being faithful in marriage. One of Lauren’s arguments is that for Christians our sexual ethics should be a matter of communal discussion. Not that we should be airing our laundry before everyone or that we should act as police, snooping into each other’s lives, but that we should seek out people, Christians, with whom to be accountable in this and every area of our life. It’s one of the ways that we would look different.

Winner says, “Christians might claim less credit-card debt if small-group members shared their bank account statements with one another. I suspect that if my best friend had permission to scrutinize my Day-timer, I would inhabit time better. Speaking to one another about our sexual selves is just one (admittedly risky) instance of a larger piece of Christian discipleship: being community with one another.”[iii] That’s a level of community most of us haven’t arrived at, but it’s a level of sharing for which we ought to be aspiring in our small groups.

Will Willimon, whom I have been quoting often in this series because of his book, Sinning Like a Christian: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins, tells the story of a student he worked with who told him about a party he had been to with a group of friends. One of these friends made a pass at him and invited him to act on his lustful impulses.

Remembering it, he said to Willimon, “I sort of surprised myself when I said, ‘No, that’s not a good idea. I walked away feeling fairly good. Overjoyed, even. I thought to myself, ‘Gosh, I’m a better Christian that I thought! I’m in a better church than I thought. My church has lots of problems, many shortcomings, but at least it’s made a relatively faithful person out of a creep like me.”[iv]

Now I know not every story ends this way. I know there are many of us who have been wounded by what they have done and what has been done to them in these situations. Our sexuality is a place where we are so vulnerable and often so hurt. What I want to be sure to say as we close this sermon is that there is always a place for redemption and a new start in God’s never-ending love. The desire that is within us for love is a love that finds its home in God. The loves of our life, the pinings and yearnings and longings of our hearts are so often misdirected but they do have a home. It is often said of those who fast as a spiritual discipline that when we are hungering, we are hungering for God. Couldn’t it also be that when we are lusting we are really seeking a truer object for our impulses? Sexual pleasures can never transform us into the people we are called to be, but they can give us a window into the real love that is waiting for us.

Chastity?! What an old-fashioned word! What a counter-cultural thing to talk about! What an opportunity to find true love! Something tells me this is not the end of this conversation. It’s only the beginning. May God be with us. Thanks be to God.

[i] Simon Blackburn, Lust, (Oxford University Press: New York, 2004), p. 19.
[ii] ibid., p. 2.
[iii] Lauren Winner, Real Sex (Brazos: Grand Rapids, MI, 2005), p. 53.
[iv] Will Willimon, Sinning Like a Christian, (Abingdon: Nashville, 2005), p. 146.

The Seven Deadlies - Greed

Luke 12:13-21 (NRSV)
Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.”
But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”
Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, 'What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?' Then he said, 'I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, 'Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.'
“But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So it is with those who store up treasures but are not rich toward God.”

O.K. Here we are on Deadly Sin Number Five. Since I've had to raise my hand every week before this, I think it's no surprise that I'll have to raise it again today. After spending some time this week thinking about greed I have to say, “Yes, in addition to struggling with pride, envy, anger, and sloth...I'm greedy.”

I can trace my problem back to a very early stage in my life. Most of us come into the world with a propensity toward greed. Learning to share our toys with others is an early lesson in tempering our avarice. One of the first things we learn to say, maybe even before 'mama' or 'dada' is the word 'mine.' So we get this greed thing early on. One image for who we are as human beings is the seagulls in the movie Finding Nemo who hover around the water saying, “Mine! Mine! Mine!” A lot of our life is spent trying to claim the same thing.

But I wasn't trying to explain how you might be struggling with greed. I was telling you how I realized I was greedy. It was comic books. I read a lot of comic books as a kid. The Flash. The Green Lantern. Captain Marvel. And in the back of the comic books there was usually a section devoted to really cool gadgets. It was kind of a classified section for everything an adolescent boy might dream of having. X-ray vision glasses that would allow you to see through walls. Practical jokes like chewing gum that would cause your mouth to foam or your tongue to turn black. Miracle methods for developing muscles. Itching powder.

