Reading and Meditating on God's Word

The scriptures referred to are mentioned in the text.

In 2013 we participated in the Bible Challenge, which was simply to read the entire Bible in a year. And I put my reflections on each chapter every day on my blog. You can also get special editions of the Bible that arrange the text in a form that takes you through the whole thing in a year. There are apps that will do that for you and even ones that read the Bible to you so you can do it on your commute. It's not hard to read the whole Bible in that time. Inmates at the jail can do it in 3 weeks. Of course, they have little else to occupy their time. And ever so often you will read about a church holding a Bible marathon in which people sign up to take turns reading parts out loud so that the entire thing from Genesis to Revelation can be heard in about 90 hours. Other churches have a program in which participants read the whole Bible in the 40 days of Lent. I am in favor of anything that educates more Christians on the basic texts from which we get our beliefs and behaviors.

My only caveat is this: reading the entire Bible, though essential to being a well-informed Christian, is just the first step. To get the most out of this document that has changed the world, you really have to study it. There is an old Woody Allen joke about how he took the Evelyn Wood course on speed reading. He said, “I read War and Peace in 42 minutes. What's it about? I'll tell you what it's about. It's about Russia.” Similarly merely reading through the entire Bible once will only give you the most superficial understanding of it. Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair claimed to have read through the entire Bible over a weekend at the age of 12 or 13. She said she was shocked by the inconsistencies and impossibilities and sordid sex and sadism of it. She might as well have summarized it by saying, “It's about God and sin.”

One problem with people who look at the Bible as O'Hair did is that they tend to think that in 2000 years no Jew or Christian has ever noticed these parts of it. Which means they haven't availed themselves of all of the literature out there where devout people deal with those very things. And in some cases the inconsistencies are more apparent than actual. For instance at a certain point Matthew and Luke's genealogies of Jesus diverge. Which would be troubling only if Joseph and Mary were brother and sister. But they are descended from different branches of the Davidic line. One genealogy traces Jesus' lineage through his legal father and the other through his biological mother. There are a few other issues but they are by no means insurmountable.

Some of the problems are cleared up by understanding the culture, something a cursory reading would not pick up on. In our Bible study this week we dealt with the fact that Exodus says that the Passover is to be celebrated in the first month of the year, which it sets in the spring, whereas in other parts of the Bible the first day of the Jewish year, Rosh Hashanah, takes places in the fall. It turns out that, like us, the Jews' liturgical year was different from their calendar year. The church year starts with the first Sunday in Advent, in either late November or early December. The calendar year begins January 1. If you really want to complicate things you could point out that the US government's fiscal year starts October 1. It's not a contradiction; it's cultural.

A related problem is that of translation. The King James version of 1 Timothy 6:10 reads, “For the love of money is the root of all evil...” But the American Standard version, noted for its attempt to be as literal as possible while still being readable, renders the same verse thus: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil...” Most modern translations, reflecting a better understanding of the underlying Greek, follow suit. There is no perfect translation but today's are based on older and better and more numerous manuscripts as well as a better understanding of what the text is actually saying.

Which brings up another way in which problems in the Bible are often resolved: we learn more as time goes by. There is practically nothing in the Bible that skeptics have not doubted: Pontius Pilate's title, the existence of David, the existence of the Hittites. At one time, the only evidence we had for those things was found in the Bible and nowhere else. Those three things eventually were resolved in the favor of the Bible by archaeological discoveries. As the saying goes, absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. Sciences like archaeology, paleontology, and geology periodically have to be rethought and reorganized simply because new evidence is found that had been buried for thousands or even millions of years. A new fossil, an new stratum, or a new inscription can overturn our current understanding of the past. Science is always a work in progress.

