Repent or perish

Texts: Isaiah 55.1-9; Psalm 63.1-8; 1 Corinthians 10.1-13; Luke 13.1-9

Today the Scriptures confront us with the question: ‘do you hunger and thirst for nothing, or do you hunger and thirst for God?’ The Psalmist clearly hungers and thirsts for God; and God, out of an infinite kindness, satisfies this hunger completely:

O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water . . My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips . . . for you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.

Isaiah, on the other hand, speaks of a desire that is not so satiated, a hunger and a thirst that is not quenched because it is a hunger and a thirst for something other than God:

Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which does not satisfy?

 To spend one’s labour and one’s money on things that can never, in a million years, bring satisfaction is to spend oneself for nothing. Some of you will remember the Rolling Stone’s hit from the mid 1960s:

When I'm drivin' in my car
And that man comes on the radio
He's tellin' me more and more
About some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination
I can't get no satisfaction

When I'm watchin' my T.V.
And that man comes on to tell me
How white my shirts can be
But he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke
The same cigarettes as me
I can't get no satisfaction.

The point made by this song and, nowadays, in a slightly more sophisticated manner by cultural critics like Noam Chomsky, is that you can never satiate an essentially spiritual hunger with food or drink or consumer goods, no matter what the advertisers might say. For while the consumer society lives from the human desire for things – a bigger or better house, car, phone, dress, suit, storage-solution, diet, boyfriend, body – none of these things will ever do the trick. For in the end, for all their shiny attractiveness and glitter, consumer goods are like mirages. They come into view, they attract our attention and give birth to a desire. But once we possess them – once we have them in our hands - they disappear. For consumer goods never deliver what they promise: happiness, peace, contentment, an end to the never-ending cycle of desire. Having shelled out our hard-earned cash, what we finally hold in our hands is nothing, nothing substantial. What we possess, instead, is a shell with a hollow heart. And this hollowness signifies nothing other than the hollowness we continue to experience in the heart of ourselves, the hollowness of unfulfilled desire. So out we go again, on the hunt for something that can finally fill the void.

 
According to the faith of Christians, in fact there is only one thing that will fill the void, and that thing is not really a thing at all, but a person, the God made known in Jesus Christ. Jesus, as Bach memorably wrote, is the joy of all our human desiring. He is the bread and the water and the wine that can finally satiate our thirst. He is reality, the truly substantial, solid and concrete and undeniable as you like. We are all searching for him, whether we know it or not; but we seldom find him because we in search for in all the wrong places. He is the one who can fill the great big hole in our hearts. By comparison, everything else is as insubstantial as fog.

The problem, of course, with hungering and thirsting for every damned thing that is not God is that you can eventually starve to death. Perhaps not literally – we might still be walking around – and yet we do so as zombies. You know, the walking dead who have no zest for life, no joie de vivre. In the passage we read this morning from 1 Corinthians chapter 10, St Paul speaks about the history of God’s people Israel and points out that even though the people of Israel saw the reality of God with their own eyes - having been led out of their slavery in Egypt with great power and an undeniable series of miraculous signs - when they found themselves in the desert of Sinai they nevertheless began to hanker after everything they had left behind in Egypt. They hankered even for the conditions of slavery from which they had been freed. They longed, in other words, for that which is evil, for that which makes not for life, but for death. Many who were possessed by that desire in fact perished in the wilderness. Their corpses littered the desert. Now how do you explain that? How do you explain a desire for evil and not for good, especially when evil’s greatest longing is for our death?

If we step back a little and look at these phenomena from a New Testament perspective, the apostle calls our preference for evil rather than good by the biblical name ‘idolatry’. Now, an idol is an object we make, but then forget that it is we who made it. We elevate that self-made object into the place that only God should properly occupy, the space of our greatest desire, the place of our deepest love and worship. But here’s the rub (and the philosopher Feuerbach wrote about this extensively more than a century ago): any object that we make and then elevate to the status of a deity most often symbolises nothing other than ourselves, our deepest desires, the things we long for most. To worship such a thing is therefore to worship ourselves. It is become like Narcissus in the Greek myth, who became so enamoured by his own image on the surface of a pool that, in the attempt to hold and possess his own reflection, he fell in and drowned. The love of things in other words, is really the love of ourselves, a worshipping of our own ingenuity at creating ever-new ways to deceive ourselves. And it is a sad fact that most of us would rather worship ourselves than God. Even if, by so doing, we make ourselves miserable with hunger and thirst.

For miserable is what we are, is it not, when no matter how hard we work and how many things we obtain as the just deserts of our hard work, we nevertheless feel as empty as a drum? The truth is this, you see: we cannot, no matter how hard we try, replace our need for God with an idol that represents ourselves. The good and the beautiful and the true - the life worth living, the life that is meaningful and joyful - is not something we can actually create for ourselves by the sweat of our brow. Human beings are not God. We cannot create such wondrous phenomena out of nothing. When they come our way, the good the beautiful and the true arrive not by hard work or ingenuity, but as sheer gift or grace, an act of unconditional love from God. Such gifts are indeed priceless, as Isaiah says:

Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.

