Empty or Filled?

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Matthew 6:16-24; Isaiah 58:1-9a

May 26, 2013 • Portage First UMC

VIDEO INTRO

Do you know any hypocrites? Now, don’t point fingers...because they might be pointing at you as well! We’re all a blend of saint and sinner, faithful and hypocrite, because there are always times we pretend to be something other than we are. The word “hypocrite” comes from a Greek word that refers to an actor. In the theater of the Roman world, actors would wear large masks to indicate the nature of their character; it’s still where we get the theater happy and sad masks. So the actor would hide behind a mask, augment his voice so that it could be heard in these huge amphitheaters, and pretend to be someone else (Vine’s, pg. 242). He was a “hypocrite.” Today, the word still refers to someone who pretends to be something or someone other than they are, someone who loves to be seen for what they are doing.

Jesus often talks about hypocrites. In fact, the word is only found in Matthew, Mark and Luke—mostly in Matthew. Fifteen times in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus describes a hypocrite—always as someone who pretends to be other than they are, or who is simply doing something for the show, for the attention. It’s the billionaire who donates a large sum of money and makes sure the news media is there to cover the donation. It’s the politician who makes whatever promises he or she has to make in order to get elected, and then doesn’t follow through when in office. It’s the religious leader who preaches grace and tolerance and then punches out a church member in the parking lot. And, in today’s Gospel, it’s the person who chooses to fast but wants to make sure everyone knows what he’s doing.

Today we’re continuing our series on “Connections,” seeking to find ways to connect with God. So far, we’ve talked about prayer as our first and most obvious connection, and we’ve also talked about holy conferencing or community and how in the way we interact we others we represent God, we connect with God and help others do the same. Then last week, I focused on confirmation and the ways the Holy Spirit works in our lives. I hope this week you’ve been surprised by his presence in some way. But there is another discipline that is often neglected, particularly in our culture, that helps us connect with our heavenly Father. And even if we do practice it, we often get it wrong. Sometimes, we use it draw attention to ourselves, or to try to manipulate God. But neither of those things are the reason we’re called to practice fasting. And we are called to practice it. Jesus says, “When you fast,” not “if you fast.” So what is the discipline of fasting? How does it help us connect with God? And how can we practice it? That’s our task this morning.

Fasting is, quite simply, going without. It is abstaining from something for some greater purpose. Now, there is only one fast commanded in the Old Testament, and that was to take place on Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement, the great day every year when the Jewish people make sacrifices for their sin. It’s the holiest day of the year. One person described it as sort of a “spiritual spring cleaning.” That day, according to Leviticus 16, they were to fast, to give up food in order to focus on God. Other fasts were put into place later in their history, and by Jesus’ time, fasting was connected to regular confession of sin. The Pharisees, those legalists that Jesus argued with so much, fasted twice a week, probably Monday and Thursday (Carson, “Matthew,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 8, pg. 175), and they put a lot of emphasis on this discipline God had not said a lot about. In fact, in a famous story Jesus tells about two men who go to pray, he pictures fasting twice a week as something the Pharisee brags to God about (Luke 18:12). But here in Matthew, Jesus exposes what it’s really about: they were more interested in people seeing how devoted they were to God. And so, they would let their hair and beard go unbrushed and be all tangled, and they would smear ashes on their faces so they would look dirty and unkempt (Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part One, pg. 62). So then, if someone came up to them and said, “Are you felling well?” They would respond, “Oh, I’m fine. I’m just fasting. I just want to draw closer to God. Don’t mind me.” And Jesus says if that’s what they are looking for, if they are fasting so they can be noticed by other people, then that’s all the reward they will get. They won’t connect with God; they won’t even really connect with other people. They will be noticed, and they’ll have to be content with the attention they get from people walking by (cf. 6:16).

