Can’t Get Enough

9-20-09 Can’t Get Enough

Last weekend, ahead of the blight and dropping temperatures, I brought in a last beautiful basket of garden produce: 5 deep red lipstick peppers and a couple of green ones. A dozen and a half perfect plum tomatoes and a couple still green around the edges.

I ran down to the post office to grab the mail before it closed, came back and into the kitchen and did a double take. It was all gone-all but two semi ripe tomatoes sitting forlornly on the counter. I looked, scratched my head, questioned my reality, and came to the realization that our dog, Ben, is a glutton.

I didn’t see the evidence until several days later, a light pink stain scattered with a few seeds in the dining room corner.

Gluttony in the church house is not a new problem. There are references scattered all through the New Testament to the gluttony undercutting the infant Christian churches.

Each week, the day after Sabbath (which for Jewish communities is Saturday), Jesus followers would gather in homes large enough to hold them and share a love feast. They brought food (pot luck) and enjoyed that provided by the host, broke and blessed bread in Jesus’ name, passed the cup of forgiveness, and told each other what they had remembered, what they had learned, encouraged each other in the difficult journey of following the resurrected Jesus.

But some of them were wealthier than others, less driven by the clock and demands of bosses. Some of them got there first and dug right in to the fresh fragrant food. Others, who got done with work later and took longer to clean up from grubby work, got there later and got leftovers.

The first group was comfortable with the way things were. It didn’t really bother them. Oh, some might feel badly for those who didn’t get enough, but not enough to challenge their friends and families to wait. It fell to those who had most closely experienced Jesus to rebuke the “family,” to remind them that this was indeed a new community, a community of utter mutual caring and sharing.

Can we have too much of a good thing? When it blinds us to reality, to other’s need, to God’s presence and purpose, yes.

Yesterday in Boston’s Filene’s basement, I overheard a woman complaining to her friend that health care reform might drive her taxes up. With the next breathe she marveled at the good deal she was paying for, an Armani jacket at half price-just $2,500.

So many things can fill us up, give us indigestion, stretch our bellies and dull our abilities.

We can even ingest so many words that there isn’t room for thought. The Ping Pong battle played out in the news has our heads going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth instead of thinking with the mind of Christ about our actual life and the lives of those around us.

A few weeks ago Dr. Scott Morris spoke with New United Methodist District Superintendents and Conference Staff people at their training event.

[Morris is a family Practie Physician and a UM Elder, who founded]….. The Church Health Center provides quality, affordable health care for working, uninsured people and their families. It is the largest faith-based clinic of its type in the country, caring for 50,000 patients of record without relying on government funding.

He told them that People go to the doctor today for things they once would have taken to their pastor….Morris said so often in his practice, a patient came to him with a complaint about their back hurting or some other problem, but what was really wrong was they had a broken heart.

“You can’t MRI somebody’s spirit,” he said. … “We need to explore what it means to have a healing ministry in our congregations and in our lives,” he said. - UM News Service

Our youngest daughter is studying food. This means studying the role food plays in our lives. As Solomon Schimmel, author of the current standard study on gluttony writes, “we are a society inundated with food and drink.” Food plays a social role. It shapes our sharing.

What’s the first thing you think about when you find out someone’s coming to visit? We feed our guests. Food is usually the first way we reach out to neighbors in pain, in poverty.

The way we behave with food both reveals and reforms the way we relate to the other human beings on our planet. Food practices reveal status (where did YOU go out to eat?) The first human murder, Cain against Abel, was over the way God received their gifts of food differently.

Gluttony got listed as a deadly sin because it overfills us to bursting and illness, because it rivets our attention to what we can’t get enough of, whether we are over privileged or deprived, and because when we take more than we need, it means that someone else doesn’t get enough. There’s no good side to gluttony, no silver lining.

One of the most powerful images of God I’ve ever encountered describes God as ever renewing and overflowing.

When we become the body of Christ, we become that open fluid flow of God’s life.

(This Holy Mystery, p. 25) “all who are baptized into the body of Christ Jesus become servants and ministers within that body, which is the church. …the one Body, drawn together by the Spirit, is fully realized when all its many parts eat together in love and offer their lives in service at the Table of the Lord.

We can be too full to care, or full enough to share. What is it you can’t get enough of?