Fasting

A Sermon for Lent

Moreover when ye fast, be not as the hypocrites of a sad countenance.... That thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret.” — MATT. vi. 16, 18.

THE character of the time and place in which the earthly life of Christ our Lord was lived, has certainly had much to do in shaping the whole growth of Christianity. It was necessary that the incarnation should stand at one special point in history and at one particular spot upon the earth. That period and spot must have been chosen by Him who sent His Son to be the Savior. And one consequence has been that the vices and errors which peculiarly characterized the country of Judea eighteen hundred years ago stand forever most emphatically denounced, and their opposite virtues and truths most enthusiastically praised, by the Master of the Christian faith.

Among other things which had gone sadly wrong in His time, there was what we may call the bodily treatment of the spiritual life, the treatment of the spiritual life through the body in which it is enshrined. And so Jesus is especially drawn to declare what the true method of that treatment is. It shows us how naturally the evils which He encountered spring out of human nature, when we see that not even the clearness of

Christ’s teaching upon the subject has prevented the Christian world from dropping back into the same evils over and over again. That there is such a bodily treatment of the soul’s life is clear enough. Hardly any thing can happen to our bodies that does not send some influence in to the most spiritual part of us. The condition of the body tells immediately on the condition of its inmate. And immediately the question comes, — the question which has always come to those who cared earnestly for their soul’s life, — since everything that happens to the body tells upon the soul, may we not treat the body so as to help the soul? That idea runs through the whole of man’s religious history. It inspires alike the monk flogging himself in his lonely cell, and the fresh young English believer in muscular Christianity. Out of that idea sprang the whole theory and practice of fasting, or the denial of any of the appetites of the body, with a view to the training of the corresponding appetites of the soul. That is what fasting means. It is not mere abstinence from food or from any other pleasure, in itself. It is abstinence with a purpose. This idea of the soul in, and capable of being treated through, the body, was essential to it. Now, when Jesus came to those Jews He found the practice still prevailing, but its purpose had passed out of it. It was an honorable, almost a required thing, to practise certain abstinences; but that care for the soul’s life, out of which the habit of abstinence had sprung, was gone. Christ’s whole endeavor, for the Jews and for the generations who, to His sight, stood crowding behind the Jews, was to bring the purpose back into the practice. A purpose is to every practice what an inhabitant is to a house. A house can stand with no inhabitant, but it soon becomes rotten and goes to decay. You can tell in a day when a tenant has moved into a house which has stood unoccupied. The house puts on at once the look of life. Its breaks and ruins are repaired. It is renewed and preserved by its new occupancy. So a practice may stand after its purpose is dead, but it is weak and soon grows rotten and decays. But if you can bring its purpose back into it again, it assumes once more the look of life. Its broken walls are rebuilt, its windows mended, and its gates repaired. Many men attempt to keep up a body of good habits without any spiritual purpose of goodness to inhabit them. It is as anxious and costly and hopeless an undertaking as would be the attempt to keep in repair a whole village of unoccupied houses. But put the pur pose into the practice and let it live there, and it is strange how the practice takes care of its own repairs and is always sound and whole.

Lent begins this week, and the idea of Lent is spirit ual culture, and always, as a part of that idea, there has been associated with Lent the thought of abstinence. We are looking forward to a soberer and quieter life, a life which in some form or other is to fast from some of its indulgences. And the old danger comes up with the old duty, the danger lest the fasting should become to us as dead a thing as it was to those Jews. To guard against that danger, ought we not to try to put its highest purpose into this practice to which we annually return? Is it not well that on this Sunday before Lent we should try to see what God designs by those Lents, those periods of sobered life and abstinence from outward pleasures, which both in His word and in the intimations of our own nature have His sanction and authority?

God has a reason for everything. Our best religious progress consists in large part of this, the coming by sympathy with Him to see the reasons of what have been to us bare commandments. The change from the arbitrary to the essential look in what God does is the richest and most delightful feature of the spiritual growth. God says that He will punish the wicked. I bow submissive, but am puzzled and depressed. He says so, and it must be right. But by and by I come to know that He must punish the wicked, that the wicked man punishes himself, and all is changed. The puzzle, the bewilderment, is gone. God says, “Love me and you shall prosper.” It sounds like an arbitrary reward given to His own favorites; but we go on to see that to love Him is prosperity, and then the heart rests satisfied. So God says, “Curb and deny the body, and the soul shall thrive.” Gradually again we come to see that this too is essential and not arbitrary, and to trace the principles under which physical mortification ministers to spiritual life. One of the greatest joys of heaven must forever be this deepening and deepening sight of the essential behind what seemed arbitrary in the ways of God.