So fasting is giving up something—which is the reason it’s not practiced much or well in our culture. We don’t believe we should be deprived of anything. If you don’t believe me, watch the fit some people throw when a store is out of something they want to buy. Or think about the massive credit card debt we have in this country. We believe we shouldn’t have to wait for anything. We should be able to get what we want when we want, and so we rack up debt in order to have everything. As of March 2013, Americans have $846.2 billion in credit card debt, an average of $7,073 per household. How long do you think that will take to pay off if we just pay the minimum amount? Many will never pay it off. We complain about the government’s debt, but they simply reflect the way we already live. We don’t like to go without, and so fasting is a cryptic practice to us. Even going without food, the traditional form of the fast, is a strange idea. We are an overweight people, not denying ourselves anything. I went to my cardiologist a couple of months back, and he sent in his med student to tell me I was fat. I had gained quite a bit over the winter. I’m working at walking it off, but most of our culture is not. According to the most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, 36% of American adults over 20 are obese—and, worse than that, 12% of children who are ages 2-5 are considered obese. We don’t do well with giving up anything—and we don’t even realize what impact that has on our spiritual lives. Fasting is not just a way to lose weight or to save money. Fasting is a way to connect with God.

But how? The point of fasting from anything is to clear out space in our lives so we will have room for God. It’s not that food is bad. Food is good. Food is a gift from God, as are other things we fill our lives with. It’s just that we often leave so little room for God. These other things take over our entire lives. For the ancients, fasting was an opportunity to demonstrate that they, not their bodies, were in control. As Richard Foster writes, fasting “dethrones the body as master and gives us authority over our body. We learn that cravings need not control us” (Foster, Life With God, pg. 159). And then, with the space that is created, we can listen and pray and spend time with God. When I was in seminary, my first year, we had a covenant group that met weekly, early in the morning—back when early morning meetings seemed to make sense! And we developed a list of spiritual practices we would each take part in. The point of the group meeting each week was to hold each other accountable, and one of those disciplines was fasting. We agreed to fast every Friday over the lunch hour and spend that time praying or reading Scripture or in some other way connecting with God. I did pretty good for the first few weeks, but I remember one Friday when I was particularly overwhelmed by the stresses of the quarter, and I was hungry, and a little grouchy, so I went back to our apartment over lunch, pulled all the shades down and fixed myself some lunch. About halfway through eating my lunch, there was a knock on the door, and when I pulled the blinds back and looked out, I saw that it was Rob, my next-door neighbor and fellow covenant group member. Busted! Drat! I let him in, and he could see my lunch, so I had to confess I had broken the covenant. And with a smile, Rob said, “Well, I just finished my lunch, too.” In that moment, we both were holding each other accountable, and we both realized we had missed a chance that week to connect with God by clearing out space in our lives for God to speak and for us to listen.

Jesus, however, is talking to his disciples about ways we can abuse or misuse the discipline of fasting, and one of the primary ways is when we make fasting all about us. That’s why Jesus talks about hypocrites. They look somber and draw attention to themselves (6:16), and more than that, they are busy storing up treasures on earth (6:19). They’re busy making sure they get noticed and get rewards here on earth. They’re more worried about what others think than what God thinks. And that’s a constant challenge for us, isn’t it? I mean, we can see those others. They can talk about us. They can post on our Facebook page and point out where we’ve missed it. There are still Pharisees around today who want to judge and critique and evaluate your relationship with God. There are still plenty of people around today who want to make sure they are “more holy” than you are, and often the way they do that is to tear others down so they can be lifted up. I would imagine you know exactly what I’m talking about. At various times, we are all the tear-er or the tear-ee, and really neither position feels all that good. What it results in is us trying to impress others, to prove our value, our worth, our spirituality. Look at me, we say through our actions, look how spiritual or religious or even Christian I am! I even fast! Jesus says if we simply store up treasures on earth, we’ll find them rotting away pretty soon. When we fast (or practice any other discipline) just to be noticed, then that “notice” is all we get. We’ll never get a real connection with God.

