A Fast That Lasts
Ash Wednesday - March 5, 2014
What are you giving up for Lent?
Every year we have conversations like this, whether they happen at home with our families, or around the coffee pot at work, or across the miles with our Facebook friends as we enter into these 40 days, seeking to draw closer to God, to repent, to live lives that better reflect what we believe.
Fasting – giving something up – is one of the ways that we seek to do that. We hope that by giving up something - chocolate or alcohol or meat or Facebook or whatever it is - that we’ll somehow better understand and appreciate the sacrifice Christ made for us on the cross. We want to empty ourselves before God and so remember our dependence on the only One who can truly fill us. We yearn to give something up in recognition of the One who gives everything to us.
That’s fasting at its best, at its most pure, and yet, as I look back on fasts of my past, I wonder how successful I have ever been, how useful this Lenten discipline has been in accomplishing these things. Once in college, I gave up chocolate. Another year I stopped using the internet after a certain hour in the evening. I even did an actual fast from all food one Good Friday – but I have to admit that that was really a desire to get over a dieting plateau dressed up in fancy religious garb; it really had nothing to do with my sense of repentance or longing to be closer to God.
That’s the trouble with fasting. We want our hearts to be in the right place. We want to do the right thing. We want to please God – and yet it’s so easy to get it backwards. Easy for pride to sneak in on the heels of our humility. Easy for our self-interest and our hope for self-improvement to masquerade as repentance.
That’s what is going on in the second reading we hear from the book of Isaiah today. These are folks who have the outward forms down pat. They are religious and community leaders who have experienced what it means to be far from God, led away into captivity and exile in Babylon as a result of their communal sin, their failure to live up to God’s expectations. Now, at long last, they have returned to the Promised Land - their ancestral home - just as God had promised. But this new life is not what they expected. It’s not all sunshine and roses. It’s not been an easy transition. Instead, it’s been hard work, as they seek to rebuild the city of Jerusalem and God’s temple, as they try to restore their relationships with the people the Babylonian forces had left behind – the ones who were too poor and vulnerable to be seen as any kind of threat. They’re struggling, and so they turn again to God, calling for the people to fast, in hopes that this will get God’s attention, that God will turn to them and help them. But their solemn observances and religious rituals go unnoticed by God, and they cry out, "Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?" They are mystified about why God is not responding to them.
But God is not interested in empty ritual that does nothing to transform everyday lives. These people, God says, serve their own interest on their fast day. They oppress their workers, they quarrel and fight, all while they put on a show of humility and repentance. “Is this what you call fasting?” God says. Hear God’s word from the Message version of the Bible: “This is the kind of fast day I’m after: to break the chains of injustice, get rid of exploitation in the workplace, free the oppressed, cancel debts. What I’m interested in seeing you do is: sharing your food with the hungry, inviting the homeless poor into your homes, putting clothes on the shivering ill-clad, being available to your own families…”
In the words of an article I read this week: “Make your sacrifice meaningful, not miserable.” Choose a fast that will last. Fast in ways that will transform you – and the world around you! Fast from affluence and indifference and privilege, give up judgment and grudges and pride. Leave behind something that is getting in the way of your relationship with God and God’s kingdom coming in your life! Do this, not out of habit or cultural/religious pressure to conform or some misunderstanding that this is what God requires of you, but in order to make room for God to do something new in your life. Enter into the struggle against your own sinful self and find solidarity with the poor and marginalized. Wrestle with your apathy and complacency and find yourself on God’s road to restoration. Break a habit that blocks the way to wholeness and experience God’s healing.
That’s the invitation of Ash Wednesday, and the whole season of Lent – to be real with God about who we are and what we need, to admit that no matter how hard we try, we can’t do any of these things on our own – but then hear God’s promise to us – that our brokenness is where God shows up most powerfully, that when we cry for help, God answers, “Here I am!” And in our trying, imperfect and incomplete as it may be, God uses us – our lives begin to glow in the darkness around us, reflecting God’s own glory and light. Leaning on God, we experience the fullness of God’s life, even in parched, empty places. We become for others like a well-watered garden, a spring that never runs dry – a place of nourishment and refreshment. Then, God says, the rubble of the past will not get in the way of building anew, and we become a place, a people where God is at work to redeem and rebuild and restore. This is the kind of fast God longs for – one that draws us closer to God and opens our heart to our neighbors. This year, may God help us enter into a fast that lasts.
Amen.
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