It was the itching powder that did it. Most of those things inspired me to think, “Man, my life would be so much better if I just had that. Now don't ask me why it was the itching powder that most inspired my need to acquire, but that was it. My friend, Philip Jaderborg, and I pooled our allowance money and sent off an order for itching powder.

You know, I think it was Old Bay seasoning. That's what it looked like when it came – like somebody had taken some Old Bay and put it in a plastic bag. No instructions on how to use it and we really weren't creative enough to figure out how to inconspicuously put it down somebody's back or in somebody's underwear so we ended up using it on each other just to see if it worked. What a total disappointment.

You would think an episode like that would have started me down the path to virtue and to realizing that things, stuff was not going to be the magic cure for my desires, but like most everyone else in this society that is built on the need to get more stuff, I haven't shaken that childish belief that my life would be better if I just had that. You've seen the bumper sticker, “The one who dies with the most toys wins”? I may not have that on my car, but that belief that I'm somehow in an unholy competition to get more stuff sometimes works on me.

We've talked each week about how insidious these sins are. Greed, I believe, is in a class by itself. Not only has greed managed to get close to us, it has managed to convince us that it's not even a vice. It masquerades as a virtue.

What do I mean? Well, think about how our economy is built on the notion of greed as good. Advertising appeals to the acquisitive, covetous side of our natures. This iPod? It's not just a desirable little piece of technological wonder. You need an iPod. This Hummer? You could rule the world with this vehicle! This cereal? Your breakfast is going to be so much better with Count Chocula! Everywhere we look we are being told that there are things that we don't have that we not only want, but need.

This week I was in Nashville doing some filming for a DVD for a curriculum that I've been writing on vocation. For the first time in my life I had to sit and be made up for 30 minutes. The young woman doing the make-up said, “You have very dry skin. You should get some man lotion.” Man lotion! I didn't even know there was such a thing. And now that I know there is such a thing, how can I get along without it? I need man lotion! You can bet that before I went to location for the second day of filming I had bought me some man lotion! This is how we get trained in the ways of greed. Henry Ford knew this when he started selling cars at the turn of the last century. He knew he couldn't just poll the people in the market to discover what people wanted. As he said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted they'd have said, 'a faster horse.'”[i] He felt he had to educate them on a need they didn't even know they had.

We have even become convinced that buying things is a noble activity. Shortly after the attacks on 9-11 and on at least one occasion since, our president has urged us to keep shopping as a patriotic exercise to support our economy. If you're like me, you probably felt a little uneasy about that. Of course, we want our economy to be healthy, but there is something wrong about the health of our nation being dependent on whether or not I own a TiVo or another pair of trendy shoes.

In the 1987 movie, Wall Street, Oliver Stone created a character that has come to symbolize the worst excesses of greed in our society. Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, is a New York financial tycoon who makes his millions by buying other companies, milking them of their profits and then selling out. In one of the most famous scenes in the movie, Gekko gets up at a stockholder's meeting of Teldar Paper and declares that what we generally have thought of as immoral is, in fact, a great civilizing impulse:

“The point is, ladies and gentleman, that 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.”[ii]

Greed is good. This is where we have come. Most of us would not agree with Gekko. Most of us believe that there are limits and that individuals, groups, corporations can all go too far in overreaching. But not many of us would agree that it is good to be greedy. It's just hard to know where to draw the line. As Bishop Will Willimon puts it, I am pretty good at seeing when you have crossed the line but pretty poor at seeing when I have tripped over it myself.[iii]

So what's a Christian to do when Greed clothes itself in the garb of a righteous person? How do we know when we've gone too far? We need some “stuff” to survive, but when have we gone from simply living to being truly greedy? As with all these deadly sins, the reason they still beset us is because they have settled in very close to home.

Jesus knew this about us. The temptation to greed wasn't invented by the advertising industry. He knew how easy it was to be distracted by things and the desire for things. He also knew how dangerous it was. It wasn't for nothing that he told the disciples that it was easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.

