The Society of Saint John the Evangelist: The Daily Office
Thanksgiving, the Lenten Fast
Br. Timothy Solverson, SSJE
Monastery
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Isaiah 1:2-4, 16-20,
Psalm 50
Matthew 23:1-12
We are in the second week of our liturgical season of Lent. Assuming you gave something up, how are you doing with your fast. Unfortunately for many of us Lenten fasts are more likened to New Year’s resolutions. Lots of good intentions with little follow up. Why? It is because we are too hard on ourselves, particularly if we are religious and pious. There are so many things to do. We must fast, we must pray, we must tithe, we must strive to be good, righteous and moral in order for God to…Love us[?]. If your experience is anything like mine the God we profess we believe in and the actual way we interact with God are incongruent. Many of us profess that God is a god of Love, yet we are sure, even though it is highly irrational, that our God is on the outlook for sinners, us in particular. God is love unless you sin. God loves you but, he (and he is always a he in this scenario) doesn’t quite love me; or, he might love me, but he doesn’t really like me. After all if you knew what I have done it would all be understandable. I believe this is a common belief among the faithful of God. We are not worthy to be in relationship with God. I imagine this breaks God’s heart because God is love and everything created including you and I are an expression of God’s Love. Yet we turn away from this love because it is too intense. God loves you. God loves me. God desires us and has built with a desire for God. We fast in Lent, or we take on a discipline during Lent, not to make ourselves worthy, but to acknowledge our need for God in our lives. The hole created in the fabric of our being through our fast should be filled with more of God or else it is not a fast at all, nor is this a way to God but only ends in further alienation. Religious activities motivated by fear, obligation or achievement are anti-religious and should be avoided at all costs.
I think this is the deep meaning of our readings today. Isaiah sets the stage, as it were, for the judgment God would soon bring about because Israel had turned from their first love and worshiped idols. The psalmist, too, refers to God’s displeasure with his Chosen people because the worshiped God with an unfaithful heart—they went through the motions of religion but had forgotten the deeper truth of faith: Everything they have comes from God. Every thing they were as a nation was a gift from God. God does not desire the blood sacrifices of their ritual but the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. This is the humility of religious poverty. “Those who bring thanksgiving as their sacrifice honor me; to those who go the right way I will show the salvation of God. So too, in our gospel for this evening we hear Jesus denouncing the religious practices of the Scribes and Pharisees. It is Jesus’ turn on the phrase “Do as I say, not what I do.” But in this case it is to the benefit of his hearers. Jesus is encouraging his followers to do what the scribes and Pharisees teach because they are the interpreters of the law. TORAH is the lifeblood of Jesus faith. Therefore he taught fulfillment of the law as the practice of true religion. Love your neighbor as you love your self; Love God with all your strength, heart, and soul; realize you are a child of the creator and you will do what the creator does. Loose the bonds of injustice, heal the sick and feed the hungry for the law, TORAH is the essence of your very being… the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe. Jesus teaches a religion of relationship with God and not a religion of do’s and don’ts. Jesus teaches a religion that leads one to God through love, and in finding love one enters into freedom. Freedom leads to gratitude, thanksgiving, and true humility.
The religion as practice by the Scribes and Pharisees leads to bondage and spiritual blindness. But I wonder, did the Scribes and Pharisees know they were on the wrong path? Had they become so entrenched in the religious politics of the day that the practice of their faith became simply a function they participated in? Were they, in fact jaded and cynical, or were they actually faithful Jews who loved TORAH, as much as Jesus did yet failed to see God in their neighbor? Are the Pharisees good religious people whose long seemingly unrequited wait for God’s promised Messiah led them to believe in their hearts God had become distant, remote and only accessible if they got everything just right? In short, are the Scribes and Pharisees like us; professing one version of God yet living out another: God will only truly, love me, bless me, heal me if I just simply behave myself and say all of the right things. Is your professed God-image, the God-image you actually live through?
I believe with all my heart that God loves you. I know on a very deep level that God loves me, and yet I have great difficulty living as if this is true. Because I fall, and get up; and fall, and get up; I fall; I fall and I need you to help me up. You need me to pick you up. We need each other because sometimes life is like participating in a dance wearing a blindfold and having your shoes on the wrong feet. We fall and for the grace of God we do get up. You offer me your hand; I give you my shoulder; we hobble into grace with each other. Our instructor is Jesus who showed us the love of God. Jesus who understood that life, love, and freedom takes place when one lays down their agenda and seeks God who is Love. Jesus under stood that true religion is define by knowing God and then worshiping God out of gratitude and thanksgiving.
Are you looking for God this Lent? I believe you are, but better yet, I believe God is looking for you. So then, how are you doing on your Lenten Fast? As for myself, I have to go back to the drawing board and remember to love my self, to love my neighbor, and to offer my fast as pure worship to God who has given me everything I have my life, my health, my breath, my desire my dreams. My friends, God is closer than you would know and desires you to know it. The Sufi Mystic Kabir has put it this way:
Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat.
My shoulder is against yours.
You will not find me in stupas, not in Indian shrine
Rooms, nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals:
Not in masses, or in kirtans, not in legs winding
Around your own neck, nor in eating nothing but
Vegetables.
When you really look for me you will see me
Instantly—
You will find me in the tiniest house of time.
Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?
He is the breath inside the breath.
--Kabiri
And to paraphrase Deuteronomy God is near to you; God is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe. Seek the Lord and be saved. Lean into the truth God is speaking to you this Lenten season. Offer God the sacrifice of thanksgiving and walk into life, love and freedom.
The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.
AMEN
i Robert Bly. The Kabir Book: Forty-four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir. Seventies Press, Boston 1977 p. 23
© 2008
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