Let us ask what is the use of fasting, for so we shall best come to understand the true methods and degrees of fasting. And let us begin with this. All bodily discipline, all voluntary abstinence from pleasure of whatever sort, must be of value either as a symbol of something or as a means of something. These two functions be long to it as being connected with the body, which is at once the utterer and the educator of the soul within.

Just suppose -any great mental or moral change to come in a man’s life. We will not speak of the great fundamental religious change of a man’s conversion; but any change from frivolity to earnestness, from lightness to seriousness of life. He who has been careless, free, and irresponsible, taking life as it came, with no reality, no sense of duty, undertakes a different way of living, begins to study, begins to work, seeks knowledge, accepts obligations. The old life fades away and a new life begins. Self-indulgence is put aside. Self-devotion takes its place. This is a spiritual, an inward change. It is independent of outward circumstances. A man conceivably may live this new life, and everything external be still the same that it has always been. But practically this more earnest inward life suits the outer life to itself. Quickly or gradually the man who has begun to live more seriously within, begins to live more simply without. He comes instinctively to less gorgeous dresses and barer walls and slighter feasts. The outer life is restrained and simplified. And this restraint and simplicity is at once a symbol or expression of the changed inner life, and a means for its cultivation. If the change is one which involves repentance and self-reproach, the giving up of a life which never ought to have been lived at all for one that always has been a duty, then both of these offices of the outward self-denial become plainer. The stripping of the old luxury off from the life is at once an utterance of humble regret for a wrong past, and also an opening of the soul to new and better influences. It is as when an effeminate reveller at a banquet is suddenly summoned to a battle where he ought to be in the front rank. As he springs up from the couch in self-reproach, the casting away of his garlands and his robes means, first, his shame at having been idle and feasting when he ought to have been at work; and second, his eagerness to have .his limbs free so that the work which he has now undertaken may be well done. His stripping off of his wanton luxuries is at once a symbol of his self-reproach for the past, and a means of readiness for the new work that awaits him. And that is the meaning of all voluntary mortification which has any meaning. You go to a monk in his cell, and say: “What brings you here? Why do you choose these bare walls, this hard bed, this meagre fare?” If he understands himself at all, and has any real right to be there in the cloister, his answer is: “I love them for two reasons. They are the symbols of my repentance for my sin. They suit this soul of mine, stripped bare of all its pride, and prostrate in humility. And then, besides, they help this new life of communion with my Lord. Through their blank emptiness the highest influences may come in to me. My soul is not muffled and hidden from the voice and touch of God.” Both as a symbol of repentance and as a means of education he loves his dreary cell.

Now to take one step more, if what this monk’s ex perience is made of must, in some form or other, come in the life of every growing spiritual man; if in every spiritual advance there must be a stripping off of pride and an opening of the nature by some new doors to some new power; then, in healthier and more human forms no doubt, but still the same essentially, there must be in every aspiring life the same symbol and the same means which he has in his cell. No man can be a better man save as his pride is crushed into repentance; and as the swathing, enwrapping mass of passions and indulgences that is around him is broken through, so that God can find his soul and pour Himself into it. There is no other way. You want to be a better man. Perhaps you cannot remember that you ever wanted it before. You have gone on, self-satisfied and self-indulgent. But at last this new wish has come to you. Now, what have you to do? Any merest tyro in the spiritual experience may tell. You have got to break your pride all to pieces with repentance; and you have got to say to these crowding passions of yours: “Stand aside. Leave my soul open, that it and God, it and duty, may come together.” Pride and passion must be conquered. That is an inward struggle. But it reaches the outward life, and in the voluntary surrender of that in which the pride has gloried and on which the passions have fed there is the symbol of the humiliation and the means of the new life of the soul. Yes, the monk was all wrong when he thought that there was merit in his lonely life, all wrong when he forgot or despised the rich teachings and helps of God which come through bounty and not through poverty, all wrong when, trying to diet his soul, he starved it; but let not our brighter religion, our joy in all of God’s good things, make us forget wherein the monk was right, in his earnest fight with pride and passion, and in his earnest desire to make the circumstances of his outward life his ally and not his adversary in that fight. That is the redeeming glory which often illuminates the inhuman brutality of his life, and makes his cell-walls glow with heroism.

