“Is This The Fast That I Choose?”
Preached Ash Wednesday, February 22, 2023
We’ve been here before.
We’ve been here before - the middle of February in Ohio. It’s gray and dark and sometimes we have to stop and think how many days it's been since we’ve seen the sun. We’re wondering if Spring will ever come again…and on those weird 60 degree days, we are worried about climate change rather than hopeful about Spring.
We’ve been here before - hearing Isaiah 58 in worship. Just two weeks ago we were here, in this sanctuary, talking about the fast we choose. Talking about the disconnect between our desires and our actions. The disconnect between God’s will for us and what we choose. Talking about choosing the fast of feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, and removing the burden from the oppressed.
We’ve been here before - news of another shooting in the news. 3 dead teenagers at Michigan state. Diagnoses from doctors. Illnesses. Long covid and cancer. War is raging - threats of nuclear disaster linger. Closer to home we are worried about the devastating effects of the train derailment in East Palestine. Will our drinking water be clean? The air we breathe? Headlines detail a rise in despots, dictatorship, and fundamentalism. My friend’s synagogue is ordering metal detectors - again - as an anti-semitism rally is happening down the street. The world seems too dark.
We’ve been here before - the beginning of Lent. How will we mark this season? Will we mark this season? Do our fasts, our prayers, make a difference? Do our good works amount to anything? Is it really already Lent again? And will it make any difference?
We’ve been here before…
Let’s take a deep breath.
Ash Wednesday has a reputation as this kind of depressing day - we get ashes, burned from the palms we waved last Palm Sunday, we get ashes on our foreheads and we tell each other, “From dust you came and from dust you will return.” The non-sugar coated way of saying this is, “You will die.” But we already have a hard time getting people to come to church so we don’t say this - we use a little more pretty language. But why do this in the first place? Why this day? Why this ritual?
Is it because we are morbid and depressed? Because we’ve given up on this life and what we do in it?
No! It’s the opposite.
We do this because how we use our time here matters. In her book, “No Cure For Being Human,” Kate Bowler, when she was diagnosed with cancer and the doctor told her that her days were numbered, said this: “In my finite life, the mundane has begun to sparkle. The things I love—the things I should love—become clearer, brighter.” She grapples with the news that her days with her husband and son are numbered - she wonders, how many more nights will I have to read this boy in dinosaur pajamas a book before bed? But when confronted with her finitude, that her time was no longer the infiniteness that most of us go about thinking it is - how she lived her life in the present mattered more than ever.
Isaiah asks, “Is this the fast I choose?” Because the fast we choose does matter. It matters to us and to God. It matters that our heart’s desire for God and our actions of caring for neighbor match up. It matters what we do, here and now, this Lent.
We also do this ritual of ashes and of Lent because it reminds us that, ultimately, we are God’s. In Genesis we are given the metaphor of God lovingly forming humanity out of spit and dirt, dust, ash. The Psalms tell us that God knew us intimately before we were born, knit us together in the dark of our mothers’ wombs. And, when this life is over, we return to God. The maker of us and the maker of all the world who has plans to redeem all creation - we belong to that Maker God. And that God invites us into those plans for redemption, here and now, in this life. Redemption can seem so far away - so let’s work with God to bring that day nearer.
And so, as we say “We’ve been here before…” it is never hopeless and always worth it to say again: “This is the fast I choose.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a member of Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a professor at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Her book, “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants” is one I’ve mentioned in preaching before and have talked about with many of you - for me, it was a huge perspective changing book and perhaps one of the most important works of non-fiction for our age. In an interview with the New York Times about her book and this path to environmental destruction that our world seems to be on, she says this:
“The story that we have to illuminate is that we don’t have to be complicit with destruction. That’s the assumption: that there are these powerful forces around us that we can’t possibly counteract. The refusal to be complicit can be a kind of resistance to dominant paradigms, but it’s also an opportunity to be creative and joyful and say, I can’t topple Monsanto, but I can plant an organic garden; I can’t counter fill-in-the-blank of environmental destruction, but I can create native landscaping that helps pollinators in the face of neonicotinoid pesticides. Which research has suggested is especially harmful to wild bees and bumblebees. So much of what we think about in environmentalism is finger-wagging and gloom-and-doom, but when you look at a lot of those examples where people are taking things into their hands, they’re joyful. That’s healing not only for land but for our culture as well — it feels good.”
In light of this, when we say, “This is the fast I choose” - can it be joyful? Can it feel good? When we say, “Is this the fast I choose?” we are saying that we will fast…
To fast from complicitness
To fast from apathy
To fast from cynicism
To fast from despair
To fast for hate
To fast from isms and prejudice
To fast from the destructive ways of this world
Using church language we would say, to fast from evil, to fast from sin
We live out this fast by choosing those things which are in line with God’s will, to love God and love neighbor.
To fast by planting a garden
To fast by saying thank you
To fast by writing our representatives on issues of gun control and war and discrimination bills so that we can live in a safer, more just and peaceable world
To fast by making peace in our own little corners of the world
To fast by working on healing our own trauma
To fast as Isaiah says: To fast by giving bread to the hungry, To fast by giving homes to the homeless, clothes to the naked
To fast by removing burdens from others
To fast by freeing others from oppression
To fast by doing whatever we can within our lives and our spheres to make this world more like the world in God’s plan of redemption, a day when every weapon is beaten into plowshares, there are no more tears, no more death - and peace and love reign.
We’ve been here before, asking - “Is this the fast I choose?” And it is always worth it to say, yes.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment