A Lenten Blog, Day 7

Jesus’ Own Fast

To answer the question of “Why fast?” that i finished with in yesterday's blog entry we need to return to the scene of Jesus’ own fast, and the temptations that followed immediately afterwards. First, three qualifiers. I’m indebted to church historian, theologian and New Testament scholar N.T. Wright for much of the thinking in this entry. Note that the fast and the temptations came together. And note also that the temptations followed straight after Jesus’ great moment of vision, when His sense of calling and love was so dramatically confirmed at his baptism, described in the previous chapter.

The writer to the Hebrews tells us that Jesus was tempted like other humans, in every possible way (4.15). Jesus HAD to face the whispering voices and recognise them for what they were: ways of distorting His true vocation, the vocation to be a truly human being, to be God’s person,
to be a servant to the world and to other people. Jesus must face these temptations now, and win at least an initial victory over them. If He doesn’t, they will meet Him suddenly, in the middle of his work, and they may overwhelm Him.

I’ve read many analyses regarding the nature of the 3 temptations Jesus faced down, but Wright’s insight, of tying them in with the baptism and affirmation of God the Father he has just experienced is particularly helpful. The first 2 temptations play to the very strength he has just received. Paraphrased, they go like this:
“If you really are God’s beloved Son, surely you can’t go hungry when you have the power to get food for yourself. You of all people shouldn’t go without! You’re too important for that. And surely you want people to see who you really are! Why not do something truly spectacular?”

Then, dropping the apparent logic and the references to Scripture the enemy comes out boldly:
“Forget your heavenly father. Worship me and i’ll give you power, greatness like no one else ever had.”

Jesus sees through the trap. He answers, each time, from the bible and with God. He is committed to living from God’s Word, to trusting God completely without setting up trick tests that put God on the spot. He is committed to loving and serving God alone. 

And here, I think, comes the point of Lenten discipline, including the practice of fasting. To reference Martin Luther’s unholy trinity: the flesh may scream for satisfaction; the world may beckon seductively; the devil himself may offer undreamed-of power. But Israel’s loving God, the one Jesus knew as Father, offered the reality of what it meant to be human, to be a true Israelite, to be Messiah.

But to be able to first distinguish, then follow the voice of God among the voices seeking to drown it out requires discipline, spiritual muscle. Every time I hear about yet another Christian leader who has failed morally I remember my mentor’s sobering statistic: of the bible’s approximately 400 leaders only about ¼ finished well. But to do that I must undergo spiritual discipline, and live in a disciplined way, like Jesus did. And to achieve this goal it helps to realise that I am/we are parts of a great story.

The biblical texts Jesus used as his key weapons against temptation help us to see how this story fits into Matthew’s gospel at this point. They are all taken from the story of Israel in the wilderness. Jesus came through the waters of baptism like Israel crossing the Red Sea. He faced, in 40 days and nights, the equivalent of Israel’s 40 years in the desert. But where Israel failed again and again, Jesus succeeded.
“Here at last is a true Israelite,” Matthew was saying. “He has come to do what God always wanted Israel to do - be a light to the nations.”

Behind that again is the even deeper story of Adam and Eve in the garden. A single command, a single temptation, a single, devastating result. But Jesus kept his eyes on the father, and so launched the mission to undo the age-old effects of human rebellion. He would meet the tempter again in various guises: protesting, through His closest associate, that he should change His mind about going to the cross; mocking him, through the priests and bystanders, as he hung on the cross. These whispers were all designed to distract Him from his central vocation, the path of servanthood that would lead to his suffering and death. They were meant to stop Him from carrying out God’s Calling, to redeem Israel and the world.