This, then, is the philosophy of fasting. It expressed repentance, and it uncovers the life to God. “Come down, my pride; stand back my passions; for I am wicked, and I wait for God to bless me.” That is what the fasting man says. You see what I mean by fasting. It is the voluntary disuse of anything innocent in itself, with a view to spiritual culture. It does not apply to food alone. It applies to everything which a man may desire. A man may fast from costliness of dress, from sumptuous houses, from exhilarating company, from music, from art, considered as sensuous delights. There are times when some deep experience, some profound humility of repentance, rejects them all. Not they but their opposites become the soul’s true utterance. In its sorrow for its sins, all sumptuousness jars upon it. The feast and the feast’s music are out of place. By emptiness and not by fulness that self-contempt, that sense of the vanity of the spirit’s search to find goodness in itself, must be expressed.

Now let us dwell upon these two in order. Let us think first about this first value of fasting as a symbol. It expresses the abandonment of pride. But it is the characteristic of a symbolic action that it not merely expresses but increases and nourishes the feeling to which it corresponds. Laughter is the symbol of joy, but as you laugh your laughter reacts upon the joy and heightens it. Tears are the sign of sorrow, but they feed themselves the sorrow out of which they flow. Cheers are the expression of enthusiasm, but as the crowd sends up its shouts its zeal deepens and glows the brighter. And so if abstinence is the sign of humility, it is natural enough that as the life abstain from its ordinary indulgences, the humiliation which is so expressed should be deepened by its expression. Thus the symbol becomes also a means. I know the dangers to which this idea may lead. I know and I dread as much as anybody that reversal of the true relation which begins the creation of feeling at the outside, and tries to make the heart beat by mere moving of the arms and opening of the dead lips. But with all its possible misapplications it is a true principle still. The utterance of an emotion increases that emotion. The heart once beating, the outward exercise makes it beat the more truly. And so it is no artificial thing, nothing unreal or unnatural, when the soul, sorry for its sins, ashamed of its poor bad life, lets its shame utter itself in signs of humiliation, and finds in quick and sure reaction the shame which it expresses deepened and strengthened through the utterance which expresses it. Take it all to yourself. Suppose that something some day makes that real to you, which you know so well now, that your life, made for a more than angelic purity, is all blotted and stained with sin. Suppose that some day that awful contrast faces you which changes a man’s whole thought of himself. You see yourself and you see God. Your sin stands out against His holiness; your darkness against His perfection. On such a day as that, humbled and broken, tell me, what will your outward life be? Do you think there will grow up in you no repugnance to your easy luxuriousness? Will it seem well and fitting that an inner life so bruised and shamed should be carried about in a body pampered and decorated, where men are crowding, where lamps are shining, where all is gay and has no touch of any thing but pleasure? Something so different from that

That mortified, bewildered inner life will claim its symbol. Solitude, silence, soberness, plainness even to meagreness, will seem the true expression of its new experience. And then from that expression of it there will come back new vividness and depth into the experience itself; and the soul will gather a new humility out of the circumstances of humiliation which it has already gathered about itself. That is the constant reaction between the outer and the inner conditions. That is what all representative dress and habits mean. The nun’s quietude, the priest’s purity, the mourner’s sor row, the bride’s joy, the soldier’s glory, - — all are first uttered and then deepened by the garments in which they are severally clothed. First you give the emotion its true symbol and then the symbol in its turn gives new strength back to the emotion.

And if then it be good to consecrate some special weeks to the especial recognition of the experience, it is surely good likewise to put the expressive and educating symbol into those weeks too. Lent is consecrated to self-knowledge, to the humbling of pride, and so to that fasting, that abstinence and soberness of life, by which the soul’s humility is first expressed and then increased.

