The Fast God Wants

I want to say this as clearly as I can - I don't believe God wants us to give up chocolate for Lent. Nor do I believe that God wants us to go on a diet for Lent. It may be good for us to give up chocolate or to go on a diet, but not as a discipline designed to respond to God's call to repentance.

I was amused by the article I read in the paper the other day, which said that there is a church in the area that will be selling fasnachts during the first five weeks of Lent - just another tradition that has lost touch with its original purpose. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it will help people understand that the disciplines of Lent should be about more meaningful things than giving up fat for the season.

The people of Israel had lost touch with the purpose behind their fast. They went through the ritual, yet there was no evidence that God even took notice. So they wonder why they bother. But God tells them that their fasting is meaningless. It is only a surface display that makes no impact on how they live their lives.

God is not interested in a show of piety. God wants us to change the way we live our lives. The fast God wants, we hear in Isaiah (58:1-12), is for us to cease from doing injustice, to give freedom to those who are living under domination by us or by others, to share what we have with the hungry, to bring the homeless poor into our houses! Unlike the show of humility and the feigning of repentance, such actions would reflect true faithfulness.

Jesus makes the same point (Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21). If your piety is all about trying to impress others or God, then it is its own reward. When you give an offering, Jesus says, don't make a show of it. Do it in secret. The value of your offering is not in its public display of your commitment. The value of your offering is in your own recognition that you can do without a considerable portion of what you possess.

It may seem, as we hear what sound like harsh warnings, in Isaiah and from Jesus, that we serve a God who likes to make demands - a tyrant who enjoys lording it over us. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is just the opposite.

If God were a tyrant who simply loved to give commands in order to watch people jump at those commands, then the kind of meaningless piety that Isaiah and Jesus condemn would be just the kind of thing we would have to do in order to please God. A God who is primarily a tyrant would be constantly ordering us to jump simply in order to see us jump.

But the God revealed in Isaiah and through Jesus is just the opposite. What our God asks of us is not some meaningless ritual, but a way of life that makes life better both for us and for those who are influenced by our decisions. God has no desire to see us do what God commands just to enjoy the power of being God. God's only desire is that life be good for all the people of creation and for the creation itself.

If God is not a tyrant who demands certain behaviors for no reason, then the church must not make such demands either. There is no purpose in shouting at others whom we think are violating God's commands. There is divine purpose in working together to discover what makes life more just, more fair, more enjoyable, and more fulfilling.

The Bible gives us a record of the early attempts of God's people, moved by the Holy Spirit, to discover what matters in life - what we should avoid doing - what it is good to do. To take the Bible and treat it as if it is the last word on human behavior is to make the Bible into something it must never be - an idol to be worshipped and adored as if it were God itself.

 The truth is, there are many prohibitions in the Bible that have been dropped even by most everyone who considers the Bible an authoritative source for the way we live our lives. Now some people try to distinguish between what they have dropped and what they have not, as if there is a clear difference between such things. The truth of the matter is that every people who seek to follow God's ways must determine for themselves, in every age, what makes life better and what diminishes life.

One of the things that I think diminishes life the most right now, and in a way that clearly violates what God desires for us, is the judgmental ranting of a few against the rest of us. On issues ranging from abortion to evolution, there are a few people who insist that they alone know the truth and that all who disagree with them are evil.

I am not a fan of abortion, and I don't know of anyone who is. I don't know anyone who thinks abortion is such a great thing that they go out and promote it as something good and delightful. I do think that there are times when abortion may be the lesser evil. I also think that the decision about abortion needs to be made by those most closely impacted. It should be, as some have put it, legal, safe, and rare.

There are some who think that abortion is simply murder. They say that the unborn child is an innocent child of God who is being murdered. But I have to wonder about their conviction, because many of these same people, who are so adamant about abortion, have no problem dismissing the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqi children as so much collateral damage.

What God wants of us is to be consistent in the way we apply the truths that we learn from the Bible. If we think that all human life and even potential human life is sacred (a claim many abortion opponents make), then we must apply that belief consistently and resist war as vehemently as we resist abortion.

Personally, I reject the notion that human life is sacred. I believe that God has made the whole creation for goodness. Only if we value and respect the whole creation can life be good for any part of that creation. That doesn't mean that we don't cut down a tree to build a house, but it does mean that we might want to avoid clear-cutting, because such an approach can cause serious damage to the eco-system in which we live.

God wants us to approach other peoples with justice in mind. That may mean helping them to get rid of a tyrant who oppresses them. But it also means doing whatever we can to alleviate hunger and disease and poverty around the world.

If our primary goal these days is to reduce terrorism, our greatest weapon is our friendship and our generosity. If our primary goal is to establish our domination in the world, then our primary weapon will be our ample instruments of death and destruction. You decide whether you think we, as a nation, are moving in the direction suggested in Isaiah.

The greatest danger we face as a community of faith is that we will think that our worship is what God wants from us. If we come and say we believe and then go back out into the world and live as if we don't, what have we gained? If we nod to the words of Jesus about loving our enemies and defeating evil with love and then go into the world and do everything but, what have we learned?

If we would commit ourselves to do whatever it takes to free people from domination, from hunger, from disease, and from poverty, then our light shall break forth like the dawn and our healing shall spring up quickly, says Isaiah. Then we shall call, and the Lord will say - Here I am. May we seek that day with all our heart and all our strength. Amen.