No matter how clever or rich or hardworking you are, you will not be able to buy, beg or steal the life of joy. It is like the manna that the Israelites ate in the desert of Sinai. It is like the water they drank from the rock. It is a gift that cannot be stored or profited from. It is God’s gift in Jesus Christ, and in the way of life that he represents. It is grace, and mercy and peace with one’s enemies.

So if you feel like you are on a treadmill, or like a mouse on one of those wheels in a cage, or if you value your house, your car, your toys, your clothes, your social reputation, or even the apparent ‘needs’ of your family more than you value the gift of God, then I would encourage you to ‘repent’. Yes, ‘repent’! Not a fashionable word, I know, but then again preachers are not supposed to be fashionable! When the gospel-writer talks about ‘repentance’, he means this: to change one’s heart, to stop longing for things and start longing for God; to stop going in one direction, to turn around 180 degrees, and go in the opposite direction. Repentance, you see, is not just for the Trumps and Putins of the world, those whom we rightly see as evil incarnate. It is also for us, with our far more ordinary and prosaic evils. The evil, for example, that is content to let the rest of the world starve to death and descend into endemic criminality so long as we are able to preserve the comforts and relative affluence of our own homes and hearth. Repentance is what Lent is about. It is a return to the promise we all made at our baptism to turn away from the devil, and all his works, and turn instead to Christ and his gift of life, life in all its fullness. It is to turn from a life of empty slavery, in the thrall of our many idols, toward a life of thanksgiving for the many gifts that God bestows upon God's beloved people. It is to reimagine the fruitfulness of our lives, not in terms of the quest for safety and status and the accumulation of things, but in terms of our readiness in the power of God to produce the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience and self-discipline.

So let us reflect on our lives in the light of the word that is able to give life. Let us give away the appetites that lead to death, and let us repent. A change of heart can make all the difference, both for ourselves and for the world at large.

Garry Deverell

The Fast that Satiates our Hunger

Texts: Genesis 2.15-17; 3.1-7; Psalm 32; Romans 5.12-19; Matthew 4.1-11

This morning I want to talk about a spiritual practice that, like most spiritual practices in modernity, is rarely practised anymore.  Fasting: going without food. Allowing oneself to experience genuine hunger.

Fasting used to be a very important part of Christian discipleship, especially during the season of the church year that began on Wednesday, the season of Lent.  ‘Lent’, which means ‘spring’ (somewhat anachronistically for us in the southern hemisphere) has served, since its inception in the second century, a dual purpose: (1) to prepare the newly converted for their baptism into the life, death and resurrection of Christ; and (2) to renew the baptised, all the people of God, in the life and discipline of that same Easter faith.  The practice of fasting was seen as an essential part of this purpose because it taught people the discipline of letting the old desires go—the desires that belonged to the old, pre-Christian, way of life—in order to embrace a radically new set of desires, the desires planted in our hearts by the Spirit of Jesus Christ.  Here a clear connection was being drawn between desire and hunger.  The church reasoned that if one could learn to discipline the body’s basic desire for food and drink then one might also learn to discipline the wayward desires of the heart, that these might come to more accurately reflect the love of God in Jesus Christ.

With that history in mind, it is perhaps easy to see why fasting is no longer seen as a particularly relevant or beneficial thing to do, even by many a good Christian.  Modern wisdom has become suspicious, after all, about any practice that would seem to limit or deny what the body (or the soul) feels it ‘needs’. According to the prevailing common-sense, self-denial is a bad thing, an ancient evil, a form of repression which turns perfectly happy, actualized, assertive and confident people into miserable door-mats for others to wipe their feet upon.  What is wrong, after all, with getting what you want?  Greed may not be good, but don’t we all have a right to be happy, and to follow whatever path we choose in order to obtain that happiness?  What is so wrong with eating, or drinking, or sex, if it feeds one’s inner hungers?  What is so wrong with gaining the world through financial or social 'success' if it enlarges one’s happiness?  If I were to name an anthem that sums up all this modern mythologizing, it may well be the Queen song, ‘I want it all’, which seeks to re-define the traditional notion of love so that it is no longer about putting limits on one’s own wants or needs for the sake of the other person, but about enlisting the other person -  indeed all things -  to the cause of one’s own insatiable desire.

Of course, as well as accepting and absorbing the popular mythology, many contemporary Christians have found additional reasons not to fast. Baptists, for example, often reject the practise as too 'Catholic', too much to do with working one’s way to salvation and not enough to do with being saved by God’s grace alone.  The irony here is that many of the first Baptists were very diligent fasters.  Not because they accepted the supposedly Roman Catholic notion of working one’s way to God through good works and self-discipline, but because, for them, fasting was a way to make room in one’s life for a different kind of feasting, a feasting upon the word of God.  One cannot attend to God or God’s word, which is the only source of life, they argued, unless one also, and at the same time, seeks to put aside the many false gods which clamour for our attention.  Like the god of one’s stomach, for example.  In this, ironically, the early Baptists were closer to both Catholic and biblical teaching than they are to a great many of the moderns who bear their name.

