I liked watching Guy Fieri travel around to “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives,” munching on BBQ, giant burritos, and huge pancakes. And I vividly recall an episode of “Man vs. Food,” where Adam Richman tackled a six-pound platter of king crab legs, salmon and a huge circle of reindeer sausage at an Anchorage, Alaska restaurant. Fortunately, I think, we no longer have a cable package that includes the Food Channel.
This week’s deadly sin, gluttony, is tough to pin down in relation to our society. On the one hand, Will Willimon argues that it’s the only one of the seven which we do not need anyone to tell us is a sin. The social pressure on those who overeat is already huge. Any number of doctors, health experts and fitness instructors seem to be warning us against gluttony. Overweight people are ostracized and discriminated against enough to make them feel plenty guilty for any excessive eating which contributes to their size.
On the other hand, there is the Food Channel. We Americans have available an incredible variety of food and we seem obsessed with it. Even if we don’t overeat, we seem very near to the description we find in this week’s text from Philippians 3:17 – 4:1, verse 19, “Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; their minds are set on earthly things.”
Gluttony is definitely mass overconsumption of food, but the evil spirit of gluttony is also present in other forms of food obsession, whether it’s an excessively gourmet taste or anorexia. It may not seem like much of sin, just over-indulging or over-focusing on a basic need. Yet gluttony makes the deadly list because it takes our attention away from God. It literally puts something else at the center of our beings.
I paraphrased Peter Kreeft last week to say that lust is not the greatest sin, just the most popular. I’m wondering now if that might not be better said of gluttony. We are all constantly tempted in relation to food. A person can be celibate and live, even live a happy, good life. But no one can go without eating. Our problems with food force us to confront how sin distorts and ruins even the simplest and best things in life, using them to draw us away from God.
We’ll need to think more about this together. In the meantime I just closed up the bag of Fritos rather than take another handful or two. May God have mercy on us all.