In the gospel passage we read today, Jesus tells the story of a rich man who had an incredible harvest on his farm. That's the good news. But he thinks to himself, “Self, what am I going to do? I don't have enough space to put all of my stuff.” And since this was in the era before climate-controlled rental storage units, he said to himself, “I think I'll tear down my barns and build bigger ones so that I can put all of this grain in there.” Sounds like a pretty reasonable plan if you've got the means to do it. Pretty sound thinking.

But then he does something else. He says to himself, “Self, you are in the green. You've got good socked away for many years. It's party time!” (This is from the New Revised Alex Joyner translation of the Bible). Then God says to him...well, what does God say to him?

In most translations you get to this part and it reads, “You fool! This very night your life demanded of you. And these things you have prepared, whose will they be?” That makes it sound like what Jesus is trying to say is: “You can't take it with you.”

But there's another way to translate this. You could read the Greek as God saying, “You fool! This very night, they are demanding your life from you.” And who is they? Those things. That stuff. It's after your very soul. In this case it's not immanent death the man has to worry about...it's slavery to his stuff. Then Jesus follows this up by saying, “Don't worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear...God knows what you need and will provide.”

Our things, our greed, has a way of doing to us what all of these other deadly sins so to us – they can turn us in upon ourselves so that we lose touch with who we really are, so that we lose touch with where our salvation lies, so that we lose touch with the people around us. We saw this week the story of the two winners of the $340 million dollar lottery – one of the biggest ever. We like to fantasize about what we would do with that kind of money...maybe even to fantasize about all the good we would do with it. “I would help the church. I would help the poor. I wouldn't keep it all for myself.” But we have heard enough stories about the fate of lottery winners to know that we need to say a special prayer for Mr. Ed Nabors in Georgia and the unnamed person in New Jersey. If they are like many other people who come into sudden money, their souls are at risk.

Kenneth Lay became a symbol for greed when his company, Enron, went down in a sea of bad business practices. He died before he ever went to prison, though he was convicted of fraud and conspiracy. He always seemed a bit bewildered by his fall. How could it happen? He didn't feel that he his life of wretched excess was anything to be concerned about. He owned 15 homes, mostly in Texas and Colorado. He bought a $200,000 yacht for his wife's birthday. Despite his wealth he had over $100 million in personal debt. And when they asked him about it, Lay said, “It was difficult to turn off that life like a spigot.”[iv]

But I don’t tell that story so that we can look at how different Ken Lay was from the rest of us. I tell it because Ken Lay is so much like us. We easily get blinded. We can’t see what our stuff is doing to us. And even though we may not have 1,000 pairs of shoes in the closet like Imelda Marcos, we’ve got our own closets with things so dear to us that we can’t see what’s really important.

So what do we do? If we are so bad at being able to see where we’ve gone over the line, what can we do find our way back? One thing we might try is just saying ‘no.’
What if we said to some of the things that we think we might need, “Thank you, but I’ve got enough”? What if it’s not true that every teenager needs a car? What if it’s not true that only new clothes will do? What if it’s not true that we are depriving ourselves by spending the evening at home together than out spending money? These are things Christians ought to struggle with. If we decide some of these things aren’t true, we’re going to look different.

Another thing we might do is to give. The most radical thing the church may ask you to do is to give money. Why would it do such a thing? Everywhere else I am asked for money I do so in exchange for a service. What sort of service am I paying for when I give to the church? You might say that you are paying to support an institution that you believe in. You might say that you are giving to support a worthy cause – mission projects and other programs that serve people here on the Eastern Shore and around the world. You might even say you’re giving in order to help meet the budget. But none of those things is at the heart of why giving is part of our discipline as Christians.

