Don’t Forget to Chew
Sermon given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
October 5, 2014
By Rev. Craig M. Nowak
There’s a wonderful story from our Unitarian history that recalls an encounter between William Ellery Channing and one of his parishioners from the Federal Street Church in Boston. It seems Channing was strolling through the Boston Common on a Sunday afternoon and encountered a parishioner whom he recognized as having been absent from the morning’s worship service. When Channing questioned the parishioner as to why he was not in church that morning, the parishioner informed Channing that he had decided to stay home after learning of the day's sermon topic. According to the story Channing never again revealed his sermon topics ahead of Sunday morning.
This story is often lurking somewhere in my mind each time I send in my sermon titles for the monthly newsletter and more so when I’m aware that the topic of the day might be considered controversial, difficult, unpleasant, or …heaven forbid... boring. I confess before you now that today’s topic carried the potential to be considered any or all of these if it were made fully known ahead of time.
Today we begin a seven part series on something we don’t talk too much about in Unitarian Universalist churches...sin. Once a month, I will devote a sermon to one of the so-called Seven Deadly Sins. My hope is that this series will engage rather than repel you for as with so many things in life, all is not as it appears at first glance.
That being said I want to begin by attempting to define or frame what I mean by the very loaded word, sin. Listen again to the words from our call to worship, words that come from the Hindu tradition, “There is a path of joy and there is the path of pleasure. Pondering on them, the wise (one) chooses the path of joy; the fool takes the path of pleasure.”
This raises the question...what’s the difference between joy and pleasure? Well, the path of pleasure is the path where, having met our most basic needs, we hold on tight, though we often think we’re letting loose. On the path of pleasure our overriding concern is our own survival and own amusement. It leads us on a journey towards self-satisfaction. This path is littered with clever, well researched and targeted slogans and reassurances of our personal entitlement in order to ward off any pangs of guilt or too much concern for others that crop up now and then. On this path we are bombarded with an ever expanding menu of entertaining choices to satisfy our every whim which serves to numb our existential angst and pain. The path appears at first to be one of freedom, but it is bondage.
It places our emotional and spiritual well-being at the mercy of transient, external conditions and leads us directly into the kind of world that dominates the headlines, a world of war and hatred, ruthless competition and overconsumption, greed and manufactured scarcity.
The path to pleasure funnels us into a shrinking, grasping, brutal existence leaving us confused or uneasy as we realize despite the vast array of choices we have in almost every facet of our life...the very definition of freedom to some...we feel inexplicably trapped. In this sense, the path of pleasure is a path of passive doing.
The path to joy is the path where we give of our life. Moving beyond our own self, survival, and amusement, we journey towards self-fulfillment. The path of joy is less visible, less glitzy, less sexy…and doesn’t get much air time on the evening news…but it’s there. It cuts across the grain of the dominant culture and conventional wisdom. Meandering through the all the thick and dark places of our soul, it engages with life at its most raw and real. Reminding us that life, our lives, are finite and therefore precious, it encourages us to pause and to wonder what it means to be alive...what it means to be at all. The path of joy is the path where the journey becomes the destination and the world in which we live is created with each step we take… in each moment we live. It is the path of active being.
The two paths share the same ground but they lead to very different places, spiritually. In considering the question of sin, conventional wisdom, at least in western culture, would suggest sin is choosing the path of pleasure over the path of joy.
This understanding is in keeping with a definition of sin as an offense against a divine or moral law, rebellion against some deity, a misdeed, or even a serious shortcoming or character flaw.
These definitions approach sin primarily as an action, something we do or don’t do. Such definitions give sin the weight of moral judgment, reducing it to a simplistic game of choosing between good and bad or a matter of will. Life lived however is rarely that straight forward. So how else might we understand sin?
In the ancient Hindu text the wise person and the fool, as we might expect, each choose a different path. Clearly, the authors of the text think the path of joy is the way to go, but is it really a simple matter of choice or will? After all, most of us don’t sit up one day and consciously decide to devote our lives to our own self concerns or conversely, to transcend them.
Instead we tend to crisscross between the path of pleasure and the path of joy, this is part of being human. Now, we’re told both the fool and the wise person ponders the two paths before making their choice. Pondering requires we pause and attempt to gain some perspective on what we’re looking at. Knowing this, the deciding factor seems less about will than about perception or awareness that arises out of that pondering.
