CHRIST SANCTUARY    –     9th June 2024            
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If there is one sin / of the Seven we don’t take seriously / it’s gluttony
Conservative Christians make a fuss about homosexuality
but when it comes to gluttony / everyone gets a free pass 
You’ll never see Christians holding up signs saying 
“God Hates Gluttons” / outside all those steakhouses  
It’s true isn’t it / that gluttony has become an acceptable “lifestyle sin”
Ours is a culture of “Supersized” portions 
and we’ve come to accept it as normal 

The Webster’s Dictionary defines a glutton as “one given habitually 
to greedy and voracious / eating and drinking” 
“having a huge appetite / ravenous / insatiable”

Thomas Aquinas identified five different ways you may be gluttonous
* Eating too eagerly gorging voraciously with no restraint  
* Eating too sumptuously / too lavishly / expensively
* Eating excessively / eating too much / more than is needed 
It’s your “all-you-can-eat for $35” buffet or smorgasbord
Or like those Chinese emperors who ate excessively 
only to induce vomiting / so they could eat some more
* Eating daintily / eating only the finest of food
It’s eating luxuriously / extravagantly / exquisitely 
It’s a kind of Roman extravagance / where they made pies 
out of nightingale tongues and peacock brains
* Eating at an inappropriate time
what our parents called  “pinching” / “eating between meals” 

In our text / Eli’s two sons Hophni and Phinehas are sinning in these many ways
They’re priests serving in the temple but they dishonour their high office 
* they’re gorging greedily the finest portions from the sacrifices 
* they’re ignoring the Levitical regulations
that the fat belonged to the Lord / they take it anyway
* they threaten those who object to this sacrilege
* they’re feasting sumptuously
* and they’re eating at an inappropriate time
v. 13 “while the meat was being boiled” 
* and they’re eating greedily / they plunge their three-pronged forks
  into the caldron / for the meat

The Bible talks about gluttony in several places
It was gluttony / that plunged the whole human race into a state of sin 
    Genesis 3:6 / Eve ate the forbidden fruit and gave it to her husband

It was gluttony that led to a curse of destruction upon Sodom
Ezekiel 16:49 says: “Sodom’s sins were pride / gluttony and laziness”

It was for gluttony / that God struck the people with a great plague
when they craved for meat in the wilderness / Num 11:18-34

The psalmist talks about how the people tested God in their heart 
by demanding the food they craved” /  Psalm 78: 18 

Or this most uncomfortable verse that virtually no one quotes
I’m talking about Proverbs 23:2 / “when you sit down and dine 
put a knife to your throat if you are given to gluttony”

Now / when we’re confronted with such verses / it is easy to think 
     * that Christianity must be all dull and dreary 
    * that God can’t stand to see us having fun
         But that is simply not true
The Bible does not forbid us from enjoying God’s good gifts

In fact / food and eating 
play a crucial role in the story of redemption
Right through Scripture / eating and drinking are routinely associated
with events of the highest theological significance

* The Bible starts with God placing the first humans in a garden 
         full of food / telling them to enjoy the bounty of the land
        We often think of the forbidden fruit / we’ve forgotten 
that God actually gets them to eat freely

* Then / the most important redemptive event / the Passover 
was commemorated with a special meal

* And remember how in the wilderness / God graciously provided 
manna from heaven / and water from the rock

And let’s not forget that / on two occasions 
Jesus is accused of being a glutton

Now that should tell us that whoever Jesus is / He’s not an ascetic
Shiva the Hindu deity / may be an ascetic
 The Buddha may be an ascetic / These religious teachers are into
 disciplinary self-denial and contemplative self-mortification
They dedicate their lives to rigid and austere monastic life-style
But not our Lord Jesus / And it should come as no surprise 
why they would accuse him of being a glutton 

