Lenten Fasting

Fasting is misunderstood.  People criticize fasting as the work of killjoys who don’t know how to savor the good things of life.  Folks often assume that religious people just don’t know how to appreciate anything pleasurable.

Fasting really affirms the wonderful pleasure of food.  Fasting never condemns food as “bad.”  Unlike fad diets, Christianity doesn’t have a list of ’50 foods to avoid.’  Nope.  Christians enjoy bodily pleasures.  We believe God created the universe and made us bodily creatures.  All the pleasures of our bodies are God’s gifts to us.  We believe God was one of us, experienced the joys of eating and drinking with sufficient enjoyment that his critics called him a glutton and a drunk. 

We don’t fast because food is bad or because the pleasure of eating and drinking is too sensual, too indulgent of the “flesh.”  We fast so that we might feast.  We do without so that we might indulge.  We experience hunger so that when we are filled we might rejoice.

This Holy Week is like no other we have experienced before.  We are fasting from worshipping together.  We are fasting from touching each other.  We are fasting from lifting our voices together in prayer and song in our places of worship.  Our fasting is not by choice and not undertaken as a spiritual discipline, but as a requirement of love, that we might not harm one another and especially that we take care to protect the most vulnerable among us.

Among the things we are fasting from is participation in the Lord’s Supper.  This sacred meal demands that we gather with one another, around the common Table and receive the elements which have been consecrated by our prayer of thanksgiving for the saving acts of God, recalling Jesus’ words of institution and praying that by the power of the Holy Spirit the sharing of bread and wine might be for us communion in the Body and Blood of Christ.

There’s no need to go into the whole theology of communion here, but sharing communion is not a DIY project that we can carry out at home over the internet.  It is a communal celebration – a participation (communion) in the Body of Christ, not only a time to remember Jesus’ sacrifice.

So, for now, we hunger; but before too long, we will feast.

Prayer:  Lavish God, you give yourself to us in so many ways.  Even as we taste your goodness, keep our appetite keen for more.  Amen.