The wise person perceives him or herself as interdependent or existing in relation to others whereas the fool understands him or herself as independent or existing separate of others. The wise person has at least some sense or awareness of their wholeness and the interconnectedness of life, the fool does not or else denies it.
Sin therefore, for our purposes, is not something we do or don’t do, but something that prevents us from seeing, like an obstruction. The result is misperception or lack of awareness of who we are. It is this misperception that is at the root of the acts we typically label as sinful, immoral, evil, and so on.
In the Cherokee parable, our reading this morning, the grandfather is aware of who he is...speaking of two wolves at battle within himself, one life affirming, the other life threatening, his is not a lesson in willing oneself to do good versus evil, but a lesson in discernment about what threaten or affirms life. When his grandson asks, “Which wolf will win”, he replies, “The one you feed.”
To feed the wolf is to give attention or energy to something.
Which brings us to the seven deadly sins, and specifically, today gluttony. The seven deadly sins spoken of in the Christian tradition: pride, lust, greed, sloth, gluttony, anger, and envy, were formulated by Pope Gregory the Great in the 6h century. They are said to be “fatal to spiritual progress” (deadlysins.com).
Thomas Aquinas, the medieval Catholic theologian defined gluttony as “not any desire of eating and drinking, but an inordinate desire... leaving the order of reason, wherein the good of moral virtue consists."
And of gluttony, one 19th C. Russian bishop wrote, “Wise temperance of the stomach is a door to all the virtues. Restrain the stomach, and you will enter Paradise. But if you please and pamper your stomach, you will hurl yourself over the precipice of bodily impurity, into the fire of wrath and fury, you will coarsen and darken your mind, and in this way you will ruin your powers of attention and self-control, your sobriety and vigilance.”
I guess I should have gone with light cream cheese on my bagel this morning!
Of course, it is easy for us today to poke a little fun at some of the language in these writings, but it is important for us to remember for the writers this was not hyperbole, they took spiritual well-being seriously.
We should too.
Gluttony is alive and well in our day and though it may including pampering the stomach, its spiritual manifestation is our concern as people of faith. Gluttony manifest spiritually consumes the world and our lives with “thoughtless waste, misplaced sensuality, malicious depriving of others...and a refusal to share with others.” (faust.com)...as if we’re the only person, people, organization, nation, culture, species and so forth that matters. It is a warning that we are losing our way...losing touch with who we are.
Indeed, over consumption of everything from food to smart phones, media to medicine is rampant in our society and we’re gobbling it all up so fast most of us have no idea where the things we consume came from, how they got to us, who made them, and under what conditions or at what cost to life and quality of living. And this is what makes gluttony a deadly sin.
The word gluttony comes from the Latin (gluttire) meaning to swallow or gulp down... an image of mindlessness if I’ve ever heard one. Gluttony inhibits our capacity to see ourselves in relation to anything other than that which we consume...it feeds an illusion...a misperception experienced as separation and independence from others by focusing our attention and energy primarily on self-satistfaction...it feeds the wolf that will ultimately consume us on the path of pleasure.
To counter or fight the seven deadly sins, Gregory the Great, formulated a list of seven heavenly virtues. To counter gluttony, he prescribed temperance...moderation in things that are necessary and abstinence from that which is not.
On a popular radio show in Connecticut, “The Food Schmooze”, host, Faith Middleton cautions her listeners to never eat more than they can lift.
We could try to practice temperance or abstinence, acts of will, to counter spiritual gluttony...but these seek to address the act, not the cause of our over indulgence.
Rather than temperance or abstinence we could learn to chew…that is, to get curious about our habits of consumption...to ponder what path we’re really on.
How might our perception of who we are change if we were more curious about what, why, and how we consume? Or if we asked how the way we’re living really tasted... or made us feel? Do our habits of consumption make us feel more or less connected to ourselves, others...to life itself?
What might we learn by questioning who or what we are feeding with all that we consume?
Gluttony as a spiritual issue cannot be addressed through dieting...all those thou shalt nots...overprescribed or perhaps more accurately misapplied by religious people for centuries. For it is not so much about what we consume, but what we’re feeding. And so as prepare to depart for now from this place, let us invite and encourage one another with this simple exhortation: Bon Appetit and don’t forget to chew!
