Restless Heart Syndrome

“Moving from GLUTTONY & LUST, toward ORDERING DESIRE”
Matthew 11:16-19, 28-30; Philippians 3:17-21

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I know you’re bitterly disappointed about it,
but this is the last sermon on the seven deadly sins.
I had to combine a few to get it done in five weeks.
So naturally, I put these last two together—lust and gluttony . . .
because there’s not that much to say about them . . .
and they mostly afflict other people, and not us.

Thank you for that nervous laughter.
That’s the reaction I was hoping for.

I did a series here on these sins 12 years ago.
I was looking over some of my notes from then
and I wrote down something I probably would have forgotten.
Early on in the series,
someone stood up during the open-mike sharing time,
and shared that he and his wife would be traveling for a month,
but reassured me, and everyone else,
that they would be back in time for my sermon on lust.
Of course, everyone laughed.

Out of the seven sins, gluttony and lust stand out
for how often humor is employed when talking about them.
We laugh, I imagine, because it eases the tension.
It softens the impact of what we know are serious topics,
and ones that are very personal,
very real in all our lives,
and we don’t speak frankly about them very often.

I would also add,
these two sins may be the most closely related to each other.
That’s the real reason I combined them.
They are both sins of disordered desire.

What do I mean?
I mean they are distorted ways to respond
to good and natural embodied desires.
Notice I didn’t say physical desire.
I said embodied desire.
It’s way too simplistic, and just plain wrong,
to think of food and sex as feeding only physical needs or drives.

Our desires for satisfying nourishment and intimacy and bodily pleasure
are core to who we are as created beings.
God gave those desires to us.
They are good.
And they are as complex and multi-layered as we are.
They consist of physical sensation, of course.
But they also engage us at a deep emotional,
spiritual, and psychological level.
They have to do with aesthetics, with beauty and art.
They impact relationships with others.
They can draw us closer to others.
They are tools of connection with God.
Think about the eucharist, the bread and cup.

But . . . when disordered,
these same good hungers take us other places.
They drive us away from others.
They take what is beautiful and cheapen or objectify it.
They make us self-indulgent and unhealthy in multiple ways.
They distance us from the very God
who wants to commune with us.

As with other sins,
sins of disordered desire
offend against the unconditional love of God.
_____________________

The very first question in the old Westminster Catechism is,
“What is the chief end of human beings?”
The answer is,
“To glorify God, and to enjoy God forever.”

That’s an ancient core affirmation of the church.
We are relational and covenantal beings,
intended to give and receive the love of God.
We were made to commune with God
in love and enjoyment.

And I have always loved the famous prayer of St. Augustine,
“You have made us for Yourself,
and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”

God is love.
God is known to us in Covenant Love.
And we were created in God’s image.

Lust and gluttony
offend against love,
by undermining this chief end of our humanity.

These sins of disordered hunger misdirect our devotion,
from our great God, to our small selves.
Or to say it like Paul, in today’s reading from Philippians 3,
they “make a god of our stomach.”
They aim for personal, solitary, and momentary physical pleasure
at the expense of truly involving oneself in the life of the other,
or the life of God,
They keep us from entering more deeply and fully
into the relational life we were created for.
They diminish our humanity.
_____________________

So let’s talk about both of them a bit, separately.

I’ll start by saying this about lust.
God is not a body-hater, and neither should we be.
Our body, our fleshly self,
along with all its fleshly drives and pleasures,
is a wonderful gift of a loving Creator God,
who desires nothing more than our deepest joy and fulfillment,
deep pleasure,
in our bodies, in our flesh!

There are long-standing Christian streams of thought
that radically separate
flesh and spirit
body and soul
earth and heaven,
and say the first is fallen and evil,
and second is glorious and holy.
Certain narrow readings of certain biblical texts
can and have been used to justify
this denigration of the flesh.
I believe a more holistic reading of scripture does not support it,
and in fact leads us to see that God loves it all,
and is on a mission to redeem it all,
to bring earth and heaven together in a new creation.

