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

Lost and Found

I've never really seen the show, except for that one time I caught a bit of it while channel surfing. I'm sure it's a very good show and that I would probably like it if I invested myself into it. It has happened with other well-written shows.

In the last two weeks, much has been lost in our church. Two dearly loved servants of the church; quiet servants making bold impacts in the lives around them, yet no longer in the kitchen to help pour tea at potlucks. Another dear woman lost her memory, confused and angry that her family would take her to receive the care she doesn't know she needs. Yet another losing her appetite due to cancer treatment. All of us, losing another moment... and another... and another... as time slowly plods (or races swiftly by).

The coin. The sheep. The son. Life is turned upside down to find that which is lost. But getting lost can be so much better. Getting lost in a television show, in one's own political opinions, in the heat of the moment, are all much better than being challenged to do what is right or be a good steward or serve someone other than ourselves.

But being found means someone bothered to do the looking. Being found means we're reinvested, part of the flock again, a restored child that has to go back to doing the chores. The object in question (time, coin, sheep, son, et al.) must have some value to the Finder.

What if we too become finders, recovering lost time, finding time to rescue dying relationships, finding a space to meet God daily, finding the courage to run out to greet grace, finding the resolve to restore a sense of purpose to waking-up every morning. Our lives can be spent either way: either in losing or in finding. And only one of them leads to rejoicing.

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So he told them this parable: "Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.' Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.

Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.' Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents."

Then Jesus said, "There was a man who had two sons. 12 The younger of them said to his father, 'Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.' So he divided his property between them. A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living.... But when he came to himself he said, 'How many of my father's hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands." ' So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him....."

Luke 15:3-21

Simple Gifts

Bold voices sang the National Anthem to conclude the ceremonies. As they did so, the wind blew outside. The American flag which hung out of sight outside the window where I was, fluttered into view, as if those chest-fulls of air were blowing down the Blue Ridge Mountains and into Floyd. The winds of change indeed.

30 minutes before, tremendously talented musicians such as Itzhak Pearlman and Yo-yo Ma played John Williams' arrangement of the old hymn, "Simple Gifts." Watching their fingers defy the bone-numbing chill, I found it ironic that it would require more than simple skills to play the extremely difficult music well.

And yet that seemed to be the theme: simple gifts into grand designs. A black man with humble beginnings writes the pages of history that will never be forgotten. Those singers, musicians, pastors and poets, their pneuma-blown gifts faithfully to transform a wintery day into a historic moment. It all began somewhere for them. And it does for us.

"To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good." (1st Corinthians 12:7). History-changing days are born from simple beginnings. We might not make national news, but we could see the world around us transformed if we might take our simple gifts and use them well.

Working the Angles

I'm not particularly passionate about politics. I don't trust them. However, I do believe in responsible citizenship as an important part of faith in Christ ("give to Caesar...") So with all the hubbub around the presidential election (which bubbled up over two years ago!), I decided to do some research and invited Facebook friends to offer some view points.

One friend pointed me to another discussion already shared. I found it some of the talk to be a wonderfully succinct distinction between Republican and Democratic motives. It helped me clarify some of the broad brushstrokes of the two primary parties. With permission, I've included it here:

"It’s ultimately a difference of world view. The reason Republicans and Democrats have such a hard time talking to each other is they have such different narratives about what’s important and how the world should work – and both world views are pretty self-consistent once you’re inside them. It’s just like a devout person and an atheist trying to have a conversation about religion – far from being able to convince the other of the truth of one’s viewpoint, they quickly find it almost impossible to even understand what each other are saying because their world views are just built on entirely different foundations.