* He accepted invites to dinners 
* He attended parties with tax collectors and prostitutes 
* Matthew says Jesus “came eating and drinking” / Mat 11:19
* Unlike John the Baptist / Jesus didn’t regularly fast
* One time He turned 180 gallons of water into 180 gallons of wine
That’s an equivalent of 1,000 bottles of wine! 
By all accounts / that’s heaps of wine for a wedding
* Quite often / we find Jesus / eating with both friends and enemies
Jesus did much of his teaching / as a guest at dinner parties
* On at least three occasions / he played host 
providing large quantities of fish and bread
* After His resurrection He cooked his disciples
a breakfast of fish / over hot coals / John 21:12
* And the early Church is evidenced by its agape or love feasts 

* The Bible begins / with God inviting our first parents to eat
* And the Bible closes / again with God inviting us 
to a grand banquet / the Marriage Supper of the Lamb

In fact / the Bible is full of metaphors from the culinary world
 * The Preacher in Ecclesiastes says / “Wine makes us merry
 and feasting brings us laughter / Eccl 10:19
* The psalmist uses the analogy of taste / to speak of God’s goodness
 “Taste and see that the Lord is good” / Ps 34:8
* When the younger son returns / the father throws a banquet
 Imagine using the metaphor of a banquet 
to depict the heart of the gospel
* Jesus told parables about banquets
* And He tells us “Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him 
will never thirst again” John 4:14
* He uses bread as a metaphor for life / “I am the bread of life
Whoever comes to me will never hunger again” / Jn 6:35
 * Peter refers to the Word of God as milk / 1 Pe 2:2

* Our Lord finished his time on earth with a meal
Not only that / He instituted a weekly feast / the Holy Supper 
* And He tells us that the new earth 
will be ushered in with a wedding feast  
 
God uses all these metaphors from the culinary world 
because the heart of the Gospel / is satisfaction and enjoyment 
of God’s goodness and providence
 About the only scholar / that I know of / who has developed 
a theology of gastronomy / is John Montgomery
He argues that gastronomy is not gluttony 
The misuse of gastronomy may be gluttony / but 
gastronomy in and of itself / is not gluttony
He says / when you misunderstand / the idea of “worldliness” 
you cut yourself off / from enjoying / God’s creative gifts

But Paul affirms this so long ago / He says: “God richly provides us
with everything / for our enjoyment” / 1 Tim 6:17
 
Now all this should tell us that all good and glorious food / are ours to enjoy
Just think about it / anything from Angus Beef Fillet to Comfit Duck Leg
to Slow-Cooked Pork Belly / Garlic Buttered Crayfish
finish off with crème brulee or macadamia-topped pavlova
All that washed down with the finest Sauvignon Blanc / Chardonnay
Or if you’re more adventurous / Lamb Biryani / Chicken Tikka Masala
Lamb Pasanda / Rogan Josh / Peking duck / or Foie Gras

The point is this: The Bible does not forbid the enjoyment of good things

But let’s not get carried away with this truth
As in all biblical truths / we must hold all truths in good tension
In this case / Christian hedonism on the one hand 
and classic Christian spiritual discipline on the other

Our New Testament reading today Galatians 5 says 
“Do not gratify the desires of the flesh / for it is opposed 
to the desires of the Spirit . . . You were called to freedom
but do not use the freedom to gratify the desires of the flesh”

So while Christian freedom liberates us / the Word of God warns us 
     that the Kingdom of God is not about food and drink / Rom 14.17
 
Now / here’s the crucial point  
Like each of the seven deadly sins 
gluttony starts in the heart / not anywhere else

We’re gluttonous 
not because we’re hungry / but because we’re empty

Gluttony is an outward symptom / of an inward hunger
Gluttony is only an objectification / of a deeper discontent
Gluttony deludes you with a false of fullness / but there’s a kind
of hunger that can’t be quenched by all the stuff you consume
Your stomach may be full / but your soul is famishing 
You’re trying to fill your soul by filling your bellies
Why? / Because gluttony is a problem of the heart
Someone has said / “Gluttony is more about 
       the direction of our loves than the contents of our cupboards”

As Frederick Buechner says / you’re raiding the refrigerator
to find a cure for your spiritual malnutrition
There’s simply no cuisine
that’ll ever be translated into soul-food

Now if this is so / then we would expect to see / gluttony popping up
in other areas / other than just the consumption of food
And it is the case!