But this traditional devaluing of the earthly and the fleshly,
have led to certain streams of thought
that could be described as body-shaming.
These streams arose, I guess, to protect us against the sin of lust,
but some Christian groups and other religious groups
have gone to such extremes,
as to utterly hide the body from view,
make strict rules against embodied activities
like dancing or swimming or modeling,
and practically make it shameful
for persons to enjoy being in their own body.

To do so is not only misguided. It’s ungodly.
Our bodies are God’s good creation.
When we denigrate them, we denigrate their creator.
Our bodies, including the hungers and desires planted in them,
are from God,
and were given to us to honor God with them.

Lust undermines this good gift.
Rather than accept our flesh as divine gift,
and receive the gift with gratitude to God,
lust seizes that flesh for its own pleasure, and cheapens it.
Someone said, lust is not a sin of the flesh.
It’s a sin against the flesh.
It humiliates the flesh.
It takes what God gave us in love, to help us enjoy relationships,
and uses it to isolate us from others.
It hones in on our narrow self and our personal pleasures.

The Latin word for lust,
in all the old lists of the Seven Deadlies, is “luxuria.”
It’s the same word from which we get luxury.
And luxation, which is when one of your joints gets dislocated.
So lust, luxury, and getting a shoulder out of joint,
are all related.
Lust puts things out of joint, it dislocates a good gift of God.

Love creates community, lust makes us solitary.
Or as the British essayist Henry Fairlie put it,
Love is involvement. Lust refuses to get involved.

One-night stands, the hook-up culture, use of pornography,
all of these are about maximizing individual pleasure,
releasing one’s own pent-up sexual energy,
without the complicating factor of a deeper connection.

People usually engage in pornography by themselves.
The danger of pornographic images
is not that they excite our sexuality,
they weaken it.
Pornography is not an innocent outlet for sexual energy.
It’s a cheap and degrading and addictive substitute for love.
It does substantial damage.
It damages our own capacity to love.
It damages our important relationships.
It damages the way society begins to view people.

And once when we get immune to looking at other human beings
as objects for our satisfaction,
where does that lead?
It leads us to engage in dangerous behavior with those objects.
It leads us to engage in sexual coercion and sexual violence.
It leads to system human oppression and abuse,
like human trafficking and sex slavery.
And yes, the buying and selling of human beings,
happens in this community,
and nearly every community.
That is the ultimate offense against the God who
created human beings as good and beautiful,
in the flesh, and in God’s own image.

Love invites us to offer ourselves for the sake of the ones we love.
Lust only wants to be serviced.
Love leads toward some form of self-sacrifice.
Lust is a shield against self-sacrifice.

The sin of lust is not that it stimulates our sexual drives,
it’s that it suppresses our deepest selves.
It withers our capacity to be intimate.
It makes parched deserts of people.
That’s why lust offends against love.

Covenant love, on the other hand, offers the best chance
for deeply satisfying and embodied pleasure.
Covenant—the kind revealed in scripture,
and taught in the best of Judeo-Christian tradition—
gives us relational security,
a place to find rest.
Covenantal love is the cure for Restless Heart Syndrome,
as in the prayer of St. Augustine.
“Our hearts are restless, until they find their rest in you.”
Covenantal love is what Jesus offered in today’s reading—
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,
for I am gentle and humble in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
_____________________

Now a few words about gluttony.
Like lust, gluttony offends against love.
It isolates us.
It withers our richly textured inner lives.

Gluttony is not the same thing
as enjoying an abundant feast or decadent desserts,
which I have done,
and will continue to do on occasion.
Gluttony is a disordered focus on the self.
It is a reaction to bodily craving,
that takes a short-cut to self-satisfaction,
at the expense of building community
and strengthening our health.

Ironically, a quick and disordered response to the craving,
often leads to harming the very thing we are trying to satisfy—
our bodies.

Now, I’m not saying there’s a direct connection
between the sin of gluttony
and the physical condition of obesity.
There’s not.
There are many possible causes for obesity.
And there are many people of average weight, or even thin,
who have to continually guard themselves against gluttony.

