Death by Chocolate
Ezekiel l37:1-14
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45
Is there anyone here who’s ever had too much of a good thing? Anyone who’s eaten so much candy on Easter morning they got sick? Anyone ever OD’ed on caramel corn? Anyone ever eaten so much great food on Thanksgiving that you turn green and crawl away from the table in agony? Drunk so much eggnog you want to hurl. Eaten a whole bag of Dove chocolate bars and then paid the price?
Given the quality of food, particularly desserts, produced by members of this congregation, I have to believe you know what I’m talking about.
Chocolate and ice cream are two of the predominant weaknesses of choice for many people. The craving for these things has given rise to a type of dessert known as Death by Chocolate. It is the name of a flavor of ice cream, the title of a recipe book by Chef Marcel DeSaulnier, and the trademarked name of a dessert of Bennigan’s restaurants.
Death by Chocolate. Sounds like a great to go.
There’s more than a little irony in that title, though. To some people, eating chocolate is one of the greatest pleasures in the world. It’s something they crave. One of the things that most makes life worth living. But at the same time, too much of it will destroy your health. If all you eat is chocolate dessert, it will kill you. It will literally kill you.
Death by chocolate is a good image to keep in mind when reading any of the Apostle Paul’s writings about body and spirit. When Paul writes, “To set the mind on the flesh is death,” this is the kind of thing he is talking about. He is talking about attractions and cravings and pleasures that, if not controlled, will kill you.
I knew a guy in college who was a brilliant biology student. He designed his own independent study with rats, one that would have PETA up in arms today. He implanted an electrode in the hypothalamus of rat, the area of the brain known to be the center of pleasant or euphoric feeling.
This electrode was hooked up to a little push bar in the rat’s cage. Every time the rodent touched the bar, it would get a jolt of pleasure. It took a few days for the rat to figure out the connection. But once it did, it was all over.
The rat kept coming back to the bar for more, with increased frequency. It became so obsessed with that little jolt of electricity that it could not focus on anything else. It did not eat, it did not drink. By the end it was pressing the bar more than 4,000 times an hour, while literally starving itself to death. That’s what death by chocolate looks like.
Now we human beings aren’t as stupid as rats, of course. We would never do anything that ridiculous, would we?
Well, how is that rat any different from a drug addict or any kind of substance abuser? Who give up their future for the sake of jolts of euphoria? Who need more and more jolts for it to have any effect, until it takes over, until life just isn’t possible anymore.
But that’s just those people. It’s not us.
I’m afraid we can’t take comfort in that belief anymore. The gap between “those people” and us isn’t what it once was. Increasingly, we are becoming those people. We are as a society becoming more and more like the rat in the experiment.
What happens when people have the ability to obtain for themselves more and more of the things they want, the things they crave? Increasingly, we spend more and more or our time pressing the bar to jolt the hypothalamus.
Think of the vast number of changes in the past 30 years, advances if
you will, that have taken dead aim at the hypothalamus. Computer games,
video games. X-boxes.Guitar hero. Home
entertainment centers. Wide screen, flat screen, high definition television.
Giant theme parks, virtual reality amusement rides. VCRs and DVDs so you can
watch movies in the home 24-hours a day. Tivo to
record and replay anything. We’ve gone from 4 television stations to
hundreds of them. Gambling casinos and race tracks are everywhere. Luxury
cruise ships sail to anywhere in the world including
Those changes have all happened in just the last 30 years.
Do you see a trend there? Are we or are we not starting to look an awful lot like that rat in the cage?
It’s more than scary. The rat’s life was taken over by the hypothalamus. The pleasure center crowded out even those things that bring life—food and water.
Do you know what American society spent on entertainment last year? Do you know how much that amount is increasing every year, in comparison to spending money on things that really matter, that bring life like, say education or spiritual needs? We are becoming a nation of rats pressing the bar faster and faster to keep the jolts coming, while starving ourselves of that which brings life.
To set the mind on the flesh
is death.
