Bitesize Catechesis - Fasting and Abstinence

‘Bitesize Catechesis’

I wonder what the words fasting and abstinence mean to you.

Perhaps what Muslims do in Ramadan springs to mind; and how impressive that is amongst the devout, fasting between sunrise and sunset and breaking the fast with prayer and communal celebration.

It seems that Christians have long drifted from the ascetic sense of what fasting and abstinence are.

Although that’s not true for all Christians, certainly outside Western Europe.

I was once very chastened when a student at the University of Surrey, a Jordanian Christian, asked when English Christians begin fasting before Christmas. That prompted a fair bit mirth. After all, the Advent fast is less about preparation for a great feast, and more about mince pies, mulled wine, parties and over-indulgence. The secularised Christmas fast is ‘Dry January’ and ‘Veganuary’.

What she described was the Little Fast - in Advent and before Lent, the Sundays known as Septuagesima, Quinquagesima and Quadragesima -of abstaining from meat, and then the Great Fast – Lent - which is a meat free, dairy free diet.

That sounds very remote, but there are remnants of it still. After all, we say pancakes are eaten the day before Lent because they use up all the ingredients that are going to be given up; except the next day we carry on as normal.

Interestingly for Anglican Christians the same rigour is picked up in the Book of Common Prayer 1662 that speaks of days of fasting and abstinence.

And boy, is it rigorous.

I have done a rough tally that there are 122 fast days which include the eve of feast days, the 40 days of Lent, Ember days and every Friday of the year, unless it’s Christmas Day.

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That says something about practices of fasting. But let’s just get our terms clear first.

Fasting and abstinence. But which one’s which?!

Both refer to renunciation, the act of giving something up. Fasting applies to the amount we eat; abstinence to what we eat.

In other words, fasting is going easy on something; abstaining is giving up it up all together.

So when I fast I reduce the intake of all foodstuffs; but when I abstain I remove a particular foodstuff from my diet.

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So we’ve thought about fasting practices, what they are and how people might do them. But why do Christians fast?

We fast because Jesus teaches about it.

When Jesus teaches about it he’s absolutely clear about three key points:

1.      We only fast in his absence, as part of our expectation for his coming and return; (Matthew 9.14, 15; Luke 2.37);

2.      Fasting is not an excuse for showing off, a ‘look how marvellous I am’ approach; it’s about our interior journey with God; (Matthew 6.16, 17);

3.      Fasting doesn’t earn you any heavenly brownie points unless accompanied by penitence and sorrow for sin; (Luke 18.12).

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So where does this leave us? Is it all too overwhelming? How might fasting connect with us and we with it?

One response is for people to say that they are not going to give up something for Lent but instead take something up, a good work, for example.

Perhaps fasting sounds too old-fashioned or traditional or demanding. Fasting and abstinence can sound uncomfortable in relation to eating disorders, body image issues or controlling habits. Certainly health should be taken into account around fasting practices, especially if you’re taking medication.

Taking something up sounds much more active; you’re doing something. The danger is that we take refuge in doing rather than being.

Fasting is a way of doing something without activism. In other words what we do is give up control by relinquishing a particular pleasure so that we come to appreciate what we have.

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I hope that fasting becomes less of a remote practice, because in that way we become a less controlling, less self-indulgent church and a church that turns a way from self-preoccupation and focuses on Christ.

And we can be creative. I know one 17 year old who has given up Instagram for Lent, and believe me that’s a life-changer for him! Another, 15 year old, is omitting lunch on Fridays; he’s doing that prompted by the impressive example of his Muslim friends, and he wants to reconnect with his own faith and its tradition.

So what might all this mean for you?

That’s for you to ponder. And as you do here are three final positives to consider:

1.      Fasting and prayer. Prayer is what gives ballast to fasting and abstinence; they’re empty practices unless accompanied by prayer: Jesus is abundantly clear about that. Fasting clarifies prayer, intensifies prayer and turns prayer away from ourselves and back to the heart of God. One practical way to combine fasting and prayer is to skip a meal and use that time to pray; fasting without prayer is a diet!

2.      Fasting and the body. The great thing about fasting is that it connects our bodies and spirit. When people talk about ‘spirituality’ it can be very removed from the body. And Christianity is nothing if it is not about body and spirit together. Our spirituality always has to be embodied in physical practice – fasting is a great example of that;

3.      Fasting and consumption.  Fasting gives a deep perspective on our relationship with food. Fasting is a great antidote to food waste and it gives us solidarity with the hungry because giving something up makes us appreciate it all the more. The fast God desires, says the prophet Isaiah is all about justice, freeing people and lifting the yoke from the poor; (Isaiah 58). One way to live this out is to give away the amount we would have spent on the meal we’ve omitted to give; that’s what our Lent lunch on 29^th March is about, as we give to the Bishop’s Lent Call for Zimbabwe.

