Insatiable!
Many kids of my generation, children of the depression, often heard the urging at meal time: “Clean your plate; there are starving children in ___________ (somewhere around the world).” The logic of this parental advice obviously made no sense; it was never explained to us how our clean plates would assist children in need elsewhere to have better food. But, in my opinion, the intuition of the parental imperative was spot-on, because our capacity in the West (and especially in the United States) for unrestrained and undisciplined consumption depends upon what I view as our predatory posture toward the rest of the world. As a result of the immense power of the United States economy, I believe the rest of the world has been reduced to support staff for our unsustainable standard of living and our relentless capacity for limitless consumption. This practical recognition of socioeconomic reality, even if rather crudely articulated, is an acknowledgement of our US capacity as the world’s insatiable consumer culture. Social media serve as seductive agents for consumerism:
The more time you spend on social media, the more inclined you are to engage with your favorite brands but also buy impulsively, making unplanned purchases…The internet and all of its tools allow shoppers to be marketed constantly, all the time. (Jordyn Holman and Aimee Orhhtiz, “Consumers Tune Out, Unsubscribe and Delete to Break Shopping Habit,” The New York Times, March 3, 2025 B1-2).
This memory of parental admonition, coupled with our insatiable consumer culture, set me to thinking about the same socioeconomic reality in scripture. My reflection yielded these results to which many other texts might be readily added:
- In Isaiah 3:16-17, the prophet mocks the social performance of the wealthy women of Jerusalem:
The daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with outstretched necks,
glancing wantonly with their eyes,
mincing along as they go,
tinkling with their feet (Isaiah 3:16).
Isaiah then provides an imagined inventory of the overstocked closets of these women marked by exotic variety and exhibition (vv. 18-23). They are endless consumers who always aim to acquire yet more manifestations of their wealth and status. Their appetite is insatiable.
The prophet, however, warns that such wealth cannot endure, because such self-indulgence is against the grain of created reality in the real world of God’s creation:
instead…
instead…
instead…
instead:
stench, rope, baldness, sackcloth, shame, lament, ravaged!
- The matter of insatiability is given wider horizon in the poem of Jeremiah:
They shall eat up your harvest and your food;
They shall eat up your sons and your daughters;
They shall eat up your flocks and your herds;
They shall eat up your vines and your fig trees (Jeremiah 5:17).
Imperial powers (in this case Babylon) never have enough of territory, cheap labor, or natural resources. They are in the relentless habit of seizing such resources from dependent and vulnerable colonies. Thus Judah served well as a supplier for Babylon. It is not different in our contemporary world.
- We get a full picture of insatiability in the inventory of Ezekiel 27:12-25:
Tarshish did business with you out of the abundance of your great wealth; silver, iron, tin, and lead they exchanged for your wares. Javan, Tubal, and Meshech traded with you; they exchanged human beings and vessels of bronze for your merchandise. Bethogarmah exchanged for your wares horses, war horses, and mules. The Rhodians traded with you: many coastlands were your own special markets; they brought you in payment ivory tusks and ebony. Edom did business with you because of your abundant goods; they exchanged for your wares turquoise, purple, embroidered work, fine linen, coral and rubies. Judah and the land of Israel traded with you; they exchanged for your merchandise wheat from Minnith, millet, honey, oil, and balm. Damascus traded with you for your abundant goods—because of your great wealth of every kind—wine of Helbon, and white wool. Vedan and Javan from Uzal entered into trade for your wares; wrought iron, cassia, and sweet cane were traded for your merchandise. Dedan traded with you in saddlecloths for riding. Arabia and all the princes of Kedar where you favored dealers in lambs, rams, and goats; in these they did business with you. The merchants of Sheba and Raamah traded with you; they exchanged for your wares the best of all kinds of spices, and all precious stones, and gold. Haran, Canneh, Eden, and the merchants of Sheba, Asshur, and Chilmad traded with you. These traded with you in choice garments, in clothes of blue and embroidered work, and in carpets of colored material, bound with cords and made secure; in these they traded with you. The ships of Tarshish traveled for you in your trade (Ezekiel 27:12-25).
This inventory, of itself, does not suggest seizure or confiscation, but rather something like equitable trade arrangements. Nonetheless Tyre is at the hub of all of this commerce, so we may conclude that it was the power of Tyre, commercial and naval, that made such trade possible and flourishing. What made such trade “indispensable” is the unsatisfied appetite of the ownership class in these various economies. Clearly such a rich inventory of goods was not on offer among ordinary laboring folk, but was the preoccupation of a leisure class that had time, intent, and motivation to pursue the accumulation of endless commercial goods, notably including “human beings” who are here reduced to commercial goods, that is, “slaves” (v. 13).