I don’t know that you can overstate the consequences of our society’s growing addiction to the hypothalamus. We have actually managed to convince ourselves that this addiction is a good thing; that the purpose of life is to grab for all the gusto you can, in other words, to press that little bar as often as you can. Most of the marketing that relentlessly promotes this philosophy has been aimed at our young people. As a nation, we have done a good job of leading them to that little bar and convincing them that life consists of pressing that bar as often as you can, to get as much entertainment and pleasure as you can.
We have set their minds on the flesh; we have handed them over to death.
We proclaim in our advertising and in our actions that the purpose of life is to be entertained, that the reason for our existence is to press the little bar as often you can; and then we wonder why people turn to drugs and alcohol. Under that philosophy, why wouldn’t you use them, because if you’re looking for something that will bring faster and more powerful jolts to the hypothalamus, that’s the place to go.
Once the rat set its mind on the hypothalamus, it was on the road to death. The rat could never get enough.
Where do we think we’re going on this road? What makes us think we could ever get enough? When I was in preschool, I had far more hypothalamus stimulation than my parents did at that age. My kids had far more than I did. And today, preschool kids with 10 times more hypothalamus stimulation than kids got 30 years ago are bored. They’re looking for more.
We have set their minds on the flesh; we have handed them over to death.
How does the church respond to this threat? Often with an overreaction. The monastic movement of medieval times has brought some valuable gifts of discipline to the church, but it also has given rise to a knee-jerk response so severe that it has branded religion as a spoilsport that appeals only to crusty, bitter old people who have no joy in their lives and can’t stand to see anyone else having any.
The pious response to the excesses of the “if it feels good do it philosophy,” is the grim “if it feels good, don’t do it” philosophy of the Puritans.
Puritans read Paul’s words as condemning anything that has to do with the physical world. The world is an evil place. Life is a test, a trial, to see how well you can run this gauntlet of evil known as life.
Whatever the world has to offer is just a trap. Therefore, the key to this holier than thou philosophy is to see how little you can interact with that disgusting abomination known as the world. Avoid it all and you will be worthy of heaven.
If it tastes good, spit it out.
If it looks good on you, don’t wear it.
If you feel like laughing, stifle it.
If it is beautiful, burn it.
If it’s exciting, ignore it.
If it makes your life easier, throw it away
Too many people have interpreted Paul’s words to mean, “He who gets the least out of life wins.”
The Bible refutes every word of that. Genesis tells us that the world is God’s creation and it is good. Our Gospel story today says Jesus came into the world to bring life. More life, abundant life. The problem isn’t that chocolate or entertainment, or all these other things are bad. The problem is that they take over. The problem is too much of a good thing.
So it turns out that theses two philosophies, if it feels good do it, and if it feels good don’t do it, are flip sides of the same coin. Hedonism and asceticism both lead to death. They both reduce life in the end to a pile of dry bones in the desert.
What is the way out of this dilemma? Jesus says, I am the way. The way to life. Sent to point the way between preoccupation with the little push bar of pleasure, and the living death of those who would refuse the gift of creation.
In the reading from Ezekiel, God shows the prophet a vision of dead bones, the very graveyard where the way of flesh empties out, the same graveyard where the lifeless ascetics end up, and he shows him the way out. The way back to meaningful life.
“I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live,” says the Lord.
It is the spirit of God that gives life, and nurtures it, and grows it.
To set the mind on the flesh is death,” writes Paul. “To set the mind on the spirit is life and peace.”
As Christians we say that if the Spirit of God lives in you, then Jesus is the lens through which you see the world. When that happens, you will recognize the dangers of the hypothalamus as well as the joys.
It takes a powerful message of love to pry us away from our addiction to too much of a good thing. It takes a powerful message of sacrifice and sharing to get through to us that life is not centered on the pleasure bar, but that neither is it off limits. It takes a powerful magnet of shared relationship pull us away from our obsession with the pleasure bar that leads to death; and to pull us away from the fearful reaction that trashes God’s creation.
Living in the spirit of love that Christ lived and shared with us reveals to us a stronger and more meaningful purpose than mindlessly batting at the entertainment bar, a purpose that will bring real life, real enjoyment of the creation that God gave to us and shares with us.
Jesus offers us a way out of the death trap. Live in the spirit of the light of God. Reflect it back. And watch life flow into your life and into the world.
If the Spirit of him who
raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead
will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in
you.