The Republican narrative is of the independent and self-supporting individual with traditional old-fashioned values. If you buy into this narrative then you resist government regulation of industry because it restricts the entrepreneurs & markets which make our economy go and diminishes the freedom and ability of individuals to achieve that independent and self-supporting American dream. You’re not particularly worried about the effect of industry on the environment or society because mostly the free market will devise good solutions anyway before there’s too much of a problem, and you resist taxation – especially of businesses and their owners – because it fuels the government regulation (tampering with market forces) of which you disapprove because it slows our economy and job-creation and obstructs the free markets which could actually solve our problems better than big government, and tends to fund a culture of dependence which is at odds with your self-supporting values. You worry that the decay of traditional values as the basis for our society would in time erode and destroy it, and are therefore more than happy to turn to religious values as a blueprint for shoring up our civil society. Finally from the independent & self-supporting narrative comes your foreign policy of aggressively knocking down threats from the outside world – and resisting an unrestricted flow of immigrants who would in essence steal the advantages of our society from us without earning their place in it and by not sharing our traditional American values might undermine them.

The Democratic narrative is of members of the community supporting each other, and the idea that ultimately the community must come first before any particular individual. From this ultimate value springs your tolerance for government regulation because it prevents entrepreneurs and industries from getting out of hand, making profits for individuals at the community’s expense, especially by passing along hidden environmental or social costs to the community at large while pocketing a short term gain. You’re willing to be taxed because this is “paying your share” of the community upkeep, and think the wealthier and more successful members of the community (in particular rich business owners) should be paying a proportionately larger share – and the slower growth of business and markets which inevitably results you see as more than made up for by the social benefits. Out of your narrative of community also comes a sense of indignation when one segment of the community profits at the expense of another or sets itself up as dominant over another: this leads both to your championing of minority causes large and small and your resistance to one society group’s “traditional values” (even if it is the majority group) being elevated over another’s. Traditional values often sound arbitrary and non-rational, and should be allowed gradually to erode and be replaced by the wisdom of the community – through science and research when possible. Possibly you also perceive yourself as a member of one or more disadvantaged or minority groups, whether racial, religious, gender, or otherwise, which leads you both to be more willing to discard some or many traditional American values (since they aren’t yours), and to identify with the struggles of other similarly disadvantaged groups.

The narrative of the community also extends to foreign policy, where you see it as most important to make friends in the world community (even sometimes at the expense of our short term interests). And you see potential immigrants as fellow members of the world community who deserve a chance to succeed as much as we do and who would contribute productively to our society if only given that chance.

Try to put yourself inside of either world view and you’ll find it pretty self consistent. And both of the ultimate foundations (valuing the individual and valuing the community) are attractive ideals which have been with us for a long time. The rest of the political scene is just an ongoing power struggle between those two camps – in particular the propaganda battle to attract the “swing voters”, the ones who are either sufficiently torn between the two world views (e.g. the atheist wealthy business owner, the devout environmentalist) to be influenced or haven’t thought enough about their world views to have picked a side and can perhaps be swayed by slogans, feel-good appeals, etc." ~ Brian Reynolds of Baltimore

The Best Policy

“Your second year is harder than your first.”

This is what a close friend said to my wife and I when he and his wife asked how married life was going. I was not at all irritated for what might seem like a harsh or jaded forecast. He did not say it as one who pretended to know everything about marriage. He simply spoke as one who had walked the trail a while and who loved us enough to speak the truth. In fact, I loved my friend more for saying it.

Honesty is a rare commodity. Or perhaps it is not so much rare as it is neglected. Unspoken truths can pile up like dusty boxes, cluttering our hearts.

Mostly, helpful honesty goes unspoken because “I don’t want to hurt their feelings.” It is very easy to confuse “I’m hurting them” with the more accurate notion, “The truth can hurt”. But that’s just the thing: the truth is true no matter how we feel telling it. The hurt of honesty can be the antiseptic sting of cleaning a wound. If you see your sister harming herself because she has not weighed the consequences of her actions or because she simply is unaware of how her actions are hurting others, shouldn’t something be said regardless of her reaction? If it were you, wouldn’t you want to know?

People are afraid of honesty’s sting, however, because it can most certainly become a weapon when not employed in a spirit of love or in concern for another’s welfare. I knew one person who refused to restrain his harmful opinions about others with the throw-away phrase, “Well, I’m just being honest.” Actually, he was being opinionated, unkind, and rude. It was not spoken to offer to help but harm. But at the same time, no one called him on it.

