During this Lenten season I have decided to fast from Wednesday after lunch until suppertime on Thursday. Last week was my first try at it. Thursday afternoon I was sitting in a classroom at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago where I am auditing a class, and while the professor was talking about the apocalypse and the Renaissance and how Savonarola saved the city of Florence from Charles VIII in 1494 but was executed by the people in 1498 for decreeing that there would be no carnival and they must all fast, all I could think of was a giant chocolate chip cookie. Fasting is a discipline that is not automatic, even when we stop eating. It takes focus on things that matter.

On the first Sunday of Lent each year the gospel reading is that of Jesus fasting for forty days and forty nights in the wilderness. That is reminiscent of Moses fasting for forty days and forty nights on Mt. Sinai in preparation for receiving the Ten Commandments. It recalls the forty years that the Israelites wander in the wilderness before they cross the river into the Promised Land. It reflects the forty days of Lent between Ash Wednesday and Easter, not counting Sundays, which are considered “little Easters” along the way.

Why did Jesus do it? We are told that the spirit, the Holy Spirit of God, led him there. It was not the Devil who made him do it. The season of sacred deprivation was not a punishment, but rather a preparation. The Force of Evil tempts Jesus, puts him to the test, presumably when he is strongest in faith and weakest in body.

On the surface it looks as if the first temptation is simple and direct. “Jesus, if you are so hungry because of your fast, and if you are the Son of God, turn this stone into a loaf of bread.” Certainly, it works as a temptation on that level, but I like the emphasis Parker Palmer puts on it in his book, The Active Life. This is not just about Jesus filling his stomach; it is more about proving who he is. The devilish taunt is, “If you are the Son of God . . .” If you are such a good employee, if you are such a good partner, if you are such a good parent, if you are such a good Christian . . . The temptation is to prove ourselves, to be relevant according to someone else’s definition.

A second one: “If you worship me, then I will deliver the whole world into your hands.” The temptation of power over others. To have power over another is to insulate us from that person’s suffering.

Then, the third: “Throw yourself off this temple pinnacle and have the angels catch you before you hit the ground. Do something spectacular, and the whole world will bow at your feet.”

The temptations of relevance, power, and spectacle, all very much present today. Be a celebrity, a star, have your own reality show. And Jesus, because he has been in the wilderness not only fasting from food but also praise and success, can resist because he knows that the confirmation of his mission, his call, will be inward, not outward.

He steps back from the press of daily life to discern whom he will serve . . .God or the Devil. That is the refrain of the old Bob Dylan song,

You may be an ambassador to England or France,
      You may like to gamble, you might like to dance,
      You may be the heavyweight champion of the world,
      You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls
      But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
      You’re gonna have to serve somebody,
      Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
      But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

Fasting, intentional deprivation, lessening the clamor of the world, creates a context, an “inner space,” in which Jesus intuits the answer to that question, “Whom will you serve?”

Now, notice after this dramatic start to Jesus’ ministry he is not a big advocate of fasting, and this gets him into trouble with the Pharisees. There arises a controversy in which the rigidly faithful of the synagogue ridicule the disciples of Jesus because they do not fast routinely. Not only do they not fast, it seems that they are feasting all of the time. And Jesus answers, “When the bride and groom are at the wedding banquet, the people should celebrate. There will come a time soon enough when they are gone, and the feast will be over. Then there will be a time to be modest.” John the Baptist was an ascetic, wearing animal skins and eating locusts and wild honey. Jesus respects that but does not make it a norm for following him.   

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, was not an ascetic, either. He did not think that it was necessary to fast in order to punish oneself for past sins. And he certainly did not think that fasting would win us any “extra credits” with God. God’s grace never could be earned; otherwise it would not be grace. It would be a reward for good behavior, and God does not work that way, no matter what the Church had to say about indulgences and doing penance.

But, Wesley wrote in his seventh Sermon on the Mount exposition that there was a good reason to fast as a matter of discipline because gorging oneself destroys God’s gift of health and well-being. In that sense, it is a sin, one of the seven deadly sins, gluttony. So, he writes about this abuse of too much of a good thing: “”They have transgressed the holy law of God with regard to temperance, if not sobriety, too; how they have indulged their sensual appetites, perhaps to the impairing even their bodily health, certainly to the no small hurt of the soul.”