We are asked to tithe, to give a tenth of our income to God, because it is a spiritual practice that helps us to be freed from greed. The discipline of generosity is a way of freeing us from the illusion that our security is found in our possessions. Our giving is a way of giving thanks to God. As Willimon says, “Gratitude is sparse in those with Greed, Pride, and Envy, too. Greed is that great lack that enables sin to flourish, that great misreading of the true condition of your situation, that refusal to worship God, the giver of all good gifts.”[v] If we are able to emulate God in the giving of a portion of our gifts back to God perhaps we can reclaim the freedom from Greed we are intended to have.

Finally we can acknowledge that our needs are disordered and can only be reordered when we give ourselves to Jesus for reshaping and remaking. Combating greed is the work of a lifetime for Christians. It is something that comes with the daily work of being conformed more and more to the likeness of Christ. Unless we are doing things daily to put ourselves into Christ’s presence, unless we are daily finding ways to give to God, Greed will continue to deform and distort the people we are truly meant to be.

For the foreseeable future we will continue to live in a “bling” culture. The world around us will continue to offer us what Marc Yaconelli calls the unholy trinity of identity. In other words, the world around us will tell us that we are what we look like, we are what we do, and we are what we own. As Christians we must say ‘no’ to all of these. We are far more than our physical appearance. We are far more than the job that we do or the roles that we play. And we are certainly far more than the things that we own. At the end of the day, we are children of God – nothing more, but absolutely nothing less. Thanks be to God.

[i] Richard Laermer & Mark Simmons, Punk Marketing, (HarperCollins: New York, 2007), p. 4.
[ii] Stanley Weiser & Oliver Stone, Script for Wall Street, 1987.
[iii] William H. Willimon, Sinning Like a Christian, (Abingdon:Nashville, 2005), p. 100.
[iv] Phyllis Tickle, “Greed:The Mother of All Sins”, www.beliefnet.com/story/109/story_10952.html
[v] Willimon, p. 105.

The Seven Deadlies - Sloth

John 15:1-8 [NRSV]
"I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.
“You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.

“Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.”

Now I know what some of you are going to say today. You know I’ve been doing a sermon series on the seven deadly sins. And for three weeks, I’ve been hitting pretty close to home, haven’t I? We’ve talked about pride; we’ve talked about envy; and we’ve talked about anger. And as sins go, these are pretty big ones. I’ve certainly recognized them in myself.

But today, you came to church and you saw that I’m preaching about sloth and you said to yourself, “This time he’s gone too far! It’s one thing to take on pride because we know that we sometimes think too much of ourselves. And envy? Well, yes, sometimes we do covet what our neighbor has and take pleasure when bad things happen to them. And yes, anger does keep me from seeing God’s justice instead of my own sense of what’s right.

“But sloth? What does Alex have against a cute little three-toed animal that hangs from trees in the Amazon? How in the world can a sloth be deadly? I don’t think they even have teeth! All they do is suck on leaves!”

To that I say, “Let me explain myself.” Granted ‘sloth’ is not a word we hear much any more and when we do it usually is referring to the cuddly-looking, leaf-sucking beasts that swing in the rainforest trees. But that’s not the kind of sloth I’m talking about. The sloth I’m talking about is, once again, like pride, envy and anger, something that is found deep inside and, like these other deadly sins, it threatens our life with God.

Now if someone has ever accused you of being a sloth, of the ten-toed variety, they were probably accusing you of being lazy. That’s the generally-accepted synonym for sloth. Slothful people lie about and do nothing. They refuse to put themselves out for anything or anyone. They just don’t seem to have a whole lot of ambition. That’s how this line of argument usually goes.

Now if that’s the case, sloth might seem to be a problem, and maybe even a character flaw, but we’d hardly describe it as a deadly sin. In fact, in a society where nobody seems to have enough time for anything…when 24/7 is the standard measure of how much we want to be available to work…when families are stretched because of work schedules, ball schedules, music lesson schedules and even church schedules…when everything is rushed (even on the Eastern Shore!)…when high stress lifestyles lead to high blood pressure problems…when there aren’t enough hours in the day to do all that we feel we have to do…you know, a little bit of sloth might be a healthy thing.

