Is this not the fast I choose? Ash Wednesday 2023
Tonight, as we step into Lent and also into a season through which we as a community will explore what it means to choose again and again become followers of Jesus, I want to focus our attention on the passage read from Isaiah.
This is from a portion of the sweeping Isaiah text known as Third Isaiah. It addresses a community that is returning from its exile in Babylon to a very broken society in Judah.
Jerusalem is mostly rubble, and there has grown up a desperate and divided community – a community divided socially, economically, and religiously.
In my mind’s eye, it looks dystopian, dusty, damaged, drab, desolate, and dangerous but still alive.
Into this tension, a prophet’s voice challenges the people.
Your worship and your ritual matter not one bit if the hungry are not fed.
Your fasting leaves others poor and hungry. That is not righteousness.
A righteous fast is not about your deprivation or any particular law so much as it is about raising up the oppressed. Can you take the food from your plate and feed it to one who is hungry in the street?
Can you use your freedom and privilege so another can experience freedom and privilege too?
Does your shelter serve as a shelter for others in need?
These, these are the practices that change the world.
These, these are the practices that bless God’s creation.
These practices bless each of us as well.
In a small group of relative newcomers to Faith Church that I am leading right now, we a discussion last week about giving and generosity. The curriculum had us focused on how we might adjust our attitudes and our lives to begin thinking about giving 10% of our income away and saving 10% of our income – sort of in keeping with the Wesleyan principle of earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can.
But the group, hungry for more, asked a pressing question.
How do we honor God even with the 80% that remains? The 80% on which we also live?
How do we spend money in ways that don’t harm others? In ways that don’t oppress? In ways that actually support living wages and healthcare and affordable housing and safe passage for those in harms way?
I hear in those questions, those longings, the deep desire to be part of God’s justice, part of God’s Kin-dom come here on earth as in heaven. I hear in those questions a deep desire to know God, to follow Jesus. I hear in those questions great hope for a thriving future.
In this Lenten season, I pray that we will remember the prophet’s words again and again, understanding how they would have shaped Jesus’ words and actions and ministry as well.
Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?
Is it not 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?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am. If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.
May we choose a fast that makes a difference.
May our fast serve the Kin-dom of God.
May we choose again and again to follow Jesus along the way.
Even the way of emptying ourselves.
May it be so.
Amen.
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