The prophet sees that such inordinate accumulation cannot be sustained:
Your riches, your wares, your merchandise, your mariners and your pilots,
your caulkers, your dealers in merchandise,
and all your warriors within you,
with all the company that is with you,
sink into the heart of the seas on the day of your ruin (v. 27).
In Ezekiel’s judgment, such accumulation of wealth is unsustainable; such a drive for such limitless satiation is sure to end in desolation, for such accumulation defies the possible ordering of society and skews all human relationships.
- In its shrewd discernment, the text notices that such avarice and pursuit of goods cannot finally or fully satisfy:
You shall eat but not be satisfied,
and there shall be a gnawing hunger within you (Micah 6:14).
The prophet matches the old curse of the covenant:
Though you eat, you shall not be satisfied…You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters (Leviticus 26:26, 29).
The greed will finally use up and exhaust the future of the coming generation. We may indeed wonder about devouring the future of our children with our astonishing national debt and our frantic effort at satiation and the maintenance, at all costs, of our unsustainable standard of living. Our ecological depletion of the earth is nothing less than devouring that future when different policies and practices might effectively be turned toward conservation for coming generations. It cannot be accidental that the starchy threats of Leviticus 26 occur in a catalog of “curses,” that is, of severe outcomes that follow violations of creation that amount to a disregard of the will and intent of the creator.
- Living according to satiation (that can only end in failure), we readily imagine that we are self-starters, agents who have generated our own wellbeing. Such a claim assumes that we will have no sense of being on the receiving end of God’s goodness, and so no ground for giving thanks for life that is all a gift. Thus Moses warns Israel about its coming prosperity:
When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid wasteland with poisonous snakes and scorpions. He made water flow for you from flint rock, and fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good (Deuteronomy 8:12-16).
The great temptation is to imagine that such wellbeing is not a gift but an achievement that issues, not in gratitude, but in self-congratulations:
Do not say to yourself, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth” (v. 17).
Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (2011) comments:
In this context [of satiation] it becomes very difficult for any of us to live deeply, or with affection and responsibility in the places where we are. The habits of our economic lives point us in the opposite direction: the direction of exile.
A failure to give thanks is refusal to recognize that all good gifts are “sent from heaven above.”
The sum of this attitude and practice of insatiability is well voiced in the well-known lines of the familiar hymn:
Cure thy children’s warring madness; bend our pride to thy control;
Shame our wanton, selfish gladness, rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
lest we miss thy kingdom’s goal.
(“God of Grace and God of Glory, Glory to God, 307).
We know well what it means to be “rich in things.” The inventory of Ezekiel 27 is a measure of our contemporary capacity for wealth, ease, and comfort that together breed social indifference. We do not reflect as readily on what it means to be “poor in soul,” to lack a capacity for gratitude to God and so a failure to practice the kind of social solidarity toward neighbors wherein all may live in safety and prosperity. The foundation for such “failure of soul” is here said to be a “warring madness,” a readiness to assert self-interest in greedy and violent ways that render neighborliness unthinkable and impossible. In the hymn stanza the linkage between “warring madness” and “poor in soul” is pride, the inclination to perceive ourselves as autonomous self-starters who do not recognize our penultimate position in God’s good creation.
The outcome of such “warring madness” is an endless scramble for control as we reckon, always again, that we do not yet have enough. When we ponder such greedy, restless clamor for more, we seem not remote from the conduct of the “enemies of the cross of Christ.”
Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things (Philippians 3:19).
Their belly is their god! They live according to their appetites and the satisfaction of a bottomless appetite. So Paul sees it as a preoccupation with “earthly things” that detract from any inclination toward the faithful love of God and neighbor. And, of course, consumer culture is inexhaustibly committed to an expansion of our felt needs for more commodities, even though we know in reluctant ways that such accumulation keeps our hunger unrelieved and unabated.
It seems obvious that a big part of the work of the church now is not only to bear witness against such insatiability, but to nurture and nourish an alternative life that does not rely upon and is not satisfied with ever more consumer goods. The Bible knows that a life of covenantal solidarity with God and with neighbor is a God-willed alternative to a life of “things” that in the Old Testament is variously dubbed as “Canaanite” or “Baalism.” Thus the covenantal tradition all the way back to Moses is a demanding “either/or” which on the lips of Jesus comes down to “God or mammon” or “God or capital” (Deuteronomy 30:15, 20, Matthew 6:24, Luke 16:13).