The temptations we all face may be very different from the ones Jesus faced down, but they have exactly the same purpose. They are not simply trying to entice us to commit this or that sin. They are trying to distract us, to turn us aside, from the path of servanthood to which our baptism has commissioned us. God has a costly but glorious vocation for each one of us. The enemy will do everything possible to distract us and thwart God’s purpose in us. If we have heard God’s voice welcoming us as His children, we will also hear the whispered suggestions of the enemy. But as God’s children we are entitled to use the same defence as the Son of God Himself: Store Scripture in your heart, and know how to use it! Keep your eyes on God, and trust God for everything. Remember your calling, to bring God’s light into the world. Live Lenten lives of godly discipline. And say a firm ‘no!’ to the voices that lure you back into the darkness.

A Lenten blog, Day 6

The Foothills of Fasting

How many of us have tried fasting at some time or another? For many years I’ve engaged in a short fast from Thursday evening, the time of the Last Supper, to Friday mid-afternoon, when Christ died. It’s called a Wesleyan fast, and it does several things: reminds me of Christ’s Passion, suffering and death, reminds me that life is not about satisfying my own appetites, and of course it benefits my body (if my i am well enough to withstand fasting rigours.

But I’ve only travelled in the foothills of fasting. The bible speaks of a number of people, including Jesus Himself, undertaking 40 day fasts. Neither is this practice confined to the biblical era. I have a friend, a woman who started her own church, who has completed her own 40 day fast. The Chinese Christian Brother Eun claims to have completed a 73 day fast.

In recent times we have become more creative with fasting. Decades ago I was introduced both to the practice of fasting and to the great Christian agency called World Vision by participating in their 40 hour Famine. Those who fasted, mostly rich young western Christians,
got an idea of what it is like to go without. By fasting they raised money for those who were REALLY doing without.

Some years ago my friend Sarah awoke in the night with the words “Lent Event” ringing in her head. Sarah’s minister at that time, a wise and godly man, realised that this was from God. And so began Lent Event. The idea with Lent Event is that during Lent you do without something, eg. filtered Swedish coffee, or fastlagsbullar, calculate what that would have cost you if you had indulged and donate that sum of money to Lent Event.

And as one final example, one of my contacts on LinkedIn, who is the Coordinator of Green Anglicans, the Anglican Church of Southern Africa’s Environmental Network, has introduced me to the concept of a Lenten Carbon Fast, a 40 day feast of practical tips and biblical versus all on how to care better for god’s creation.

All well and good, but I still get the feeling that many Protestant Christians find something vaguely offensive about the very idea of fasting. Why not just send the money to the poor and have done? And more theologically and pointedly, isn’t there the smell of the dreaded “WORKS” around fasting! Didn’t Christ go without so we could enjoy the riches that are in Him? And if that is the case, isn’t fasting, at it’s worst, an attempt to win God’s favour and our own salvation BY OUR OWN EFFORT?

To answer these questions properly we need to return to the scene of Jesus’ own fast, and the temptations that followed immediately afterwards.

I’ll get into that discussion in tomorrow’s blog.

David

A Lenten Blog, Day 5

A little on Lent

The word “Lent” is derived from an old form of the English word “lengthen”. In the northern hemisphere at this time of year the sky is lightening earlier, and the days are lengthening.

But in Sweden, where I learnt how very long the days become,
the word for Lent has nothing to do with this. Instead, the Swedish word for Lent is “Fastan”, “the Fast”. Like Ramadan is for Muslims, Lent is traditionally for Christians a season of fasting and spiritual discipline. It is based on the remembrance of how Christ has suffered for us.

Yet for some reason Protestant Christians seem to prefer to fast from fasting as their Lenten discipline. A number of Protestant European countries have retained the Catholic tradition of feasting up until and including Shrove Tuesday, the day before Lent begins. English and Dutch eat pancakes on what the English call “Pancake”, or “Shrove Tuesday”.
The French call is “Mardi Gras”, or “Fat Tuesday”.

In Sweden there is a 3 day period, called “Fastlagen”, just before Ash Wednesday when lent begins. Fastlagen is a period of feasting. It begins on “Fastlagssöndagen” and finishes with fettisdagen (“Fat Day”). on which delicious fastlagsbullar with cream, marzipan and icing sugar are consumed. All well and good, but instead of fasting during Lent people simply carry on feasting!