But our study of the Bible should go even deeper than these matters. It is the content not the incidentals that has captured the interest and devotion of people for millennia. Contrary to what many skeptics think, most Christians do not use the Bible as a science text that tells us how the physical world works but as a spiritual text that gives us a greater understanding of ourselves, our fellow human beings and God. It gives us essential insights in how we should think, speak and act in regards to those 3 relationships. Sometimes it gives us prescriptions of how to do those things and sometimes it gives us descriptions of how people have acted in those areas, and not all of those descriptions are to be emulated. Madalyn Murray O'Hair saw terrible things in the Bible. Apparently her pre-adolescent brain did not discern that some of those were meant to be bad examples. Perhaps she did not pick up the fact that the Bible never says that people are perfect or the fact that God can use messed up people and situations to bring good out of bad. Perhaps she missed how often God condemns violence, deceit, greed, rage, lust, envy, selfishness, oppression, xenophobia, exploitation of the poor, animal abuse, being a bystander to injustice, mistreatment or neglect of the disabled, the aged, women and children. She evidently overlooked all the commandments to love your neighbor, and the foreigner, and even your enemy. I'm pretty sure she missed all the condemnations of pride, or to use the better translation, arrogance. Oddly enough, arrogance also leads to bad science, something she was supposed to care about. Know-it-alls don't advance science; it's acknowledging that they don't know everything that motivates scientists to keep asking questions, keep learning, keep questioning the orthodoxies within their own disciplines. Humility was not a virtue in the ancient world. Its introduction into culture by Christianity is at least part of the reason that science really took off in the West and why most of the early scientists were not merely Christians but often clergy.

In fact, the Instruction for Lent to read and meditate on God's holy Word would be useless were it not for the fact that we are a faith in which literacy is prized. In the ancient world, the upper classes could read. Middle class folks and business people, like merchants and landowners, must have been literate. For that matter certain types of slaves could read, like the Greek physicians so favored by the Romans. But the average peasant may only have had knowledge of certain written words, so he could read signs, and only enough math for his most basic needs. He wouldn't read for information or pleasure because books, which had to be hand-copied, were expensive.

The church very early on insisted that clergy be literate. Bishops could read because they often came from the upper classes. Monks were expected to read and write and were taught if they could not. During the so-called “Dark Ages” the knowledge of the classical world was preserved by monasteries. Irish monks were even sent as missionaries to the European continent and did their best to revive literacy, which was spotty among parish priests. But the invention of the Guttenberg printing press and the emphasis of the Reformers on being able to read the Bible led to increased literacy in countries where the Protestants were in the majority, so that, for instance, the Scandinavian countries were fully literate by the 17^th century.

Nowadays not only can you buy any kind of Bible you want, you can download several on your phone. You can also get quite a large range of Bible dictionaries, concordances, commentaries and other tools for understanding the scriptures online as well. So if you haven't started studying the Bible for Lent, you can do so shortly after reading this. I just want to give you some tips to start you off.

I would definitely start with one of the gospels. Mark is the shortest. If you read 3 chapters today and one chapter every day hereafter you will have it done by Easter. I would definitely use a study Bible for the explanatory notes. My current favorite is the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible. For more devotional purposes, the Life Application Study Bible is good. If you don't have one of these, you can go to biblehub.com or the Logos Bible app and find some of the same features. In addition you can go to my blog for those comments I posted. Go to February 1^st 2013, Day 33 of the Bible Challenge for Mark. But I just summarize chapters and highlight certain features.

To go deep, get a commentary. Nelson's New Illustrated Bible Commentary is good, going verse by verse. If you have a Kindle may I suggest the Baker Illustrated Bible Commentary or for individual books in the New Testament the appropriate volume of N.T. Wright's For Everyone series.

If you want to go in deep on specific topics, or just get more information on persons, places and things mentioned in scripture, get a good Bible dictionary, like the Holman Bible Dictionary or the New Bible Dictionary by Intervarsity Press. You can look up specific verses using Google or with a concordance, of which Strong's is the best, especially in a newer edition. But many Bible apps will have a concordance feature and often they will be linked to Strong's numbers, which tell you the Greek or Hebrew word underlying the English, complete with definitions and etymology.

A word of caution here. Don't be like one of those comic book geeks who gets so lost in the forest of details and theories and the inevitable controversies that they miss out on the main purpose of comic books: entertainment. The main purpose of studying scripture is to get closer to God and to become closer to Christ in our thinking, speech and action. Look for the things that help you do that. The other stuff can be ultimately useful but it can also divert you from the main purpose of scripture, and you can lose your way, Bart Ehrman is a respected Bible scholar who lost his faith because he was raised to be a fundamentalist and take everything literally. Most atheists are just as literal as fundamentalists when it comes to the Bible. If you don't allow for paradox and nuance and you wish to reduce everything to a simple formula, you won't make a very good student of scripture or of science either.

