Friday, March 4, 2022
What sort of fast will this Lent be for you?
An excerpt from Isaiah 58: 1-9 (NRSV)
Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself?
Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?
Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Reflection from Dillon Shipman,
The Church of St. Elisabeth:
What sort of fast will this Lent be for you?
This is a question I admittedly struggle with each year as we near the Lenten season. Sometimes, it’s helpful for me to remember what Lent is not about as my starting point. Lent is not a time to beat ourselves into the ground and force ourselves to feel guilty and unworthy of God’s love for us. I really like what our most former Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, The Most Reverend Dr. Katherine Jefferts Schori, has to say about Lent:
“Lent is an opportunity to review, refine, and retune all the systems of our lives in the hope of living more congruently as a resurrected people. Each of us has been given abundant and unique resources for a risen life in the Body of Christ. We seek to love God with all our heart and soul and strength and mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Each of us is challenged by different aspects of the gifts we have and how to use them most effectively and appropriately.”
Lent is still a time when we still look for and celebrate the great hope and perfect love that we discover on Easter morning. That reality never ends for us as Christians, and we always should be thinking about the part that we play in Christ’s ongoing resurrection story. During Lent, though, we center ourselves in a more focused way on remembering this great truth: even though we have marred our baptismal pledges by failing to love our neighbors, being hasty to judge others, and wasting earth’s resources due to our inner greed, God can cleanse us, restore us, and make a new heart within us. It is a powerful reminder of our need to be fast from our striving for perfectionism, our complacency,our fear of “doing it wrong,” to be honest about our shortcomings and intentional about evolving and growing because of them. We are the ones that God calls to love our neighbors, to break the cycle of judgment and oppression, and to take care of this one earth that we’ve been given. During a season that has traditionally been looked to as time for penance, repentance and self-denial, I am choosing to focus my fast from my desire to be in constant control over life and instead look to God to be sustained by the faith we have because of the abundant life and love that we find together through Jesus.
Stations of the Cross by Jon Dutcher, St Gregory's Episcopal Church
For further study and prayer, the readings assigned for today are:
Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16, Exodus 6:1-13, Acts 7:35-42
Music:
“Lord Who Throughout These 40 Days”
arr. Zebulon Highben,
sung by the StGs quartet
And through these days of penitence,
and through your Passiontide,
forevermore in life and death, O Lord,
with us abide.