Here are some other ways / where gluttony rears its ugly head
* excessive screen-time on your phone is gluttony
* retail therapy is gluttony * binging on Netflix is gluttony
* staying up too late gorging on Instagram 
playing countless hours of video games / the list is endless
* owning 80 pairs of trainers / is gluttony
* I mean “See the whole of Europe in 7 days” / how’s that possible
 * Or having 200,000 friends on Facebook / that’s the record
 held by a certain Steve Hofstetter / FB had to reset his profile
because he was slowing down the system

Looking at it this way / we begin to see how pervasive gluttony is
And the problem is compounded by the fact
that we go looking at all the wrong places to be filled

G.K. Chesterton once said: “Every time a man 
knocks on a door of a brothel / he is searching for God” 
He knocks on a brothel door 
because he mistakes pleasure for love
Ultimately / what he’s looking for is love 
He’s looking for God / Who is love / 1 John 4:8

And the reason we crave and hunger / is because 
congenitally we’re overcharged / over-built for this earth
* We were built for infinity / for transcendence 
* We’re eternal spirits / trapped in skin and flesh
Our hearts are made 
to be latched on to Someone supremely sublime
 
 Solomon sniffed it out so long ago / He said
“Wise men and fools alike spend their lives scratching for food
 yet his appetite is never satisfied” / Eccles 6:7 

In an area in the county of Cornwall / there was a problem with the soil
there was a cobalt deficiency in the soil
Cobalt is a trace element / and sheep need it / sheep must have cobalt
But sheep have no capacity to store cobalt 
so they must have it supplied continuously

And you’ll find / that for a short period of time maybe a year / they’ll go on
they’ll live / they’ll grow wool / they’ll produce lamb

But they’re lethargic / they developed a warped appetite 
The’ll scrounge around / and start eating lumps of wood / stubbles 
and other strange things / that sheep aren’t supposed to eat
They don’t know why they’re doing that / but they know
they’re lacking something and they’re reaching out to find that

And in Cornwall you take them down the road and over a narrow stream
And just as soon as they’re over the other side 
they start eating up all the grass by the hedges 
Because on the other side / there’s cobalt in the grass 

And the farmers there need only to leave them there for a week 
and you can bring them back / and for a year they’ll be alright
Their eyes will be more alert / their wool regains a sheen
they’ve received what they truly need

But before they had cobalt / they were driven to do strange things 
in an effort to satisfy themselves

Now / people do this spiritually / They’ve been driven on / by a need 
they can’t identify / and so they scrounge around the junkyard of life

None of us is spared / We’re like a sheep eating bits of wood
and missing out on what we truly need

When Princess Grace Kelly of Monaco met her untimely death 
at age 52 in a car accident / one columnist wrote these words: 
“She had so much / out there to live for 
and she had so little time / So she drank it all in”

Our greatest deception is this / We keep telling ourselves 
that “down here / right now / I can find happiness”
The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen / calls this a “life lie”

And there are two places / where that lie in your heart / can be exposed
when you’re in poverty / or when you’re in plenty

* People who’ve had their dreams dashed / come up empty / in poverty
are in a better place / to realise they’ve been believing a lie
 
* On the flip side / people who have had their dreams come true
    and come up rich / are also in a better place 
to have that lie exposed / when they discover 
to their surprise / that with everything they now have 
they’re still pathetically empty inside

Os Guinness in his book The Call says: “as modern people
we have too much to live with / and too little to live for”

