16 O Lord, in distress they sought you, they poured out a prayer[b] when your chastening was on them. 17 Like a woman with child, who writhes and cries out in her pangs when she is near her time, so were we because of you, O Lord; 18 we were with child, we writhed, but we gave birth only to wind. We have won no victories on earth, and no one is born to inhabit the world. 19 Your dead shall live, their corpses[c] shall rise. O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a radiant dew, and the earth will give birth to those long dead. (New Revised Standard Version)
“A Place at the Table: An Advent in
Solidarity with the Poor,” Week Four
Sitting
on a simple wooden bookcase in my apartment is a simple, spiral-bound book full
of handwritten letters that my great-uncle Albert Mouradian wrote home during
his service in the Marine Corps in the Pacific theater of the Second World
War. Knowing my family’s penchant for
meticulously maintaining its history, I appreciated being handed down a copy of
this collection of letters for myself. After
seeing the fake passports that my great-grandparents used to smuggle themselves
into the United States as refugees during the First World War, after hearing
the stories about their lives in the Ottoman Empire prior to their escape, I
have known for many years that there is a wild and incredible story that led up
to my being where I am today. But it was
not until Christmas seven years ago—when I was already an adult, that Albert’s
letters were compiled, copied, and distributed to the family, including me.
The
book contains all that I know about a man I have never met: what he looked like
as a child, his handwriting style, and how he died—as a Marine, K.I.A. in the
battle of Okinawa in the spring of 1945.
The Japanese name for the battle of Okinawa was tetsu no ame: the rain of steel.
If there is a more poetically appropriate name for war, I have yet to
find it. And family legend has it that
after the testsu no ame, for nearly a
decade, Albert’s father, my great-grandfather, was unable to smile. He would not smile again until nine years
later, when my mother was born.
Albert’s
letters home in the weeks and months home were—are—an emotional reminder of the
nature of fasting: fasting from the presence of a loved one, fasting from the
knowledge of their safety, and, ultimately, fasting from their being alive
altogether. A nine-year fast on being
able to feel joy? I could not do
it. But that is what I want to talk
about with you today: the nature of fasting, and of what it is you have been
forced to fast and abstain from yourselves: something as trivial as a drink, or
as profound and wanting as the love a friend—or God Himself—provides.
This
liturgical season—called Advent—is relatively short, unique in that it is
largely a waiting game as we count down the days to Christmas (which, let’s be
honest, how many of us started doing after Halloween?). and almost over by now! Even though Advent is a time of festiveness
in our culture, with Christmas carols on the radio station and gingerbread this
and peppermint mocha that, Advent actually began as a penitential season—a
season in which we were meant to follow the exhortation of John the Baptist as
he foretold Christ, telling us to repent and believe in the coming Messiah. One of the most prominent spiritual
disciplines of penitence is fasting, and so for this Advent, I chose a source
of sermon series material you may be familiar with. If you remember my “Advent Conspiracy” sermon
series two years ago, about trying to find Christ within the crass consumerism
of Christmas, well, one of the Advent Conspiracy authors, Pastor Chris Seay of
Ecclesia in Houston Texas, has written a sequel called “A Place at the Table,”
in which he details fasting as a spiritual discipline. Though the book is actually written for Lent,
the season when we are supposed to give something meaningful up, I have
shanghaied it for Advent because I think that the holiday season is probably
when our charitable goodwill is often on the front burner, and I wanted to be
able to speak to that here. This week,
we finish up and to the chapter of Pastor Chris’s book entitled “Fasting and
Feasting,” in which he writes in part:
I have observed that frenetic people
dine in a way that is hurried, distracted, and apathetic about the things that
matter most. I have also observed that
people who eat intentionally, taking time to savor flavors, and engage the
people around them, realize they are nourishing both their bodies and souls. This posture overflows into other areas of
their lives, and they seem to live from a spring of wisdom and peace.
Which came first, you wonder: the
frenetic life, or the unfortunate table manners? Thankfulness for the meal at the table is
more than just an indicator that something in our life has gone awry, it is an
all-out warning that we need to make some changes, to check our
priorities. That’s where we are
headed. We are taking time to dial back
our internal metronome. As we slow
things down, we will begin to see things we never have before…
My problem, and possibly yours as well,
is not that I spend too much time fasting or too much time feasting. My problem is that often I do neither. I simply consume my food.