It's important to remember that the Bible is not a straightforward “how to” book about life. It is a library of 66 books, written by at least 40 authors over thousands of years. It contains poetry, parables, proverbs, letters, wisdom literature, and history. It uses metaphors, similes, hyperbole, irony, and even humor. Jesus came up with some comical images, like people straining out gnats from their drinks and swallowing camels, or trying to remove a speck from someone else's eye while walking around with a log in their own. Familiarity has drained these sayings of their funny and startling nature.

My point is that you cannot compare what Paul is saying in one of his letters to what a psalm says as if they were of the same genre. Be careful, too, of looking in Jesus' parables for facts about, say, heaven or hell when they may just be story details to support the main point. It's important to know that something can be true without being literally factual at times. If I say my heart leaped when I saw my beloved, don't go looking for medical conditions in which the cardiac muscle in my thoracic cavity moves away from its fixed position without killing me.

The Bible tells the story of the God who is love and who creates a world and populates it with creatures made in his image. As part of that image, these creatures are free to choose to love him and each other. They choose not to and so God decides to win them back. He works through flawed people to teach folks to trust him and also to set it up so that he can enter into his own creation and make a change that will require a great sacrifice on his part. Once he does so, he pours out his Spirit on those who put their trust in him and enables them to spread the story of his love and invite others to join in the effort to bring everyone into the circle of his love. He promises to return and recreate the world and its people when he knows the time is right.

Once you know the greater story you can figure in how the various books and passages fit into it. You can see how people respond to God in different circumstances and observe the varying degrees of success they have in thinking like God. So when the people God chose to be a blessing to the world go against both the letter and the spirit of what he commanded them, they see him as a stern judge. When they repent and return to him, they realize he is forgiving. When reflecting on God's creation, they see God's delight in it and how it reflects his majesty and his orderly ways and his provision for his creatures. When in distress, they feel the pain of being separated from the source of all goodness and wonder where God is. When they are rescued, they proclaim his faithfulness and mercy. 

In Jesus' own life, we see him angry with those who twist God's words, gentle with those who are outcasts, determined to alleviate suffering regardless of the rules, impatient with his slow-on-the-uptake students, courageous when standing up to power, forgiving to friends who denied him and subject to pain, sorrow, surprise, compassion, and feeling abandoned. Jesus is God and God is multifaceted.

One last tip. When Jacob is at a low point in his life, he finds himself wrestling with a stranger. Jacob says, “I will not let you go until you bless me.” The man subsequently gives him the name Israel, which means “the one who wrestles with God.” As we have said, there are parts of scripture that disturb people. You can pretend it doesn't because it comes from God. You can reject the whole Bible because of the bits that bother you. Or you can wrestle with it. God has allowed those parts to be in there for a reason. Maybe it was so that we can wrestle with some the issues and features of this life that upset us. And out of that wrestling can come blessing: insight, strength, knowledge, acceptance, and a desire to make the world better. So read honestly and prayerfully. Meditate on it.

There is a reason that people still read and get wisdom and comfort and inspiration from the Bible. The Bible changes people. So does life but it doesn't always change folks for the better. The Bible tells us that God can change us into the people we were created to be, regardless of the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Our past need not determine our future. There is hope to be found if we trust in Jesus, the Word of God made flesh. We read the written Word of God to learn more about his living Word, Jesus, our Lord, in whom we see what God is like and what we can be.

Sacrificial Giving and Works of Love

The scriptures referred to are mentioned in the text.

On the internet there are so many misquotes and just plain made-up sayings attributed to famous people that I tend to mistrust ones that sound a bit too apt. Luckily there are websites that track down who actually said these things and exactly what they really said. For instance, the words, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle,” has been attributed to either Plato or Philo. In fact, thanks to the Quote Investigator website, we know it is a paraphrase of what a Scottish minister, the Rev. Dr. John Watson, wrote in 1897 under his pen name Ian McLaren: “Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle.” And Gandhi never said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” It's a shortened paraphrase of a much longer quote of his. And Plato never said, “Love is a serious mental illness.” Rather this is a misleading translation of what he recorded his teacher Socrates said in the dialogue Phaedrus: “Love is a madness.” Far from condemning love, Socrates was alluding to the common idea that madness was sent from the gods. Sometimes it was a punishment but sometimes it granted the person insight. Socrates often reported what we would call an audio hallucination: a voice that spoke to him. He saw it as a lesser deity or guiding spirit since it usually advised him not to do certain things. So for him love was a divine madness, a kind of enthusiasm, which literally means being possessed by a god.