When one is on the receiving end of honesty (even the constructive kind), often one immediately feels attacked. A common, knee-jerk reaction to honesty is to defend oneself. Criticism threatens something important to us and we naturally rush to shield it from harm. Honesty moves directly toward our emotional treasures and we are left little time to react. Instinct usually takes over and we simply brace for impact. So again, we are afraid to deal in it.

And yet, honesty can be a tool of profound freedom. Honesty sheds light and opens the shutters into one's heart. It reveals things hidden from view. The absence of honesty is obscurity. Dishonesty breeds obscurity in that it blurs or distorts the truth. Our perception of a given subject is shaped by how honest or dishonest we are about the matter. Unhappiness in marriage persists because of a lack of honest communication that confesses hurt and a refusal to receive news of harm we have caused. Without that honesty, things fester, become infected until the sinew and tissue are damaged of one's marriage feels beyond repair. Nothing left to do but amputate. Honesty has the power to wipe away obscurity; to clean out the infection. And with that better information gained from improved vision, we are more prepared to weather the difficulties.

Of course, the effectiveness of honesty is directly proportionally to one’s willingness to receive it. As I said before, the instinctive reaction to honesty is defense. However, when we trust someone enough to know that their assessment is not meant in cruelty but shared in a spirit of love and concern, we can slow down enough to receive their thoughts as a gift. If you had something hanging from your nose or you were experiencing a revealing wardrobe malfunction that you had yet to notice, would you not want your friend to be direct enough to (privately) draw your attention to the oversight? Or would you get offended that they noticed what was glaringly obvious to everyone else in the room?

Perhaps the most difficult honesty to handle is being honest with oneself; to be willing to look in the mirror and accept what is there, both the well-groomed parts and the hidden warts and defects we hide from the world. As Christians, this is a fundamental practice (we call it "reflection"), not only for our brothers and sisters in the faith, but for our own spiritual well-being as well. We must be willing to be honest enough with our short-comings to acknowledge our deepest need for Jesus. Until we are, why bother with Jesus at all?

It is no throw-away title when Jesus calls himself “the Way, the Truth and the Life.” Jesus’ life is punctuated by moments of blunt, yet life giving honesty. He is not afraid to tell the Pharisees how their legalistic religiosity has imprisoned the lives of the people in spiritual check-lists and not freed them to live with God (Matthew 23:1-7). The admonition to “take the log out of your own eye” is done so that “you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.” (Matt. 7:3) We are Jesus to one another when we tell the truth in love.

Any life-giving freedom born from honesty is a testimony to Jesus, Himself, and the freedom He longs to give from all the forms of sin and death. Jesus defeats anything that imprisons. He removes any obscurity or dishonesty that seeks to undo. “For freedom Christ has set us free,” says Paul. Once we can become more comfortable with being honest with ourselves, we can accept Jesus’ honest criticism of the things we continue to do that keep us away from knowing Him more. Because Jesus wants to give us freedom, He points His finger at the things we need to change (not necessarily a change from bad to good, but also good to better!). Jesus’ brand of honesty is never about harming, but pruning the dead places to make room for more life and growth. And once we’ve learned how from Jesus’ gracious hand, we’ll find the courage and freedom to share the gift of constructive honesty with those around us.

I’m glad our friend loved us enough to speak the truth about marriage. And I know that, whatever trials may away us, we are more prepared for our second year of marriage because of it.

I am often amused at the ways followers of Jesus try to “Christianize” some of the most absurd things. I once owned a small tin of “Testamints”: powerful tiny breath mints with a Bible verse on the wrapper. T-shirts and refrigerator magnets are popular places to present passages of Scripture. One of my favorites is the “Buddy Christ”: a Jesus action-figure who has a big smile on his face and is giving you the thumbs-up.

