- Forty Days
In the midst of a forty-year journey through the wilderness, Moses spent forty days atop Mount Sinai.
After his baptism, and before he began his ministry, Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness, where he fasted, and where he was tempted.
Throughout the world, Christians have now begun a forty-day journey through the season of Lent, a season that ends with Holy Week, and Easter Sunday.
In the wilderness, Jesus engaged in fasting as a spiritual practice, so naturally, the first temptation was food. The first temptation was meant to lure him away from that practice, lure him away from a life of faith.
So it is with many of the temptations we face.
Just like Jesus, we, too, are called upon to face our demons; to confront the temptations which lure us away from the path we are called to follow…
This season of Lent is a holy time. A sacred time. A kairos time.
It is a time when Christians are invited to sort through their lives, and draw deeper to the source of their faith.
It is a time when many Christians return to one or more of the ancient spiritual practices, or renew their commitment to these practices… I’m talking about practices like: prayer. Worship. Study. Silence. Stewardship. Service. And fasting.
Anything that helps direct one’s focus on a life of faith is a practice that can be enriched during this season of Lent.
- Black and White
One thing I did last year, and which I’ve begun doing again this year, is sharing only black and white photos on my instagram account. This is not your typical Lenten fast, but I found it helpful.
I enjoy taking pictures here in Long Beach as well as on my hikes, and some of them I share on facebook, but instagram is the place where I share most of them.
...And during Lent, all the photos I share are in black and white.
This decision does have its drawbacks. I went on one hike last year through the poppy fields during the height of the superbloom. Bright, orange hills covered with poppies, for miles! Well, pictures of golden poppy fields just don’t work all that well in black and white.
However, a lot of photographers like black and white. Black and white removes the distractions of color, and allows you to focus more on subject, the textures, shapes and patterns, and composition.
This is actually a picture I took just a few weeks ago, while hiking through an area that burned in a wildfire last year. In this picture, color was a distraction. The shape of the tree, it’s stark beauty, it’s contrast against the clouds in the sky, all show much better in black and white.
This picture shows that even though black and white is limiting, it can also be liberating.
And that’s what Lent is all about. Finding practices that remove the distractions in our lives; practices that allow you to focus more on things you may have overlooked.
For me, this is a type of fasting.
- Spiritual Gain Train
But why fast in the first place? Why did Jesus fast? Why did others in ancient times fast, and why do people still fast today?
Fasting, like other spiritual practices, is a spiritual workout to strengthen the muscles of faith. And that really is a good analogy. In exercise, we make our bodies do hard work. And sometimes, there is even a little bit of pain, during and after exercise.
But the pain we experience after exercise is actually the feeling of our muscles recovering from tiny tears and injuries they sustained when they were pushed to their limits… and as those muscles recover from that, it’s as if the muscles say to themselves, “Well, we’re going to make sure we’re ready for that next time!” So as they heal, they add a little mass, making them stronger than they were before.
The apostle Paul actually makes a comparison between physical training, and spiritual training. In 1 Cor. 9:24-27 Paul writes: “Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we [train to receive] an imperishable one.”
And again, in 1 Timothy 4:7, Paul writes: “Train yourself in godliness.” And that word train, in Greek, is gymnaze, which refers to physical exercise, and is related to our modern word gymnasium.
Because muscles need time to recover, a workout must be followed by a period of rest. Likewise, practices like fasting are meant to last only for a set time.
When the fast is over, your spiritual muscles continue growing and getting stronger.
I pulled a book about fasting from my bookshelf to help me prepare for today’s sermon, but before I opened it and re-read parts of it, I searched online to see what the internet had to say about fasting.
One internet article I found said that today, millennials are twice as likely to fast during Lent as boomers. Boomers go to church more, but millennials fast more.
That was interesting.
4. Fasting Is Manly (Who Knew?)
Another article I found came from a surprising place: the website artofmanliness.com, which had an article about fasting by Brett and Kate McKay that actually had a lot of good things to say.
First, the article talked about reasons people fast.
Fasting, it said...
...Teaches that discomfort is not always bad
...fasting Strengthens the will
...fasting Intensifies prayer (praying “give us this day our daily bread” takes on new meaning when one is fasting!)
...fasting makes you aware of your everyday abundance, and fosters gratitude and humility
...fasting gets you out of a rut and re-asserts your humanity. The article explains this by saying, “You feel a hunger pang, and you ignore it. You always eat at noon, but today you’re not going to eat at all. You hear your phone ping, and you disregard it. You see your phone on your dresser, and you walk on by…[in this way] fasting communicates a profound freedom.” I don’t have to do things the same way, day after day. I am not a slave to my habits. I’m not a slave to my cravings. I’m not a slave to my phone. I am in control. I can change things around. I can try new things.
Fasting also builds solidarity with the suffering.
(Reading this, I wondered: Is it possible for me to “fast” from my white privilege? Probably not. But fasting can help make me aware of the privileges I have... and how I can use that privilege to empower those who are under-privileged or oppressed.)
Then, inline with what I said earlier, the article suggested that we consider fasting from anything that’s detracting from our higher priorities and needs to be rebalanced in our lives.
Then the article listed a number of ways you might choose to fast. You could fast from any and all devices with screens (television; smartphone)
You could fast from sports or hobbies.
You could fast from talking.
You could fast from Social media (or the internet altogether).
You could fast from News.
You could even fast from sharing pictures in color.
5. Incarnational Spirituality
One good thing about actual fasting is that it incorporates the whole body into worship. We’re called to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and body; fasting includes the body part of that.
This is hard for us. We tend to neglect our bodies and their connection to a life of faith.
And we here may be among the worst of all Christians when it comes to this. Most of us don’t even raise our hands in worship very often. We don’t get down on our knees in prayer.
When we worship God, we tend to neglect or ignore our bodies.
We do often walk forward for communion, which I love, because it is a liturgical moment that puts our bodies in motion. But how else do we incorporate our bodies in our spiritual lives?
What if fasting involved walking, instead of driving, to any place that is within a 20-minute walking distance? Walking can be a wonderful spiritual practice. Thich Nhat Hanh has said that the real miracle of living isn’t walking on water; it’s simply walking on this green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment, and feeling truly alive.
Just walking like that, in the moment, can be a
wonderful spiritual practice.
There are many other types of fasting. A year or two back, Pope Francis made some suggestions for possible fasts. “Fast from hurting words,” he said. “Fast from complaints, and contemplate simplicity. Fast from grudges, and be reconciled. Fast from pessimism, and be filled with hope.”
And, we heard a few weeks ago from Isaiah 58, which says that a proper fast is
“to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke...
to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin.”
There are more important things than giving up food… Any practice or discipline that helps you remove distractions from your life, and focus on what’s important, can be a spiritual fast... Anything that turns your life toward God, toward spiritual things, can be a fast worthy of this season of Lent... And any spiritual practice that incorporates the whole body can be an especially meaningful spiritual practice.
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