He probably said this because love changes people and makes us do things we normally wouldn't. Macho guys will write bad love poems to their girlfriends. Women will suddenly develop an interest in sports or D&D or certain topics they previously didn't care about. People get the name of the person they have been dating for a few months tattooed on their bodies. Love inspires us to do amazingly good things and appallingly bad things. Neurologically love looks like addiction, triggering in the brain the same neurotransmitters. It also overrides the parts of our brain that usually restrain us from reckless actions. So Socrates wasn't far wrong.

Yet love also gets us to appreciate persons and aspects of life we wouldn't usually focus on. Love gets us to trust folks and to work for the good of people other than ourselves. Love binds groups of individuals who are otherwise quite different in their personalities and their outlook on life.

This shouldn't surprise us because, as Christians, we believe that God is love and that we are created in God's image. Jesus rated two Old Testament commandments, to love God and love others, as the greatest of all commandments. To which he added two other commandments: to love our enemies and to love each other as Jesus loves us. In an earlier edition of his book The World's Religions, Houston Smith subtitled the chapter on Christianity The Religion of Love.

Yet there are many who would feel that our faith does not deserve to be known as the religion of love, largely because of the awful things that have been done by members of the church and by church bodies. I will not justify any atrocities done in Jesus' name but I will point out that people who are willing to throw out Christianity because of its failings don't seem to want to do the same thing with democracy, though the history of this country is filled with the same sorts of horrible acts. You don't abandon an ideal because some people espousing it betray its core tenets. You try to do better in realizing its aspirations.

I watched the recent HBO documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, an engineering student and college dropout with the dream of coming up with a way of doing medical tests with drops of blood rather than vials. When I first read about the concept years ago I was enthusiastic because as a nurse there is nothing more frustrating than having a blood test rejected because you were simply unable to get enough from an aged patient with veins that had long since collapsed, due in large part to the enormous number of blood tests we continually demanded of them. We can determine your blood sugar from a drop of blood; why not other substances? So I don't think the spectacular failure of Holmes' silicon valley startup was due to her having the wrong goal but to refusing to rethink how to achieve it. She wanted a mini-lab in a box capable of doing 200 blood tests. When actual engineers said that at the very least the box needed to be bigger because of a little thing called the laws of thermodynamics, she refused to consider it. In the end, her company switched to secretly doing blood tests on commercially available machines using regular vials of blood rather than pinpricks and she lied about the fact. Had she not tried to roll out the tests before her engineers perfected the technical challenges, and had she not taken $900 million under false pretenses, she might have ended up a great hero. Instead she endangered lives by having people with insufficient training doing tests and giving out inaccurate results. Her original motivation was to catch diseases early enough that they could be treated in time. She betrayed that commendable ideal.

Our ideal is to treat everyone as a person who was created in God's image and for whom Christ died. If we do it right, people will be motivated to investigate Jesus and hopefully follow him. Though we are not saved by works, works should naturally follow being saved, the way love changes people and they just naturally do things for those they love. It was not so much the preaching of the church that drew pagans to the faith but the acts of love they saw the early Christians do, such as staying in the cities during times of plague and taking care of the sick and dying at the risk to their own lives. Their works of love brought people to examine their motivation, which is the God who is love.

As I said last time the Lutheran version of the Instruction for Lent replaces “self-denial” in its list of spiritual practices to adopt with “sacrificial giving and works of love.” And I wholeheartedly agree because too often our faith is characterized by “don't”s. Christians are better known these days by what we are against than by what we are for. And verbally trying to correct the impression won't do. People need to see us doing positive and constructive things if they are to believe our message of the good news. After all, do you think as many people would have to come to see and hear Jesus if he was only preaching and not healing and feeding people as well?

So what are the works of love we should be doing? Love is primarily an attitude of wanting good things for those we love. If they are sick, we nurse them. If they are hungry, we feed them. If they need help, we provide it. We tend to learn how to love from those who raised us. Good loving parents meet the physical and emotional needs of their children. They make sure their kids are fed, clothed, cleaned, sheltered, educated, and loved properly. When the parents are out of the picture for some reason, hopefully others step up and take over: grandparents, uncles and aunts, adoptive parents, or even an older sibling. How well they do this job will affect how well the children will be at loving others.