In fact, there is a health researcher in Germany who has suggested just that! Professor Peter Axt, in a paper entitled “The Joy of Laziness,” says, “The benefits of procrastination are grossly undervalued in modern society. People are working longer hours and trying to fit more into every day. But when you are already stressed and anxious, it can be much better to do nothing than rush to the gym for a workout…People who would rather relax in a hammock than run a marathon certainly have a better chance of living to old age.” And they may be smarter.[i] Now that’s my kind of study.

So sloth, if it is laziness, sounds like a pretty minor sin. And not only that, it might even be healthy. There is a group out in San Francisco called the Lazy Eight Foundation, (I kid you not), that says, “Quality laze-time can give rise to the most creative, inspirational and original ideas.”[ii] That may go against the American Protestant work ethic, but it sure sounds nice.

But what if sloth is something more? Surely it must be since it made the list of the Seven Deadlies. What was it about sloth that made this sin seem like such a threat to our very souls?

In my first pastorate in Virginia I worked with a young man who was very gifted. He was bright, sociable and had all kinds of potential. He had a lot of things going for him. He had all these things going for him despite the fact that he had a lot working against him, too.

He was being raised by a mother who had overcome her own drug addiction to straighten her life out. She had been through a resurrection of sorts, leaving behind the death that her old ways represented and creating a new life for herself and her two boys. She had done this with the help of family and with the help of God who had given her this new life and who was opening her up to give to others.

This young man, in other words, had a great mother, who had a strong faith, but she didn’t have a lot of money and she worried over her son. He often got into trouble and, even though he was smart, he didn’t get the best grades. Even so, when he graduated from school she worked hard to get him into college.

It was late in the summer before he got a place and they were sure of being able to pay for his tuition. A generous scholarship from the school helped. Then he started school with all of his potential and all of his gifts.

But something happened to him at school. The dark shadows that often overtook him followed him there. Despite all that he had and the support that he had and the promise that this new life represented, he made some bad choices that got him kicked out of school. What finally did it was smoking pot in his dorm room, but something worse than drugs had gotten him. Something worse than laziness. He had given in to his own joylessness and given up on being what even he knew that he could be. What struck him was the sin of sloth.

The ancients used to call sloth “sadness” and by that they meant a deep despair that kept people from living up to the potential they had. The desert monks of the fourth century referred to it as “the noonday demon” because it crept in in the middle of the day when the sun was at its hottest. It’s the time of day when the life and energy they experienced in the early morning was burnt off by the heat and what was left was a sense of the pointlessness of work in the midst of a desert day. Why not sleep? Why not give up on the work they were given to do?

I know this experience. I know it well. How many times have I met with people at the beginning of a project when everyone is excited by a new idea! We all sit around the table and say, “Yes, we will start an evangelistic campaign!” “Yes, we will draw up plans for a new building!” “Yes, we will read through the Bible!” And everyone is intoxicated by the notion and assignments are made, plans are put in place. Then a few weeks later, the energy has flagged. Everyone still agrees that it is a good idea, but the work has ground to a halt. Nothing seems to be moving forward. Sloth has set in. It’s as if there is a great drowsiness in the land.

We all know the old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is for this reason that Jesus didn’t say to folks, “Let your mind transformed. Believe differently. Try on a new mental paradigm.” He did want our minds to be transformed, but he wanted us to do more than that. He wanted us to bear fruit.

This is the point of the parable from John which we read this morning. When Jesus says that he is the vine and we are the branches, the next step is for the branches to produce fruit. If we only hear the word…if we only listen and believe…but then do not go on to live the word and put into practice in our lives, then what good is the word to us or to the world? God’s desire is that we bear fruit and in that way be Jesus’ disciples.

Sloth is the sin that threatens that fruit bearing. It is, as Thomas Aquinas said, “that sluggishness of mind which neglects to begin good.”[iii] It is the impairment in our souls that prevents the motion we feel towards God from being expressed in action. It is when it seems that we are collapsing in on ourselves, like some dying star. You know how when a star collapses it becomes so dense that not even light can escape it and eventually it becomes a black hole? (Somebody can correct my astronomy later…that’s how I envision it happening.) We also can experience a collapse so that we can’t see the good in doing good…the light which we are supposed to be for the world cannot go forth from us…and eventually we become inert. Maybe we even drag down those around us.

