"The Acceptable Fast"

The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, Year A

Isaiah 58:1-9a

For the record, if you ever want to make a curate break out into flop sweats, just tell her or him that one of the lectionary texts begins like our Old Testament reading did this morning:

            Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins.

I had a conversation this past week about the Hebrew prophets, and I mentioned that I found them deeply comforting and deeply disturbing. Comforting, because they always end as our reading does today, Then you shall call and the Lord will answer… Disturbing, because they always require a lot of soul searching to get there. As a Christian, the fifteen books of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible are some of my favorite texts of Scripture, texts in which I always find something new, texts which make me grow in my walk with God, especially Isaiah. But as a priest, I often cringe when they come up in the lectionary, especially Isaiah, because they are so difficult and so hard to hear. And it would be so much easier to preach this morning about salt and light, wouldn’t it?

That’s where all of you come in, thank God, because you keep me honest. Every time I’ve tried to take the easier road and skip over the difficult lectionary text, many of you ask me about it on your way out the door after services, so I have to preach an impromptu second sermon. So, given the choice of Isaiah with notes or Isaiah without, I choose with.

By all accounts, the people of Judah to whom this section of Isaiah was addressed were doing things right. They’d come back from exile in Babylon, and they’d put aside the idols and false gods that they’d previously worshipped. They were worshipping the Lord their God alone, and they were even rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem. They were doing things right, living by the Law of Moses, keeping kosher, dotting all their Is and crossing all their Ts. But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough because it was purely external. Nothing they were doing actually affected their hearts. They were the same old people with the same old hearts of stones, they were just trying to put a better spin on things. In fact, it sounds like they viewed religion as a form of magic: if I do this God, then you have to do this. So they fasted, and they prayed, and they conducted elaborate, beautiful worship before God. And God sent Isaiah to them to say, “You’re doing it wrong.”

I don’t know about you, but I can sympathize with the people of Judah. My second year of seminary, my class was required to go on a four-day silent retreat. I didn’t want to go, because I had a lot of important things that I needed to do. It didn’t help that, once I got there, one of my classmates shared the flu with all of us. So I was sitting there, silent except for coughing and blowing my nose, and feeling pretty sorry for myself. And my retreat director told me that I should meditate on the story of Elijah on Mount Carmel. In that story from 1 Kings, the prophet Elijah is feeling pretty sorry for himself too. He’s on the run from the wicked Queen Jezebel, who is trying to kill him, and he runs to Mount Carmel, the mountain of God. And there, God causes a great wind, and an earthquake, and a fire to pass by, but God comes to Elijah in the sound of sheer silence. So I meditated on this passage of scripture. And as I began to imagine myself in the story, I found myself saying Elijah’s words to  God, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts…” In the story from the Bible, Elijah gets to say a lot more before God cuts him off, but in my meditation, God stopped me right there. God said, “No you haven’t, Josh. You have been very zealous for the church, and that’s a different thing. You have been very zealous for bishops and commissions on ministry and standing committees. You have been very zealous for impressing seminary professors. But you’ve forgotten why all that matters.” Now, part of me wanted to reply that I was an Episcopalian, and that Episcopalians don’t expect God to talk to us, but I didn’t feel like this was wise. Maybe it was the flu, or the silence getting to me after a couple days, but I did need to hear that word from the Lord, just like the people of Judah needed to hear the word that Isaiah brought to them.

It’s hard to hear, but it’s easy to let our religion become external, a matter of observing the right rituals. It’s even worse, sometimes, to let our religion become internal, something private between ourselves and God. The people of Judah did both of these things. I’ve done both of these things. And in response, Isaiah tells us about the fast that God chooses. It’s not giving up chocolate for Lent. It’s not something private between ourselves and God designed to draw me and only me closer to Jesus. It’s a fast from self-obsession, which is what happens when we let our religion become too external or too internal. The fast that God chooses, Isaiah says is: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke. And oh, this is a hard fast.

It’s hard because it changes us. It’s hard because it tells us that the way to love God is to love the people around us. And that’s hard. And it’s hard because, as you know, loosing the bonds of injustice can seem like an impossible task. But there’s a quote from Mother Teresa that is a touchstone in my own spiritual life: “You can do no great things. You can only do small things with great love.” When we do small things with great love, God does amazing things through us.

Glennon Doyle Melton, a blogger, author, and Ted Talk presenter, shared a story about her son’s fifth grade teacher recently. Glennon had gone to the teacher to ask for help understanding the new way long division was being taught—her son understood it, but she didn’t. What started out as a parent-teacher tutoring session ended up becoming a deeply meaningful conversation. It turned out that each Friday, the teacher passed out ballots to every student in the class. Each student was supposed to pick four students they’d like to sit with the next week and to nominate one classmate as citizen of the week. The teacher wasn’t especially interested in help in coming up with her seating chart or honoring good citizenship.    More than these things, she was looking for patterns in the responses. Who had suddenly gone from popular to unpopular? Who couldn’t name four friends? Who was never nominated for citizen of the week? The teacher made notes of those names, and she singled them out for special attention, for more love the next week.

Glennon asked how long the teacher had been doing this, and, with weary eyes, the teacher answered, “Every Friday since Columbine.”

This is the fast that God chooses.This is loosing the bonds of injustice, and letting the oppressed go free. How will this fast look in your life? It’s hard, sometimes, I know to figure out how to start. This is a big question to attempt to answer. It’s about ultimate importance. But, on Saturday, March 8, our Outreach Committee is offering a Listening Day as one way to begin to understand what God is calling you to do. This fast is big, and it’s scary, and it will change us. But we need to be changed. And our world needs to be changed, too. And God will bless us with enough foolishness to dream impossible dreams and enough strength to accomplish them, so that, through God’s grace, our fasts to loose the bonds of injustice will accomplish what others say cannot be done. Amen.