Inheritance, Week 3: Fasting

So as I said at the beginning of worship, today is the third Sunday in the six-week season of Lent. Lent is traditionally thought of as a time devoted to prayer and self-denial; that’s kind of the classic way to describe it. People give up old ways or habits, or take on new practices, to get us focused on the story of Jesus’ trial, death, and resurrection, and what it might mean for us. 

During this Lent, though, I’ve been inviting us to recall the deeper purpose of Lenten self-denial. Removing something from our lives during Lent is not about suffering, although it’s often framed that way. It’s not about doing something we hate to make God like us better or pushing ourselves to do hard things like we’re athletes in some spiritual Olympics. That’s not why we do it.  

I think that in Lent, we give things up for the same reason the first Christian monks in the 4th century went out to the North African desert to spend their lives in prayer: they were eliminating distraction. They were making room for a deeper, more expansive spiritual life. And even though I imagine that most of us are not called to retreat to the desert or join a monastery for a lifetime of prayer, we can learn to focus more mindfully on God and on our everyday lives, which is most often where we discover God. So this year during Lent, instead of focusing on repentance or self-denial, I thought I’d take these six weeks to talk about some of the tools and practices we’ve inherited from our Christian tradition to develop our spiritual life, to help us live more mindfully in God’s presence. Because in the end, that’s what Lent is for. That’s the purpose of all this focus on giving things up, or taking things on, or self-denial, or whatever we do to mark the season.  

Today, I want to talk about fasting as a spiritual practice. I think it’s interesting that even though religious engagement and spiritual practice is decreasing throughout the developed world, fasting is kind of having a moment. If you check out anything on diet or exercise on social media the web, whether it’s YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X, even TikTok, there are tons of articles and videos about all the benefits of going without food for some period of time. Athletes and people trying to lose weight are embracing an eating pattern called “intermittent fasting,” where they eat only during a short window of time during the day. We’re told that fasting improves heart health, changes your metabolism, helps you lose weight, improves your digestive system, puts you in a better mood, give you more energy, maybe even cures cancer. And any number of pseudo-scientific internet bros will be happy to tell us more.  

Thankfully, we’ve got a lot of doctors in this congregation, so I’ll leave the nuances of all this to those of you who actually know what you’re talking about. But from the little reading I’ve done, it seems that most of those claims are not backed up by solid science, at least not yet. Fasting does not seem to shift the way the digestive system works, or cause long-term changes in metabolism. Studies have shown that people who fast do lose weight; they lose weight because they eat less food, which is not exactly a Nobel prize winning medical discovery. Apparently there have been studies in worms and mice that show fasting might help remove dead and diseased cells from the body, which as Wendy Zukerman, the host of the great podcast “Science Vs.”, put it is great if you’re a worm or a mouse but I’m not sure it helps humans out much. And it seems there are some promising studies that suggest that fasting combined with chemotherapy might do better against cancer than just chemotherapy alone, but from what I hear the jury’s still out on that one and research is continuing. 

But even though fasting has become very popular in the last few years, very little has been written lately about its spiritual benefits.  

As I talk about fasting as a spiritual practice, though, I do want to say it’s really not for everybody. This is not a “better Christians and worse Christians” kind of thing at all – it’s just that some people find fasting helpful in their spiritual lives and others don’t. And besides that, there are lots of people who should not fast for health reasons. If you’re diabetic, for example, or you have other potentially debilitating health issues, you shouldn’t fast – or if you’re going to, you should at least talk to a doctor first. If you have medication that you take every day, and you need to eat food with it, don’t fast. If you’ve ever struggled with an eating disorder, fasting is probably a bad idea. For a lot of people, fasting doesn’t make sense – which is fine. There are plenty of other spiritual disciplines to explore, and as I’ll say more about in a minute, you don’t have to fast from food. Fasting can be going without other things as well.  

Still, the spiritual practice of fasting is found all over the world. I’m not sure why this is, but as far as I know every religion practices some form of fasting. It’s in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam; it’s in Native American cultures; fasting shows up in Buddhism and devotion to Hindu Gods. All over the world and throughout history, people have used fasting as a way of deepening their spiritual lives.  

Probably the most famous example of fasting in the Christian tradition comes from the story we heard a few minutes ago. This story shows up in the Gospels of Luke, Matthew, and Mark, which means it was pretty important to the early Christians. Luke says, “he was led by the Holy Spirit in the wilderness, where he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those 40 days.” (And then in one of my very favorite pieces of Biblical understatement, Luke adds, “And he was famished.”) I think Jesus is going to the desert specifically to fast and pray in preparation for the work in front of him. And while he’s there, the devil tries to derail that work before he even starts.  