Speaking of gluttony may conjure up images like
compulsive overeating,
downing containers of ice cream while binge-watching TV,
hot-dog eating contests, and the like.

Those things are not my particular weakness.
But I have others.
There’s a fairly healthy snack mix I like to make at home,
out of mixed nuts, sesame sticks, and such.
And it stays within easy reach.

If I am working at home alone,
and I’m feeling some stress, or pressure, which isn’t unusual,
it’s a hard-to-resist habit
to take a handful whenever I walk by the container.
Not because my body needs nourishment,
but because it tastes so good,
and I’m in the vicinity,
and it’s better than stewing about whatever is on my mind.
It’s called nervous eating.

Do you see the tell-tale signs of that seemingly innocent behavior?
Being alone.
Using momentary pleasure to mask deeper anxiety.
Enjoying something good, but in excess.

Sure, I could lose some pounds, but I’m not obese.
Still, gluttony nips at my heels and I must be on guard.

There are many good ways to eat, and eat plentifully.
Especially when the food is of high quality,
and full of love,
and shared with family, neighbors, strangers.
We can and should abundantly feast,
to our good pleasure,
and to God’s,
and to share our lives with others at the table,
especially those on the margins.

Jesus set the bar for feasting.
How many stories in the Gospels tell about Jesus at a banquet?
And you know, gluttony was the sin he got accused of most.
It happened in today’s Gospel reading from Matthew 11—
“Here is a glutton and a drunkard,
a friend of tax collectors and sinners.”

But the scribes and Pharisees and other holiness police
that went after him for his eating and drinking,
misunderstood the sin, I’m afraid.

Jesus was using food and drink in exactly the way God intended—
to build relationships,
to give dignity to the poor,
to offer reconciliation.

The religious elite called him a glutton and drunkard,
not because of the amount he ate and drank,
but who he ate and drank with—
tax collectors, sinners, lepers, women!
_____________________

Here are some things to ask—about gluttony and about lust.
Here’s a way to evaluate how we are living with
our God-given embodied hungers for food and intimacy.
And these are deeper questions.
They don’t have quick and easy answers.
They are not rules-based, like,
“exactly how far can I go, with whom, under what conditions?”
or, “how much can I eat of what kind of food, and how often?”

Ponder these questions, as we discern what is right and wrong . . .
Does it build up relationships?
Or does it make us solitary?
Does it honor the other, while respecting the self?
Or does it prioritize the self
at the expense of objectifying the other?
Does it protect the vulnerable?
Or does it endanger them, and blind us to their plight?
Does it honor the self-sacrificing covenant love that God gives us,
and that God invites us to enter into more deeply,
and that God calls us to emulate
in our relationships with each other?
Or does it offend against that love?
_____________________

All of us suffer, from time to time,
with Restless Heart Syndrome.
But there’s a treatment available—
going deeper into the love of God,
and resting there.
God’s invitation is costly,
but it is richly satisfying.

As George Matheson wrote in the 1880s,
O love that will not let me go
I rest my weary soul in thee.
I give thee back the life I owe,
that in thine ocean-depths its flow may richer, fuller be.

Let’s sing together #577 in HWB.

—Phil Kniss, February 24, 2019

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To burn with a pure fire

“Moving from ANGER, toward PASSION for life”
Jonah 4:1-11

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What if we tried to match one biblical character, Old or New Testament,
with each of the seven deadly sins.
One person that could be our prime example or archetype,
of what happens when a particular sin overtakes us.

I talked about the envy of Cain,
how it destroyed him from the inside out,
and drove him to murder his brother Abel.
James and John the sons of Zebedee
let vainglory or pride grip them
and they vied for seats of honor to the left and right of Jesus.
Greed—maybe King Solomon? Judas?
Sloth—who knows?
Could be an interesting exercise.
A little biblical homework for you.
Totally optional.
Extra Credit.

But I’ll tell you who gets my vote as the archetype,
the perfect example, of the sin of anger.
It would be the prophet Jonah—hands down!

