Lent 1

Sermon preached by the Reverend Anna Matthews

‘He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished.’

Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness gives us the pattern for Lent. 40 days before Easter (Sundays in Lent don’t count, as Sunday is always a celebration of the resurrection) the church invites us to prepare for this by a season of penitence and fasting.

So some of us give things up. Perhaps some types of food or drink – chocolate or crisps, meat or alcohol. Perhaps some habit that is bad for us, or has got out of hand – scrolling on social media, binge-watching Netflix, internet shopping.

In the medieval church fasting was enforced: bread, vegetables, a little salt, watered down beer was your lot. Fish, if you were rich. For most Orthodox Christians today a stricter fast persists than that undertaken by most of us in the Western Church: meat, fish, dairy and oil tend to be off limits, though it can vary a bit by region and bishop.

So what are we doing when we fast, or when we abstain from something? Fasting, usually, means going without food and drink (except water or sometimes juice) for a period – sometimes part of a day, sometimes from evening to evening. Abstaining from particular foods or drinks or practices shares things in common with fasting, but isn’t the same.

Here are some things we’re not doing:

We’re not doing a Christian version of Veganuary or dry January, though there are some overlaps.

We’re not trying to impress God or other people with how pious we are.

Nor are we trying to make God love us more by making ourselves miserable. God’s love for us doesn’t depend on how much or how little we eat, of chocolate or anything else.  

Rather than thinking of fasting or abstaining from something as a lever I pull to get something I want – be that something from God or the approval of others or a sense of spiritual achievement or even a healthier lifestyle – fasting, biblically, is much more responsive.

Something significant happens, and people fast. Moses fasted for 40 days and 40 nights before the Lord after he discovered the people of Israel worshipping the golden calf. Elijah, under a death threat from Queen Jezebel, flees into the wilderness, and after eating bread and drinking water, fasts for 40 days and 40 nights. King David, convicted of his sin in abusing Bethsheba and arranging for her husband Uriah to be killed, fasts as an expression of his penitence. Jonah, finally persuaded to take God’s message of repentance to Ninevah, is so successful in his preaching that the entire city repents, puts on sackcloth, and a fast is proclaimed.

Fasting is responsive. It follows from the recognition of sin, or an encounter with God’s holiness, or from grief or threat. Sometimes it comes as a form of hunger or desire for God that arises in response to a recognition of God’s absence. And it’s a bodily response. We are embodied creatures, and that matters for our spiritual lives as much as our physical lives. Fasting, and abstinence, as embodied prayer, can focus our attention and hunger on God.

Fasting or abstinence are ways of taking seriously our condition before God and our desire for God. They aren’t manipulative practices to make God do what we want – we don’t have that kind of power over the almighty! – and they’re not commended for everyone all of the time. In particular if you are ill, under 18, pregnant or nursing, fasting – going without food for a period – isn’t recommended.

In this season of Lent the practices of fasting and abstinence are particularly focussed on preparing for Easter, for the new life of the risen Christ. We may fast or abstain from things in Lent as a response to a sense of wanting to be more focussed on God, or a desire to be more loving or more holy, or maybe out of a fairly generalised sense that this might be good for us.

I find the practices of Lent helpful because they help me learn and embody things that sometimes I need at other times of the year. Because the times when I feel like I’m in a spiritual wilderness don’t always neatly coincide with Lent. My desire and need for resurrection doesn’t always happen in April. But the habits and practices of keeping Lent prepare me for the times when my own life’s Lent falls in May or October or whenever. The season we keep in common helps me in in the seasons I go through more personally. When I face my own temptations in the wilderness, or I find myself responding to an encounter with God or a sense of my own sin, our keeping of Lent gives me something to call on.

I’ve kept Lent in different ways over the years. It’s taken a long time for God to subdue my will enough for me to approach the season less as a test of commitment and more as an invitation into God’s love. I was the one who thought saying that Sundays in Lent don’t count was for wimps; I could look with a certain satisfaction at the lists of things I’d given up and think that this somehow demonstrated I was a serious Christian; I had a sneaking suspicion that if it was hard it was somehow good for me.

Fasting can go wrong in all sorts of ways. Jesus himself counsels against boasting about fasting so that others will be impressed by you. Isaiah and other Old Testament prophets are fierce in their denunciations of those who keep all the appointed fasts but neglect to show justice or compassion. If all fasting is doing is building up our spiritual pride we’d be better off not doing it.

But fasting or abstinence can also sharpen our desire for God. Refraining from those things that we usually turn to to sate our appetites or fill our time can reveal to us a deeper hunger – for God, for love or freedom or healing or forgiveness or belonging or holiness or community – all of these gifts of the risen Jesus. Sometimes we’re tempted to mask these hungers, or distract ourselves from them, or seek to fill them with things that won’t, finally, satisfy. Lent gives us a season to reacquaint ourselves with what it means to hunger for God, and to turn to him for nourishment.

So for example, if you’ve given up chocolate, when you find yourself thinking about it, or craving it, or wondering if you break off just a little piece whether anyone will notice, try to pay attention to the hunger that prompts you. Does it come because you’re feeling discouraged, or under-appreciated, or in need of comfort? Can you begin to notice what your hungers are? And turn them towards God in prayer?

And can you let God use your hunger – whether for food more generally or for whatever it is specifically that you’ve given up – to encourage a sense of commitment to those who have no choice in their hunger? Can your hunger be a vehicle for God’s hunger for justice, and an expression of solidarity with those who don’t have their daily bread? Can you pray more for them? Give the money you haven’t spent on chocolate or alcohol or meat to charity? Volunteer for a foodbank? Lobby for better international and local aid and justice?

The more we offer God our hungers, our desires, the more God will draw us into his desires. Which is why Lent is, above all, a season that invites us to enter more fully into God’s love. For God’s desire is to make us his: to share his life and love with us, and to establish his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

Here’s a time to clear away some of the distractions, to learn what we really hunger for. So that when the fast ends we’re ready for Easter to happen in us, too: for the love and freedom and healing and forgiveness and belonging and holiness and community of the risen Jesus to be offered to us. And then - then it will be time to feast.