Dealing with Gluttony
March 2, 2010
Recently, I wrote about gluttony, that sin that crouches at the door of our disordered appetite to disrupt our intimacy with God. Gluttony is turning food and drink into idols. When food becomes an obsession, time to alter our relationship with it.
How then do we overcome gluttony?
As with any sin, awareness, confession, and repentance are a start. Then comes the hard work of heart transformation, and adding new habits. My role today is not to play Holy Spirit. I only seek to share what I have found helpful in the struggle against the conspicuous drive to over indulge in good food. A little time alone with God and a little time facing our gluttony will go a long way to get us on track to using food and drink in a God-glorifying way as God intends.
Down to brass tacks. Personally, as one beggar teaching other beggars where to find bread, I have found the following ideas and two behaviors helpful of late.
The idea first: We are embodied selves. By saying this, I am affirming something quite obvious. We know we are body and we know we are soul (spirit, mind). When I scrape the ice off my windshield I experience that activity as a body with a souI. When I’m dreaming I experience my dream as a soul with a body. The deep connection between body and soul is real. The bottom line here for gluttony is that how I relate to food affects my soul, and how I take care of my soul affects my body. If you find this idea hard to swallow for now, never mind. Skip it. But notice how the way we feel affects the way we eat (as in times of grief or tragedy).
The second idea: fasting is primarily a response to a sacred moment that God brings to our attention. A crisis, tragedy, and sin, for example, are apt occasions for us to respond by not eating (It is always so in Scripture that fasting is a response). However, a side benefit of periodic fasting (that is, not the reason why we fast) is the awareness that God can meet our physical needs even in the absence of food. Jesus told his disciples at the well that he has food from above that the disciples knew not of, which sustained him. Gluttony is a sin and fasting is the right response that may awaken us that our disordered attachment to food can be broken.
First Behavioral change: My colleague, David Manner, serendipitously gave me the best advice I have received on overcoming gluttony. We were eating one day at Olive Garden. As usual, I ordered spaghetti with tomato sauce (Is spaghetti not the fruit that is always in season on the tree of life flanking the flowing river in Revelation 22:2?). When my relished pasta graced the place mat in front of me, I noticed a few lonely strings meandering in all directions on the bottom of the shiny porcelain plate. A few drops of tomato sauce barely stained a few of the strings. David must have noticed my dismay at the paucity of the fare. With his quick wit, he sought to alleviate my insulted ego saying: “Maybe they brought you what you need, not what you want, Georges.” Ouch! Of course, it’s not easy to know when David is joking or sparring. No matter! Holy Spirit is not partial to niceties when he needs to get a truth across. Of course, that it came from Mr. Fitness himself was not wasted on me either!
I am taking David’s words to heart. They have become mantra to my eating habits. Eat what you need, not what you want. It seems that I always want to eat more than I should but this episode is a constant reminder in my choices of servings when I eat. Thanks David. You meant it for good and it is doing good.
Second behavioral change: I have found it helpful to minimize the number of times I eat alone. There are times when we have to eat by ourselves. Some of us may live alone. But whenever possible we should eat in company. I have discovered that eating alone dampens my gluttony sensors while heightening the feelings of loneliness. Eating is meant to be a social activity, a grateful experience of the bountiful blessings of God. Eating alone is counterintuitive to human nature. Why even the first sinners ate together! Eating with others like family, friends, and colleagues, has a way of promoting a wholesome relationship to food. When eating with others, the relationship takes the primary focus and the food the secondary.
Our body, just as much as our spirit, are a stewardship to the Lord. We are embodied spirit. Separating the two is a mistake that can easily lead to a gluttonous life style while seemingly maintaining a robust faith. Those who walk with the Master are concerned for the bodies as much as for their souls.
Gluttony
March 2, 2010
I have been writing about the seven deadly thoughts or sins. So far I have written about pride and humility, envy and contentment, and sloth and seeking God with fervor. These are deadly because they tend to destroy our moral fiber. They deaden our sensitivity to love God and love others. They breed forms of behavior that ought not to be found among us as followers of Christ. These sins are indicators of a character and of core beliefs that are disordered. Today, I want to say a few things about gluttony.