When I was a Lutheran pastor in Sweden over 20 years ago, one of my weekly duties was to lead devotions at a weekly afternoon tea called “trivselträff”, lit. “enjoyment meeting”. After devotions there were always 4 or more different kinds of delicious biscuits and buns, washed down by wonderful Scanian filtered coffee. From mid-February to April fastlagsbullar made their appearance. During Lent I started restricting myself to coffee only - a small enough sacrifice I would have thought.
But the ladies of trivselträff were scandalised that I was not eating fastlagsbullar. It made no difference that I told them that we were in Fastan; they were much exercised that pastor was not eating properly, thus endangering the proper enjoyment of the meeting!

In tomorrow’s blog I’ll write a little about the practice of fasting.

David

A Lenten Blog, 2017

A Wet Saturday

I went cycling today, as I usually do on Saturday mornings. However, it had rained overnight, which meant that the other fellows I usually cycle with gave stayed at home. Only James drove to the café ¾ of the way around the course that we usually take our break at, and kept me company. 

Although the weather stayed mostly dry it the paths and roads I cycled on were wet enough to think about road surface, and how on earth a bicycle gets enough traction not to slip from underneath one. I pump the tubes of my road bike tyres up to 100-110 psi, so hard that there can’t be more than elongated coin’s worth of contact between tyres and surface, and yet my sense of control is good; I feel secure.

Be that as it may, most of the rest of the day was filled with the usual Saturday things - shopping and trying to bring some semblance of order to our house. 

In the evening we went to dinner with a recently widowed, long-standing friend, and four of her friends. A pleasant evening. One gets to field interesting questions at dinner parties when one is a minister!

David

A Lenten Blog, Day 3  

Live Lenten Lives 

We’ve come to that part of the Church’s year called “Lent”. 

As a young Methodist I had no idea about Lent. We celebrated Christmas above all else, and Easter. Good Friday was a bit morbid, but Easter Sunday was cool because we got chocolate. In those days it was little better in quality than cooking chocolate, but hey - we didn’t know any better. Chocolate easter eggs made sitting in church worthwhile!
Occasionally some preachers would reference the eggs in a children’s address or sermon, saying that they symbolised the NEW LIFE that came at Easter when Jesus was resurrected from death. As a child I didn’t care much about new life. From those days to these I love chocolate. 

Anyway, that was it, as far as the Church Year was concerned. Christmas, Good Friday and Easter. Santa, hot cross buns and chocolate eggs. At United Theological College I was introduced to other seasons in the Church’s year. I had known about Pentecostals for years. In 1970 an American Pentecostal who was leading the Gordon Methodist Youth Group led me to faith in Jesus. But I had no idea about the Day and Season of Pentecost until UTC. All final year students got to preach once at Friday chapel. I got to preach on the Day of Pentecost, and why the 120 gathered disciples spoke in languages strange to them.

And at UTC I was introduced to the seasons of the Church Year that lead up to the great festivals of Christmas and Easter: Advent, during which we remember Jesus’ first Coming and await his 2nd; and Lent. The word “Lent” is derived from an old form of the English word “lengthen”. In the northern hemisphere at this time of year the sky is lightening earlier,
and the days are lengthening. But in Sweden, where I learnt how very long the days become, the word for Lent has nothing to do with this.
Instead, the Swedish word for Lent is “Fastan”, “the Fast”. Like Ramadan is for Muslims, Lent is traditionally for Christians a season of fasting and spiritual discipline. It is based on the remembrance of how Christ has suffered for us.

Yet for some reason Protestant Christians seem to prefer to fast from fasting as their Lenten discipline. A number of Protestant European countries have retained the Catholic tradition of feasting before Lent: 

• Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, in France
• Pancakes on Shrove Tuesday in England
• and delicious fastlagsbullar with cream marzipan and icing sugar in Sweden. But then, instead of fasting during Lent people simply carry on feasting!