There are so many different ways
that anger expresses itself in the story of Jonah.
Different sources of anger.
Different expressions of anger, some raging,
some nuanced,
some almost silent.

We caught the end of the story in our scripture reading this morning.
That may well be the most obvious outbreak of anger,
when he raged at a bush, and a worm.
But that’s not the only place anger shows up in Jonah.
_____________________

So let’s go to the beginning of the story.
From Jonah’s perspective, the city of Nineveh was not just
a city of wickedness and sin.
Put aside the children’s Sunday School version of this Bible story.
When I was growing up in church,
the image I got of Nineveh was an evil urban metropolis,
the kind that good little Mennonite boys stayed away from,
because of all the immorality taking place there—
alcohol, drugs, sex, and other unspeakable things
done by individual persons in certain dark private places.

Actually, nothing in scripture suggests the people of Nineveh
were being punished for personal immorality.
No doubt some people in the city were mis-behaving.
But what scripture makes a point of—
especially in the short 3-chapter book of Nahum, read it—
is that Nineveh was a violent, power-hungry,
and oppressive regime that enslaved other nations.
It was the capital of Assyria,
a regional superpower who had already overpowered
and subjugated the Babylonians, Medes, Chaldeans, Persians,
to name a few.
It had a reputation of brutality.
After a big victory, the king of Nineveh might bring home
the severed head of the conquered king,
raise it on a pole at a royal banquet to celebrate,
and then mount it over the city gate to rot.
Torture, slavery, institutional brutality, was considered normal.
And this empire, in the time of Jonah,
was now breathing down Israel’s neck.
Had not yet captured Israel, but was close.

Care to change your opinion of Jonah,
who ran the other direction,
when God asked him to go be a street preacher in Nineveh,
the capital city of his oppressors?

So Jonah runs away, boards a ship to Tarshish.
His escape doesn’t work out so well, as this fantastic tale unfolds.
A storm comes up.
He is thrown overboard, at his request.
A great fish swallows him alive.
Jonah has time to pray and think and repent.
The fish vomits him up on the shore.
And he goes to preach to Nineveh after all.

Over the years,
we’ve done some pretty odd things with this disgusting story,
making it a whimsical children’s tale for one thing,
singing cheerful ditties, like,
“Who did, who did, who did, who did,
who did swallow, Jo, Jo, Jonah? . . .”
And we’ve gotten into bizarre arguments about
what species of large fish in the Mediterranean
has the right kind of gastrointestinal system for a man to
not only stay alive in it for three days,
but enough space and the right ambience
for someone to kneel in prayerful meditation.

My goodness, how badly we can mess up a great Bible story!!

So let’s just listen to what the story tells us, on the face of it.
This is a story about God’s great love for all people,
and how the sin of anger can blind us to that beautiful truth.

So where does anger show up in this story?
Well, I think Jonah—and most Israelites—
spent a lot of energy nursing anger toward Nineveh and Assyria.
It was how they maintained a semblance of self-determination.
They had every other power
stripped away from them by their oppressors.
But they had the power to be angry.
No one could take that.

So maybe . . . God’s command to Jonah
to go to Nineveh and preach a message of repentance,
was really a command to think differently about his enemies,
to see them as whole human beings that God loves,
and to let go of his anger toward them as fellow humans,
to stop dehumanizing them,
stop categorizing them.

Anger at a person or people, on the one hand—
and a desire to see them made whole and redeemed, on the other—
those two cannot coexist.
You cannot invite people toward something good and whole,
while you secretly pray for their destruction.

I think Jonah realized the impossibility of doing both.
So rather than release his anger and hatred,
he turned tail and ran,
trying, in vain, to outrun the unconditional love of God.

We usually think of Jonah’s escape as an act of cowardice.
That he was afraid to go to Nineveh.
I don’t think so.
I think it’s an act of misdirected anger.
Think about it! What else could it be?
In fact, at the end of the book, he admits it, plainly.