Loving means developing the emotional intelligence to figure out what form of love is needed in any given situation. New parents eventually learn which of the cries their baby makes means “I'm hungry,” “I'm wet,” “I'm in pain,” or “I'm lonely and need picking up.” Perceptive parents continue to construct a vocabulary of how kids, even those who can speak, express themselves in other ways and what the loving response should be. Sometimes the kid does something bad just to force the parent to put down his or her phone and pay attention to them. Studies show that as bad as abuse is, neglect is worse. To a kid, as well as some adults, bad attention is better than no attention at all.

Adults are not always forthcoming about their real needs either. They may act out not to get attention but because something else is bothering them. The resulting outburst is all out of proportion because it's not really about the immediate triggering incident. Hurt people tend to hurt people and the ultimate cause may be deeper than what we see. A therapist says she wonders not why people come to her but why did they come now. What long buried problem has the immediate situation reawakened? Her response is to listen attentively, and we can do the same, even when we don't know what to say.

Of course, often the need is fairly obvious. The hungry person needs food; the sick person needs medical care; the person with holes in their shoes needs new shoes; the person fleeing violence in their home needs a safe place to stay. Jesus gives us a very common sense rule of thumb in such situations: treat other people as we would like to be treated. (Matthew 7:12) If I were homeless how would I want to be treated? If I were suffering from an illness with few obvious and outward signs how would I like to be treated? If I were forced to flee my country because of violence, how would I like to be treated by those in a wealthier, more stable country? In fact Jesus raises the bar on this ethical rule. In Matthew 25, he says that what we do for the least of his siblings, we do for him. (verse 40) The obverse is also true: what we neglect to do for the least of these, we neglect to do for him. (v.45) It does not go well for those whose sins are that they did not help the unfortunate. (v.41) And the examples he gives are feeding the hungry, quenching the thirsty, inviting the foreigner in, clothing those who need it, looking after the sick and visiting those in prison. That's still a good place to start.

And you can help people in a number of other ways. There are groups and organizations within and outside the church that help with those in need. You can choose to participate in or support whichever groups are doing what you are interested in or have a gift for. If nutrition or teaching children to read or helping the victims of domestic abuse or aiding prisoners who are dealing with addiction are important to you, there are local organizations that address those problems. If you wish to help the victims of human trafficking or help rebuild the lives of those who were hit by disasters or positively affect the lives of those in other countries, our denomination has ministries that do that and they can always use volunteers and contributors.

Now confess: how many of you, hearing “sacrificial giving,” thought I was mostly going to be talking about money? And, yes, giving money to churches, ministries and non-profit organizations is vital. It's not like they have tangible products to sell and make money with. But, as I have learned at the jail, sacrificial giving can simply mean giving a portion of your life, your time, to others.

A lot of the problems of the world are caused by disconnected people. How often have these gunman who have made places that should be safe, like schools and churches, into slaughter sites been found to have been loners? Not introverts who merely need time alone to recharge but people who want to connect to others but somehow fail to. You know what attracts a lot of people to gangs and terrorist groups? The need to connect with others. These groups often recruit through the networks of family and friends. They target people who do not feel that they are regarded as valuable members of the society in which they live. They give them a place where they are accepted and where they have a role. Whether they are neo-Nazi groups, or terrorist cells, or street gangs, they provide a surrogate family and community for people who do not find that in their home or in their country. Providing such a person with your time, caring for them and listening to them and offering them a role in helping and healing rather than blaming and harming, can literally save lives.

Usually when we talk about Lenten disciplines we think about giving stuff up. But there are also things we can take on. Like works of love, ways to make our message concrete. God made us both spiritual and physical. He did not just give us words, breaths shaped into sounds, or squiggles on paper. He gave us Jesus, the Word of God made flesh. Jesus did not merely speak the good news; he expressed it in physical acts of healing and helping. As Jesus embodied God's love, so we are to embody it in all we do. We are not, as someone once put it, to be so heavenly minded that we are of no earthly use. We are to make real solid changes in this world.