I
would take Pastor Chris’s observation about his food and extrapolate it to
almost the entirety of our lives: in other words, that our problem is that we
simply consume our lives. And we consume
without thinking, which in mine eyes is a way of fasting. After all, if fasting is the denial of
something for yourself, then if you are not getting the most out of something,
you are by definition fasting. You are
in distress, or even in mourning, like a bereaved parent.
Isaiah
compares this to a woman in an especially painful pang of labor as she strives
to give birth to her child: when we are in distress, we are like a new mother,
and we writhe and twist and contort in pain, only to see that what we have
created is not a child, but the wind—pure air, nothing at all. In turns out that all that pain and labor was
for naught. It is a tremendous loss.
And
seriously, is that not something you could relate to? Doesn’t everyone have something in their life
that has turned out for nothing after so much time, so much sweat, so much
heart, that gets poured into it? Even in
the midst of wartime—if you’re down in the trenches, if you’re in a battlefield
where only inches are being gained and lost, where victory and defeat are
measured not over the course of months but over many years, and where seeing
the God’s-eye view of anything is damn near impossible—it can feel like all
your are doing is running on the most diabolical treadmill ever made. You are getting nowhere and giving up so much
to get there.
And
that is another form of fasting. You are
giving something up: your very reason for being.
There
is a reason, though, that Christmas is officially labeled a “Feast Day” on the
Christian liturgical calendar, and not just because of that ever-elusive,
permeating thing that we call “tradition.”
It is because the greatest fast of all time, our fasting from right
relationship with God, is about to end in the most unpredictable, wonderful,
awe-inspiring way possible.
God
is going to become one of us. God is
going to become a crying, screaming, kicking baby.
God
is going to become one of what Isaiah calls the “dwellers in the dust.” God is going to become dusty and dirty and
mortal and…human. Solely because He
loves us that much.
And
that God-as-a-crying-baby thing? Yes,
Jesus starts out that way. But his cries
evolve over time. In the beginning, he
will cry as any other baby. But as the
years progress, as He matures and grows into His calling as the Messiah, He
will be the one to cry out the refrain of Isaiah 26:19, “Your dead shall live,
and their bodies shall rise! O dwellers
in the dust, awake and sing for joy, for your dew is radiant, and the earth
will give birth to those long dead.”
To
those long dead. To those who feel so
beaten down, so used up, who have fasted from everything joyful for so long
that they felt as the dead, to those who have died to their own radiance, to those
who have died to the world and to everything in it, the Christ child comes.
At
the time of His crucifixion, for three days the world went without the presence
of Jesus. For three days, His friends,
His family, those closest to Him, lamented His absence. But in three days, He returned, resurrected
and whole. It only took three days. Three long, watchful days.
Today
is the 22nd. In three days
time, Jesus comes, though not as an apparition, or as a resurrected being, but
as one of you. As one of us. In three days, our fasting shall be over. Our days of simply consuming our lives will
be over. And finally, at long last, the
feast can begin.
In
three days time, whatever starvation diet that you have put yourself through in
your life can—and should—cease. The
fasts necessitated by financial insecurity, by outright poverty, by
homelessness, by abuse and violence, these are the fasts that God calls us away
from, that God calls us to help lift others out of, because every one of those
fasts represents somebody else being made poor, somebody else being told that
there is not enough to go around, somebody else being told, like Joseph and
Mary were on that fateful night, that there is not enough room at the inn.
What
a colossal lie. What a huge,
unbelievable falsehood that Jesus’s earthly parents were fed.
Because
in their son, there is always a spare room at the inn. In Christ, there is always an extra seat at
the table. And in Christ, there is
always a feast, even when our physical lives feel naught.
In
three days time, our ways of simply consuming, or of fasting outright, will
come to an end. Those ways must come to
an end. It can happen no other way. It can be no other way.
For
as the angels will soon say to the shepherds, born unto you on this day, in the
city of David, is a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.
In
three days time, born unto YOU is a Savior, who Scripture says shall be called
Emmanuel, which means “God with us.”
In
three days time, God shall come to be with us.
God shall come to be with you.
Are
you ready? Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
December
22, 2013
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