When I was a Lutheran pastor in Sweden over 20 years ago, one of my weekly duties was to lead devotions at a weekly afternoon tea called “trivselträff”, lit. “enjoyment meeting”. After devotions there were always 4 or more different kinds of delicious biscuits and buns, washed down by wonderful Scanian filtered coffee. From mid-February to April fastlagsbullar made their appearance.

During Lent I started restricting myself to coffee only - a small enough sacrifice I would have thought. But the ladies of trivselträff were scandalised that I was not eating fastlagsbullar. It made no difference that I told them that we were in Fastan; they were much exercised that pastor was not eating properly, thus endangering the proper enjoyment of the meeting!

How many of us have tried fasting at some time or another? For many years I’ve engaged in a short fast from Thursday evening, the time of the Last Supper, to Friday mid-afternoon, when Christ died. It’s called a Wesleyan fast, and it does several things:

• reminds me of Christ’s Passion, suffering and death.
• reminds me that life is not about satisfying my own appetites.
• And of course it benefits my body.

I’ve only travelled in the foothills of fasting. The bible speaks of a number of people, including Jesus Himself, undertaking 40 day fasts. Neither is this practice confined to the biblical era. I have a friend, a woman who started her own church in West Ryde, who has completed her own 40 day fast. The Chinese Christian Brother Eun claims to have completed a 73 day fast.

In recent times we have become more creative with fasting. Decades ago I was introduced both to the practice of fasting and to the great Christian agency called World Vision by participating in their 40 hour Famine. Those who fasted, mostly rich young western Christians, got an idea of what it is like to go without. By fasting they raised money for those who were REALLY doing without.

Some years ago another friend awoke in the night with the words “Lent Event” ringing in her head. Her minister at that time, a wise and godly man, realised that this was from God. And so began Lent Event. The idea with Lent Event is that during Lent you do without something, eg. filtered Swedish coffee, or fastlagsbullar, calculate what that would have cost you if you had indulged and donate that sum of money to Lent Event.

And one of my contacts on LinkedIn, Rev Dr Rachel Mash, Coordinator of Green Anglicans, the Anglican Church of Southern Africa’s Environmental Network, has introduced me to the concept of a Lenten Carbon Fast.

Tomorrow I’ll continue with Lent, Carbon fasts and the biblical genesis for the whole thing.

A Lenten blog, Day 2 

Inspired by Jalebi 

Lena and I have just been to see the film “Lion”. The true life story that inspired it was of a small boy called Sara (actually Sheru, meaning “Lion”) from a village called Ganesha Talai in western Madhya Pradesh, a state in central India. Saroo’s father had left his mother for another women, leaving the family in a terrible plight. So Saroo’s mother had to work as a day labourer, moving stones. the 4 year old boy helped her with that, and his elder brother Guide in his scavenging efforts - stealing coal from a train, etc.

On one of these ventures to Kandwa station Guddu left Saroo to look for work, and the boy climbed onboard an empty train, fell asleep and was taken to Calcutta. Somehow he survived there until he was taken to an orphanage, where he was picked out for adoption by an Australian couple, the Brierleys, who lived a comfortable life in Hobart. The last thing Saroo told Guddu was to get 2,000 jalebi! (jalebi is an Indian sweet made by deep-frying maida flour - plain flour or all-purpose flour - batter in pretzel or circular shapes, which are then soaked in sugar syrup. They are particularly popular in the Indian subcontinent. The sweets are served warm or cold. They have a somewhat chewy texture with a crystallized sugary exterior coating. Citric acid or lime juice is sometimes added to the syrup, as well as rose water. Jalebi is eaten with curd, rabri (North India) along with optional other flavours such as kewra (scented water).)

The story continues 20 years later. Saroo, by now very Australian, has made contact with some Indian students in a course he’s enrolled in. One of them brings jalebi to a party. This triggers a memory and an identity crisis for Saroo. But how could he find the home he left as a 4 year old. Enter Google Maps. And that will do. Suffice it to say that the reunion scene was brilliantly done.