For a long time, I always assumed that fasting made Jesus more vulnerable to the temptations the devil offers. I mean, the guy is out in the desert in the middle of nowhere. There’s nobody around to support him, and he hasn’t eaten in 40 days. He’s got to be feeling weak and dizzy and nearly delirious. I always thought the story was intended to point to his incredible determination to carry on his mission.  

But about 20 years ago, I began to rethink that. I had this friend who decided that she was going to try regular fasting. Once a week, she would go one day without food. At first, she didn’t feel much difference. She was telling me about it, and she said, “for about a year, I fasted once a week and all I felt was hungry.” But slowly, after that first year, she noticed that if she missed her weekly fast for some reason, she didn’t feel right. She was out of sorts, distracted. Her prayer time suffered. She felt like she was just skimming the surface of her life. One morning, she found herself thinking, “I am so stressed today; I have so much going on, so much to do, if I don’t fast, I’m going to completely fall apart.” Without realizing it, her regular fast had become a source, not of hunger or weakness, but of strength. It brought her an inner quiet that wasn’t present on other days. Her prayer felt more focused. She felt more deliberate, more mindful, more grounded in God. 

As I thought about my friend’s experience, I came to see this Gospel story differently. I don’t think fasting makes Jesus more vulnerable. I think it connects him more directly to God. Even as he’s become physically weaker, fasting doesn’t weaken his spirit. Fasting clarifies and focuses him. Fasting is what allows Jesus to reject the temptations he’s offered.  

Now, like I said at the beginning of this sermon, fasting from food isn’t for everybody. But we can also fast from things other than food. I had another friend, another woman, who was an absolute news junkie. She followed politics like the most rabid Bronco fans follow football. She knew all the players and all the issues and all the inside stories. I always admired her for it, because she believed that as a citizen of a democracy, it was her responsibility to understand the issues so she could vote well and be in contact with her elected representatives as citizens in a democracy are expected to do.  

Eventually though, she began to get pretty anxious about the state of the world. She became irritable and cynical, easily upset, strident and loud when she talked to people. She began to lose sleep. So one year for Lent, she decided to fast from news. And she went cold turkey: for six days every week, she gave up reading or watching or listening to news of any kind. She restricted all of her news consumption to one day per week.  

She told me that at first, it was hard. She was used to reading news first thing in the morning, last thing before bed at night, always keeping up on the latest stories. But after a few weeks of her news fast, she noticed she was resting better. She was in a better mood most of the time. She wasn’t so inclined to rant to everybody she knew about the latest terrible event. She said maybe the most surprising thing she learned was that she was just as well informed as she had been before; after all, things don’t change that much over the course of one week. But even though she was aware of the same disturbing events, she found she could respond to them more calmly and deliberately. Rather than reacting to every new crisis or outrage, she could respond thoughtfully and choose what she wanted to do. She had been afraid that her news fast would make her less equipped to deal with the world. She found exactly the opposite. She was just as informed, and better equipped to respond.  

I have to confess: in the end, I don’t know why fasting works the way it does. I genuinely don’t know why cultures all over the world have developed the practice of fasting to be more connected to God. But here’s what I do know; here’s what I’ve learned over the years. When we regularly go without something that we believe we depend on, whether it’s food or something else, we begin to discover the reality of what we truly depend on. We discover that God is present to us. We discover that even in our weakness, the water of God’s spirit will hold us up so that we float. And knowing that, we begin to discover some other things as well. 

We discover that even in physical weakness and awareness of lack, we are lifted and held and carried. We discover the presence of God.  

We find that we don’t need as much as we think we do; we become better able to distinguish needs from wants. 

We become less anxious about what we don’t have, and better able to deal with the discomfort of not having what we want. 

We become more calm and grounded when we’re under stress.  

Maybe fasting is for you, and maybe it isn’t. But if you’re inclined to try fasting, let me encourage you to be patient and start small. Remember my friend, who fasted once a week for a year before she began to realize the effect it was having on her. So be patient. Start small. You don’t need to do anything heroic, 3 days, five days, 40 days. Start by skipping lunch, or going for one day without YouTube, or whatever it is. It’s like I said last week about prayer: even a small gesture gives God all the opening God needs. Jesus says faith the size of a little tiny mustard seed can move mountains. And little tiny seeds do have a way of growing in us as God’s Kindom takes root.