Some Christians think our main task is to simply evangelize others. But Jesus clearly told us to take care of the hungry, the poor, the sick, the foreigner and the prisoner. He touched lepers and bleeding women and corpses. He washed dirty feet. He was a spiritual and physical being ministering to a physical and spiritual world. The two are entwined and it can get messy. But people believe you more if you show as well as tell.

And part of following Jesus is to, like him, look for opportunities to perform acts of love. Look for the neighbor unusually downcast, the coworker struggling, the person who is jumpy for no reason or uncharacteristically irritable. Don't just keep walking past like the priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Ask how they are. Say “What can I do?” Sacrifice some time. Give them an ear to bend, a shoulder to cry on, an arm to support them. Reach out.

Our elder siblings in faith, the Jews, have a concept called tikkun olam, repair of the world. Rabbis think that God left part of creation unfinished for us to tackle. As Rebbe Menachem Schneerson put it, “If you see what needs to be repaired and how to repair it, then you have found a piece of the world that God has left for you to complete. But if you only see what is wrong and what is ugly in the world, then it is you yourself that needs repair.”

Jesus came to repair us so we can repair the world. He came to make us better so we can make the world better, not just with our words but with our works. We are not just to proclaim but to reclaim, not just to reveal but to heal, not just to root out evil but to plant and nurture the seeds of all that is good.

Jesus said, “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:14-16)

This is a dark time for the world. People are groping for hope and not finding it. We have that hope. You may not feel that you are the brightest lamp around. But that reminds me of what E.L. Doctorow said about writing. He said it was “like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” So let your light shine however much it can. It will be enough to get you and whoever is holding your hand, and whoever is holding theirs and so on, through the gloom to the risen Son of God, who calls us out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Fasting and Self-Denial

The scriptures referred to are mentioned in the text.

When a certain someone turned 5 she said that she was now an adult and could use bad words. I pointed out that since she couldn't legally drive or vote she wasn't an adult, but she was in denial about those things. In her mind, she was all grown up. If I wanted to prolong the argument, I could have pointed out that one mark of maturity is having a fairly accurate perception of who you are.

There is no culture that sees anyone whose age can be expressed in single digits as fully grown. For certain civil rights you have to be at least 18. While you can get a learner's permit in Florida at age 15, you have to have a licensed driver who is at least 21 in the car with you. At 16 you can get a restricted license, but to get a full license you must be 18. Yet most car rental companies will not let anyone under 25 rent a car. And it turns out that is closer to the age neuroscientists say a person is fully adult, though some of them would put it at age 30. Their criteria includes having the prefrontal cortex completely hardwired. The prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain just behind your forehead and it is where judgment and impulse control reside. Among other things, it puts the brakes on the emotions, instincts and basic drives that come out of your limbic system. For most people the prefrontal cortex doesn't have the reins fully in hand until they are in their mid- to late-twenties. So while children think of adulthood in terms of all they can do, scientists realize it is really when you have the ability to see that just because you can do something, it doesn't necessarily mean you should.

The wise have long known this as well. Indeed, without the benefits of neuroscience, the framers of our Constitution put the minimum age when you can be elected to the House of Representatives at 25, the age you can serve in the Senate at 30 and to be President you must be at least 35...chronologically at any rate. Ironically, this is highlighted in the movie Wild in the Streets which came out in 1968. It posited a United States where the voting age was lowered to 14. Anyone over 30 was put in a “paradise camp” and kept on LSD. It ends with a child looking at the new 22 year old President, who is depicted as a jerk, and vowing to put everyone over 8 out of business! Though marketed to youth, the movie was obviously meant as satire.

Yes, we all know children who seem older than their age and adults who have terminally arrested development, like the man-child who is only entertaining in TV and movies but not in real life. Sometimes tragedy causes one to grow up fast. Sometimes wealth and lack of consequences abet the person who perpetually acts like a spoiled child. But most people agree that “adulting” is all about taking responsibility, and that requires being able to say “No” to some things you'd like to do and “Yes” to things you'd rather not.

Maturity is a recurring theme in the Bible. Paul writes, “Brothers and sisters, stop thinking like children. In regards to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.” (1 Corinthians 14:20) Children frequently resort to magical thinking. They think that certain powers like athletic prowess, musical or artistic excellence, or academic achievement come easily to those with the talent and a belief in themselves. But in fact they take lots of practice and perseverance. If you don't do well at something, it doesn't mean you will never do well at it. If you persist in doing it, and, usually with the help of a coach or mentor, figure out what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong, and make improvements in your technique, you will get better. Even prodigies, who seem to effortlessly do things well at a young age, often find that maintaining that level of skill as they get older requires a lot more work than before. The actors playing superheroes don't have those bodies when they are cast. They go on diets and have trainers to get that look.

