Gluttony vs. Fellowship, Justice and Reconciliation

Revised and condensed from a sermon preached in Goodson Chapel (Duke Divinity School) on 16 November 2008, part of a Sunday Night Worship sermon series on the seven deadly sins. I was asked to preach on gluttony.

“For, as I have often told you before and now say again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” – Philippians 3:18-21

Gluttony. For me, the term immediately calls forth the image of the Star Wars character Jabba the Hutt. Even more relevant is the parallel character in Mel Brooks’ spoof Spaceballs, Pizza the Hutt, a gruesome creature made completely of—you guessed it—pizza. Pizza the Hutt is so gluttonous that eventually he eats himself.

However, that is an easy, caricatured way to understand gluttony. I’d like to offer an alternative definition that has less to do with the action of eating too much and more to do with the nature of our relationship with food. Food is important throughout the Bible. In Genesis, Adam and Eve took the forbidden fruit not just because it was forbidden but because they “saw that the tree was good for food,” according to Genesis 3:6. When wandering in the desert with Moses, the Israelites had manna rained down on them from heaven—but they could only gather what they could eat in a day, so they would not forget that the food was a gift. When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he set an example that would have us saying, “Give us this day our daily bread” before even “Forgive us our trespasses.” Food matters, and our relationship with food is linked to our relationship with God.

The witness of Scripture shows us that food is not merely or even primarily for sustenance. Meals are meant to be shared in community. In fact, instances in Scripture where the inherent value of food is emphasized over against its place within a communal meal often involve temptation. This is not to say that food is inherently bad. When God created the world, he made plants and animals expressly as a source of food for humans. We need food. The question is not whether food is good or bad, but whether we consume it and share it in a context that fits the Biblical pattern and lives into the fullness of how God intended for us to live together. This is how we should frame our relationship with food: by understanding meals as a central action of community, a means for social justice to take place, and a starting point of reconciliation.

I chose the verse from Philippians 3 because it contains the phrase “their god is their stomach.” This passage leaves open the question of precisely how the stomach comes to be idolized. Is it in satisfying a greedy appetite, or in obsessing over how small your stomach can be? Either way, disordered eating turns too much of the focus onto the food itself, thereby making food-related fellowship, social justice and reconciliation difficult or even impossible. One part of the suffering of people with eating disorders is that they are unable to share in normal meals with friends and family, which isolates them even more in a time of need. Overeating abuses the gift of meals together, and abstaining from meals removes us from fellowship with one another.

I believe that, like so many other things, eating disorders and corrupted relationships with food cannot be overcome alone. This is why the fact that eating disorders often remove people from table fellowship with others is so dangerous. An anorexic needs common meals more than I do, even if being around both food and other people is difficult or even traumatic. We need to look out for each other. Despite Cain’s sarcastic question in Genesis 4, we are our brother’s and our sister’s keeper.

Of course, if we are to care for each other, we must first be able to see the wounds that need healing. When we have to sit at the dinner table with our family, we see pretty quickly where tension lies. When a person struggling with an eating disorder comes to a meal, their desperate need is made painfully clear—even more so when he or she does not come to the meal. When we break bread for communion, we see the brokenness of Christ’s body, both at the altar and among the people present at the table.

At the Lord’s table, there is fellowship, there is a mandate for social justice, there is a chance for reconciliation with each other and with God. But communion is a strange sort of food. Never is the phrase “You are what you eat” more true. When we eat the bread of which it has just been said, “This is my body,” we become part of that body—the body of Christ. The last part of Philippians 3 says that Jesus “will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” This sounds like something that will happen in the distant future, but it happens in a small way every time believers come to this table of mercy. Join in that meal. Share in the fellowship, hear the call to justice, look around for the beginnings of reconciliation. It doesn’t happen by magic—entering into these functions of food will involve both joy and pain. Don’t shy away from seeing the brokenness in the room. Do not be consumed by appetite or a desire to be thin. Be consumed by Christ. Believe in his healing power. Become a part of his body.