For what does the Bible actually teach us about hunger, desire, and fasting?  Well, there’s the story from Genesis, for a start, the story about Adam and Eve eating fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and of evil.  Note, here, that in contrast to many contemporary assumptions about the story, the problem is not that Adam and Eve gave in to desire as such (for God had told them that they could eat and drink pretty much anything else they desired from the garden in which they lived), but that they desired more than was actually good for them.  It might just be possible, you see—despite what the prevailing wisdom says—that desire and need are often rather different.  It might be possible, in fact, that some of the things we desire are really rather poisonous.  Unfortunately, a great many poisons do not advertise their nature as a matter of course.  They can look and taste rather heavenly! That in no way mitigates a poison's essential function and identity, however: ultimately to do little else but injure, deceive or destroy whomever would take it to one's lips or heart.   

That is why I often think of the serpent (who first introduced the ludicrous idea that poison might actually be good for you) as the very first advertising executive!  Just as the serpent argued that the fruit of the tree would not kill Adam and Eve, but make them like God, so modern advertising tries to convince us that bigger and shinier houses, cars, toys, drinks, gadgets and television programmes will make us the masters of our own destinies and fulfil our every hunger.  In truth, of course, they cannot and they do not.  More usually, these many shiny things make us miserable because we don’t actually need them: they do not fill the hole that is a non-possessive relationship with God, neighbour and creation.  For that is really all we need, according to Scripture: relationships of love in which there is nothing to possess, because everything we need has already been given us.  The truth is that all this other stuff, this consuming of things, does little else than distract us from what is really real: God, and who were are in God’s embrace.

Paul deepens the point in his reflection on this story in the letter to the Romans.  While sin and death came into the world via Adam’s desire for something he had never desired before - through his trust in the serpent’s lie - life and relationship come into the world through the simple and foundational reality of the gift, or grace.  I mean, think about it for just one second.  God has already given us all that we need in creation, and in the revelation that God, from eternity, desires nothing other than to know and love us.  The gift of Jesus Christ, says Paul, is first of all the good news that this is still the case, in spite of the fact that we have woven for ourselves so many other desires, desires for things that succeed only to maim or destroy human life.  Yet, in Christ, there is the further gift of forgiveness.  In Christ God teaches us that even where we have harmed and maimed and killed for the sake of our desire, even where we have forsaken the gifts or God for the sake of so many chimera without any substance or gravity whatsoever, God is willing to forgive.  To go searching for us in the wilderness of our sin, to take us again to Godself and give us the gift of life and of healing.  If only we will let go of our poisonous addictions!

The temptations of Jesus, as they are enumerated in Matthew’s account, make this point yet again, but in another way.  According to this story, the practise of fasting is indeed about the denial of self, but the self that is being denied is the self that buys into the lies of the devil.  For the self that desires to (1) turn the whole world, as if by magic, into something that I can consume; or (2) turn God into someone who is only there to confirm and serve my desire; or (3) turn every other being into my slave, engaged only to confirm and serve my desire; is ultimately a false self that has tragically retreated from the fulness of a world already given us in grace and love by God.  It is a self that indeed dreams of becoming like a god, but certainly not the God revealed in Jesus Christ.  For the Father of Jesus is a God who invites and pleads and remonstrates with his creation, but never bullies or coerces or forces us accept his path.  The god we would become, on the other hand - by all our misplaced faith in demonic lies - is a god who sucks our loved ones, the true God and, indeed, the whole world, into despotic slavery.

Therefore, when Jesus resists such lies, when he resists the temptations of the devil, he is not harming his essential self, the self that is God’s and belongs to God’s way of love.  It is the other self he is harming: the accumulating, consuming, magical self, the inner demon who would make all the world its food and its slave.  It is the self that Thomas Merton rightly called ‘the false self’, ‘false’ because it is built upon a lie.

As followers of Jesus, we too are called to resist such a self, and to do so because what we desire most of all is not a house built of lies on a foundation of sand, but the firm and real house that is God’s welcoming love.  This home is a gift of God, given in creation itself, and given again in Jesus Christ, who comes to us anew each day in the stories of Scripture, the sacrament of bread and wine, the call of the neighbour and the witness of the faithful.  In this perspective, to fast from all that is a lie in order to listen to what is true, to fast from all that would poison in order to drink from the waters of life, is not really a fast at all.  It is to quieten one's heart and its false desires, in order to listen for the one word, the one gift, that is able to save us from ourselves. It is to make room in one's longing for the immeasurable gift of God’s friendship, that is alone finally able to satisfy our deepest hunger and quench our deepest thirst.

Glory be to God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as in the beginning, so now, and for ever.  Amen.