This Sunday we are talking about the Lenten disciplines of fasting and self-denial. And they are disciplines, like art, music or athletics. Practicing these disciplines is like working out in a gym. You don't do the exercises as an end in themselves but as a means, the way someone might lift weights not to become a professional weightlifter but in order to play baseball or football or do gymnastics. Fasting is not an end in itself but a means to improve spiritually.

Fasting is a common religious practice. And researchers have found that fasting does improve alertness and mood and can improve subjective feelings of well-being. It might even relieve symptoms of depression. For one thing, it shows that a person does have some self-control in some areas of their life, making them feel less helpless. And it is a demonstration of how important praying to God and seeking his favor is. Thus all religions have days where the whole community fasts.

A strict or absolute fast involves not eating any food for a whole 24 hour day, from sunset to sunset, as Jews do on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. And if it is a multi-day fast, since you can't survive much longer than 3 days without water, such fasts usually allow one to drink water for hydration. In contrast, a normal fast lasts from sunrise to sunset, which is what Muslims do for the whole month of Ramadan. They neither eat nor drink during daylight hours. A partial fast, which many Christians do for Lent, is to restrict one's diet and abstain from certain types of food.

The connection between giving up food and seeking God is not obvious. It becomes a little more understandable when you realize that in the Ancient Near East fasting was usually a reaction to a disaster, suffering or mourning. When in the grip of such powerful emotions one often forgets to eat or simply loses one's appetite. Thus a natural reaction became a custom or rite. And it is also natural to turn to God at those times. In the aftermath of losing a loved one, or a community, or one's own well-being, talking to God about it and dealing with the existential questions it engenders might even be seen as taking a precedence over eating. If someone told you that ever since a person started working on some matter, they haven't even taken the time to eat, that would show you how serious they were. When David's son by Bathsheba was dying, we are told, “David pleaded with God for the child. He fasted and spent the nights lying in sackcloth on the ground. The elders of his household stood beside him to get him up from the ground, but he refused, and he would not eat any food with them.” (2 Samuel 12:16-17)

And that's another reason why people fast: to show God they know how serious their sin was. When the Israelites respond to Samuel's call to turn from other gods, it says: “After they had assembled at Mizpah, they drew water and poured it before the Lord. They fasted on that day, and they confessed there, 'We have sinned against the Lord.'” (1 Samuel 7:6) After the Babylonian exile, when Ezra reads the book of God's law and the people of Jerusalem hear it for the first time, they fast and confess their sins. (Nehemiah 9:1-2) When the people of Nineveh hear Jonah preach imminent judgment, they fast. (Jonah 3:4) As it says in Joel, “'Even now', declares the Lord, 'return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning.'” (Joel 2:12) After all, you would hardly think a person was sincere if while apologizing to you he continued shoveling food into his mouth.

The purpose of a fast should be to get closer to God, not to lose weight or look especially holy to others. God says to Zechariah, “Ask all the people and the priests, 'When you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months for the past seventy years, was it really for me you fasted?'” (Zechariah 7:5) Jesus said, “When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show others they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.” (Matthew 6:16)

In the Hebrew text about the Day of Atonement, the usual word for “fast” (tsom) doesn't appear but instead a word meaning “self-denial” (anah) is used. (Leviticus 16:31; 23:29; Number 29:7) In fact that word can also mean “to afflict,” “to weaken,” and “to be humble.” Thus on Yom Kippur observant Jews also abstain from bathing, from wearing leather shoes, from anointing oneself with oil or perfumes and from sex. You are denying yourself even little pleasures and normal things.

Again such self-denial is not for show but to get closer to God. Money usually spent on such pleasures could be given to charity or the church. Time spent on such things is given to prayer or reading the Bible or other Christian acts. In Zechariah, following up on his question of whether their fasting was sincere, it says, “This is what the Lord Almighty said: 'Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other.'” (Zechariah 7:9-10) And on Yom Kippur, Jews are to do 3 things: pray, repent and give to charity. In fact, in comparing the Instructions for Lent in the Ash Wednesday liturgies for our two denominations, I found that the word “self-denial” in the Episcopal version is replaced with “sacrificial giving and works of love” in the Lutheran version. We will deal with that next week but the point is to redirect our attention, energy and talents towards things of the spirit.

