Roger Ray, pastor
Feb. 12, 2012 Epiphany 6
1 Corinthians 9:24-27
Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.
Every holiday season you hear someone sweating the challenge of "what do you get for someone who already has everything?" It always sends a bit of a shudder down my spine for what that question says about our society..... why on earth would anyone feel the slightest motivation to give a gift to someone who is already bury in material things?
I can tell you from experience; it is much harder to know what to give to someone who has almost nothing at all. For many years of my life I was a friend to the Trappist community at the Gethsemani Monastery in Kentucky. Brother Luke was a particularly close friend who was so important to me that I felt that I always had to give him something on special occasions. Luke keeps two changes of clothing, a few photographs, a few books and almost nothing else. He is allowed, by the order, to have a few personal possessions and sometimes he would indulge himself in some sort of personal stereo.... That he liked to call a "walk monk" or a camera but after enjoying that personal item for a while he would always give it to someone else because he didn't want to be distracted from his primary job which is to pray and to serve his faith community.
Perennially skinny, Luke stays pretty cold from September to May so one Christmas I bought him a couple of pairs of really heavy thermal sox because Trappist monks are the only people in America who should be allowed to wear sox with sandals. I remember the day he opened the package and the look on his face was suddenly a look of crisis. I had hit a homerun, of sorts. The thick wool sox were exactly what he would love to wear but, as he explained later, he already had two pairs of socks and so he felt that it would be best to give them to someone else.
In movies and in a lot of literature, monastic communities are often portrayed as being filled with sick masochists who like to beat themselves with whips and impose painful penance on themselves and others. This is a gross misrepresentation of monastic discipline on the scale of pointing to Timothy McVeigh as an example of MidWestern Christianity.
In our epistle lesson today, Paul uses the terribly unfortunate choice of words to express this sense of personal discipline by saying: I beat my body to become its master. Sadly, history is full of examples of people who took that sentence way too literally. But what he was saying was that he disciplined himself to keep from being run over by his appetites.
One of the desert fathers from the ancient Alexandrian tradition explained his practice this way: He said, "If you never take your fill of bread, you do not long for meat and if you never take your fill of water, you do not lust for wine."
The life of a monk, either in ancient Alexandria or in modern day Kentucky, will seem to be absurdly severe to most of us.... Not only beyond our reach but beyond anything we would even desire. But the merit of their example can only be understood when you look at the opposite extreme.
The news is full of disgusting examples of outrageous bonuses paid to investment bankers and greedy insider trading on the part of corporate bosses and elected officials. It is easy to point to the excesses of the fabulously rich and you all know that I have written and said a great deal about economic injustice in the division of our nation into a privileged class and a permanently poor class.
But, seriously, we don't need to devote all of our attention to the 1% whose personal habits are not under our control. Every person in this room and within the sound of my voice has a dark, greedy, pleasure seeking and pain avoiding part of your character that Freud called the "id." It is a part of us, whether we are a greedy Wall Street banker, a third world dictator or a pope or a prophet. What seems to me to be the greater spiritual issue is how each and every one of us addresses our own id, our appetites.
Seeing Brother Luke stand and sweat about a decision about whether it would be morally wrong for him to own 4 pairs of socks or not, makes me have to wonder about personal choices of my own..... should I cook at home or eat out again? Should I buy a used car or get a new one? Should I join a gym or just discipline myself to walk more and exercise at home?
As our economy has languished in a nearly imperceptible recovery, a lot of Americans have had to tighten the belt and have learned that living on their credit cards in the assumption that they will have more money next year than they have this year is not at all necessarily true. Many young people get themselves into huge difficulty by not being able to say "no" to their appetites at all.... Buying impulsively, scratching every itch, trying to satisfy every desire, until they become imprisoned by debt.
Debt, as one commentator put it recently, is the new slavery. As we were shocked by the news of Whitney Huston's death yesterday, though I do not want to jump to conclusions, we are all aware of how her drug addictions had ruined her beautiful and talented life and probably cut her life on this earth in half. Addiction is the saddest and most wasteful example of how our appetites can turn on us and consume us.
As most of you know I've been working for the past several months to lose some weight and it is a fascinating topic about which everyone on earth has advice to give.....most of unsolicited and a great deal of it entirely wrong.