This is a lot more than laziness. Even busy people can suffer this kind of sin. Wendy Wasserstein, who wrote a satirical book all about how to be slothful, says busy people in our society are the ultimate examples of slothdom. They are übersloths. She admits that it’s hard to imagine: “Any woman who is obsessed with her Palm Pilot, her Blackberry, and her cell phone can’t possibly be construed as” a sloth, but they are. “When you achieve true slothdom, you have no desire for the world to change. True sloths are not revolutionaries…It doesn’t matter if the world evolves, because your purpose is not to get things done. Sloths are neither angry nor hopeful. They are not even anarchists. Anarchy takes too much work. Sloths are the lazy guardians at the gate of the status quo.”[iv]

The lazy guardians at the gate of the status quo. Wasserstein suspects that there is no point to all of our work. It’s a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Are we really producing anything of value? Is all of our activity really leading us somewhere new? Somewhere important? Why are you so busy and is it working out for you?

It turns out that sloth is really not about laziness at all. It’s about paying attention to what really matters. It’s about paying attention to God. And whether you’re sitting in a Barcalounger with a TV remote 7 hours a day or working like a maniac 24/7 you can still be caught in sloth. Either one can be pointless and can lead you away from what really matters.

When Jesus goes with the disciples to the garden of Gethsemane to pray, what happens to them is symbolic of what happens to all of us. Jesus has only one simple request to Peter, James and John as he goes off to pray. Do you remember what it was? “Stay here and keep awake.” But what is it that they do? They fall asleep. Their intentions were good. They were willing to do whatever Jesus asked of them. But they were overcome by sleep.

Our sleep takes many forms. Our ability to be responsive to God can be impaired in so many ways. And even in America, where we have such a noble commitment to work, we can forget what truly matters.

Sloth is the shadow side of pride. If pride is thinking too much of ourselves, sloth can sometimes show up as thinking too little of ourselves and of our abilities. It is failing to claim the capacities that God has given us to be the people we were meant to be. Sometimes that comes across as low self-esteem, and how many young women are crippled by this? Sometimes it comes across as a busy-ness that distracts us from the abundant life Christ calls us to live. Either way, we fail to be what God has made us to be.

But the most devastating effect of sloth is how it saps our joy. When we lose the capacity for joy we have entered into the deadly realm. What the forces of evil want more than anything is for us to lose our ability to take joy in the world around us, to take joy in the people around us, to take joy in our lives, and to take joy in God.

The movie Life is Beautiful depicts the love of a father and son as they are taken off to concentration camps in the middle of World War II. The father is a born comic and he is able to convince his son that they are part of some great contest. It is the father’s ability to maintain his joy even in the midst of the most dehumanizing conditions that sustains the boy and sustains hope.

Jesus, when he went to the cross, was able to remind his followers that no one was taking his life from him. He was laying down his life willingly. He was suffering the worst that the world had to offer, but he was not giving up the joy, the hope and the promise that God had put into the heart of creation. Those things would remain. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he said. “And do not let them be afraid.”

God does not want sour-faced Christians who do not know how to experience deep joy. God wants you with all of your capacities for life and joy and fruitfulness. It doesn’t matter what obstacles you face. It doesn’t matter where you have been or what you have done. It doesn’t matter how far you have felt from God to this point…God is calling you to life. This is our hope. This is our strength. This is the promise that we know in Christ Jesus, who will not be defeated, even by our slothfulness. Thanks be to God.

[i] Anastasia Stephens, “Sloth-the cardinal virtue,” The Independent Newspaper, 2001.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Summa Theologica, II.2.35
[iv] Wendy Wasserstein, Sloth, [New York: Oxford University Press, 2005], p. 104.