Lion provokes and addresses many issues which I don’t wish to address here. It was, however, nice to watch a “no baddy movie”. There was a paedophile ring which the 4 year old avoided, and some brutal treatment of children, but in general the story is the thing. And in the story, both Saroo’s biological and adoptive mothers are strong, sympathetic women.

Lion is the best movie I’ve seen since “Interstellar”.

Day 1 An Important Conversation

A Lenten Blog, 2017

Day 1 An Important Conversation

I’ve decided to write a Lenten Blog again. 

I last did one 2 years ago in India. That situation seems now to be so much more exotic than this. Yet the cluster of issues that have developed over the past 2 years make the communication of ideas all the more important even than they were in India 2 years ago. There and then I took up environmental issues, which was my reason for being in India, and reflected upon aspects of Indian culture and life that I thought might be interesting both for Australians and for Indians reading the reflections of a sympathetic foreigner.

Here and now? Well, my city of Sydney, and my state of New South Wales have just lived through a summer whose average daily maximum temperature was well over 2 degrees Celsius greater than the previous record. That is huge, and is only one metric that indicates that climate change is well and truly upon us.

Even more distressing is that pyromaniacs seem to be taking control of the ammunition depot. Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, 600,000 One Nation voters in Queensland, reclusive, deeply conservative billionaires funding the rise of the alt.-right, climate denial, white supremicism, misogyny, attacks on the free press, amongst other values that I thought were disappearing after Nazism and World War II. Have we gone mad? Why are we letting them do it?

A more biblical image might help to answer that. It comes from johnpavlovitz.com via Facebook. Pavlovitz reckons that white American Christians have let the wolves in. By this he means that American evangelical Christians in particular have become so allied to the Republican Party, which itself has swung so far to the political Right that extremists belonging to the “Alt Right” have achieved real power in the United States. 

The values of these Alt Rightists, some of which I have listed above, have little in common with orthodox or, for that matter, Orthodox(!) Christianity. So Pavlovitz has picked up on one of Jesus’ images. Evangelical Christians, who should be like Jesus’ undershepherds, protecting society from those who would destroy it as a shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. Instead, some conservative Christians are behaving like wolves themselves, and others are acquiescing with that behaviour. If you want more detail on this argument, for I realise that it is controversial, I refer you to “In Defense of Christian Faith and a Democratic Future: On the Trump Presidency From Members of the Princeton Seminary Faculty”. 

Evidence is now emerging that it is not only Russia that has been meddling via the internet in US politics and in deeply un-Christian ways. Conservatives themselves have learnt to collect data on hundreds of millions of people via unmanned computer programs, and to sway the public’s perceptions by swinging thousands of websites into action at strategic moments in a political campaign. This in addition to more traditional means of corrupting politics: outspending one’s opponent, and gerrymandering such that votes are far from being of equal value. To say nothing of widespread efforts to hinder and prevent the young, non-whites and those of lower socio-economic status from being able to vote at all.

But this lupine phenomenon is not confined to the US, unique though that country is. Feeding on fear of Islam and widespread dissatisfaction with their ruling classes, and motivated by their own perception of disenfranchisement prompted by influxes of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, extreme right wingers are also making their presence increasingly felt in the UK, France, Germany, Scandinavia, Australia and other countries. 

All my life I have assumed the reasonability of the electorate in my country, Australia, at least. Along with others, and influenced by the common perception that this Australian prime minister was incompetent I sang “Billy McMahon was a bullfrog”. I sensed a new optimism when Gough Whitlam came to power, and raged when he was deposed by the governor general. But I assumed that I could at least have a civil discussion around the barbecue with those who interpreted those events differently from me. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 I was confident that a new era of democracy was dawning.

But now I worry, and grieve. Totalitarianism, it seems, is more tenacious than we had thought. And if that is not serious enough, if the would be “masters of our political and financial universe” get their way this corner of the physical universe will become less and less liveable, even in the gated communities to which the uber rich are already retreating.

This, I think, is a set of issues worthy of our urgent pray this Lent.

David Reichardt