There are times, though, we seek a connection that is not Biblical, because sometimes we only fast to try to manipulate God. Isaiah, the Old Testament prophet, called the people to account on this very issue. Isaiah says to shout aloud the message he’s about to speak; he doesn’t want anyone to miss it. “Do not hold back,” he says. “Raise your voice like a trumpet” (58:1), and then he proceeds to talk about the people’s rebellion. Rebellion? Really? He starts with what sounds like something good: “Day after day they seek me out; they seem eager to know my ways…[they] seem eager for God to come near them” (58:2). But then he goes on and says the reason they seem to be that way is because they are fasting. But it’s all an act. They’re not fasting to draw closer. They are fasting to try to get God to do what they want him to do. “We’ve fasted,” they say. “Why has God not responded? Why hasn’t God done what we asked him to do?” You see, that’s the sort of religion that was all around them. The pagan religions of the day believed that if you wanted crops, for instance, you would go to the pagan temple and either offer the right sacrifice, or sleep with a temple prostitute, or do some magic ritual, and if you did it right, then the god or goddess would be obligated to respond. Do A, get B. And the Hebrew people think that’s a pretty good deal. If we fast, if we do the right ritual, then God will have to respond. We’ll force God’s hand God will have to give us what we want. It’s the same way they approached prayer in many respects, as we talked about a few weeks ago. And yet, the prophet says, their fasting results not in holiness or in a closer relationship with God. It results in a fist fight! “You cannot fast as you do today,” God tells them, “and expect your voice to be heard on high” (58:4). God cannot be manipulated. But don’t we do the same thing today? Every once in a while, a new book comes out that promises a magic ritual or a particular prayer that if you just say it right, do it right, pray it with all your heart, God is guaranteed to respond. Do it right, get the results you want. There are even folks who believe if you fast for a certain amount of time or in a certain way, God will have to respond the way you want. Fasting becomes a way of trying to manipulate the God who cannot be manipulated. The Bible is clear that God does not respond to that, and that manipulation is not the point of fasting. The point is drawing closer to God.

And more than that, Isaiah says, when we fast in order to listen to God’s voice, we’ll respond to our world not with more demands for things or advantages for ourselves. Rather, we’ll respond to the world in the way God would. It’s interesting that the folks in Isaiah’s day were so focused on things God hadn’t said a whole lot about—fasting—and were ignoring things that he spoke frequently about—justice (Oswalt, The NIV Application Commentary: Isaiah, pgs. 624-625). “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen,” God says through Isaiah, “to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?” (58:6-7). That’s Isaiah’s long-winded poetic way of saying: “It’s not about you. Fasting is not about what you get out of it. Fasting is about connecting with God, allowing him space to speak to you and allowing him to change you, mold you, shape you into a force for good in the world.” Fasting is not about getting. It’s about giving. It’s about being transformed so that God can use us. When we approach fasting with any other motive, we’re abusing this means of grace, this discipline God has given us, and we’re missing a chance to connect in a meaningful way with the creator of the universe. Jesus says we’re hypocrites, actors on a stage.

So, since fasting is by and large a lost discipline, how do we go about it? Well, first you have to decide what it is you are going to fast from. Granted, the traditional understanding of fasting is from food, but if we think of fasting as a way of breaking the hold that something has over us, of a way of confronting a second master (as Jesus puts it), then fasting could be from any number of things. I want to give you just a few examples, knowing that there are so many things in our world today that try to master us. As Jesus says, we can’t serve two masters (6:24). We have to make a choice. So let’s start with food, which is, as I noted earlier, a huge thing in our culture. If we choose to fast from food, we set a specific time frame, and I’ll talk more about that in a few moments. It’s good, before the fast, not to eat a huge meal but to, in fact, eat slightly smaller meals than normal for a couple of days ahead of time. Continue to sip water or fruit juice, and be aware that your stomach will start grumbling. Your body is trained well over many years to be hungry at certain times. Martin Luther said that the flesh tends to grumble dreadfully. But you are master of your body, not the other way around. Richard Foster says, “In many ways the stomach is like a spoiled child, and a spoiled child does not need indulgence, but needs discipline.” Tell your spoiled child to calm down and in a bit, the hunger pangs will pass. The pangs are a distraction from the purpose of the fast: to pay better attention to God. I’m not saying you spend the whole time in prayer. Perhaps you spend the time you would normally spend eating in prayer or Bible reading, but the point is to be more aware of God’s presence in your life and in the world. Be more attentive. It’s not to draw attention to yourself, but to draw your self’s attention to God (cf. Foster, Celebration of Discipline, pgs. 56-61).