Amen and Blessed Be
Sermon given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
October 5, 2014
By Rev. Craig M. Nowak
There’s a wonderful story from our Unitarian history that recalls an encounter between William Ellery Channing and one of his parishioners from the Federal Street Church in Boston. It seems Channing was strolling through the Boston Common on a Sunday afternoon and encountered a parishioner whom he recognized as having been absent from the morning’s worship service. When Channing questioned the parishioner as to why he was not in church that morning, the parishioner informed Channing that he had decided to stay home after learning of the day's sermon topic. According to the story Channing never again revealed his sermon topics ahead of Sunday morning.
This story is often lurking somewhere in my mind each time I send in my sermon titles for the monthly newsletter and more so when I’m aware that the topic of the day might be considered controversial, difficult, unpleasant, or …heaven forbid... boring. I confess before you now that today’s topic carried the potential to be considered any or all of these if it were made fully known ahead of time.
Today we begin a seven part series on something we don’t talk too much about in Unitarian Universalist churches...sin. Once a month, I will devote a sermon to one of the so-called Seven Deadly Sins. My hope is that this series will engage rather than repel you for as with so many things in life, all is not as it appears at first glance.
That being said I want to begin by attempting to define or frame what I mean by the very loaded word, sin. Listen again to the words from our call to worship, words that come from the Hindu tradition, “There is a path of joy and there is the path of pleasure. Pondering on them, the wise (one) chooses the path of joy; the fool takes the path of pleasure.”
This raises the question...what’s the difference between joy and pleasure? Well, the path of pleasure is the path where, having met our most basic needs, we hold on tight, though we often think we’re letting loose. On the path of pleasure our overriding concern is our own survival and own amusement. It leads us on a journey towards self-satisfaction. This path is littered with clever, well researched and targeted slogans and reassurances of our personal entitlement in order to ward off any pangs of guilt or too much concern for others that crop up now and then. On this path we are bombarded with an ever expanding menu of entertaining choices to satisfy our every whim which serves to numb our existential angst and pain. The path appears at first to be one of freedom, but it is bondage.
It places our emotional and spiritual well-being at the mercy of transient, external conditions and leads us directly into the kind of world that dominates the headlines, a world of war and hatred, ruthless competition and overconsumption, greed and manufactured scarcity.
The path to pleasure funnels us into a shrinking, grasping, brutal existence leaving us confused or uneasy as we realize despite the vast array of choices we have in almost every facet of our life...the very definition of freedom to some...we feel inexplicably trapped. In this sense, the path of pleasure is a path of passive doing.
The path to joy is the path where we give of our life. Moving beyond our own self, survival, and amusement, we journey towards self-fulfillment. The path of joy is less visible, less glitzy, less sexy…and doesn’t get much air time on the evening news…but it’s there. It cuts across the grain of the dominant culture and conventional wisdom. Meandering through the all the thick and dark places of our soul, it engages with life at its most raw and real. Reminding us that life, our lives, are finite and therefore precious, it encourages us to pause and to wonder what it means to be alive...what it means to be at all. The path of joy is the path where the journey becomes the destination and the world in which we live is created with each step we take… in each moment we live. It is the path of active being.
The two paths share the same ground but they lead to very different places, spiritually. In considering the question of sin, conventional wisdom, at least in western culture, would suggest sin is choosing the path of pleasure over the path of joy.
This understanding is in keeping with a definition of sin as an offense against a divine or moral law, rebellion against some deity, a misdeed, or even a serious shortcoming or character flaw.
These definitions approach sin primarily as an action, something we do or don’t do. Such definitions give sin the weight of moral judgment, reducing it to a simplistic game of choosing between good and bad or a matter of will. Life lived however is rarely that straight forward. So how else might we understand sin?
In the ancient Hindu text the wise person and the fool, as we might expect, each choose a different path. Clearly, the authors of the text think the path of joy is the way to go, but is it really a simple matter of choice or will? After all, most of us don’t sit up one day and consciously decide to devote our lives to our own self concerns or conversely, to transcend them.
Instead we tend to crisscross between the path of pleasure and the path of joy, this is part of being human. Now, we’re told both the fool and the wise person ponders the two paths before making their choice. Pondering requires we pause and attempt to gain some perspective on what we’re looking at. Knowing this, the deciding factor seems less about will than about perception or awareness that arises out of that pondering.
