I hope that you will forgive me this morning because the Christian educator in me comes out, and sometimes I have to take time to do a little bit of teaching as well as preaching.  And so Frank is going to be okay if I go a few minutes over.  I think it’s important to take some time and lay out a series that we are going to be doing and how that relates to how our Lenten worship is going to progress.  I want first of all to thank the women from the altar guild who designed this wonderful wall display.  I want to explain the meaning behind it, as it’s a little more abstract than some of the things we’ve put up there.  Do you see the washed-out purple?  It is the traditional color of Lent.  That color is a reminder of a kind of penitence.  And penitence isn’t a negative word; it’s about looking inward and trying to push away those things in our lives which get in the way of our truly putting Christ at the center.  But you also see some branches up there that are pretty dead, right?  Now the word Lent comes from the Latin word which means spring. In many ways, as we pick up on the metaphor of nature, Lent comes to represent to the church the period that we know as winter—when life slows down and when lives pull inward.  At this time both nature and people draw inside themselves to preserve and to reconnect in that innerness so that new life will come later.  Even though the limbs are dead because they have been cut from their trees, the truth is that most of those trees we see out there without leaves on them aren’t dead at all.  They are simply pulled inward so that they might preserve life until the right moment.  I’m not going to give away the whole secret of this, but I will say that those limbs at Easter will be a representation of the life that we see in them.  Just know that this broad, wonderful sweep is a reminder to us of our Lenten time when we might focus more centrally upon prayer in our life, which is why we have the praying hands up here.  I’m encouraging you to use your Lenten devotionals that we’ve created, to use the labyrinth that we have out there, to take that cross and put it on your kitchen table, and to be sure that we are more intentional in our praying at this particular time of the year.  Now that I’ve said that, I want to ask a question, which will show your age.  Can any of you remember when the Beatles were performing in the 60’s?  Raise your hands.  Okay.  It’s interesting to see the subtle impact the pop culture.  Pop culture has in some pretty profound ways affected our culture and how we look at life.  You can’t predict the ways in which what is happening now will carry over decades later.  You recall how at one point the Beatles went to India and found themselves a guru, didn’t they?  And they came back to America with this Eastern mysticism and spirituality, which still impacts our culture in some significant ways.  Before the Beatles did that, if someone had said the word yoga, for example, you would have thought they meant Yogi Bear or Yogi Berea or something like that.  But what we see is that some people in their quest to discover something spiritual of depth embraced this kind of Eastern alternative that came into being.

What I want to say to you is that the modern age has presented us with a crisis.  And the crisis is that often we see our lives in two dimensions.  We think we are being sophisticated and scientific because we look at life with just the facts, right?  We just want the facts.  The exterior looks wonderful.  What this modern life has given us on the exterior is material prosperity.  It has given us the ability to communicate knowledge on some level (and by the way there is a difference between knowledge and wisdom) and in amounts that we have never seen before.  Yet we all know as modern people that we are in a spiritual crisis, because somehow those gifts this modern age has given us have left us deprived of some depth.  That is what I personally see as I look at the symbolism of the Beatles’ heading to India.  I see the same thing as I look at the growth of New Age religions and the impact of Eastern spiritually on our culture.  Such searching is an indication that people are looking for meaning and purpose in their lives that might give them something to hang on to.  Now I will admit to you that I’m not a major proponent of Eastern religions, although I think that when they stand on their own they have a lot of integrity.  There is also much that we can learn from them.  I will also say that part of the crisis of our modern time is that we want to think about the future, but in doing so we have cut ourselves off from the past.  Mainline Protestantism, the Catholic Church, and the Orthodox Church have always emphasized something that many other brands of Christianity have simply have washed away.  That is that we are connected from one generation to the next by two thousand years of history of the gathered saints.  We call that the tradition of the church—and by that I don’t mean some stodgy thing.  What I mean is that those who have gone before us have something to say to us about where our faith might happen to be now.  One of the things that is sad to me is that the Church has failed in many ways to look into that rich community of saints, because the saints might teach us something about the spiritual crisis in which we find ourselves.  