Some folks, however, have medical conditions that prevent you from fasting from food. And for others, food is simply not something that controls you. But there are other things that do. For many, money is something that controls us. Some of us fixate on accumulating and hoarding money, afraid that we’ll never have enough. And others of us fixate on spending money, constantly shopping, always buying more, whether we need it or not. Money becomes a controlling force in our lives. In our consumeristic culture, we currently spend 5.6% of our income on entertainment. Now, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it, until you consider a couple of other statistics. As a culture, we give only 3.4% of our income away to charitable causes (and that includes churches, nonprofits, and the like). United Methodists are worse, though. In our tradition, we give less than 2% of their income annually. Even though we have heard sermon after sermon about generosity and tithing, still only 5% of American adults tithe. I’ve said it before: in this church, we profess to be a tithing church, and yet the numbers tell us that we currently tithe, as a congregation, as if we were living below the poverty level. Here’s another number: in America, we spend 2.1% on education. We spend more than twice as much on entertaining ourselves as we do on education and we wonder why the rest of the world seems to be so far ahead of us. You add our charitable giving and our money spent on education together and it’s still less than what we spend on entertaining ourselves. That saya something about what we value, what controls us. Money and spending are powerful forces, so perhaps a fast for you would be a fast from spending. Save what you spend. Give what you would spend. You can’t imagine the ministry that could happen in this place if we all committed to really tithing, to giving, but because we don’t, we’re limited in how we can reach out. So perhaps a fast from spending might be a time when you can talk to God about finances, and about how he calls you to order that part of your life.

I had a friend, one of the members of our covenant group in seminary, who wasn’t able to fast from food and so he chose to fast from words. I don’t know if you know this or not, but preachers do a lot of talking. And Greg was more extroverted than the average preacher, so he talked a lot. He liked to talk. He loved spirited conversations. But he realized that he talked so much he rarely took time to listen. So his fast was to stop talking and to listen—to God and to others around him. It wasn’t easy, but it was valuable. As Pastor Deb said a couple of weeks ago, sometimes we’re so busy planning what we’re going to say next that we don’t listen. We’re so centered on ourselves, even in conversation with someone else. As we begin this summer and fall to train new Congregational Care ministers, one of the first things we will teach is how listen—to God and to others. It’s not as easy as it sounds, especially in our sound-saturated world. If you’re one for whom controlling the conversation—even the conversation you have with God—is an issue, perhaps a fast from words would be something that would create space for you to be able to better listen to God. I love the story—I’ve told it before—of journalist Malcolm Muggeridge who once interviewed Mother Teresa and asked her what she said to God when she prayed. “Nothing,” she said. “I just listen.” Muggeridge said, “Well, then, what does God say to you?” “Nothing,” she said, “he just listens.” And if that story leaves you scratching your head, perhaps a fast from words is what your soul most needs.