And then let us pass to the second value of fasting, its value directly as a means. The more we watch the lives of men, the more we see that one of the reasons why men are not occupied with great thoughts and interests is the way in which their lives are overfilled with little things. It is not that you deliberately dislike thought and study and benevolence. It is mainly that you are so busy with amusement and society and idleness that you are living such an unprofitable life. It is not that you hate your soul that you never talk with it. It is that your body lies so close to you that it occupies all your thought. It is not that you despise the highest hopes and interests of your immortal nature that you neglect them so. It is mainly that your passions crowd so thick about you that you are entirely occupied with them. It is no untrue picture of the lives of many of us if we imagine ourselves, that is, our wills, standing in the centre; and close about each central figure, about each man’s self, a crowd of clamorous passions and eager lusts; while away outside of them there wait in larger circle the higher claimants of our time and powers, culture and truth and charity and religion, with all their train. This self stands in the centre listening to the passions which crowd up so thick about it; worried and restless all the time because, though it cannot see them, it is always conscious of that outer circle of more worthy applicants. It hears their strong remonstrance with the passions which are shutting them out from the soul that belongs to them. It promises itself the time when all these lower claimants shall have been satisfied, and shall give way and let into their places those who are more worthy than themselves. That time does not come. The passions crowd and clamor as noisily as ever. What ought to come to pass is that those crowding passions should feel themselves the higher dignity of those who wait behind them and should make them selves their ministers, and urge not their own claims but the claims which surpass their own, upon the central man. If they will not do that, then the man some times puts out his hand, parts and pushes aside this clamorous crowd, these physical appetites, these secular ambitions. He says to them “Stand back, and at least for a few moments let me hear what culture and truth and charity and religion have to say to my soul.” Then up through the emptiness which he has made by pushing these clamorers back, there pours the rich company of higher thoughts and interests, and they gather for a time around the soul which belongs to them but from which they have been shut away. By and by the old crowd may return. The passions will not be satisfied until they have girdled the man’s life once more. But even when they hold him fastest afterwards, they cannot but remember how they have once been driven back; they cannot be as contemptuous as they used to be of that loftier circle of influences which still stands outside of them; perhaps some time or other they may come to take and rejoice in their true place as interpreters and messengers through which the power of these higher influences may reach the soul. That is the story of the true fast. That is the real Lent. It is the putting forth of a man’s hand to quiet his own passions and to push them aside that the higher voices may speak to him and the higher touches fall upon him. It is the making of an emptiness about the soul that the higher fulness may fill it. It may be temporary. Once more the lower needs may fasten on us, the lower pleasures try to satisfy us; but they never can be quite so arbitrary and arrogant as they were, after they have once had to yield to their superiors. They will be conscious that the soul is not wholly theirs. Perhaps some day they may themselves become, and dignify themselves by becoming, the meek interpreters and ministers of those very powers which they once shut out from the soul.

A man whose very bodily appetites brought him suggestions of divinest things, whose most secular life had playing freely through it the messages of God, he evidently would need no fast, no interruption of those pressures on his life which, with whatever worldlyseeming hands they touched him, all brought him influences from divinity. There will be no fasting-days, no Lent in heaven. Not because we shall have no bodies there, but because our bodies there will be all open to God, the helps and not the hinderances of spiritual communication to our souls.

Do you remember the Collect for next Sunday, the first Sunday in Lent? — “0 Lord, who for our sakes didst fast forty days and forty nights, give us grace to use such abstinence that, our flesh being subdued to the Spirit, we may ever obey Thy godly motives in righteousness and true holiness, to Thy honor who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Ghost, One God, world without end. Amen.” When we pray that prayer next Sunday we shall begin with our Master’s fasting, we shall remember how He put the associations and appetites of the earth aside that His Father might come close to Him. We shall pray to Him then to help us, too, so to let Spirit in where flesh is now, closest to our wills and selves, that hereafter we may be more full of spiritual influences always, more ready to do what is right than to do what is pleasant, more sensitive to the fear of God than to the fear of man. Is it not indeed a noble and a thorough prayer? How earnest must be the man who really prays it! How happy is the man in whom it really is fulfilled!

