What The Spirit Can Do, When We Fast! Ash Wednesday February 6, 2008

(First read the text for this sermon: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21)

Lent is a time of baptismal renewal. Lent is a season of dying to yourself, so you can live to God. To use one of Luther’s images about baptism, the “old creature” in us must be drowned, so that the “new person” in us can arise!

This is something that needs to happen every day, according to Luther. In the Catechism he asks, “What then is the significance of such a baptism with water?” He answers, “It signifies that the old creature in us with all sins and evil desires is to be drowned and die through daily contrition and repentance, and on the other hand that daily a new person is to come forth and rise up to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.”

This life of righteousness is lived one day at a time. It’s lived in the same way that a recovering alcoholic stays healthy: by choosing health one day at a time, and by being utterly honest with himself. Did you pay attention to these words, in the Prayer for Ash Wednesday? “Create in us new and honest hearts, so that, truly repenting of our sins, we may receive from you…full pardon and forgiveness….”
Each day, when we are altogether honest with ourselves, and open to the Spirit, we receive power to put to death the old creature within us, so that the Spirit can raise each one of us up to be the person God created you and me to be!

That’s the day-to-day baptismal life. It is the daily life of repentance. It is the daily life of turning away from self-centered self-gratification, and becoming the new person.

This is the fundamental focus of Lent.

The Spirit can work through the Lenten discipline of fasting to raise up the new person within us.

The Ash Wednesday reading from Matthew presents Jesus teaching on three practices of the spiritual life: giving away money to meet the needs of the poor (that's what "alms" means), and prayer in a spirit of humility, and fasting. Classically practiced, fasting means to deprive yourself of food. To change the metaphor slightly, when we fast, the Spirit is able to starve the old creature so that the new person within us can arise!

If you’ve explored the web site of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, it could be that you’ve come across a wonderful essay on fasting. The author quotes a verse from tonight’s Matthew text: But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you; and continues: “Jesus taught and expected his followers to fast as a spiritual discipline. But if our pride allows us to tell others of our fast, so as to impress them with our devotion to God, we have lost our focus on God and the impact of the fast goes with it.” The point is repentance! In this case, repentance means to turn away from self-absorption, and to focus on God. As the author continues, “Fasting…helps to break us out of our self-centered world. When we stop satisfying our every craving and desire, we can more easily open ourselves to God and to the needs of others.”

Listen to what Gordon Lathrop writes: "The point of Christian fasting in Lent should not be to demonstrate our supposedly spiritual athleticism, our gnostic ability to rise above mere flesh and its needs, as if that were any virtue. Exactly the contrary. The deepest biblical conception of fasting is that it demonstrates our own need in concert with our neighbors, with others who are wretched and hungry, with a whole world in need, as if the fast were an enacted prayer to God. Fasting is about not hiding from your own flesh.… Not hiding from mortality, telling the truth – those are the outlines of the discipline. And such a discipline may come to expression best by fasting from pretense, from self-righteousness, from misuse of the earth, and from acts of injustice as well as from self-indulgence."

This is helpful, for me, in broadening the whole concept of fasting! The Spirit can transform you when you fast from food – if it is food that is preventing the person God created you to be from arising within you. But perhaps it’s not about food!

From what do you need to fast?

For instance, are you struggling to open to God, who would like to create in us new and honest hearts, so that, truly repenting of our sins, we may receive from God full pardon and forgiveness? Are you, instead, hiding behind pretense? In what ways do you deceive even yourself – as if you’ve got it all together; that you can handle it; that you don’t need any help from anyone else? Think of what the Spirit can do when we fast from pretense – and honestly reveal our weaknesses, to ourselves, and to others who desperately want to help us do better the work God has called us to do together! What joy there is, then, when the old creature within us is starved, and the Spirit is able to raise up the new person within us!

Think of what the Spirit can do when we fast from self-righteousness; the need always to be right; and instead receive the grace and forgiveness that comes with healthy humility. What? You mean the world does not revolve around me! What a relief! I can relax! And so, what joy there is when the old creature within us is starved, and the Spirit is able to raise up the new person within us!

Be honest now. Where is it, each day, that the old creature within you is not subdued, with the result that you are distracted from God who is at the center of life?

Is the old creature the anger that comes when you’re feeling the anxiety that there is too much to do, when you’re believing the lie that it all depends upon you? A way of fasting from that anxiety is to stop during the day, for a period of non-productive, “waste-of-time” prayer; to hear from God the reminder that it is God who has given you your work to do, and that God will enable you to do what needs to be done! Imagine what the Spirit can do when you and I fast from the conceit that it is all up to us, and, instead, when we repent by practicing humility!

I find that the old creature within me that needs to be drowned again and again is the compulsion to be productive – because that’s rooted in the lie that it is all up to me, and that I’m not working hard enough, and that I’m not doing a good enough job. (How did I internalize all of those destructive messages?!) At those times, the spiritual discipline for me is to fast from multi-tasking! I repent. I return to words written by Gerald May: “Do one thing at a time, with complete, immediate mindfulness. Don’t do it to get it done so you can get on to the next thing. Do it for love. Do it fully, sensitively, openly. Do it now. Then do the next thing.”
Do you know what? I find, then, that I am more centered in the purpose of the work that God has given me to do. And – I find that I am more productive, and with less anxiety, because I am doing each thing well, with the attentiveness it deserves! I rejoice in what the Spirit can do when I fast from multi-tasking, and starve that old creature within me, so that the new person can arise, the person God created me to be!

Have you ever fasted from e-mail? What a wonderful spiritual practice that is! On those days when I discipline myself to check e-mail only once a day – and after I have done the more important work for that day – I am much more centered in God’s presence and purpose in my work.

The list goes on and on, when you let your imagination loose! From what do you need to fast, so you can repent, turning from that distraction, and returning to God’s grace and forgiveness?

What will the Spirit do with you this Lent?

How will the Spirit move, as you practice the Lenten disciplines – of giving away money to meet the needs of the poor, of prayer, of fasting?

Pay attention!

And let me know what the Spirit is doing, as we journey through Lent!

In the name of God, who is Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pastor Andy Ballentine
St. Stephen Lutheran Church
Williamsburg, Virginia