“The Bread and the Knife”

Jon White

March 7, 2010

 

In the Book of Proverbs (Chapter six) it says there are six things the Lord hates, of course it then lists seven things, but that’s a Biblical problem we won’t be taking up today. This list bears little resemblance to the classical ‘Seven Deadly Sins,’ but they do have a bearing on our topic today, the Venial Sin of Lust. 

Some that listed as an abomination to the Lord are:

Haughty eyes

A lying tongue

A heart that devises wicked plans

Feet that hurry to run to evil

A deceitful witness who utter lies, and

One who sows discords in a family.

If you’ve ever been ensnared in lust for another person or known someone who was then you may recognize some of these. Last week, Kathy teasingly announced that I would be preaching on lust so that I could stick with what I know. But the sad truth is I do know. I know because I have been victim, witness and perpetrator. I know because as a young man I callously pursued women purely for my own sake. I know because my father’s actions broke apart my family. I know because my first wife never recovered from the actions of her first husband and the shadow of his lust hung about our necks until it choked the life out of our relationship. Wicked plans, secrets and lies, discord in families, hurrying to do evil; I’ve felt their affects and I’ve heedlessly sowed their seeds. When we’re lost in the grips of sexual lust we may tell ourselves that it is something other, a mad passionate love, or destiny, or something mysterious that no one understands. But it isn’t. It’s selfishness.

 

Now, originally as the Seven Deadly Sins were being developed lust wasn’t on it at least not in the limited way we think of it today. Early catalogs listed the sin of luxuria, or the sin of extravagance, sexual debauchery was only one of its manifestations. But, perhaps not surprisingly, medieval monks and clerics who held up celibacy as the Christian ideal began to really focus on just the lechery aspect of luxuria because it was likely one that they had the most familiarity with, not being subject to many other extravagances in their monasteries.

 

I for one would urge us to again expand our understanding of lust beyond the merely sexual. Truly, we live in an overly sexualized age, where titillation and “sexiness” is used to sell every product under the sun, where we are constantly lambasted with messages of the importance of sexual satisfaction and prowess(at least according to 95% of the contents of my junk mail folder), and where every magazine needs a beautiful woman on the cover (Heck, Cosmopolitan has been selling the exact same issue every month for years, promising more new sexual secrets than is humanly possible). But sexual extravagance, is just one salient point in a more general sea of excess that is robbing us of our liberty by dulling our sense of outrage into slumber. 

 

For most Americans, extravagance has become the American dream, before the recent recession, something like 2/3 of our economic activity was the buying and selling of consumer goods. As the comedian George Carlin used to say, we are awash in stuff. Is anyone here familiar with Real Simple magazine? It’s a beautiful glossy magazine full of ads for new stuff, new expensive stuff you need to live simply. Apparently only the rich can afford to be simple. I am reminded of a friend who was planning her sabbatical where her and her husband were going on a tour of the South Pacific for two months; including scuba diving in Australia, Tahiti and Cambodia. She said that telling me about it made it sound like she was rich. When I pointed out that her household income put her amongst the richest 5% of people in the world she didn’t, no, actually she wouldn’t believe me.

 

We have so much stuff, that the weight of it is breaking our souls. Our desire to have more stuff is another form of lust and a sign of our extravagance. Our desire for constant sexual satisfaction, our desire to be adamantly right, our desire to live life entirely on our own terms… These, my friends, are extravagance… they are lust played out in our daily lives and they are destructive of ourselves, of our families and our communities. And you have to ask yourself, why. Why do we yearn for more? Why do we cling to stuff? Why do we feel the need to possess stuff, power, others - heedless of the costs?  

 

In lusting after people and things, we disavow reality. Lust is the gateway to world of fantasy, a world of complete and total selfishness where our actions have no cost and we have no responsibilities to one another. When we lust, we don’t think about the cost of to our families or those we profess to love. When we lust we break the bonds of our interconnectedness. When we lust we live in a false sense of limitlessness.   When we lust we fail to see the reality of the world we inhabit. We fail to see its limitedness and its fragility, we fail to see our proper role in creation – we are stewards here, not owners. God provides from God’s abundance, yet we continually think we have a better plan. We don’t.

 

This unreality is the source then of the sinfulness of lust. For lustfulness posits a world with ourselves at the center and all that we know revolving around and existing only in relationship to us and to our desires. That may work for a TV show, but in real life we aren’t the star, we’re all just bit players here. By our nature we are ephemeral and only God is permanent. To step out of our self-centered perspective is our first step into reality and into true happiness. For me, sin then is not the violation of some rule but the turning away from the way of God, it’s the refusal to see we aren’t the center of the universe. To turn away from God is to turn away from the way of justice, of peace, and of community. 

 

Jesus says that we fool ourselves and waste our energies by storing up our treasures here in this world. Store up treasure in heaven, he says. For where your treasure is, so your heart will be also. The Cardinal Virtue in opposition to the Deadly Sin of Lust is chastity. Honestly, Jesus doesn’t have a lot to say about sex. Paul the apostle has a lot to say about sex – all of it bad. I think maybe he had some struggles with Lust. But nonetheless, Jesus does call us to a certain chasteness of life; he calls us to walk a humble path. Don’t worry about stuff, take care of those worse off than you; be thankful and generous with what you have. Love God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and likewise to love your neighbor as yourself. 

 

Jesus challenges us to love, and to love passionately. Passion fills our hearts where lust empties our souls. Passion lifts us up and binds us together where lust tears us apart. Cultivate love, grow in passion. Passion allows us to love for the long haul, in the good seasons and the droughts. Passion is the fertilizer of forgiveness, so tend passionately to your garden of love, for by doing so you will harvest true happiness and joy. You will find your place in the sun; you will know who you are.

 

A poem by Billy Collins

 

You are the bread and the knife,

the crystal goblet and the wine.

You are the dew on the morning grass

and the burning wheel of the sun.

You are the white apron of the baker

and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,

the plums on the counter,

or the house of cards.

And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.

There is just no way you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,

maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,

but you are not even close

to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show

that you are neither the boots in the corner

nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,

speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,

that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,

the evening paper blowing down an alley,

and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees

and the blind woman's tea cup.

But don't worry, I am not the bread and the knife.

You are still the bread and the knife.

You will always be the bread and the knife,

not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow-- the wine.