Is This the Fast That I Choose?

Ash Wednesday

Tonight you have gathered here to worship and have ashes rubbed on your forehead. Perhaps you weren’t given much of a choice. Perhaps it is your favorite service. Perhaps it is your first time and it all seems strange.

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the season of Lent. Lent is the 40 day journey that we take with Jesus to the cross. It is a journey marked by repentance and prayer, by fasting and confession, by seeking a deeper faith. It is a journey in which we are honest about ourselves and in which ask hard questions.

It is a journey we resist, but always a journey we need.

And so during this season we will seek out a deeper faith by leaning into the questions. Tonight the question that rises out of the text is “Is this the fast I choose?”

As is often the case when God poses a question, there is more below the surface. It isn’t just a question of fasting. It is a question of worship.

What is the heart of worship?

The Israelites thought they knew. If you were to look at them during worship, they seemed devout and faithful. They would sing the songs. They lit the candles. They studied Scripture. They fasted long hours.

But then worship ended and they left only to...

to serve their own interests, oppress their employees, bicker and fight. Their worship didn’t lead them to take on the needs of the afflicted. They had the mannerisms of worship without the mission. They had hands lifted high but failed to reach out. There was great worship, but when all was said and done, it was all for show.

“Is this the fast that I choose?”

Jon Berquist wonders “What would God’s righteous judgment be upon our worship practices today? In what ways do we serve ourselves in worship? When we leave worship, do our relationships with the other lead us to where God is, or do our actions increase the distance we keep? How can our worship point us back to God’s path?” How can we come back to the heart of worship?

I think this is why the revival that broke out at Asbury, lasting 15 days, and others that have now broken out across college campuses nationwide at the moment are spreading. It was worship returning to the heart of worship. There was prayer and testimony, repentance and crying out to God. It was God revealing what God can do with dust.

Is this the fast that I choose?

I confess that some shallow fasts in my life. There have been some Lents in which I didn’t give up much, and if I did, it didn’t really cost me much. Nothing that required me to dig deep. Nothing that involved my soul.

And so on the outside it would seem that I was fine. I was participating. But it never went deeper. Forty days, and I would end Lent exactly the same as I had begun. Still worrying over this or that. Still carrying the burden I had promised to give up. Still complaining about that one situation. I went through the steps, but my soul was stuck in the same spot.

I chose my own fast..... and maybe that’s the problem. When I choose the fast, I am still in control of it. Then it becomes just another thing. But this year I’m asking God to choose the fast. I’m asking God to do something within this lump of dust that I am. And it is hard, because when it is the fast God chooses, it isn’t convenient. It leads us to difficult people and conversations. It leads us to repentance, forgiveness, and enemy love. It leads us to throw down caution for the cause of the underdog. We are to become as Isaiah says “the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets.” This is the fast God chooses.

So let’s lean together into the fast that God chooses for us this Lent. A fast of genuine worship. A fast that allows God to work within the dust once again, breathing and creating and making new.