In its testimony and in its action, the church exists to exhibit a more excellent way in the world. It is a way in the world that calls us to be “rich in soul” and, as necessary, “poor in things.” This summons has led me to consider what it might mean to be “rich in soul.” It is not so easy to define that condition, but when we see such a person who is “rich in soul” we can readily recognize it. I suggest that “rich in soul” exhibits these attitudes and practices.
- To be rich in soul is to recognize that all that we have and all that we are is a gift from the goodness of God. Our life is not an achievement, an accomplishment, or a possession. It is a gift. Thus Paul can ask two probing questions:
What do you have that you did not receive?
Answer: “Nothing.”
And if you receive it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?
Answer: We boast because we cannot bear to imagine that it is a gift and that we are on the receiving end of all of life’s goodness. Such awareness robs us of our sense of autonomy
(I Corinthians 4:7).
- The only appropriate response to such a gift is thanks. Thus the tone and substance of our lives is one of gratitude:
Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you (I Thessalonians 5:18).
Giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ (Ephesians 5:20).
Yes, the apostle says, “In all things.” Such thanks in all things takes the form of public, verbal acknowledgement as we gladly accept God’s beneficence. Beyond that, however, thanks is an action, or as the Psalm has it, a “thank offering” (Psalm 116:12-19), a readiness to share with others the bounty of our blessed lives. We render thanks to God by loving our neighbor, most especially by “showing mercy” (Luke 10:36-37). Because we know about trust in the endless, generous abundance of the creator, we are able to practice abundance in the neighborhood, and so generate wellbeing for our neighbors who themselves may lack sufficient resources. If such generosity and abundance depend upon our having less, we are variously prepared to be “poor in things” as our circumstance may require. Such a practice is the exact counterpoint to a life of insatiable appetite. We find our appetites curbed and satisfied with less as we notice the transformative impact of our grateful generosity.
Thus a community of gratitude can readily affirm:
All of our life is a gift from a generous creator;
All of our life is to be lived to God in thanks;
Such gratitude is articulated in generosity toward other creatures with whom we share the wonder and the mystery of creation.
That sharing with others is done both in private and communal acts of generosity, and in the ready payment of taxes in the service of a more just and neighborly economy.
“Rich in soul” is a refusal to participate in an economy of scarcity, and a readiness to rely upon the continually given good gifts of the creator.
This practice calls to mind the familiar opening lines of Psalm 23:
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside still waters;
He restores my soul.
He leads me in right paths
for his name’s sake (Psalm 23:1-3).
We are invited to make a sheep who does not overeat, who does not store up or hoard food, but who in profound confidence trusts the provisions of the shepherd who provides food, water, and safety. Such a sheep, in readiness to rely upon the gifts of the shepherd, eats only what is required for the day—no extras, no surplus, no excessive luxuries.
“Rich in soul” contradicts the “rich in things” that define our common economy. Thus I am led to the practical paradox that is at the center of the gospel:
Those who keep their life will lose it;
Those who lose their life for the sake of the gospel will save it.
(Matthew 10:39, Mark 8:35, Luke 9:24).
This stunning affirmation deeply contradicts the readiness of our consumer culture to keep our life, enhance our life, and to extend our life. Such efforts are in the end self-defeating. The alternative is to entrust our lives to the providential care of the God who prepares a table before us even before our enemies, and who anoints our heads with the oil of identity and vocation. This is indeed an alternative life!
Most of us who intend such an alternative life here and there are beguiled and drawn away from our resolve from time to time. It is for that reason that we regularly return to the “assembly” of worship—not unlike regular participation in other “recovery groups” that include Shoppers Anonymous and Shopper Addiction Support. In that regular meeting of the church:
We meet to pray again, not only prayers of repentance, but prayer of resolve toward a new life;
We meet to sing again, as we treasure the cadences of praise, thanks, and gratitude;
We meet to listen again; we hear the words of scripture that are variously odd, archaic, and sometimes with biting power; we listen to the sermon that draws scripture into our lives that are thereby repositioned;
We meet regularly to receive a blessing that gives us the courage and will to live a different, obedient life;
We meet regularly to be in each other’s company; we are not alone in our resolve to live an alternative life, but are in the good company of others who also intend alternatives.
This remarkable community of prayer, song, and listening is an assembly of those who are answering the summons to a more excellent way in the world. Together we know that a world “rich in things” cannot keep its promises. In the end we embrace, in various ways, the verdict of Augustine:
Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.
Consumerism is a life of restlessness without end, satisfaction, or satiation. Alternatively we find our rest in the goodness of God as we heed the invitation:
Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest…My yoke is easy and my burden is light (Matthew 11:28-30).
The yoke of consumerism is heavy and is never relieved. We meet regularly to embrace a lighter burden of glad obedience. The yoke of consumerism is endlessly seductive. But we know otherwise.
