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February 10, 2008

Rediscovering the Fast

Feb. 10th Rediscovering the Fast
Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7
Matthew 4:1-11

Jesus’ temptation is reminiscent of the events in the Garden of Eden—you remember, Adam and Eve. Christian doctrine describes the Adam and Eve event as The Fall or Original Sin. Or to put it another way…an offer they couldn’t refuse. Contemporary Catholic theologian and historian John Cavadini has compared the Adam and Eve story to someone who wins a lottery jackpot but refused to follow the rules of collecting the prize because they did not write the rules.

Or, he suggests, imagine a wealthy stranger shows up at your door and offers to give you the entire city of Chicago, which he has been buying up. There’s only on condition—the giver wants to keep one condo in a building with a three-way view of Lake Michigan and he wants the lights in that condo to remain on. You are free to come and go, even in that condo, but the lights must remain on.

You accept the conditions. And the first thing you do after getting the deeds is rush downtown, go to that one building, take the elevator up to the condo in question, and turn off the lights. Where did this willfulness come from, this disobedience to God who seems to ask so little and has given us so much?

Saint Augustine said it best. Our disobedience to God comes from a quiet but powerful flaw in the weave of creation: pride. For Augustine and many others early church scholars, including Thomas Aquinas, pride is seen as the fundamental sin, the first sin. Pride encourages humanity to displace God and to glorify self. There are many artistic depictions of the seven deadly sins. One artist depicted sin as a tree with several large thick branches, and smaller shoots coming out of the main branches. Pride is the root of this tree.

“Then Jesus was led up by the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. The tempter came and said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” We know that Jesus refuses to turn the stones into bread and so the tempter tries again.

Taking him to Jerusalem and putting him on top of the steeple of the temple the devil says, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written” that God’s commands his angels to watch over you—you’ll never even hit the ground. The angels will bear you up as on eagle’s wings. Again Jesus refuses and the devil tries one more time. The devil takes Jesus in a private Lear jet. They fly all over the world seeing the vast kingdoms and the devil says to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” And again Jesus refused, and the devil leaves him alone, for the time being…

Did you notice the words the devil used to try to entice Jesus? “If you are the Son of God...” In other words, “If you are who you want people to believe you are…” Prove it! Where’s your pride?

While we might question pride as the root of all sin, or the fundamental sin, it does appear in scripture as the oldest sin. Arrogance and Conceit are born from the sin of pride. Scholars argued that it is arrogance that led to the fall in the Garden of Eden. The serpent delighted in encouraging the woman and the man to displace God, and they did not listen to God but their own arrogance.

Our human story about “original sin” is near the very beginning of our Biblical story, just after creation. And so it is no coincidence that immediately after Jesus is baptized, his story includes a similar such “test.” This test is reflected in the account of Jesus’ temptation. Let’s see how Jesus responds to an offer he supposed couldn’t refuse.

When asked by the devil to change the stones into bread Jesus responds, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
Jumping down from the top of the temple, he responds, “It is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” And lastly when asked to worship the devil, Jesus responds, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’” (Pause)

What is the antidote to pride? St. Augustine implores the Christian to seek humility. And we witness humility in Jesus beginning with the temptation story. Jesus fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. But we should not assume that he was weak, vulnerable, or unprepared for the tests that were coming. In fact, it was his time away and the fasting that provided him with the spiritual strength and clarity to respond as he did to the devil’s temptations. Jesus shows us that we can refuse to allow our pride and sin to rule our lives. He offers us another way.

Jesus is the master of spiritual disciplines. A spiritual discipline is something that strengthens our connection to God. How many of you know that fasting is a spiritual discipline? There are many types and reasons why a person would fast. So let me be clear this morning that I am speaking about Biblical fasting. In Jesus’ time, people of faith fasted. In Matthew 6:16 Jesus says, “And when you fast, do not look dismal…” Notice he doesn’t say “If you fast” but “when you fast.” Biblical fasting has been out of vogue for a long time…yet as followers of Jesus it is something that we could benefit from.

Fasting as abstinence from food detaches us from earthly goods and realities. Fasting has a liberating effect on us. It helps us to establish the proper priority between the material and spiritual, giving priority to the spiritual. Why did people in the Bible fast? In ancient Jewish tradition, fasting had two primary purposes.

One: In an effort to express personal or national repentance, fasting was a form of humble prayer before God. Examples of this appear in the minor prophet Joel chapter 2:13. “So rend your heart, and not your garments; return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness.” The people had sinned and they needed to return to God. Joel informs his listeners that God wants us to move beyond the outward and visible signs that we repent—he wants evidence of this in our hearts.

