February 14, 2024 at Saint Eugene Catholic Church in Oklahoma City, OK
Joel 2: 12-18 + Psalm 51 + 2 Corinthians 5: 20-6: 2 + Matthew 6: 1-6, 16-18
Prayer, Fasting, Almsgiving: the traditional and common practices we observe in the coming forty days. Prayer and Almsgiving hardly need any commentary. For one thing, we ought to be doing that all the time, not just in Lent. But when it comes to fasting, we’re not very clear about that, and actually have not shown any great enthusiasm for figuring it out much less putting it into practice. We live in a world of plenty. In fact, our world is more than plentiful, it is downright wasteful. There is enough food thrown away in the back of every grocery store to feed a small city for a week. What is not sold is destroyed.
If you have ever tried to explain Catholic regulations on fasting to a Muslim, a Jew, or a Hindu, you would be laughed at. Somehow “one full meal and two lesser ones not equaling it” does not cut it in the eyes of other world religions. Their idea of fasting is closer to what our doctor has in mind when he tells you to fast before coming in for a blood test.
I would like to suggest that this might be the year for us all to rediscover a valuable spiritual life practice and stop playing games with it. Too often we think of fasting as a kind of self-punishment for sin or as a way to earn forgiveness. The problem with that thinking is that it ignores the fact that forgiveness has already been granted. It is not earned. We tend to think that God will love us if we change, but God loves us so that we can change. Fasting, my friends, is about liberation. It is not about suffering.
It is not helpful to think about or practice fasting without prayer and alms giving. In fact, without them, fasting is more like going on a diet.
Here’s an example. A second century mystic writes: “In the day on which you fast you will taste nothing but bread and water; and having added up the price of the food that day which you might have eaten, you will give to a widow, or an orphan, or to someone in want.”
In just a few moments all of us will reach back into the earliest days of our faith tradition and accept a mark that must mean more than tell other that you came to church today. We cannot do this because we always have. To do so for those silly and shallow reasons makes a mockery of what we are about and the sacred season we are beginning. If you accept these ashes, you must accept what it means and what goes with it: Prayer, Fasting, and Alms giving.
If prayer, fasting, and works of justice called, “Alms Giving” form the core of Christian life, they must be so through the whole year. These forty-days are a time of testing, improving, and renewing these practices so essential for Christian life. Friday is for us the day of our salvation. It is now and always has been the day of all days when we fast celebrating our freedom from sin and our freedom for life with Christ. The most simple and consistent observance of Friday is the absence of food until evening, or one meal a day as simple as possible.
We are not a body and a soul, two separate things. We are one reality. What is good for my soul is good of my body and vice versa. Fasting nurtures humility and reminds us that we are dependent on our Creator for all good things. And, fasting is marked by moderation. Like everything else in the spiritual life, it is not about doing it all or doing it right. It is just about doing it in a spirit of faith and love.
In every culture and religion in history, fasting has been an instinctive and essential language in human communication with God. Let us not be the ones who forget the reasons, the rituals, and the words.