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Fasting and abstinence: what it is, why we do it and how we do it. Happy Lent!

Lent: Into the wilderness

A sermon preached at Croydon Minster on the First Sunday of Lent, the reading were Genesis 2.15-17; 3.1-7; Romans 5.12-19; Matthew 4.1-11.

“One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’

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Lent has begun!

And we are taken in our gospel reading, for this first Sunday of Lent, to the Judean Wilderness, where ‘the Spirit led Jesus to be tempted by the devil’.

From the dust and ashes of Ash Wednesday, the solemn marking of the sign of the cross in ash upon our heads, we are taken into the dust, sand and grit of the Judean Wilderness.

In the Bible the wilderness is physically a barren place, but spiritually a fertile place.

The prophet Isaiah says ‘the wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the crocus’ (Isaiah 35.1):

Things can happen in the wilderness that can’t happen elsewhere, or at least, the contrast is seen more clearly.

The twinkle and beauty of a star is far more powerful in the darkness, than when a star shines in the daytime. We miss it!

So it is with the wilderness: where all is stripped away, so that nothing can impede one’s immediate experience of the deeper realities of life, exposed in all their starkness: what we truly depend on is revealed to us.

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For Jesus the forty days and forty nights in the wilderness culminate in the three temptations placed in front of him.

Temptations placed in front of him when he is at his lowest ebb: famished through fasting; windswept; sunburnt in the day; frozen at night; utterly exhausted.

The wilderness bespeaks the extremes of physical and spiritual experience. Indeed, the physical and spiritual are inseparable.

There’s no hiding place in the wilderness. And as we heard about Adam and Eve, the human propensity is to cover up, hide, ‘dissemble and cloak’, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it.

Jesus did not hide from the devil. He faced the devil and endured the temptations of being fed when famished, the temptation of being given security and safety in a hostile environment, the temptation of the allure of power: all which would be received if he would only turn away from God.

He was tempted as we are. But the depth of his relationship was God was such that he did not succumb.

A definition of sin is the fracturing of our relationship with God: in that Christ did not sin.

We will be tempted; temptation never goes away.

What Lent is about is schooling us in being able to name and to face down what fractures our relationship with God and begin to find ways to repair it.

In the temptations in the wilderness Christ reveals his fidelity to God and opens to us the possibility of living life without masks, life without being trapped in the power games and manipulations of so many human relationships.

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I have been to the Judean Wilderness, albeit, like many pilgrims in the Holy Land, I did as a passenger on an air-conditioned coach. For the modern-day pilgrim to the Holy Land the physicality of the wilderness is a very different experience from the experience of the People of Israel and indeed for Jesus.

One evening, on my most recent pilgrimage there, we were travelling from Jericho to Jerusalem. The lights of the Holy City were far away, but visible, and the coach pulled over at the side of the road so that we could see a Greek Orthodox Monastery that is built into a rock face above a dried-up wadi, a little stream. Just like the first monastics, known to us as the Desert Fathers, people like St Anthony of Egypt, those monks live out the wilderness experience of prayer and fasting.

But we needed to be in Jerusalem for Mass at a church there, and we were running late.

We stepped down from the coach and my mind was taken to the Temptations in the Wilderness and also to the book of Exodus which describes the movement of the People of Israel through the Wilderness of Sinai after their liberation from Egypt.

Their experience in the wilderness is a microcosm of our human condition with its ups and downs; our experience of closeness to God at times and distance at others.

The Israelites wandered in that wilderness for forty years. A migrant people: they marvelled at what God had done for them; and wrestled with what they were doing stuck wandering in the middle of nowhere. They drank from miraculous streams of water flowing in the desert; yet they grumbled about the lack of food, saying, ‘shall God prepare a table in the wilderness?’ (Psalm 78.20).

Speaking with our local guide we decided that rather than hurry to Jerusalem and perhaps be late to the service, we would celebrate the Eucharist there, by the roadside, in the wilderness.

It is perhaps one of the most beautiful masses at which I have ever presided. I had with me all we needed: bread, wine, the Bible. And so we found two large stones which we placed on top of each other which formed an altar about a foot high.

And there we celebrated the Eucharist. To answer the Israelites question: yes, God can prepare a table in the wilderness!

I read from Psalm 78 which narrates the people of Israel’s experience in the wilderness:

‘So God commanded the clouds above and opened the doors of heaven.

He rained down manna also upon them for to eat and gave them food from heaven.

