a sermon about spiritual food and dieting

Address 8 Jan 06

I was wondering just how many people signed up to weight watchers after Christmas - or how many people made it their new years resolution to lose weight.

The only reason I feel a little plumper is because we were given so many boxes of chocolate and so many bottles of wine this year and I have had to eat all the chocolates myself - and drink most of the wine.

However the half stone I’ve added as a result I am going to completely ignore.

I did toy with the idea of weight watchers but luckily I have been saved -- by an article I read in my newspaper on Monday.

Hooray for professor Ben Fletcher, Dr Karen Pine and Dr Danny Penman., who have written the book called ‘The No Diet Diet’.

They say that diets never work. All your best intentions will go up in pounds no matter what course you follow or what book you read.

They say that our bad eating habits come though habit -- and not just eating habits. Our whole lifestyle is made up of habits - for example, we al,ways sit in the same chair, we always go the same way to work or to the shops, we do things at the same time.

Our lifestyles are made up of hundreds, if not thousands, of habits. The good professors say that we create a web of habits around ourselves and we become locked into them. Over eating is just one of them and this just one of them is the result of many other different habits we have accumulated over the years - layer upon layer of them.

Their solution is to start breaking the habits - slowly, day by day, one by one.

In essence what they are asking people to do is to examine their life styles - and make subtle changes - such as taking a little longer to walk to the local shop and use the time to look at gardens. Switch the TV off one evening and go out somewhere, look up an old friend.

The process of breaking habits begins to release the real person that is you -- releases you from the web of habits that have led you into being the person you have become.

All you have too do is put the process into reverse.

This is more than a message about weight, I thought to myself - this is a remedy for life itself.

It is a remedy for fighting our way out of the web of spiritual habits we often find ourselves locked into.

I have always thought that one of the attractions of studying Christianity is to re-examine the old religious habits we have accumulated and seeing how we feel when we break out of them.

That is how I found my way into the Unitarian Movement. It is one the spiritual home for those who want to seek the meaning of life without being fettered into a rigid tradition. To be free to challenge and re-examine the habits which have become uncomfortable.
There was a time when I thought the best thing to do was to throw christianity out of my life, lock, stock and barrel. It wasn’t fear oof God that made me hold back but the realisation that I really understood so little about it. It had never occurred to me why all these traditions and habits had found their way into this religious movement called Christianity. For so long I had been caught up in the web of habit.

I never asked why there was still an Old Testament when the New Testament was supposed to sweep away all the old practices and habits.

But scratch away - and you discover that this new religion taken up in Jerusalem was never going to change the Jewish religion unless it could be shown that it was actually part of that religion.

The followers of Jesus had to lock the new faith into the old web of religious habit. They said that the prophet's of old have foretold of these events - they made sure that some of the words attributed to Jesus were rom the Hebrew Scriptures.

When Christianity came to these islands, it was presented as an improvement on what was already here. The Christmas we have celebrated was very much a pagan mid winter festival before Christianity came along and added the baby and the manager to the holly and the yule log - and the shortest day of the year.

The God that Jesus spoke about was a far cry from the God of the Old Testament who always in conflict with his chosen people. The God of Jesus did not punish - this was a God who was forgiveness and love and understanding.

It pained me when I read of a Christian group storming into the first civil ceremony of a same sex union in Scotland. Supposing Jesus had been with them - would he have been shouting too - or would he have told them to understand and to accept? Would he have spoken of peace and love for our fellow beings or would he have shouted and demonstrated?

I would have left the Old Testament out altogether - if it wasn’t itself so fascinating. Sometimes there seem to be truths within it that have to be uncovered. The habit of believing everything we have been told and reading it the way we have been taught can mask deeper truths,

In the story of Jacob and Esau for example, Jacob is always the hero, the one chosen because he was blessed after wrestling with an angel - but the real spiritual presence is his brother Esau.

Jacob was the man of the world we are taught to admire, who weels and deals and gets his own way - who gets into scrapes and tricky situations -- and when he does, he never once prays to his God for advice or direction .

Jacob cheats his brother out of his birthright and then is terrified of him - when after many years they are to meet again - Jacob brings an army - Esau brings no one and offers only love and friendship and reconciliation. Esau the spiritual brother is stronger, in tune with life - but we have the habit of not noticing that.

And whatever happened to Joseph? The purest and most spiritual of all Jacob’s children - whose life was blameless and an example of spiritual living. He is allowed to die off without any family. If the story of Jacob and his family were a modern soap, Joseph was just too good to be interesting. The stories people want are those about scoundrels - the colourful characters - but we miss the point if we turn them into heroes.

The Jewish religion was about keeping the law - keeping all the habits of prayer - and fasting - and making sacrifice - and abstaining from nearly everything on the passover. The very things that Jesus taught were unnecessary for the spiritual life. He taught about prayer that was private rather than proclaimed for all to notice.

But old habits die hard. The followers of Jesus fell out with one another about it. They told Paul to leave Jerusalem and go and do his preaching abroad He taught about Jesus being a God - the Greeks and Romans would understand that.

When he returned to Jerusalem his fellow Christians there made him perform the habits of the old Jewish faith and he was beaten up and thrown out for it because they said that now he was no longer ‘temple worthy’.

A new religion became layered in new habits which became old habits - that could not be changed - and everywhere people were bound into their web.

Unitarians found themselves on tthe fringes of the Christian religion because they dared to break the habits accumulated over generations and look at the teachings afresh - to discover the spiritual essence of what this religion was about - and if we were honest, we could seek tout the spiritual essence of many of the great religions and find the same spiritual essence.

That life has quality when we become part of it, when we become aware of what is going on in the universe, the places around us, when we become aware of the frailties of life - both in ourselves es and in others and we are able to cope with them..

When we can live our lives without the weighty web of old habits. When we can scratch the surface of everything we think is unchangeable and change it.

Better than thinking that if we take less spiritual food we will somehow become better people - just as we think that by eating less chocolate we will become better people instead of hungry people.