Repentance… fasting… confession… all of these are words that swirl around us as we begin this church season of Lent… we think of this season as a time of giving up things we enjoy, of thinking about the ways we have fallen short of God’s image that lives within us… and perhaps some of that is true… certainly, it is a time to think about Jesus’ time in the desert and his focus on bringing the kingdom of God to Earth… but we have to be honest, that most of us, need this yearly reminder to turn away from the things that cause us spiritual if not actual physical death, and turn our lives and our souls back toward God who is the source of life…
Jesus and Isaiah before him, seem to be critical of pious practices… not because those practices aren’t helpful or good, but because it’s easy to hide behind them and turn them into shallow practices that look good, but have no real meaning… Fasting, confession, prayers… are all good things, only if they actually help to move us to action… after his exile to the desert, Jesus did not resume life as usual; the time he spent in prayer prepared him for the years of ministry ahead of him… he wasn’t just the carpenter’s son anymore; he knew that the kingdom of God was now realized, and it was his to usher in… he received strength and purpose in that time in the desert, and his fasting and prayers led him to act… hear again the words from Isaiah: “ Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord? 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?” Today, the great fast begins… we are exiled into a spiritual desert, forced to realize our place in the grand scheme of God’s mind… compared with God we are of little matter; and yet, God has loved and chosen us to be God’s people… we come together today, to realize that we are dust… and yet even as we stare into the face of our own mortality, we are marked once again with the sign of eternal life… the cross… marked in ash and oil to signify that even though we die… we shall live… because Jesus lives… even in this time, Easter joy reaches back to remind us to whom it is we belong… and to whom all our prayers, confessions, and fasts are directed towards…. they are the ways that we desperately seek to be in relationship with the God of love… and if we spend this time well, we may be asked to do some very hard work…letting the oppressed go free, clothing those who are naked, fighting against injustice, sharing our food with those who are hungry… this is what our prayers and our fasting should lead us to… this is the sacrifice that God wants from us… the sacrifice of our time, our pride, our resources… God desires us to love from deep within us, from those places of pain and discomfort… because that is where God loves us from… from a cross, a place of deep and lasting pain… and we know… that even those places of deep pain can become places of new life…
So beloved, come today and be exiled… let us be exiled into a place of hunger and thirst, realizing that God’s Holy Spirit will care for us, just as it cared for Jesus…let us know deep in our souls that what we truly hunger for is God… let us be transformed by this time, even as the cross we wear upon us this day is transformed from a symbol of death into a symbol of life. If we turn towards God, pray, fast, truly, and honestly fast with our whole being… God will be there to fill us with love… and then we, like Jesus will leave the desert to act to help bring the kingdom of God to Earth. Bless the Lord, oh my soul… and all that is within me, bless his holy name.