But we want to believe that there is an easy way to be slender and healthy.... Just take these pills, sprinkle this on your food.... Television is full of ads for some exercise equipment that will get you into a super model's physic in just twenty minutes three times a week.
It is all lies. There is nothing you can do for 20 minutes three times a week and end up with the kind of cut body they show on those ads unless you are getting lipo suction for 20 minutes, three times a week. And there is nothing you can take that will kill your appetite and leave you feeling energized except for certain controlled substances which come with lengthy prison sentences and lots of the obvious down sides of addiction.
Here is the one and only honest secret to losing weight and it is very simple.... It is the ability to be hungry and to choose to not eat. Sure, it helps to avoid fried food, sugars and fats.... Exercise is very helpful.... Some foods are better than others but it comes right down to being able to say "no" to your appetite....
To be hungry and to choose not to eat. Look, just eating salads will not do it..... I don't want to be the first one to point this out to you but fat people eat salads.... I personally think that salads are delicious but let me just remind you that all that cows, hippopotami and elephants eat are green leafy vegetables. The fattest animals on earth eat nothing but salad with no dressing.
But we live in the capital of all-you-can eat buffets.....men and women, no one should ever eat all they can eat! But the buffet becomes a symbol for our bloated society that can never tell when they have had enough. We stand over buffets of steaming fried foods like Gollum caressing the magic ring in the Lord of the Rings, "precious, my precious, it's ours it is and we wants it."
We have made fun of prudish, puritanical religion that tries to make you feel guilty about ever indulging in anything and I do despise that absurd, human hating, neurotic guilt that makes you feel bad about every aspect of being human but I'm here to tell you that anything you cannot say "no" to is, in fact, your slave master.
There is, in my opinion, nothing wrong with moderate alcohol consumption.... In fact, there can be a great deal said in favor of moderate alcohol consumption, especially when someone else is buying. The problem is that so many people cannot drink just moderately and addiction then becomes their prison warden.
Beer and liquor commercials always associate drinking with happy, sexy people but let me let you in on some mathematical facts, and this is from a recent policy paper published by the AMA: it is estimated that 3 out of every 5 drinks purchased in bars and restaurants are purchased by alcoholics.
If the beer and distilled spirits industries were making their money off of moderate drinkers almost all of them would go out of business. Addicts drive the market.... Advertising just masks the addiction. One of every ten cars on the road is being driven by someone who is intoxicated.
Even cigarette smoking wouldn't be a bad thing if people could limit themselves to one a week but the sorry fact is that no one does.... It is a product which, when used as directed, kills the consumer. The inability to say no to our appetites for drugs, alcohol, sex, tobacco, wealth, power.... This is what drove religious people to the extremism of using fear and guilt to drive the monster of appetite back into the cave though guilt and fear become their own toxins in short order.
What we need to control appetites whose aim is to enslave us is not a sick religion to counter a sick addiction. What we need is a healthy spirituality that empowers us, teaches us the discipline of being able to say "no" to our appetites. Not to beat ourselves into submission but to be willing to endure the pain of wanting something that we do not buy in order to be able to give to someone else..... to be able to resist eating everything we can hold, so that we can share our bread with the less fortunate.
While I am certainly not afraid to be critical of Paul, in this case, I believe that he has gotten a bad rap. I think what he is telling us is, in fact, very similar to the four noble truths of Buddhism. The four foundational truths that the Buddha taught to his followers are:
1) Life is full of suffering.
2) Our suffering comes from our attachment to and our desire for things
3) The solution to suffering is to empty ourselves of desire or appetite
4) The path to a life free of suffering is the gradual growth of a life of spiritual character.
In that, I believe that American Christians have a lot to learn from Buddhism. The pathway to a good life is the path of letting go of being controlled by, enslaved to, our appetites.
Our religion is not based on superstition, mythology or lies, nor is it based on guilt, fear or neurotic self loathing. The best short hand explanation I know of is to say simply, "Love is our religion."
Love of others calls us to lead lives of self sacrifice so that others may have enough to eat, a safe place in which to take shelter and a hope for the future. Love of self calls us to a life of devotion to the truth and an absolute refusal to be enslaved to debt, be it to Pay Day Loan shops or credit cards.... We will not surrender our freedom to addiction, gluttony or greed nor will we stand idly by while our sisters and brothers are tricked or forced into bondage.
