a true fast: sermon for ash wednesday

Last updated on: March 5, 2014 at 5:54 am by Anne Kennedy

a true fast: sermon for ash wednesday 2014-03-05T05:54:00-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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I commend you all for being here this cold cold morning for the inauguration of a season of penitence, fasting, sorrow, repentance, of looking at the great suffering of our Lord to understand its meaning and purpose, to draw closer to God not for our own gain, but out of love for him and gratitude for his love for us. So thank you for coming.

If you have a bible we’re going to look briefly at four texts that deal with the question of fasting. As we heard in the gospel reading, it is Jesus’ assumption that we, as the church, will fast, just as we will pray and give to the poor. This assumption is a continuation of the law. It was understood, in Israel, that just as there were times to feast, set important times where feasting were required, the Jewish person would sometimes undertake to fast. There isn’t nearly as much instruction in the law about fasting, save if you were to take a Nazarite Vow, or some kind of other vow to the Most High, as there is about feasting–but as you work through the Old Testament you can see some places where individuals undertook a fast. David, after his sin with Bathsheba, before the death of his child, is the most famous. Job, when every possible calamity overtakes him, sits down in the dust and ash as a sign of mourning. His friends sit in silence with him for seven days. It doesn’t say anything about eating and drinking but I think we might safely imagine that, in grief, this was not a moment of feasting. Daniel, in Babylon, as a distinctive mark of faith and obedience, publicly restricts his diet and abstains from wine.

As Israel and Judah slides into apostate idolatry, you don’t see many more individual accounts of people fasting until you look at the prophets and discover that the people were indeed fasting. They we’re bringing their sacrifices to the temple and praying loudly and supposedly carrying out the requirements of the law. But none of it, and particularly the fasting, was doing them any good. Let’s look at Isaiah 58:3 for just a moment. God is talking to Israel and he says, “Behold, in the day of your fast, you seek your own pleasure and oppress all your workers. Behold, you fast only to quarrel and fight, and to hit with a wicked fist.” The people of Israel, we can see, were fasting. They were abstaining from food and wine and supposedly from self gratification. The purpose of fasting was to indicate your trust in God both to yourself and to God. To say, I trust you. Even if I lack food, you are my food, my portion, my good. Even if I lack wine, you make me glad. But look at what the fast actually did. Because they were so wicked, because they did not love God, the fast stood as a visible sign of how far gone they were. It was a mockery. While they were abstaining from food, they broke the law. While they went without they quarreled and were bitter against one another. The fast showed how their internally focused, selfish, sinful, hearts were evil.

Well, it showed God. The person fasting looked very holy from the outside. Israel was so surprised to be sent into exile. They had shielded themselves from their sin and blackness. They sacrificed and counted their sabbath steps and prayed and fasted in public while in secret they were impoverishing their brothers and sisters, were engaging in violence and degradation.

What would God have rather had them do? Look at verse 6. Keep eating and drinking wine but to fast from actual wickedness, to stop placing heavy burdens on one another, to let those who they were pushing down and exploiting go free, to give food to the hungry, to bring into their very houses those who had no home, to reach out to the needy in their own families. Then their light would go out as the dawn. All of these priorities of God are outwardly focused. The lack of them showed the person fasting to be without love, for God and his neighbor, the cornerstone of the law. The internal, self justifying action of fasting was a shield the man or woman would use to protect themselves from God. And God is so angry about it.

Look at Joel 2 very quickly. For many verses Joel describes the end of the world and how terrible it is going to be. I actually felt, as I read them again, how apt they are to the wretched state of the world now. The whole world is in chaos and flames. Christians are being persecuted every where. The great principalities and powers of the world–Russia, China, Japan, the Middle East, the United States–are working out their own way, quarreling and committing themselves to degradation and violence and wickedness. We sit here in this quiet clean church, far away from war and tumult, and yet it creeps ever closer, the rumors of it swirl around us. What are we to do? The violence and evil out there in the world is found even here in our own hearts. The selfishness and idolatry and self love and unconcern for my neighbor is found even in me. What should I then do?

Joel 2:12 Even now, return to me with all your heart, with fasting
Yes, even with fasting
Weeping, mourning.
Rend your heart, break open your heart, spill out the contents of your soul,
Not your garments. You could rend your garments, you could do an outward show of repentance, but what really counts is the brokenness of your spirit, the breaking of your heart.
Return to The Lord. Turn around and go back to him. Turn away from your sin, from yourself, from everything wrong inside of you.
And Because The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He relents, he pulls back from disaster.