One of the other big things that gets in the way of our spiritual growth is our practice of entertainment. We spend, on average, 34 hours a week watching live television—that doesn’t include DVDs we might watch or other videos. And we spend an average of 25 hours a week online; 16 minutes of every one of those hours is spent on social networking sites like Facebook. 34 hours watching television; 25 hours online—that’s a total of 59 hours with media of some sort. 35% of our week. Now, granted, it’s probably true that some of that online time is for work, but still, that’s a lot of time. Some of us sit down at the computer because we have nothing else to do and we just click or read or play games with no particular intent. We do the same thing with television. When I was a kid, flipping through the channels to see if something was on took about 5 minutes, because we only had 3 channels. Now, how long does it take to flip through the hundreds of channels that are piped into our homes? I had a friend who felt he had to do that every night before he could go to sleep. Maybe we need a media fast. Perhaps media is taking up too much of our time, filling time and space we could better use by investing in our spiritual lives. I’m not one of those who says all media is bad and evil. I don’t believe that. But there are times when it’s good to unplug, get away. On Fridays, my day off, I intentionally don’t log on to Facebook most weeks, because I need to be away, to let God retool my soul. It’s a social media fast. So if you tag me in something or send me a message on Friday, I won’t respond until Saturday and sometimes not until late Saturday. I’m not ignoring you—well, maybe I am, but actually, I’m fasting for the health of my soul.

Because, remember, the point of fasting is this: it’s to make yourself “empty” so you can be filled more with God’s spirit and presence. Author Chris Webb puts it this way: “The point of fasting is not that food makes us less pious, but that seeking God with a stronger desire than our appetite for food satisfies a spiritual hunger” (Webb, The Fire of the Word, pg. 159).

So Jesus says, “When you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face” (6:17). In other words, he says, get ready just like you always do. Putting oil on your head was part of their preparation in the morning, much like we might shave or put on perfume in the morning. So get ready, and look like you always do. Why? “So that it will not be obvious to others that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you” (6:18). I like Isaiah’s imagery. He says when we fast in such a way as to allow God to shape us, to call us out beyond ourselves, this is what will happen: “Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard” (58:8). Your light will shine out. People will be able to begin to see God working in and through you. That’s what Jesus told us to do, anyway, isn’t it? “Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). See how it works? We fast in secret, allow God to shape us in secret, allow God to make us into people who do what he calls us to do because we’ve drawn closer to him, and then others will see that. They’ll see the work of God, not us. Your light will shine brighter because of the time you’ve spent making yourself empty so that you can be filled with God. “Then you will call,” Isaiah says, “and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I” (58:9).

Self-control is part of the fruit of the spirit (Galatians 5:23), and fasting is one discipline that helps us in that area. Richard Foster describes it this way: “The benefits of fasting extend to many areas of impulse control: pornography addiction, food cravings, Internet obsessions, or everyday activities such as shopping or television watching used to excess. The Spiritual Discipline of fasting teaches us not to repress desire, but to rechannel it properly” (Foster Life 160). The goal of fasting is to lead us closer to God and to help us find in life what is most important and most valuable. So this week, I want to call us to practice a Methodist fast, or maybe I should say to begin to practice, as this would be a valuable practice to continue each week. What do I mean by a Methodist fast? It was the practice of the early Methodists and our founder, John Wesley, to fast from after dinner on Thursday evening until “high tea” on Friday afternoon, somewhere around 3:00 p.m. Wesley was British; you don’t miss high tea for anything! So that means, if you’re fasting from food, missing two meals and breaking the fast with a light snack. Fast from media for that time period. Fast from speaking for that time period. Or if you’re fasting from spending, perhaps that day is not the best. Pick a day when you’re most tempted to spend or to give in to the consumerism of the day. The point is to make ourselves empty for a period of time, to give something up and allow God to fill us rather than all those other things. You see, if all of the space in our lives is already filled, how will we ever allow God to get in? So make room. Clear some things out. Become empty so that you can be filled. Practice a Methodist fast, and then as you grow comfortable with that, you may want to extend it a little longer. But don’t, for the sake of your soul, focus on what you’ll get out of it. Focus instead on how much of you God will get out of it, for fasting is all about drawing nearer and making a deeper connection with God. So as we begin our challenge this week, to master those things that seek to master us, to remember that “no one can serve two masters” (6:24), let’s pray.