After the people of Nineveh repent in sorrow,
and pray to God for mercy
we read in Jonah 4:1, when Jonah saw that God relented,
and spared the city,
he “was very displeased, and became angry.”
He cried out to God in bitter sarcasm,
“I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love,
and ready to relent from punishing.
That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning!”
Jonah could not stomach the unending mercy of God.
Not only was he angry at his enemy oppressors.
He was angry at God for having a reputation
as a God of mercy and grace.

If Jonah was that angry about God’s mercy,
and that angry about the possibility that the people would repent,
I can only imagine how obnoxious his preaching was.
There was clearly nothing winsome or appealing
about his message, or his delivery.

The biggest miracle in the book of Jonah is not
a man surviving three days in the belly of a fish.
The biggest miracle is that all the people
in the capital of the world’s most brutal empire
humbled themselves in repentance,
after a loud and angry and bitter Israelite man walked the streets
yelling in a grating voice
that God was going to destroy them in four days.

So angry was Jonah, after he finished his street preaching,
that he lost the will to live (ch. 4, v. 3)—
“And now, O Lord, please take my life from me,
for it is better for me to die than to live.”

So Jonah went out on the hillside east of the city,
and took up a position where he could sit and sulk,
and see what, if anything, might unfold before his eyes.

And as it turned out,
something else emerged for him to be angry about.
God made a bush grow up to give him shade,
which made him temporarily happy.
Then God sent a worm who chewed on the bush and killed it.
Without shade again, God sent the sun and wind,
and Jonah was miserable, bitter, and even angrier.

It’s like Jonah’s moral character is being spelled out for the reader
in big, bold, letters.
Jonah is angry, bitter, self-centered,
lacking in the capacity to see beyond his own circumstances,
and therefore, lacking in his capacity to love.
The sin of anger, like all other sins,
is shown, at its core, to be an offense against love.
It takes away our capacity to see and appreciate God’s love
for all people and creation,
and it takes away our capacity to truly love,
because sinful anger draws us into ourselves.
_____________________

So . . . here is a good time to think about the difference
between sinful anger,
and righteous anger.

I talked some about this in a sermon last fall,
when we explored the book of James,
and I made the point that, for James,
sinful anger is that which does not reflect accurately
the image of God in us.

I think I would say the same thing today,
and maybe expand a bit.

There’s no question there is a place for anger in our life with God.
God, as a matter of fact, exhibits anger. Often.
There are lots of Bible references to God’s wrath.
God gets angry when people work against God’s good purposes.

The church has always recognized and named God’s anger.
One of the ancient parts of every Roman Catholic funeral mass,
the Requiem,
is the Dies Irae, literally, the “wrath of God.”
It doesn’t get used very much any more,
because . . . as it turns out,
people don’t much enjoy focusing on God’s anger at funerals.
Who knew?
But it was written into the liturgy.

Any theological portrait of God,
that ignores or denies God’s judgement,
or God’s anger at injustice,
or God’s wrath at those who work against God’s mission,
is only presenting a partial picture of God.

I know it’s popular to downplay God’s anger,
because it makes us uncomfortable.
That’s not a good enough reason to take a theological short-cut!
We should do the work, 
and talk about God’s anger in a healthy way.
Injustice will always elicit the anger of God,
and it should elicit our anger as well.

I say this because when talking about the sin of anger,
we can soon start confusing ourselves,
if we lump all anger together in one basket.
It’s not that simple.

Sinful anger is anger that offends against the love of God.
It is anger that is misdirected, that hits the wrong target.

So if we want to name a particular practice to shape virtue,
help guard us against the deadly sin of anger,
let’s call it . . . “target practice.”
We need to improve our aim.
We do that by first examining what the appropriate target is,
and then figuring out the most effective way to hit the mark.

