A Quick Fast

“In a culture where the landscape is dotted with shrines to the Golden Arches and an assortment of Pizza Temples, fasting seems out of place, out of step with the times.”
- Richard Foster “The Celebration of Discipline”

Lent is historically a time for fasting. For some, it has become water-cooler conversation. “So, what are you giving up for Lent this year?” and then we come up with some little of inconvenience (like giving up dessert or soft drinks or TV, etc) so that we can say we are participating.

Truthfully, fasting is a forgotten art in Christ’s church. Perhaps we’re too busy to worry with it. Maybe it stirs up images of emaciated fanatics living the desert or that it just isn’t a very Presbyterian thing to do. Or maybe we’ve grown more attached to food (and the speed at which we get it) than any other culture in human history. As Foster notes, just look at how many restaurants you pass driving down a city road. Do you remember when going out to eat was a rare and special treat?

Of course, fasting is not primarily a test of our self-disciplined (for me, it is more often a painful reminder of how self-disciplined I’m not). Rather, fasting is a way to make space for God. By removing a meal or a distraction, time is made available that is given over to God. For example, if you choose to fast one lunch a week, the time normally spent at the lunch table is spent in prayer, scripture study, journal reflections about your walk with Christ or even devotional reading (i.e., C.S. Lewis).

Fasting is the way to clear some expectant room for God to land in our lives. Every time your stomach growls in hunger, you have an inescapable physical reminder of our hearts aching for God and you can take a quick moment to pray for faithfulness or to pray for others. The same applies when we fast something other than food: when we want the fasted thing, we allow that ache to turn us to God instead, who supplies all of our needs. And the more often we bump into God this way, the more we will find our lives oriented toward him. Because that is what Lent is really about: to turn away of old ways that keep us from following Christ and to fix our eyes on Jesus more than ever before. Fasting becomes that palpable reminder to do just that.


“Yet even now, says the LORD,
return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
rend your hearts and not your clothing.
Return to the LORD, your God,
for he is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love…” Joel 2:12-13

Quote of the Day

"Perhaps it is our nature to die, not our right. Maybe we have the ability, to kill, to make things dead, even ourselves, but we haven't the right. And when we exercise that ability, in the name of God (as we have done in war), or of Justice (as we have done with capital punishment), or of Choice (as we have done with abortion), we should have the good sense to recognize it for what it isn't: enlightenment, civilization, progress, mercy. Nor is it an inalienable right. It is, rather, a shame, a sadness, a peril from which no congress's legislation, no churchman's dispensation, no public opinion or conventional wisdom can ever deliver us. For if we live in a world where birth is suspect, where the value of life is relative, and death is welcomed and well-regarded, we live in a world vastly more shameful, abundantly sadder, and ever more perilous than all the primitive generations of our species before us who were sufficiently civilized to fill with wonder at the birth of new life, dance with the living, and weep for the dead."

~Thomas Lynch, "The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade"

Quote of the Day

"I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life that was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been ratified by the mere facts." G.K. Chesterton


Me too.

Quote of the Day

"The human mind is never more resourceful than when it is involved in self-justification," author Jean Garton has written.

I don't know who Jean Garton is, but they certainly have a point.

Casting Magic

"For the sake, as he sees it, of the ones he preaches to, the preacher is apt to preach the Gospel with the high magic taken out, the deep mystery reduced to a manageable size...The wild and joyful promise of the Gospel is reduced to promises more easily kept. The peace that passeth all understanding is reduced to peace that anybody can understand. The faith that can move mountains and raise the dead becomes faith that can help make life bearable until death ends it. Eternal life becomes a metaphor for the way the good a man does lives after him. "Blessed is he who takes no offense at me" (Matt. 11:6), Jesus says, and the preacher is apt to seek to remove the offense by removing from the Gospel all that he believes we find offensive. You cannot blame him because up to a point, of course, he is right. With part of ourselves we are offended as he thinks by what is too much for us to believe. We weren't born yesterday. We are from Missouri.

"But we are also from somewhere else. We are from Oz, from Looking-Glass Land, from Narnia, and from Middle Earth. If with part of ourselves we are men and women of the world and share the sad unbeliefs of the world, with a deeper part still, the part where our best dreams come from, it is as if we were indeed born yesterday, or almost yesterday, because we are also all of us children still. No matter how forgotten and neglected, there is a child in all of us who is not just willing to believe in the possibility that maybe fairy tales are true after all but who is to some degree in touch with that truth."

~ from Frederick Buechner, "Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale"


Over lunch one day, a professor-pastor-friend in college told me that for him, whenever he would visit someone in the hospital, that he felt he should remove his shoes at the door because he was about to tread on holy ground.

Another professor, this one in seminary, once told my class that the most dangerous thing that any pastor can do is forget that they handle holy things.

And by holy, I mean magical. Call it an over-active imagination or a divorce from reality, I believe in magic. Not the cantrips we hear about in Harry Potter, that unlocks doors and makes things float. Not modern Wiccan rituals or decapatated chickens or devil worship. Real magic. What Aslan calls, after his miraculous resurrection, "The deeper magic."
What the church calls Easter.

I grew up losing myself in stories about fierce, awe-inspiring dragons, powerful and dangerous wizards and valiant, iron-clad knights. And I cannot help but believe that these journeys into another world were a vital part of the formation of my faith, perhaps as much as any other event that led me to Christ: the freedom to believe in magic; the ability to envision a world where extraordinary things can happen that make a lasting, life-giving difference for everyone. More importantly, the ability to see (on my good days) that world in this one.