But what are we saying about the Gospel when we equate Jesus with toys? Can the story of God, Creator of the entire universe, manifest in Jesus Christ for the salvation of the world, be contained on the side of a box of breath mints or a fish on the back of a car? While such instances make me smile, it also makes me concerned to have the hope of the world reduced to bite-sized form.

I don’t think such things are necessarily evil (I own a t-shirt that says “Jesus is my Homeboy”!) The modern tendency in our busy lives is to rush through the Jesus-thing. The assumption is that slapping the name of Jesus on something, like a bumper sticker, automatically makes it something that is worth God’s time or gives Him glory. Busy-ness rears its ugly head, prayers get rushed, sick and lonely people go unvisited, all the while trusting He’ll be the kind of parent that will gush with pride no matter what shoddy work we thrust His way.

C.S. Lewis is attributed as once saying that the world doesn’t need more Christian writers, but more good writers that are Christian. I do believe Jesus gratefully receives any sincere offering we humbly lay before Him. There’s no chart that says your gift must be “this” good (which is good news since the world wants nothing more than to compare how “good” you are to others). But should His graciousness excuse us from giving Christ our absolute best? Shouldn’t Jesus be our first commitment instead of receiving only the leftovers of our time and energy? Doesn’t this mean that we can glorify God when we teach, repair, cook, farm, help customers, stock shelves, write sermons, drive trucks to the very best of your abilities?

I was in the marching band in high school. Whenever we performed our entire show from start to finish (at practice, a football game, competition, etc.), the director held a stopwatch. If he liked what he saw and heard, he’d run the stopwatch. As soon as something was done incorrectly, he would stop it, starting it again when the show was good. So at the end of the show, he would tell us how much time we had accumulated. We might win trophies in our competition or not, but the only score we really cared about was whether we’d all performed well enough to receive a higher time. We weren’t concerned with how we matched up to the other bands (at least, not much) but with beating ourselves. As Christian, shouldn’t we too be striving to present a better offering to our God; the very best we have?

The writer in Hebrews got this notion when he challenged his readers: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.” Jesus demonstrates a life in which He gave everything to do the will of His Father, the best he could. We certainly don’t have to be Jesus. But if he gave everything to love and save us, shouldn’t we try as hard we can too?

One Last Night

Every Wednesday morning, about a dozen men gather around a table to eat a substantial breakfast and bow their heads together. Laughter and fellowship is had over the food. Then more serious conversations arises concerning names: the names of people suffering from stage 3 cancer, the debilitating effects of MS, or coping as best they can with the death of their mother. There's never a shortage of names. Usually there are more than the previous week. Every Wednesday, they talk about death and the people who daily stare it in the face. And together, they humbly listen for God in each other's prayers, for comfort, guidance and hope.

It's hard to stand up from such a table and not have some day-dream about your own untimely demise. You wonder how you would react if a lingering headache turned into the blindsiding pronouncement that you have a brain tumor. Or if an upset stomach turned into an unexpected heart attack. So many of the names we pray for are curled up in bed with time-bombs, waiting for the morning when their legs refuse to slide out of bed.

Mostly, we healthy folk take for granted the days we are able to grumble at the alarm clock, then bathe, feed and go to the bathroom without assistance from someone else. But I wonder what we would do if we knew death was around the corner, perhaps even tomorrow. What would we do with our last hours? Try to do dinner with those we love most and put into words years of unspoken affection and gratitude? Attempt to accomplish those goals we kept putting off because we were just "too busy"?

Jesus did what He always did: love and serve those around him.

"...Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. ... during supper Jesus...got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him..." (John 13:1-5, NRSV)

There Jesus sat with a dozen men around a table. I can't imagine there wasn't laughter and fellowship over dinner. But more serious matters rose when the doomed Son of God stands to take off his robe in order to clothe himself in humility.

I've heard it said that we should live each day as if it were our last. This isn't a proposal to daily think about death but instead, to think about life and how we live each day, quieting the conversation long enough to listen for God's voice.

I always stand from the table thinking of myself. Christ's stands thinking of the others. Would it take the threat of death before we began loving and serving those around us as we always meant to do?

Or are we just too busy?