Fasting is a time-honored Christian tradition. While it’s become almost culturally cliché to “give up chocolate for Lent” or to use these weeks of late winter as a springboard for beach-body dieting –– or like a second shot at a new year’s resolution for personal wellbeing (less caffeine, less stress, more water, more rest) –– a Christocentric spirituality of fasting is not the same as simply doing more or less of what we think we oughta be doing all the time. Spiritual fasting is intended to refocus our life toward a new way of being. Habits I need to break in order to be a healthier person do not require fasting (as if it would be ok to jump back into those same unhealthy behaviors in the future): that kind of work requires repentance and conversion. Fasting is spiritually different.

Spiritual fasting opts to lay down good things in order to focus on other — possibly even better — things, not judging against our past experiences, but judging life to be spiritually worthwhile for exploring what could be beyond good. Earthly life is good—even very good, according to God’s own estimation (Genesis 1). When God takes a share in the human life of Jesus Christ, it is a very good life and well worth living. The cross that comes before Easter is not Jesus “giving up chocolate for Lent” in order to lose a few pounds, but is rather Jesus fasting from the very goodness of life because Christ has judged God’s promise of resurrection worth exploring as something bigger, something more. And Jesus does not give up his life for Lent by hiding it in the closet to re-consume when the calendar says the season of fasting is over: Jesus gives up his very good life by giving it away to those who need it –– to people like me (and you) whenever we find that that our goodness in life is being lost to the brokenness of how we hurt (or withhold love from) one another. What Jesus finds in the resurrection has to be a new life, because the good ol’ life he enjoyed up to Good Friday has been given to us––and we need it too much to give it back.

Doing good to those who need it is what it means to be fasting. We fast from a self-accumulation of goods and a self-retention of human goodness, following rather a spirituality that thinks with the mind of Jesus — a mind which always considers others as more needful of the good life we now possess than we ourselves (Philippians 2). And this fast, which, joined to Christ, gives our human goodness –– our most poetic and literal humankindness –– away to those who need it, is a fast that never ends. We don’t take back the good we give away; we trust God to raise up a new life, our life renewed, that is even better than whatever we may have had before.

Our traditional Lenten disciples add prayer and charitable giving –– of money, time and service –– to the discipline of fasting. But if fasting is simply giving up our goods to those who need them, then all our disciplines collapse into one. We give up our good prayers to build a relationship with God. We give up our good ol’ money, time and service to build lives and relationships with neighbors. We give our former understanding of goodness for the new revelation of something that could be better than good: something we might advance from “good and better and best” all the way to being something lovely, even perhaps to something we could call loving or call Love itself. Following Christ into and out of Lent (and the grave that ends it), we breathe the Spirit of fasting, of prayer, of generosity. Joined to Christ, we live the sacred spirituality that does good to those who need it wherever, whenever, as ever we can: in so doing, we live by resurrection’s love each day.

Through Lenten faith, for Easter joy, in Jesus’ peace:

Pastor Joel