So man did eat angels’ food for he sent them meat enough’. (Psalm 78.25)

And the gospel we read was the one we have read today. Hearing that gospel standing in the very wilderness where Jesus fasted forty days and forty nights sent a tingle down the spine. But it was more than that. Where we saw stones on the ground, we heard the words, ‘command these stones to become loaves of bread’.

There in the wilderness we ate the bread of angels in the Eucharist, and the reminder that we live ‘by every word that comes from the mouth of God’.

Here. Now. We come to eat the bread of angels. Into barren places God’s presence blossoms and we learn to be his people, once again.

Ash Wednesday: Taking Hold of Life

A sermon first preached at Croydon Minster on Ash Wednesday 6th March 2019.

‘Take hold of the life that really is life’ (1 Timothy 6.19)

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The season of Lent is, at its heart, a journey into Easter.

And that means it is a journey into

the mystery of Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection:

what is known as the Paschal Mystery.

And that takes us to the very heart of the mystery of faith:

            Christ has died,

            Christ is risen,

            Christ will come again.

The Paschal mystery shapes

            and defines

who we are as Christians.

Created out of dust,

like all humanity,

- of whom Adam is the representative figure -

God’s life, has been breathed

into our nostrils.

This breath,

            in Hebrew nephesh,

is the life breath that animates us

and gives us life

in Adam.

It is the Holy Spirit

breathed into us in the sacraments

            – baptism, Eucharist, confirmation and penance among them –

that gives us life in the New Adam,

Jesus Christ.

As St Paul says,

in a verse of the first letter to the Corinthians,

a verse we know as an ‘Easter Anthem’,

‘In Adam all die: even so in Christ shall all be made alive’ 1 Corinthians 15.22

‘Dust you are and to dust you shall return’.

            Those are words said in the Liturgy of Ash Wednesday,

            as the sign of the cross in ash is made on our foreheads.

‘Dust you are and to dust you shall return’.

We are not left in dust and ashes

– ‘turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ’ –

but rather in the dust and ashes

of human existence and awareness of mortality,

God’s breath gives life,

as he breathed over the Valley of Bones

            in Ezekiel’s vision

and animated them,

and brought them to life.

We are not left in dust and ashes,

            but given a new and glorious body

            within Christ’s body, the Church.

This is a journey, then, that confronts mortality,

            and faces it down.

Lent takes us from dust and ashes to new life in Christ.

This Lent here at this church we will spend some time in the company of the prophet Jonah.

Jonah is a deeply human character,

and the book of Jonah is a short and whimsical read of his ups and downs.

We might recognise parts,

of ourselves in Jonah.

Jonah is called by, but runs away

            from God.

In that flight

            Jonah is caught up in the storms

                        of life.

Jonah knows what life is like at rock bottom:

            ‘the waters closed in over me;

the deep surrounded me;

weeds were wrapped around my head’. (Jonah 2.5)

But Jonah knows redemption,

            scooped up by the great fish,

            in whose belly he was for three days.

Even after that miracle,

            he experiences bewilderment and anger

            when his own expectations

            and machinations of missionary zeal

            go awry.

In the end he finds shelter from God,

            a bush,

which then withers away

and Jonah is again angry

with God.

There is no neat resolution to Jonah’s story,

            and neither is there to ours.

Yet in the Gospels

Jesus speaks

            of the ‘sign of Jonah’ (Matthew 12.39; 16.4; Luke 11.29-30).

It is that sign that we have an opportunity to explore this Lent.

At risk of giving spoilers… this sign of Jonah

is about the call to repentance and amendment of life;

this sign is about hearing God’s call and claim on our lives;

this sign is about understanding mission

            to be God’s task

            in which we participate

not manufactured by ourselves;

this sign is about knowing how to navigate the depths of our experience;

this sign is about knowing our utter dependence

            on the mercy and grace of God.

St Paul says:

            ‘take hold of the life that really is life’ (1 Timothy 6.19).

The sign of Jonah

points us to God’s capacity

            in Christ

to scoop us up, die with him and be raised with him

in the waters of baptism and new life

so that we can

‘take hold of the life that really is life’

The sign of Jonah points us to a challenge.

The challenge is this

that we do not go through

and then end Lent

in dust and ashes,

like Jonah, grumpy and resentful,

but prepared, expectant and alert

to the purposes of God

            in our lives and in our world.

The Church,

in her great wisdom,

discerns that through

‘self-examination and repentance;

by prayer, fasting and self-denial;

and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word’

(Common Worship: Times and Seasons, The Liturgy of Ash Wednesday)

we can rise to this challenge

and come to celebrate Eastertide

by ‘taking hold of the life that really is life’

            in Christ:

our incarnate, crucified, risen and ascended Lord,

to whom be all honour, glory, and power

to the ages of ages.

Amen.