But precisely it is right here 
that we see / the subtleties / of the of sin of gluttony
Often the things we’re gluttonous for are not the poisonous stuff
 It’s often not the poison that ruins us / but the pleasure

Gluttony is taking the good gifts of God 
and making that / the reason / the core of our existence 

It is for this reason / that the Bible equates gluttony with idolatry
 Phil 3:19 “Their god is their belly and they glory in their shame”

But before we can look at the cure we need to identify 
what it is / that we’re gluttonous for

 One way to sniff out what you’re gluttonous is for you to ask yourself
 * what it is / that you mostly think of / when you don’t really
have anything to be thinking about
* In other words / ask yourself / “What’s my daydream?”

Archbishop William Temple / calls it the Solitude Test
What do you most think about / in your solitude?
 When you lie in bed / and you have nothing to worry about
 * what’s the one thing you find yourself most thinking about?
 * some place / your mind most effortlessly / goes to
                       * it’s like a default setting 
you’re there / whenever you have space to spare
* you’re dwelling on that thing / that person / that dream

Call it what you like / an obsession / fixation / fetish / an infatuation
Now / whatever that is / that / is what you’re a glutton for 

So how may we be healed of our gluttony? 

The way to be healed of your gluttony is not for you / to 
make an iron-willed discipline / to fast from your cravings
You can’t tell yourself  / “Stop it” / “Look away” / “Resist”  “Say No” 
      those are the negatives / and the negatives won’t cut it

So how then / may we be delivered?
The bad news is this / Gluttony can never be uprooted
But the good news is this / gluttony can be defeated
by having a spread before you  / that’s far more 
gratifying / delightful / stunning / and enchanting
 than what you’ve been gluttonous for

You win war against gluttony not by saying “No” / but by saying “Yes”
The cure for gluttony / is not fasting / but feasting

Why? Because gluttony isn’t an eating disorder / it’s a worship disorder

The heart’s capacity for worship knows no bound
Everyone has a god / everyone worships something / someone
The human heart is incurably worshipful / most incorrigibly!
The ultimate question is not: “Will you worship?”
but “Who or what will you worship?”

See / whether it’s gluttony / or lust / or greed / or envy
bottom-line / they’ve all got everything to do with worship
Whatever it is / that you’re glutinous for 
that is the object of your worship

So if gluttony is not an eating disorder / but a worship disorder
the cure for gluttony / is found in right worship

D.A. Carson tells us that he has a friend who likes to say: 
“You worship your way into porn / and you will not break it 
unless you worship your way out [of it]” 
All that is crappy / and coarse and degrading
will not be abominable to you / not until Christ becomes
flawlessly ravishing / exceptionally beautiful / unmatched

But how / may we worship our way / out of our gluttony
    Thomas Chalmers / in his sermon The Expulsive Power of a New Affection
tells us / that  the only way to break the power 
of the grip of a beautiful thing / is for you
      to set your heart on a more beautiful thing

Let me explain
You have this obsessive desire to hook up a record-breaking kingfish
up north in the Coromandel 
You dream about it / you watch videos on how to catch it  
save up for it / prepare your gear / preoccupied over it
 Then all of a sudden / out of the blue / a rich uncle offers you
 a free / all-expense paid / 3-weeks trip to Alaska
 to fish for the highly coveted halibut / the king of all flounders
 these denizens of the ocean could hit the scales at 400 pounds
Now / receiving an offer like that / quite suddenly
 your dream for hooking that kingi / fizzles into nothing
Instead you’re now ruined for this trip to Alaska at the end of next year
 you’re now retying your tackle / loading a different reel breaking strain
 watching different clips / you now daydream the halibut

Now / how did the dream over the kingfish die?
 Not by yanking it out of your mind / you couldn’t do that
But simply by replacing it with a bigger dream 

The point is this / Idols can never be smashed! They can only be replaced!