The wise person perceives him or herself as interdependent or existing in relation to others whereas the fool understands him or herself as independent or existing separate of others. The wise person has at least some sense or awareness of their wholeness and the interconnectedness of life, the fool does not or else denies it.
Sin therefore, for our purposes, is not something we do or don’t do, but something that prevents us from seeing, like an obstruction. The result is misperception or lack of awareness of who we are. It is this misperception that is at the root of the acts we typically label as sinful, immoral, evil, and so on.
In the Cherokee parable, our reading this morning, the grandfather is aware of who he is...speaking of two wolves at battle within himself, one life affirming, the other life threatening, his is not a lesson in willing oneself to do good versus evil, but a lesson in discernment about what threaten or affirms life. When his grandson asks, “Which wolf will win”, he replies, “The one you feed.”
To feed the wolf is to give attention or energy to something.
Which brings us to the seven deadly sins, and specifically, today gluttony. The seven deadly sins spoken of in the Christian tradition: pride, lust, greed, sloth, gluttony, anger, and envy, were formulated by Pope Gregory the Great in the 6h century. They are said to be “fatal to spiritual progress” (deadlysins.com).
Thomas Aquinas, the medieval Catholic theologian defined gluttony as “not any desire of eating and drinking, but an inordinate desire... leaving the order of reason, wherein the good of moral virtue consists."
And of gluttony, one 19th C. Russian bishop wrote, “Wise temperance of the stomach is a door to all the virtues. Restrain the stomach, and you will enter Paradise. But if you please and pamper your stomach, you will hurl yourself over the precipice of bodily impurity, into the fire of wrath and fury, you will coarsen and darken your mind, and in this way you will ruin your powers of attention and self-control, your sobriety and vigilance.”
I guess I should have gone with light cream cheese on my bagel this morning!
Of course, it is easy for us today to poke a little fun at some of the language in these writings, but it is important for us to remember for the writers this was not hyperbole, they took spiritual well-being seriously.
We should too.
Gluttony is alive and well in our day and though it may including pampering the stomach, its spiritual manifestation is our concern as people of faith. Gluttony manifest spiritually consumes the world and our lives with “thoughtless waste, misplaced sensuality, malicious depriving of others...and a refusal to share with others.” (faust.com)...as if we’re the only person, people, organization, nation, culture, species and so forth that matters. It is a warning that we are losing our way...losing touch with who we are.
Indeed, over consumption of everything from food to smart phones, media to medicine is rampant in our society and we’re gobbling it all up so fast most of us have no idea where the things we consume came from, how they got to us, who made them, and under what conditions or at what cost to life and quality of living. And this is what makes gluttony a deadly sin.
The word gluttony comes from the Latin (gluttire) meaning to swallow or gulp down... an image of mindlessness if I’ve ever heard one. Gluttony inhibits our capacity to see ourselves in relation to anything other than that which we consume...it feeds an illusion...a misperception experienced as separation and independence from others by focusing our attention and energy primarily on self-satistfaction...it feeds the wolf that will ultimately consume us on the path of pleasure.
To counter or fight the seven deadly sins, Gregory the Great, formulated a list of seven heavenly virtues. To counter gluttony, he prescribed temperance...moderation in things that are necessary and abstinence from that which is not.
On a popular radio show in Connecticut, “The Food Schmooze”, host, Faith Middleton cautions her listeners to never eat more than they can lift.
We could try to practice temperance or abstinence, acts of will, to counter spiritual gluttony...but these seek to address the act, not the cause of our over indulgence.
Rather than temperance or abstinence we could learn to chew…that is, to get curious about our habits of consumption...to ponder what path we’re really on.
How might our perception of who we are change if we were more curious about what, why, and how we consume? Or if we asked how the way we’re living really tasted... or made us feel? Do our habits of consumption make us feel more or less connected to ourselves, others...to life itself?
What might we learn by questioning who or what we are feeding with all that we consume?
Gluttony as a spiritual issue cannot be addressed through dieting...all those thou shalt nots...overprescribed or perhaps more accurately misapplied by religious people for centuries. For it is not so much about what we consume, but what we’re feeding. And so as prepare to depart for now from this place, let us invite and encourage one another with this simple exhortation: Bon Appetit and don’t forget to chew!
Amen and Blessed Be
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