We live in a time when self-restraint is not much in evidence. We have an economy driven by an unsustainable, ever-increasing consumption of goods and services. We have celebrities known for their personal excesses. We have companies who ravenously run through natural resources. We have leaders who cannot control their emotions or words. And all this at a time when the low hanging fruit of problems with obvious solutions are gone. The problems we face in this century are complex in nature and are going to require everyone in almost every field to work together. More than ever, ensuring the survival of humanity will take cool heads and self-sacrifice on the part of all. If we can't forgo some small pleasures for 40 days, how can we expect to give up some big pleasures for the common good?

Jesus said if anyone was to follow him, they must first deny themselves and then pick up their cross and follow in his steps. The word translated “deny” can be rendered “disown” or “repudiate.” Giving up all rights to our own way is not an optional part of following our Lord but an integral step in being a Christian. Much of the church has downplayed that part in recent decades. Preachers have tried to remake the gospel in the image of our consumer culture and called it the "prosperity gospel." We have recovered the fact that God pronounced all that he had made as very good in Genesis 1 but we have skipped over the part where in Genesis 6 God saw how humanity had ruined the earth and filled it with violence. (Genesis 1:31; 6:11-12) We live in a fallen world. And the reason is we don't restrain ourselves.

In Genesis 9, God makes a covenant with Noah, the new representative of humanity. God says on his part he will never ruin/destroy (it's the same word in Hebrew) the earth by flood again. Our part in this first-ever covenant is to restrain ourselves from killing one another. And the reason given is that we are created in the image of God. Since God promises to restrain himself, we, his children, should also restrain ourselves. In fact, if you wonder why God does not magically stop evil, why he doesn't just step in and start kicking butt and taking names, it is because of that promise. We are all guilty of harming or being complicit in the harm of others, even if not through violence. The strict application of justice would not go well for anyone. By holding back, God is keeping his part of the bargain. And while he vows never again to destroy/ruin the earth, that does not mean we will not ruin it on our own and destroy ourselves.

In Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, geographer and historian Jared Diamond posited that the success of the Eurasian peoples was not due to genetic superiority but to the fact that the region where they settled offered a wider variety of plants and animals suitable for domestication. In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, he examined a number of civilizations and argued that it was not whether a culture was superior or not that determined its survival but how it responded to the challenges of changes in environment and climate and to both their hostile neighbors and to their trading partners. The biggest problem is that overpopulation tends to outstrip the carrying capacity of the environment. One of Diamond's suggestions is that we find “the courage to make painful decisions about values.” Again Jesus was saying that 2000 years ago. We are going to have to deny ourselves. To paraphrase J.K. Rowling we need to choose between doing the easy thing and the right thing.

Hopefully, you already have chosen what you are giving up for Lent. May I suggest in addition looking at changing some aspect of your lifestyle in a way that will be more sustainable for this creation God has given us? You can choose foods that require less resources to grow and harvest. You can cut down on plastics, which are choking our environment and literally choking our sea life. You may have read about the starved young whale whose body was washed up onshore with 90 pounds of plastic in its stomach. Last year one was found with 80 plastic bags in it. Petroleum products in all forms are destroying the environment in a kind of revenge of the dinosaurs, from whose organic remains we get oil, gasoline and plastics. So consider a partial fast from such things.

All we have comes ultimately from God, so we are not really giving up anything that is ours in any permanent way. We are giving back to God things that he has loaned us and which he expects us to use wisely and to share. (1 Chronicles 29:14) We are not owners of anything in this life but stewards. And part of our problem is that we strut around this planet acting like we own the place. We don't own it anymore than we own other human beings. We don't even own ourselves. We have been bought with a price, the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Corinthians 6:20) We are his but he gives us the freedom to be who we were meant to be. In this life we are to grow up into an ever better reflection of the God of love in whose image we were originally made. And anything we have to give up to achieve that is ephemeral in the light of eternity and is not worth the weight of the glory he will bestow upon us. (2 Corinthians 4:17)

As C.S. Lewis put it, “The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up your self and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep nothing back. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”