He then gets flamboyant in his language, saying that excess eating leads to “airiness of mind, levity of temper, inattention to things of the deepest concern, giddiness and carelessness of spirit, a drunkenness of the soul which stupefies all of our noblest faculties as much as that caused by an excess of wine and strong drink.” John Wesley was neither an ascetic nor a teetotaler, he counseled his traveling preachers to drink the local beer rather than the water because it was safer and he had an admirable supply of claret back in London when he would return from his long journeys around the countryside, but he insisted on moderation in all things. Fasting, then, he commends as a discipline for restoring self-control, and when we are under control then we are more open to spiritual things, sensing of God’s prompting us toward what is good.

What constitutes fasting? There are all sorts of detailed definitions in the Bible and among religious people. The simplest understanding, writes Wesley, is that it is not eating for a prescribed length of time, most commonly for a day; for those who have made it a routine of their life of faith, one day a week. For those making it an extraordinary effort limited to a season, one day a week during the forty days of Lent is sufficient. But, he warns, not everyone’s health permits him or her to do it. Do not do it if it will kill you. “For we may not offer God murder for sacrifice, or destroy our bodies to help our souls.”

There is another valid reason for fasting in John Wesley’s mind, and this one is more immediately recognizable for its religious value. Many times in the Bible, in both the Hebrew scripture and the Christian scripture, fasting is joined with prayer. Daniel seeks God with fasting and prayer. All of Nineveh, at Jonah’s begrudging insistence, fasts and prays and thereby is spared God’s wrath. Paul and Barnabas fast and pray for the souls of the early disciples. Fasting is an intentional deprivation that opens us to other realities. To quote John Updike from one of his last observations (“The Sun,” Oct. 2009), “When we try in good faith to believe in . . . the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept – the realm of emotion and conscience; of memory and intention and sensation.”

Am I the only one here who opens the refrigerator and grabs something to eat while I am looking for something to eat? To eat so much reduces the joy of eating, obscures the taste of things that are delicious, and weighs us down in the physical. To fast, counsels Updike, opens us up to a spiritual reality “where we exist and where all things precious are kept.” Traditionally, fasting is tied to prayer because in a moment of deprivation the sacred can break through.

Maybe it could become a metaphor for us, “fasting” from other things that are keeping us from the realm of emotion and conscience; of memory and intention and sensation. Maybe it is a fast from work that some of us ought to declare this Lenten season. Taking a Sabbath day, resting one day in seven, not being so arrogant as to think that the world will spin out of control unless we are on the job controlling it. Certainly, fasting from drinking too much or smoking, though those are hard for people caught in addictions. How about fasting from money? Not from making it, of course, but from loving it. It is the love of money that is the root of all evil, as the saying goes. John Muir, the great naturalist, said a century ago that he was better off than the multimillionaire CEO of the Union Pacific railroad, E. H. Harriman. “I have all the money I want, and he hasn’t.” The satisfaction is in the level of wanting.

Maybe it is fasting from electronic connection. I know that that can sound like an old fuddy-duddy complaining about newfangled ideas. But that does not necessarily mean that an old fuddy-duddy cannot be right. At the Chicago Symphony a few weeks ago I sat behind someone who texted during the entire Stravinsky’s “The Firebird” suite. The bright light of her screen in the darkened orchestra hall distracted me. I shifted to the right so that her body blocked the screen, but she moved and I shifted left. Then right, then left. The poor person behind me must have been distracted by my antsiness. But, why go to the symphony if you cannot live without texting . . .and missing the enormous power of the music?

To fast is to withdraw from the clamor of the world around us in order to find the “inner space” within us where extraordinary insights can break in, to find that “self” which so often gets pushed aside. There are precious things to be discovered there, insists Updike.

Withdraw from the clamor of the world to the desert for forty days and forty nights? Unlikely and unnecessary. But where is it that we can go to be sensitive to God’s promptings in the forms of emotion and conscience; of memory and intention and sensation? That is the sense of fasting that each of us must find during this Lenten season.  Amen.