Lent 2008: Fasting
A sermon preached by Revd Michael Fuller
Looking at me you might be forgiven for wondering what I know about fasting, given my overweight condition? Well I have to say that however overweight I might look, I consider fasting to be a much-neglected spiritual discipline.Fasting has Biblical origins; at Bethel the Israelites wept before the Lord and fasted for a day and other Biblical fasts lasted for periods from three to forty days. The connection between fasting and health was realised in Isaiah's time, when God promised: "Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly".
While fasting is often associated with spiritual cleansing, devotion, or self-discipline, we can easily forget how healthy fasting can be. As a medical book I was reading in the week puts it, "Fasting helps unclog the system, and also eliminates poison from it... Modern research, ancient healers and more importantly the word of the body's Designer - God - indicate that one benefit of fasting is healing."
Fasting also focuses the mind and may benefit our mental health. Spiritually speaking, fasting helps us focus on God, to pray, to remove from our cluttered imaginations the cares of the world.
Fasting can also help conquer addictions, but it is physically and spiritually demanding to do this, which is probably why fasting is an alien concept to so many people today.
Have you ever been in a situation where there is no food, and you are really starving? No? Nor have I.
Even if we choose to fast, we are making a choice, which can be undone. But many people have hunger imposed upon them by natural disaster or political injustice, or both. While we have probably not experienced this, it is quite likely that we have seen it on the television: we will have come face to face with the genuinely starving.
The combination of our failure to experience anything more than a slight hunger pang through having skipped a meal, and our media encounters with starvation has left us unaware of the benefits of hunger.
Hunger is a desire, and as such can be a spiritual asset.
It instils in us a desire to be filled, to be satisfied, and while our need for food is God-given, so too is the satisfaction of that need.
The same is true on the spiritual level: physical hunger, if experienced, gives an insight into spiritual hunger, the desire for God. Between being hungry and being satisfied comes the fast, in which we experience a kind of pre-hunger.
It is not dangerous, nor debilitating, but it can help us focus our minds
and bodies on God. Fasting can help us hunger and thirst for other things,
such as justice, peace, righteousness and personal holiness.
As I said at the beginning of Lent, and we need to remember that Lent
began as a period of fasting, fasting is not always about 'giving something
up', it is better thought of as an attempt to remove that which comes
between us and God.
This can be helpful on two levels. Firstly, food may obstruct our spiritual life, by diverting us from prayer, reflection, or good works. This diversion may be psychological, physical or even monetary. Alcohol serves as a good example: it can consume our money; time and mental ability to do things that we might otherwise have done and which might have glorified God. I do not mean simply that a Saturday hangover can prevent one going to church on Sunday morning, but it has been known to happen! An obvious example perhaps, but other indulgences can be substituted here.
Secondly, food hinders our spirituality when it is so readily available as to render hunger irrelevant or unnecessary.
Compared with raging hunger, our other desires are but shadows of need, artificial experiences that hover above and conceal the chasm of physical starvation into which we only stare through a glass screen darkly.
Without fasting we can only imagine what it must be like to have deep needs, and since we soon forget to imagine, it can be helpful to fast in Lent (or at other times), in order to bring these dimensions of our created existence into focus, for the purpose of prayer, reflection, gratitude and repentance. But as Jesus tells us, this is not something to be ostentatious about, but is a spiritual discipline that behoves privacy and reticence.
For ultimately, fasting points us towards our primary hunger: the hunger for God, whose righteousness feeds us and whose kingdom we need to seek more earnestly, more intently and with more determination.
© Fr Michael Fuller: February 2008