John Donne knew that  / He would pray:
    “Take me to you / imprison me / for I / except you enthral me
  shall never be free / nor ever chaste / except you ravish me”
      
I know that word “ravish” may sound somewhat risqué 
it can come across as indecent / coarse / vulgar or crude

But that was how Donne would pray
“Enthral me / Take me to you / Imprison me / because 
    if you don’t imprison me / I’ll be imprisoned by something else
    if you don’t ravish me / I’ll be ravished by something else”
 
Chalmers uses the word “expulsive” / it means to “expel”
“throw out” / “banish” / “push out” / “eject” / “dismiss”
Chalmers understands that only in loving Jesus 
will you have the expulsive power / to kick out all idols

God is here saying / “Find me captivating / delightful / alluring”
Didn’t Moses pray: “Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love
 that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days / Ps. 90:14

You say: “But why don’t we find God beautiful? / Aren’t we Christians? 
Yes / Jesus is your Saviour / it’s true / but it’s only true theoretically  
It isn’t true existentially / the truth isn’t real to you 
In reality / there are heaps of stuff you find more beautiful than Jesus
Keller on numerous occasions had spoken of a 16 year old girl
who attended his first church in Hopewell / Virginia
She was really struggling / depressed and sad
She was from a Christian home / and she knew the Lord
She said to Keller “Yes Jesus is my Saviour / Yes I know He loves me
Yes I am the delight of God my Father / Yes I am His daughter
But what good is all that / when not a single boy 
at school will even look at you”

Now we mustn’t be too harsh on her 
this was a perfectly normal response for a teenage girl
But all the same / it reveals how our hearts work

Edwards would say that she had “the opinion” that Jesus loved her
but she didn’t “really know” it
  What she had was only an abstract concept of Christ’s love 
But the love of a boy was what captivated her
For her / boys were on video / and God was on audio
And every time / you’re presented with an audio and a video 
you know which one gets your attention!

Now that / is the reason why we go on / being gluttonous for stuff!
All the truths we know about Christ / we merely know them rationally
they aren’t real to us existentially

The head knows the love of God / but 
* the heart hasn’t grasp it / so you’re not overwhelmed by it
* the heart must catch up with the head

Paul must know / that the Christians at Ephesus / needed this 
    He prayed / that they might grasp 
  how wide / how high / how deep is the love of Christ / 3:18

The heart must catch up with the head
And just about the only way for our heart to catch up with our head / is 
* for our heart / to be smitten by Jesus
* for us to find Him ravishing and beautiful 

And one way our heart can be smitten by the beauty of Christ
is for us to contemplate on what He has done for us

Contemplate on what it means / when He says to us  
who are gluttons: “I am the Bread of life 
If anyone eats of this Bread / He will live forever”
And the bread that I will give / is my flesh”
You could contemplate 
on what it must have meant for Him / to be Bread for us 

Contemplate on how bread comes to us 
Grains of wheat must first be crushed / bruised to make flour
The flour is forcefully kneaded / man-handled 
Then / baked in intense heat / finally torn apart to be eaten

Contemplate on what Jesus went through for us
* He was bruised by the nails and thorns
* He went through the fires of the cross / “baked” for us
* He was finally broken / when the Father abandoned Him

Consider what it must have meant 
* for Him to go hungry for forty days / forty nights
* for Him to resist turning stones into bread in the desert
and going hungry / so we might have the Bread of life

Contemplate how on the cross / as He was dying 
He suffered from thirst so that we might have the Living Water

Now / when you contemplate on all that 
your heart might be smitten
you might catch a glimpse of His beauty 
you might finally begin to say / for the first time
with a measure of emotion / “I love you Lord”

When you’re smitten like that 
the things of earth will grow strangely dim
in the light of His glory and grace!

When you’re smitten like that
gluttony will begin to lose its grip on you

Whatever you do, do not come to the end of your life
Having to say like Augustine: “Late, have I loved Thee?”