Grace, mercy, and peace to you
from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Tonight we
continue with our theme of Lenten Customs.
Last week we looked at how ashes are symbols of our sin and repentance,
as outwards signs of our inward state. Tonight
we are going to be looking from the inside out.
Another longstanding tradition of Lent is the practice of fasting. Traditionally, the term fasting refers to the
act of abstaining from food for religious purposes, and we can see this
practice all over the Bible as well as throughout history. This is not just a Christian practice; we see
a variety of religious traditions abstaining from food for a set period of
time. Most often, this is in order to
merit some favor or achieve some righteousness before God. The church, on the other hand, has used
fasting in a variety of forms to help refocus our attention on Christ.
Our attention is
a very fickle thing. Many of us like to
believe that we are efficient multitaskers, but in reality our brains can only
process one task at a time. When most of
us multitask, in truth we are simply switching back and forth between tasks,
though perhaps seamlessly, because our brain cannot process more than one thing
at a time. This is what makes magic so
convincing. The other evening I was
watching a show entitled “Brain Games,” and on the episode about attention the
famous magician, David Copperfield, said, “If you can take their attention to
another place willingly, then you’ve done your job correctly.”
Magicians
exploit the fact that our brains can only focus on one thing to pull off
seemingly miraculous illusions. They
know that if they can get us to focus on a single object, our brain will filter
everything else out and we won’t notice even the most significant changes in
our environment. To demonstrate, the
show set up a counter advertising the opportunity to be on the show. They positioned a clerk behind the counter
and when someone walked up the clerk would hand them a release form. The clerk would then duck under the counter
to get a pen and a different clerk would reappear with the pen. Since the people were so busy looking at the
waiver, they didn’t even notice the clerk was different than before.
Through a
variety of other demonstrations and experiments the show made its point clear:
we are easily deceived into being distracted and lose sight of the world around
us. But there is one who is far superior
to all the magicians and con artists and hypnotists out there, and there is
more on the line than just your pride or your wallet. From the beginning Satan has been known as
“The Deceiver.” He has been called the
“Father of All Lies,” “The Corrupter of the Truth,” “The Tempter.” While scholars and scientists have been
studying the mind since Ancient Greece, Satan has been studying humanity since
Adam and Eve. He knows how we work. He knows how we think. He knows just how to distract and entice us
so that we lose focus on God and shift our devotion and attention to other
things. Satan knows how to turn
seemingly harmless objects into idols.
He is so good at this that we often don’t even see our own idolatry for
what it truly is.
Luther tells us
in his Large Catechism a god is something from which we are to expect all good
and in which we are to take refuge in all distress. Luther wrote, “I have often said that the
confidence and faith of the heart alone make both God and an idol. If your faith and trust is right, then your
god is also true. On the other hand, if
your trust is false and wrong, then you do not have the true God. ... Now I say
that whatever you set your heart on and put your trust in is truly your god.” Satan can work his deception so well that he
can replace the one True God with an idol without us even noticing.
There are the
obvious ways, like trusting in money or possessions, but even those we exclude
ourselves from. We insist we only trust
in God, but what would happen if like Job you lost everything? What would happen if your house burned down,
your bank account drained, your other possessions stolen, your family
murdered? Your faith would likely be
hard pressed. Even more so, what would
happen if your health was to fail you and you suffered from a crippling disease? Would you stand firm in your faith,
confidently declaring, “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away?”
But these are
big things, what about the little ones?
What would happen if you lost access television or the internet or a
computer or a telephone? What would
happen if someone hit your car and you had to go without it for a week or
two? How would that make you feel? How would you respond? My guess is that anyone in here would at the
very least be quite agitated. You see,
Satan offers us so many distractions that our sinful natures feasts upon that
we don’t even realize we are being distracted, and we are even resistant to the
idea of calling these things that we depend on idols and calling ourselves
idolaters.
Yet there is a
way that we, by the power of the Holy Spirit, are able to recapture our
attention and refocus it on Christ. One
of the ways we do this is through fasting.
Though traditionally this has been done by abstaining from food, this
practice has expanded to include abstaining from a variety of activities, thus
the question is often asked, “What did you give up for Lent?” The “hunger” for whatever we are giving up is
associated with our spiritual hunger. The
idea is that when we fast, we feel that desire; that emptiness in our lives
that used to be filled by these things we have given up, those idols in our
lives, and it grabs our attention. This
is what makes fasting from food is so effective, because the hunger pains can
get so bad that they distract us from all other things. When they do so we intentionally remind
ourselves that it is God who gives us what we truly need. He gives us the true bread and the living
water.
When we give
things up for Lent we also feel the weight of their absence, and as we are
turned to Christ by the Spirit we see how we have replaced God in our devotion with
all these other things. We see how much
time and attention we have given to them while neglecting our devotion to God. Yes, when our attention is turned to Christ
we do in fact see our idolatry, but we also see our Savior. As we confessed earlier, we know we cannot
live God’s Law perfectly, but we also know that Christ already did it for
us. As our attention is turned from our
own false gods, we see the true God who lived and died for each and every one
of us, and when we do that we also see Satan and his distractions for what they
truly are: nothing but cheap magician’s gimmicks that are incapable of
separating us from the love of God our Father, and Jesus Christ our Lord. So this Lent let your attention be turned to
the cross and know that Christ has taken your sins upon Himself, and rest in
peace knowing that even death itself is just a distraction that cannot keep us
from our Savior forever.
May the peace of
God which surpasses all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ
Jesus. Amen.
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