Today, in my church’s Ash Wednesday liturgies, the officiating priest read the “Invitation to a Holy Lent” from the Book of Common Prayer. Toward its end, the priest said: “I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.” I’m going to take this invitation as a framework for what I am offering at The Way We Practice over the 40 days of Lent. My regular lectionary reflections will continue, but in addition to those I’m going to offer a journey into the heart of Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. Our conversation with that letter will provide a means for self-examination and I hope it will also lead to the kind of repentance—a change of heart and life—that Lent at its best calls us toward. Expect a new exploration of Paul’s letter each Thursday. This will include my own commentary on the text as well as some interviews with insightful biblical scholars who can help us understand Paul’s exploration of the Gospel. I hope you’ll join this dive into Romans and use it as a means to answer the call to read and meditate on God’s holy Word during this season. Finally, below is my sermon from today. I hope it offers a helpful entry into this sacred time.
The God Who Craves
In 1602 a Spanish ship was sailing along the coast of California when a terrible disease took hold of the crew. Their skin erupted with purple dots, their gums swelled, and teeth loosened, death came to many. After reaching port, a group of soldiers rowed out to a nearby island to dispose of the corpses that had piled up. When they came to shore, one soldier saw a fruit growing from a cactus. He picked one and ate it. It tasted good and he craved more. He began eating the fruit, wherever he could find it, and shared it with others on board. As they ate, they felt their gums tightening and energy returning to their bodies. They did not then know the mechanism, but we now understand that they were experiencing scurvy, a disease caused by fatal lack of vitamin C. Those little prickly pear fruits that the soldiers found so good to eat are chock full of it. Their bodies needed vitamin C and so they began to crave exactly the fruits that provided it.
The human body, it turns out, is miraculous at craving what it needs. We often want exactly what will help us live into health. Our desires, then, are not simply random signals with which we must do battle. Our hungers can tell us something about what will make us whole.
But if you’ve ever sat down to eat a whole pint of ice cream or downed two baskets of tortilla chips at your favorite Mexican Restaurant, you know that sometimes our hungers can go awry. Just as our cravings can guide us to what we need for health, they can also be twisted to want what will ultimately cause disease. How do we know the difference between the two? That question is answered in the journalist Mark Schatzker’s important book, The End of Craving, from which I learned the story of those sailors. The book is smartly titled because its point isn’t how to get rid of cravings, but to instead show their purpose, their end. A craving can be a wonderful thing, but it must be answered carefully with the food that will satisfy it. And as Schatzker shows, so much of our modern food environment is engineered to keep us craving, longing for more without ever answering our true needs.
Today is a day for hunger, a day for craving. If you follow the traditions of the Episcopal Church, it is one of the two days of fasting on the official calendar in our prayer book (the other being Good Friday). In a day without food, even the most practiced of us will eventually find our bodies longing for something to eat. And in all likelihood we will find other desires rising to the surface. In our bodily hunger, our spiritual hungers are also raised, for the body and the spirit are not separate but intertwined. So, a good question to ask ourselves on a day of fasting is: what are we hungering for?
“What are we hungering for?” is a question worth sitting with. Worth it, because our cravings can easily be answered by a substitute, junk food for the body and the soul alike. Because we hunger, we often seek to answer our cravings with the wrong things, the things that seem like what we want but do not satisfy us with fullness. Isaiah knew that truth. A few chapters before our reading today, the prophet asked:
Why do you spend your money
for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which
does not satisfy? (Isaiah 55:2)
Isaiah was speaking of idolatry, the attempt to answer our need for God with what is not God. And he knew, just as Jesus later echoed, that even religion can become an idol along with its practices like prayer, like fasting.
If our cravings can sometimes lead us astray, hijacked by the junk food of both body and soul, what are we to do? How are we to hunger for the right things? Isaiah and Jesus offer the same answer: We should learn to hunger for what God craves.
Ours is not a God who is self-satisfied in some cosmic stasis. The God of the bible, the God of our faith, is a God who hungers, a God that desires and longs.
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
This is what God is craving, what God is hungry for in the world. If we are to answer our own deepest cravings with what will truly satisfy, we should desire the same things God does. And when those realities are not available, we should follow that common refrain of scripture: wait on the Lord. To fast is a lesson in waiting for what we truly want rather than seeking satisfaction in some cheap substitute. We learn to wait through the hunger so that we can have room for what will truly fill us.
Lent, which we begin today, can seem like a time of denial, of dour self-control. Instead, I think we should see it as a season of holy hunger in which we pass by all the cheap packaged treats, the empty idols that for all their color and crunch will not answer our deepest desires. In Lent we learn to sit with our hungers, allowing them to work in us, sharpening our longings until we are drawn to their true end: the life of God where love and justice and peace will finally fill us.
So, this Lent, keep craving, keep hungering. Learn to pass by all those empty substitutes that won’t answer your deepest desires. In your hungers know that God is hungering, too; craving that final banquet when justice and love, faithfulness and peace will be set before us. Let us wait with God until we can feast on those delicious foods and lean back, full and satisfied, our cravings having finally met their end. Amen.