Let the outward sign, let the action that you take, of fasting, be a true reflection of the brokenness of your heart. Let it be the truth, that you cannot live without God. That you do not have enough. That without him you are as nothing. That you commit yourself to him in obedience and love and to your neighbor.

Turn to Matthew six. The inward person in repentance, The Lord, says, whose heart is true and fixed, goes secretly to love, prays in hiding and fasts in secret and gives anonymously, that inward person is then seen by the whole of creation to be adding glory to God. Do you think you aren’t seen? When you commend your whole life to holiness and repentance? Do you think that no one can see?

God can see, and his seeing is for the whole world. Your light shines, ‘before men’, you are obvious and unavoidable, so loud in your love for God that God is glorified before the whole world. It is counter intuitive. The Pharisees make sure everyone can see them and so God turns away. They stand alone and naked. Their fasting is a fasting of violence and poverty. Don’t do that, says Jesus. Beware of them. Keep your distance, don’t be like them.

And yet we cannot. I know. I’ve fasted, very meagerly. Even the fast of repentance can become muddled and ruined by my own deep self love. After getting all the way through chapter six in Matthew the best thing is despair. When Jesus says, simply, be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect, you must rend your heart, you must weep and mourn and cover yourself in ash.

The final piece is in 2 Corinthians 5:20. Paul writes, “we implore you, on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God”
How? You cry. How can I truly be reconciled? How can the inward and outward be as one? How can I love God and my neighbor? How can I take an outward sign and make it truly reflect my inward repentance? How can I not destroy my neighbor? I am so sinful. I am black with sin. There is not any motivation in me that is pure. There is no work that I do that is not a little bit self serving. The wars in the world are a true reflection of the war and degradation going on in my own flesh. Even when I repent, even when I rend my heart, it lasts but a moment and is immediately muddied with confusion and blindness and sin.
How, then, can I be reconciled to God?
Verse 21 “For your sake he, God, made him, Jesus, to be sin who knew no sin
He who had never experienced sin, who didn’t ‘know’ it in the way that Adam ‘knew’ Eve, who didn’t understand it, who was never entrapped by it.
He made him to be sin so that in him we could become the righteousness of God. We could become ‘as perfect’, as if we were perfect. I’m an only child. I sabotage myself all the time because I want to be perfect. Not only do I not want to sin, I want God to love me and commend me for my goodness, my perfection. I largely don’t undertake to fast because I hate to be weak, I hate to fail. I fail all the time and I hate it. To accept the gift, the free gift of Jesus’ perfect righteousness, not my own, his, is a hard hard gift. It is the most unfair, most gracious, most extraordinary, most merciful, most terrifying exchange ever. And when the exchange takes place, your life for his, your sin for his perfection, your broken heart for his whole one, your inadequate sinful fasting and repentance for his perfect forgiveness and love. That exchange,
Paul quotes Isaiah
In a favorable time I listened to you
In a day of salvation I helped you
And then Paul says “Behold” Look, look up, pay attention “Behold now, right now is the favorable time. Behold Now is the day of salvation”.
Right now, you sitting here, right now is the right moment, the perfect moment, the auspicious moment of salvation. When the exchange takes place then, for real, for true, we can take the inward and let it be the truth, the outward reality. There no longer needs to be dissonance, hypocrisy, lying in our outward works about the inward person.
The list that
Paul gives here is beyond the substance of any fast. It is an all encompassing witness of Christ’s power in the world, beginning in the depths of you.
Endurance, afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger. Everything that you might afflict yourself with or the world might do to you is no longer a spinning worthless poverty of fasting. This fast is now participation in the glory and work and salvation and suffering of Christ. This is you standing like a lit up neon sign on top of a hill so that not a single person can get away from the glory of God.
Then he adds purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, the Holy Spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, the power of God. With the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and the left, through honor and dishonor, slander and praise, we are treated as impostors, as liars, and yet are true, as unknown, as incomprehensible, as ridiculous and stupid, as blundering idiots, yet by God we are well known. We are treated as dying, as diminishing, as on the way out, yet we behold, look up, we live. We are punished but not killed, sorrowful yet always rejoicing, poor yet making many rich, having nothing and yet possessing everything.

I don’t have any admonishments for you this season except for one thing. The whole world hates God, for these forty days, love him. The whole world hates you, for these forty days, let his knowledge of you, his perfect love of you, his perfect salvation, his glorious grace, his abounding mercy, his steadfast love, behold in this favorable moment of salvation, let his love for you be enough. Let everything else fall out of your hand, possess nothing at all except the love of Christ. Then the whole world will see and know him. Your light will go out as the dawn and the glory of The Lord will be upon the people.

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