The second purpose of a fast is what we find in today’s scripture reading. We fast to prepare ourselves inwardly (spiritually) to receive the necessary strength and grace we we can complete a mission of faithful service in God’s name. Another example of this type of fasting is found in the book of Esther 4:16. Esther tells her uncle Mordecai, “Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and neither eat nor drink for three days…I and my maids will also fast…After that I will go to the king, though it is against the law; and if I perish, I perish.”

Christianity takes deermination and dedication to God. When challenges come, are we prepared to handle them as Jesus demonstrated and taught? Spiritual disciplines are tools that can help.

Fasting is still practiced by monastics, in the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, as well as by some strict Bible-based churches. I know people in our conference who encourage pastors to fast, as they themselves fast regularly.
I recall that John Wesley, our founder, prescribed to regular fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Lent is a perfect time to reclaim the spiritual discipline of fasting. I hope you don’t hear me saying that we should fast for 40 days like Jesus in the desert. Jesus did an extreme fast and we should stay away from this. But what if we practiced something similar to the normal fast practiced in the Jewish tradition from the Day of Atonement?

This fast is from sunset of one day to sunset the next day (Leviticus 16:29, 23:32). Since we usually don’t eat during the night that makes the fast fairly easy, since you can eat again in the evening before retiring to bed. You would abstain from food and liquid (except water) for a period of one day.

Many of us might have grown up with the idea that fasting was something done by cloistered monks in prayer cells, hermits in caves, and very spiritual people on sacred retreats. But the Bible would beg to differ! In the Bible, fasting is often done as something we do while carrying out our everyday activities.

Again I lift up Matthew 6:16. Jesus tells us, when you’re out in the world while you fast, make sure you aren’t telling everyone about it by your demeanor and making a spectacle of yourself. In fact, we will be surprised at the changes that can occur in just a short period of time when we practice fasting. We will find a genuine desire to examine our hearts and make sure everything is right between us and God. We will find ourselves asking as the Psalmist did in Psalm 51—“Create in me a clean heart O God, and put a right spirit within me. “

So after all this why fast? 1. To humble ourselves before God or to say that another way, to remind ourselves that we do not live by bread alone. 2. To Prepare ourselves spiritually for the challenges and temptations of life. In other words, to strengthen our relationship with God.

Biblical fasting is deliberately abstaining from food. The time we would have been preparing and eating our meal, we now spend that time with God in prayer or spiritual readings. We immerse ourselves in God. The grumblings of our stomachs throughout the day serve as a reminder that we are offering ourselves to God in prayer.

Some of us are anxious about going without food. An image that comes to mind for me with fasting is that it feels as if we are holding our breath until we can eat again. When in reality, we need to be gulping in large quantities of the Spirit to fill the voids that are being discovered during our fast.

Reading our Bibles for many of us has gone the way of fasting—in other words, we don’t do it enough. We don’t know scripture well enough, in here (point to heart). I want to suggest to us this morning that we fast so we can feast on scripture…so we can gain the nourishment we need from the word of God.

As Christians, much of our spiritual nourishment comes from studying the word of God, or to put it another way, the word of the Lord. And do you recall what the Gospel writer John calls Jesus—the Word, capital W. So I would say to us that not only do we want to spend time in the biblical word, but we also want to make sure we are spending time with the Word—the one who was there in the beginning and who will be there when we return home…Jesus Christ.

Close—
Lent is a long season of 40 days. Let’s not get caught up in the idea that Lent is to be a time of punishment or degradation. What if we thought of the 40 days of Lent as gift? Originating in the fourth century, Lent was targeted toward the folks who were joining the church. The length of the season gave them sufficient time to consider their decision. It also allowed them to prepare themselves to a wholehearted commitment to Christ and Christ’s church. You could also say that the length of the season provided them the opportunity to reconsider and back out if they wanted.

Now Lent offers us the same gift—40 days to consider where we’ve been and where we want to go in our (spiritual lives)…our relationship with God. And the long period of 40 days is a perfect length of time to acquire a new spiritual discipline—for example fasting.

Maybe during that time of fasting, in our efforts to reign in our prideful selves, we will rediscover this text from the apostle Paul to the church in Philippi. (Phil 2:3-8) “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God to be something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

Easter is the feast of all feasts in the church. It is our most important celebration—more important than Christmas. This season of Lent take time to humble yourself before “the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us” that you might experience the love of God who never gives up on us, not matter how many temptations we fall for, no matter how prideful we are. Now is the time. Experience the fast before the feast and say, Yes to God today.

Posted by vickie at 10:00 AM