So, that’s all for the prelude.  Now we are getting to where we are going with this sermon.  One of the most extraordinary periods of the Church’s history is a period called the Middle Ages, which has often been called the Dark Ages.  We use to think it was a time when things were stale and when there was nothing dynamic going on.  But when you look between the 4^th and 11^th Centuries, there were some incredible things that were happening.  Far from being a period that was stale, some of the greatest spiritual giants of the Church arose and gave lessons in what it was to be Christian.  We often think of the Middle Ages as the period when everybody was off in their own little hut in their own little system, ignorant of what was going on in the rest of the world.  Through my interest in Celtic spiritually, I have learned that as those Celtic monks spread across Great Britain, there was a flourishing of the Church’s life as the monks converted those pagans to the Christian faith.  The fact of that matter is, that far from being these provincial figures that we know, the people had regular contact with the monks that were in Egypt.  Much of Celtic artwork has a noticeable Egyptian influence.  We know that during this time period, for example, Eastern European spiritually had a huge impact as far as Spain—to the far west—so this period was much richer than we often give it credit.  But I also want to say to you that one of the legacies of our Protestant heritage is that the Protestant Reformation and the Age of Reason occurred at the same time.  In some ways these events gave us some very positive things, but these events also left us bereft.  The Age of Reason was about thinking and about being rational, which by the way, has brought us to the crisis that we face in this modern time.  In some ways what that Age of Reason did was remove the integration in our lives.  With the loss of integration, we also lost integrity, because integrity means to have things in balance.  Often as we look back at Christianity, we see that it became two-dimensional at the expense of that more holistic view.  Now I could argue with you that John Wesley saw that problem and addressed it in a very strong way, but I won’t hit Wesley too much right now.  But what I want to say to you is that by going back to that period that we know as the Middle Ages, I want to focus some on the lessons I’ve learned from some of the saints in that period of time when spirituality was much more integrated.  By the way, the labyrinth, which we have built, was fashioned after one that was built in the 9^th Century.  During the period from the 4^th to the 11^th Century, a number of labyrinths were built all over northern France and England in particular as a form of prayer.  The labyrinth was a means to contemplative prayer.  Labyrinths weren’t about rational thought as much as there were about trying to go down to our very guts—to the place where our soul resides.  Using the labyrinth as a prayer tool wasn’t so much about giving God a list of things that we wanted as it was a way to close down our busy minds, so that we might hear what God might say to us.  Too often we look at prayer as something that we are doing as opposed to an important act of passivity in which we intentionally listen so that God may speak to us.   

One of the other things the people of that time did was come up with a list, and they called the items on this list the seven deadly sins and the seven virtues.  Now what I want to say to you is that the word sins has a connotation that may be distract us from what the original intent of the list was.  I would call the list more properly the seven deadly vices.   Sin implies something that you do once and you can insolate the time that it happens, whereas a vice is basically something to do with how you approach life.  Vice is more descriptive in defining who we are and what our character is.  So we are going to be looking at these vices each Sunday, and we are going to be looking at a passage from Proverbs, which is the ultimate self-help book of our Bible.  Proverbs gives instruction on how one goes about living the right life.  We are also going to be looking at passages, which relate to these vices and virtues in Matthew’s Gospel and in Jesus’ Sermon the Mount.  For those of you who don’t remember, all of this is in chapters 5, 6, and 7.  And hopefully by the end of Lent, we will have something that has helped us to look inward and to struggle with who we are.  Through looking inward we will hopefully discern where God may be leading us.  Then we can make changes from within as we listen to God, so that what we do might have substance as people of faith.  We will see how we live out our Christian faith, and we will grow from the foundations that we build. 