Suppose you go, some one of you whose life is all external, all animal, either in the grosser or the more elegant ways, — suppose you go to some lofty or beautiful thinker, to some philosopher or poet, and you say to him, “Speak to me; tell me your thought; make me the sharer in your ideas and visions.” He looks into your face, he sees what manner of man you are, and has he not the perfect right to answer you, “I cannot. You must fast first. Wrapped round with soft physical indulgences, all padded and protected as you are, how shall I strike into your muffled intelligence and feeling? You must strip these coverings off. You must lay bare your pampered life. You must give up being a sybarite or profligate. You must make me an avenue through this throng of lusts. Then I can come to you and you can take me in “? It is not arrogance. He cannot speak to you until you open the way. Your frivolity is like a solid wall about you and you must break it down before he can come in. That is why fashionable society is neither intellectual nor spiritual; why any man or woman must break its chains and refuse to be its slave, or it is impossible to come to the best culture either of mind or soul. There is no nobler sight anywhere than to behold a man thus quietly and resolutely put aside the lower that the higher may come in to him. Every now and then a conscience, among the men and women who live easy thoughtless lives, is stirred, and some one looks up anxiously, holding up some one of the pretty idle nesses in which such people spend their days and nights, and says “Is this wrong? Is it wicked to do this?” And when they get their answer, “No, certainly not wicked,” then they go back and give their whole lives up to doing their innocent little piece of uselessness again. Ah, the question is not whether that is wicked, whether God will punish you for doing that. The question is whether that thing is keeping othei better things away from you; whether behind its little bulk the vast privilege and dignity of duty is hid from you; whether it stands between God and your soul. If it does, then it is an offence to you, and though it be your right hand or your right eye, cut it off, pluck it out, and cast it from you. The advantage and joy will be not in its absence, for you will miss it very sorely, but in what its loss reveals, in the new life which lies beyond it, which you will see stretching out and tempting you as soon as it is gone. To put aside everything that hinders the highest from coming to us, and then to call to us that highest which, nay, Who is always waiting to come, — fasting and prayer, — this, as the habit and tenor of a life, is noble. As an occasional effort even, if it is real and earnest, it makes the soul freer for the future. A short special communion with the unseen and eternal, prevents the soul from ever being again so completely the slave of the things of sense and time.

Have we not then understood something of what the essential values of fasting are? It is both a symbol and a means. Every kind of abstinence is at once an expression of humility and an opening of the life. What then is Lent? Ah, if our souls are sinful and are shut too close by many worldlinesses against that Lord who is their life and Savior, what do we need? Let us have the symbols which belong to sin and to repentance. Let us at least for a few weeks, among the many weeks of life, proclaim by soberness and quietude of life that we know our responsibility and how often we have been false to it. Let us not sweep through the whole year in buoyant exultation, as if there were no shame upon us, nothing for us to repent of, nothing for us to fear. By some small symbols let us bear witness that we know something of the solemnity of living, the dreadfulness of sin, the struggle of repentance. Our symbols may be very feeble, our sackcloth may be lined with silk and our ashes scented with the juice of roses. But let us do something which shall break the mere monotony of complacent living which seems to be forever saying over to itself that there is no such thing as sin, that to live is light and easy work. Perhaps the symbol may strike in and deepen the solemnity which it expresses. Perhaps as we tell God of what little sorrow for our sins we have, our sorrow for our sins may be increased, and while we stand there in His presence the fasting may gather a truer reality of penitence behind it.

And let those same symbols be likewise the means of opening our souls to Christ. For a few weeks let these obtrusive worldlinesses which block the door of our hearts stand back; and let the way be clear that He who longs to enter in and help us may come and meet no obstacle. This is our lenten task. “If any man will hear My voice and open unto Me, I will come in and sup with him,” says Jesus. To still the clatter and tumult a little so that we may hear His voice, and to open the door by prayer, that is the privilege and duty of these coming weeks.

I must not linger to draw out from these descriptions of what fasting is, the methods in which fasting may be best observed. I think that you will see them for yourselves. I am sure that if you have caught what I have said, you will not think that they are anything slight or fantastic or rigid or mechanical. It is the utterance of penitence and the opening of doors to Christ. It must be very sacred; not formal but alive and glorified with motive. It must be very personal; not imitated from any pattern but the utterance of each man’s repentance and love and hope and fear. It must be very reasonable; not unfitting the body for any good work but making it a more and more perfect instrument for the soul.

May God be with us during this Lent. May we be with God. I dare to hope that there shall be among us much of that fasting which our Father loves; much penitence for sin and much opening of long-shut doors to Christ. O my dear friends, let us enter into it with earnestness that we may come out of it with joy!