I think Buechner is quite right to see the Gospel as a fairy tale. Not an entertaining story that's mostly for children and earns millions for movie-makers. The tales that actually talk back to our reality, peeling back the mundane to reveal the magic that's been there all along; the magic we're often too busy to notice.

The magic of the Gospel and its Easter-Christ, that proves He can bring resurrection to the most unlikely places and people.

But we're scientists and enlightened minds. We want hard proof before we give up our precious time and energy following leprechauns and Holy Grails. We'll take cold hard facts over warm bread and ruddy wine any day.

Because that's what we can control: our facts. Magic is beyond our control; of another world that we haven't spent enough time in to feel comfortable there. But that's just the point: faith in Christ is all about living into another world; or rather, the true world; where the grass is so real, it can cut your feet (as it does in C.S. Lewis' heaven in his account 'The Great Divorce.') .

"My kingdom is not of this world..." Jesus tells Pilate. The crowd chants for their agenda (the assassination of a God-Son they cannot contain). Weary Pilate just wants a little peace and quiet for a change, and a little truth. But even in Jesus' beaten body, magic is already at work that is going to mystically sweep away all of sin (the sin of the crowd that wants him dead, of the betrayer, of the denier, of the bystander-friend who wants to do something but is paralyzed by fear) and open the wardrobe to a magic kingdom, where peace is had, where companions and neighbors find endless joy in serving one another, where evil is easy to spot and where the King is trustworthy, compassionate and just and brings order.

And every Sunday, the preacher dances between lunacy and comfort; between the fairy tale that men and women (who "share the sad beliefs of this world") have forgotten but come every Sunday to hear and at the same time, speaking encouragement to those same tired souls. And all the while, this preacher himself fights to remember that he too is a child and that the bread and wine and Storybook and hospital rooms right there in his hands are magical; visible signs of the holy fairy tale that have punched through the veil; that has more to with the real way of things than reality itself.

Smoldering

"So you open the Good Book
you thumb to the common lection
and you sit down to read
your expectations minimal - what with your busy week
a few half baked prayers for illumination
waft to heaven like smoke from a smoldered fire."

~ excerpt from a Sermon by the Rev. Ralph
"Preaching - Impossible, Indispensable"

The excerpt is from a sermon that had preachers lined up in its sights. But I found its words penetrated deeper than my own practice of sermon writing.

I can't get this image out of my head. And I'm learning to pay attention when that happens. Just like I'm learning to pay attention to unexpected tears. Frederick Buechner talked about those tears that ambush us, unbidden, entirely un-manufactured or conjured. The moments when a word or image snags us to a jarring halt, like how fish must feel when the irresistible morsel suddenly becomes a lethal hook, and life turns upside down as it's yanked out of the normal world and into something that steals its breath away.

The thing about the images that leap into our hands, flailing like a trout, or the tears that crash like waves upon our cheeks, is that they penetrate with surgical precision deep into our lives, to the stuff in our souls that lives underground; our secret-est hopes and most essential needs that we mostly don't have words to articulate or even know about ourselves. But suddenly, a word or a hope that is uttered by another becomes that shaft of light into the bottom of the well, our eyes (so accustom to darkness) stung and dazzled when our expectations are sliced cleanly in two.

"...everything exposed by the light becomes visible,
for everything that becomes visible is light.
Therefore it says,

"Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you."
~Ephesians 5:13-14

"Wake me up inside, Wake me up inside
Call my name and save me from the dark.
Bid my blood to run, before I come undone,
Save me from the nothing I've become."
~'Bring Me to Life' Evanescence

So what is smoldering deep down that such an image would tear me asunder? I don't despair becoming "nothing" (as the lyrics state). But the melodic rock music that cries out with such psalmic vigor stirs something deep in me as well; the longing for more; a faith deeply in tune with the fiercely joyful melody of the Spirit; a life electrified into action, playfully daring for the sake of the Song. So the fear is not in being "nothing", but "nothing much."

I've been told that Augustine says (somewhere) that hungering after God is itself a gift. Whoever might have said it, there is truth there that I feel in my bones. It's like the way that faith in Christ is also a gift, the way that Christ is both High Priest and Flawless Lamb.

"So, surrender the hunger to say you must know.
Have the courage to say, 'I believe.'
And the power of paradox opens your eye
and blinds those who say they can see."
~'God's Own Fool' Michael Card

I hope I'm aware enough of my generation's (and my personal) longing for existential truth: to actually experience the praise and joy of God as a thrilling rush of gratitude (did King David not dance like a wild man?). But where is the peace in pursuing it? Or more importantly, where does it become not about me? Is being known enough? Shouldn't it be? What is the place where the surreal shoulders-up against our "real"?

O God, you are my God, I seek you,
my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,
beholding your power and glory.

Because your steadfast love is better than life,
my lips will praise you.
~Psalm 63:1-3

If the psalmists, both in Scripture and today, can long for this, can't we dare to engage the dangerous business of hope for it too?

Stolen Property

I made off with this powerful quote from a good friend's blog:

"The tragedy of life and of the world is not that men do not know God; the tragedy is that, knowing Him, they still insist on going their own way."

William Barclay (1907-1978)
The Revelation of John [1961] (Vol.II)

Incidentally, you should check it out: rentveil.blogspot.com

Sayings Worth Remembering

"An educated people are
... easy to lead
... difficult to enslave...
... and a joy to govern." ~ origin unknown


"A man may carry the whole scheme of Christian truth in his mind from boyhood to old age without the slightest effect upon his character and aims. It has had less influence than the multiplication table." ~ J. G. Holland (1819-1881)


"We spend our lives, not enjoying the things we've bought, but paying for them."
~ a colleague in ministry