One pastor who preached about the deadly sins some time back, wrote to encourage and thank me for addressing them. May I encourage you to do like wise and play the role of the prophet in your circles of influence about these deadly sins that ruin us and make our witness dead on arrival.
Sin is alienation from God or missing the mark of the high standard of God’s holiness. We are also familiar with sin as bad behavior: “We don’t smoke, we don’t chew, and we don’t go with girls that do”. But does gluttony (our sin du jour) and its sisters get enough coverage in our preaching and teaching? Gluttony is an “acceptable or tolerated sin” by many. When any sin crouches at the door of our heart we compromise our witness to the world.
What does the Bible say about gluttony?
Gluttony is no new sin. The ancient wise people of God knew it and warned against it. In Proverbs 23:20-21 they forbid joining in on those who abuse food and drink. They also knew that gluttony might lead to poverty and drowsiness (a laziness that prevents initiative). Keeping the company of gluttons besmirches the family name.
Paul warns Titus and the church he lead about the teachings of the people of Crete in Titus 1:12. He knew that even one of the Cretans’ own prophets accused them of always lying, being evil brutes, and gluttons.
Jesus is wrongly accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. But he was neither. “Wisdom is proved right by her actions” or as Luke has it “by her children” (Matthew 11:19; Luke 7:34). Jesus was full of wisdom and truth. Being accused and being guilty is not the same thing. Eating with tax collectors and sinners does not a glutton make. Contrary to popular belief, then, gluttony is not a good thing, even when we euphemize it with words such as these: he’s a big eater, she has a great appetite, or I love chocolate so much).
What then is gluttony? William Stafford (Disordered Loves) describes gluttony as a reversal of creation, the spoiling and corruption of food and all that goes with it. “Gluttony,” he says, “is eating and drinking that excludes God.” It is a spiritual disease that feeds “on our need for food and drink and for the other necessities of bodily life.” Food enjoyed as a gift from God is good. But our love of food can become inordinate or disordered and thus evil. Evil, says C.S. Lewis, is a good that has is sought in some disordered or wrong ways. Abusing food to assuage our emotions or spiritual hungers is a dead in the water idea.
Few of us will escape the tentacles of this pervasive deadly sin in our lives. Many of us are crying the 10 extra pound blues in January for the indulgences of November and December. I will spare you the parade of numbers that prove we eat and drink too much while others go to bed hungry since we all know them too well. We all know that as a society we gorge ourselves sumptuously while others get crumbs from our tables to fill their shrunken stomachs and bulging abdomens. But just because we can do something for crumbs gleaners does not mean we automatically cease to be gluttonous.
My deepest concern here is that gluttony is a strong contributor to our natural rebellion against God. Our inordinate love of food can easily become an idol and an idol is a false way to get closer to God. We take a God-given mixture of air, sun, water, wheat, flour, yeast, and heat and manufacture bread that we then abuse in gluttony.
Gluttony is a way of fabricating a personal identity based on food. You have heard, no doubt, the old adage: “we are what we eat”. There is truth here. Our children grow up with comfort foods because food shapes their social identity. How and what we eat are tied intricately with who we are. No doubt the amount of food we consume affects the way we look, and feel, and think, and relate. There is also a spiritual aspect to our eating as is evident from the talk of eating at the temple in the Old and New Testaments. Eating forms our identities in ways that are not completely understood yet. Are you a fan of Emeril et al?
For this reason gluttony, says Stafford, “is part of the old conspiracy to fabricate one’s own identity by eating and drinking, to create and sustain oneself by turning the miracle of food and drink into self-creation and self-service, excluding God.” This is sin and it leads to death in every way (physical and spiritual).
Those who walk with the Master refuse to succumb to any sin that moves us away from God. Rather, we want to do all we can to overcome our sin, gluttony included. Next article will deal with overcoming gluttony.
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