Now if you think that the seven deadly sins are some stodgy old thing, then it’s amazing how much the secular world has made reference to them.  By the way, they are referred to in the Canterbury Tales; they are referred to in Shakespeare; and they are brought up in some of the other greatest works of Western literature.  So that you don’t think pop culture has left itself out on this one either, in 1995 Brad Pit and Morgan Freedman and Kevin Spacey did a movie called Seven.  Again, this work was based on the seven deadly sins.  But the foundation of my pop culture thing for this one is Gillian’s Island.  You say, what?  Gillian’s Island?  Did you realize that it was based on the seven deadly sins?  You need for me to explain it, don’t you?  It seems so ridiculous.  The characters each represented one of those deadly sins.  The Professor was pride, Mr. Howell was greed, and his wife was sloth in her laziness.  Anyone know what Ginger represented?  Ginger was lust.  Can you figure that out?  And Mary Ann was envy, because she was always jealous of all the attention that Ginger got from all the men.  The Skipper was anger, and he also was gluttony.  Now that leaves us with Gilligan.  Actually, if you notice, he always wore red because he was a symbol of the devil, interestingly enough.  And why did this goofy figure represent the devil?  Because of this figurative hell that they found themselves in on this island.  Notice that every time in that show when they almost get off that island, who stops them from getting off by messing something up?  It’s Gilligan, isn’t it?  Anyway, we find that even our popular culture looks at the seven deadly sins in a lighthearted way.  What I want to focus on today is the sin of gluttony, because I think, first of all, it may be a little easier for us to talk about.  There are animal symbols for every one of the deadly sins.  And the one for gluttony happens to be a pig. It’s not a very pretty sight, is it?  The reason I decided to put that one first is because it has more to do with the crisis of modern spirituality.  What we find is a serious lack of “connectiveness”  in who we are as persons.  If you were to go and look at medicine 10-15 years ago, you will see that medicine dealt with bodies.  It was almost as if bodies were cadavers whether or not they were alive or dead.  At any mention of spirituality, people just backed away because doctors treated bodies, right?  A good medical practitioner—a doctor or nurse or whoever—understands the important role of our mental, our spiritual, as well as our physical well being and how the three areas are interconnected.  People who treat depression today may first warn people about how much sugar they consume.  Often people who are depressed understand innately that sugar will give them an immediate high.  Sugar simply makes them feel better. The problem is that once the glucose is out of your system, you end up depressed all the more.  One of the major focuses on treating depression is the focus on people’s food patterns.  Another focus is that the body requires a right sleeping rhythm.  That physical act of sleeping is probably one of the best ways to treat depression.  So you start to see that what looks like, on the surface, a mental thing is actually a lack of integration—nutrition and sleep included—on the whole person.  Part of our modern crisis is that we often cut out and “dis-integrate” those different pieces of us.  After all, the physical and the spiritual are two different things, right?  Wrong!  The Christian faith affirms that God is the creator of this physical world and that somehow who we are as physical beings must be integrated with who we as spiritual beings.  The sin of gluttony is the overuse of the good gifts that God has given us.   It has to do with what we put into our bodies.  Now most of you have noticed that I’ve gotten a little thinner over the last few months, so what I’m doing is personal confession, so that you don’t feel too nervous about this sermon.  A year ago the doctor said that you have got to take off a certain about of weight because of some heath issues with which you’re struggling.  So I went on a diet, and about mid summer I forgot about the diet and put the weight back on.  Well, this time I’m down about 30 pounds, and I’ve got about 25 more to go.  But what I want to say to you is that weight is an issue that I struggle with in my own life.  What we must understand as we look across the world is that there are things that we put into our bodies that may be good or may be bad.  These things really vary on the circumstances of the cultures in which we live. There is rampant alcoholism in the former Soviet Union right now.  And it is based on the readily available vodka that comes so easily in that culture.  So much vodka is consumed amidst the crisis of culture that has yet to be able to pull itself back together.  If we look in the United States, the obesity rate in our country is almost insurmountable.  Obesity is said to be the number one problem with American health.  Now as we look at those things, what we come to understand is what gluttony is. We know that word, though we might cringe at it.  What we understand is that it means lack of self-control and consuming too much of a good thing.  It is balanced against the word that’s called temperance.  Now what I want to tell you is that the Methodist Church has its own brand of divine temperance.  You remember back a hundred years ago when we understood that alcoholism was destroying our country and that temperance meant to us a total ban on alcohol period.  That sounds very puritanical, and it sounds like a total restriction of something, but the true meaning of temperance is a balancing.  It’s being able to control how much we use that good thing that comes into our bodies.  Recent studies have shown that there are male runners who run perhaps 80-90 miles a week but who are also hiding the symptoms of eating disorders.  Any good thing that we do to our body can end up destroying us because we have not had the self-control to limit it.  So often we do things in excess.  As we think about our first Sunday of Lent, we can also think about our prayer life and in praying we can pay attention to these bodies that God has given us.   We can find temperance and balance in how we use the things that we put into our bodies.

 We will now recite the Apostles Creed and have our closing prayer.