Jonah was way off the mark!
Jonah aimed his anger at the whole city, a tribe of people.
The target of Jonah’s anger should have been
the systemic evil of oppression,
that had overtaken the powers within the Assyrian Empire,
and were working against God’s loving purposes.
His anger should have been aimed at any and all forces of evil,
including those present among his own people,
forces causing harm to the poor and vulnerable.
There were plenty of poor, obviously, inside the walls of Nineveh,
plenty of vulnerable and marginalized and oppressed peoples.
Jonah chose not to see them.

In the largest city of the world, capital of a brutal empire,
there were people paying the price for that brutality.
Authoritarian regimes don’t hold on to their authority
without the violent repression of their own people.
But Jonah’s mentality was
we Israelites are, as a class of people, the innocent victims,
and the Ninevites are, as a class of people, the evil empire.
Therefore,
They . . . deserve to be wiped out.
We . . . deserve to be saved.

That way of dividing up the world is off God’s mark.
That’s not how God’s unconditional love works.
That’s not how God’s wrath against injustice works.

Are we justified in getting angry sometimes?
Absolutely!
Are we justified in voicing, and expressing, that anger sometimes?
Without a doubt!
Look at Jesus!
Look at his righteous and well-aimed fury
at the systems of oppression in the Temple,
that crowded out the marginalized
by filling the Court of the Gentiles
with vendors making a profit off the poor.
He turned some tables.
We should admire, even emulate that kind of anger.

Garrett Keizer, author of The Enigma of Anger, wrote,
“I am unable to commit to any messiah
who doesn’t knock over tables.”
In other words, if God’s messengers, ones who come to announce
good news to the poor and freedom for the captives,
don’t sometimes righteously rage against injustice,
and take action to unmask and unseat the powers of evil,
then they cannot be authentic.
That litmus test should include us,
who claim to be followers of the Messiah.
We should get angry at injustice.

But what we should not do,
is ever lose sight of God’s love for all people—all people—
including those we call our enemies.
And if, upon closer inspection,
the anger we do have seems to be focused on persons
who are getting in our way,
making it inconvenient to achieve our agenda,
or otherwise being difficult or disturbing or irritating,
if they are the target of our anger,
we need to recalibrate.

Or if we are rightly angry at the systemic injustice
perpetrated by certain people in power—
be that the president,
or leaders of congress,
or other powerful heads of powerful institutions—
and, upon honest examination,
notice that our righteous anger has somehow
progressed beyond anger at injustice,
and is now morphing into blind rage,
and a hatred of persons God still loves unconditionally,
then maybe we also need to do some repentance,
and recalibrate our anger,
so that it is aimed at the appropriate target.

We human beings are created by a God of passion,
a God who feels, deeply.
And we were created in the image of God.
We flourish as humans when we allow ourselves to feel deeply,
like God does—
and act in ways that have integrity with our passions,
but do not offend against the covenant love God has with us,
and with all people, and all creation.

As soon as our actions do harm or violence against covenant love,
we distance ourselves from God,
we stray from our created purpose,
and we sin.

There is a fire burning within us—a fire God has set.
That fire can burn
in a way that has integrity with God’s intentions for us,
in a way that produces life.
We can burn with a pure fire.

Or that fire can burn out of control,
spreading flames of destruction in every direction.
That fire is not from God.
It is not consistent with the image of God in us.
It must be repented of,
and doused with the love of God,
which, in turn, will ignite a new life-giving flame.

Let’s sing about that pure fire.
You can pull out Sing the Journey, the green book.
But keep it closed for the moment.
I first want you to prepare yourself to sing this song,
“How can we be silent?”

Think about some injustice in the world—
maybe on the global stage, in the middle East,
on our own borders,
in our nation’s capital,
in our state’s capital,
in our town,
in the church.
With that injustice in your mind,
go ahead and sing with a righteous anger,
sing with heart and soul, this is not a polite song.

But if you find your anger veering toward hatred of a person,
any person, recalibrate.
Focus your anger on that which makes God angry,
and get in touch with the anger of God within you,
touch the spirit, as this song says,
the spirit burning now inside you.

Turn now to #61.
And if we’re going to sing angry, we’re going to need to stand.

—Phil Kniss, February 17, 2019

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