Date: July 28, 2024

Scripture: Matthew 4:1-4

Sermon Title: “Fasting: Emptying for God”

Preacher: Rev. Dr. Bob Jon

You can also listen on Podcast from iTunes and Spotify. Search for “Podcasting from Rev. Bob Jon.”

There’s a story about a priest. After a long day of work, he was going back to his rectory in the dark evening. As he was turning the corner, he was accosted by a robber who came from the back, pulled a gun on him, and said, “Your wallet or your life.” As the priest was slowly reaching his hand into the pocket of his coat, the robber noticed his Roman collar, so he said, “Oh, I said, You’re a priest. Never mind, Father, you can go.” Somehow impressed by the generosity of the mercy of his robber, this priest wanted to compensate him or just showed gratitude by giving him the candy bar in his pocket. When he offered the candy bar to the robber, he said, “Well, no, thank you, Father. I don’t eat the candy bar during Lent.”

Fasting is one of the essential practices in many religions. In Judaism, during Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, people fast all day long. As we know, during Ramadan, people of Islam fast from morning till evening.” In Buddhism, the monks also fast. They don’t eat anything after their meals in the afternoon. In Christianity, in many mainline churches, we don’t talk about fasting that much. We only hear once per year, maybe during Lent or when we start Lent, how Jesus is telling his disciples how to keep fasting. But if we believe that Jesus also practiced fasting and participated in it, we can maybe consider what the benefits are when we fast, whether they are emotional, physical, or spiritual.

I have three points to share with you. First, fasting helps us cleanse, heal, or renew our bodies. The earliest instance of fasting used for therapeutic purposes dates to the 5th century in ancient Greece. Hippocrates, known as the father of medicine, used to prescribe fasting for patients who exhibited signs of chronic illness, such as epilepsy. Hippocrates believed that food is medicine. It can be like medicine depending on how you eat and what you eat, but to eat food while we are sick is like a drinking ailment. He also noticed and observed with some scientific research in his time that even animals, when they are ill or they’re sick, they start eating until they recover from them. They refuse to eat for a while. So.”

I’m not a physician, but this is just based on my readings this past week. Glucose, the sugar found in our blood, is the main fuel that our cells use to produce energy. Fasting uses our liver’s stored glucose, causing cells to release fats. When these fats travel to our liver, they are converted to ketones. Our body uses them for energy. There are some benefits that come with fasting because we are living in a world where, you know, we don’t necessarily grow our own vegetables and go into the gardens or soil, do the hard work, or go to extra lengths to catch our games in the wildlife. We don’t have to do all that work, which means we need to waste our energy and calories. We get them simply from the grocery store, even buy the take-out food or processed food, or even sometimes junk food.”

In his book, Brad Noble discusses intermittent fasting. He says one of the best ways to detox our body is through fasting. It’s not necessarily through medication, but when we abstain from food, our body is designed to have a system to detox and let the toxins out. He says if our liver, kidneys, lymphatic system, or digestive system are not working properly, fasting is an effective way to deal with it.

Last Sunday, before I started service, Susan Lewis noticed, and she told me that I just feel like you’re a little thinner. Is that a good thing or a bad thing, she said. And I told her, thank you for noticing that. But as a matter of fact, my wife and I have been fasting dinner for the past few weeks. We have some personal reasons and some matters that we have been praying together for our family and for our church. But every night after lunch, we kind of try to keep it as kind of a time of fasting so we can devote ourselves to prayer and praying to God for various reasons.

The good thing is that it helps us lose some weight. So, for the past weeks, I’ve been losing about 15 pounds, which is a good thing because I can see that the blood work—the United Methodist clergy need to do some blood work every year to show how our health is—is pretty much better than what I had last year. It feels good to be able to get into the pants I was not able to wear last year. But you feel like you get more energy like you are refreshed and recharged. Although sometimes, I’m a little like a tempter to my wife, and at nine o’clock after our kids go to bed, I tempt her by saying, “Do you crave some pizza from Domino’s now?” Or “Do you want to have some ice cream?” But sometimes we fast, sometimes we fail, like we human beings with our frailty and weaknesses. 

There are some benefits to fasting. Physically, we can lose some weight, and it also helps us detox, letting go of some of the unnecessary and unhealthy things from our bodies. So, many food experts recommend that instead of getting processed food, especially junk food, we cook healthy food ourselves, maybe just individually with our family members, and when it’s possible, we abstain and fast to give the rest to our bodies.
I had been dealing with some inflammation or digestive trouble, but since I started fasting, I noticed that I’ve been improving dramatically with those kinds of things, especially at night. So, the first thing is that fasting can help to renew our bodies. 

The second point I want to address is that fasting helps us clarify our goals and visions. From time to time, we encounter situations when we need to make some major important decisions. And times such as that, like fasting, can help us clarify our minds and focus on our vision and goal. So, according to WebMD, fasting gives us less toxic materials flowing through our bloodstream. Also, when we are fasting, the energy we usually normally use for digesting our food is actually can go to our brain. It gives us clarity in our mind, better memory, or increased sharpness in other senses. So I don’t know about you, but when I was in high school when I had some important exams at school, my mother used to encourage me to eat lightly. Did your mother or father encourage you to do that when you were kind of younger? My mother used to encourage me to eat lightly or even abstain from food. It’s kind of a little hungry, but I can direct it to focus my energy on the questions that I have to deal with for the exams.

But in the Bible, we notice that some people, when they were facing important decisions or even altering their identity, often fasted, intensely praying to God to give them the direction they had to go. There’s an apostle, Paul, in chapter 9 of the book of Acts. He was on his way to Damascus. He was going there to capture some Christians and bring them to Jerusalem, put them on the trial, and hopefully persecute and even execute them. As he was going his way, he was struck by a light from heaven and heard a voice. “Why do you persecute me?” And he responded, “Who are you, Lord?” And the voice said, “I am the one you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you have to do.” So, he was led by the hand of another person. He was brought to the city of Damascus, and for three days, he did not eat or drink. He waited for God to tell him what he was called to do. 

This is also the case not just individually but also as a church. Sometimes, when we are making an important decision regarding mission and outreach, we can also fast as a congregation, asking God to give us clarity in our vision and what we are called to do. The Holy Spirit, in Chapter 13 of the Book of Acts, was calling two disciples, Barnabas, and Apostle Paul, to go out and spread the good news for Christ. These people, along with the congregation, fasted and prayed together. And as they were being sent out, the other people they gathered laid their hands on Barnabas and Paul and they prayed for them. And this was the occasion that Saul changed his name to Paul. His identity was altered in response to what the Holy Spirit was calling him to do. 

I don’t know about you, but when we encounter some challenging situations, whether individually or as a family, it’s a time that we are discerning the will of God for us. We can pray, but also sometimes it can involve fasting, abstaining from food, or something that we really feel like we cannot live with in our life. That we are making a statement that, “No, I can’t live with the Word of God and the love of God for us for a while.”

Lastly, fasting helps us to establish our satisfaction and happiness are found in God, nothing else in the world. It helps us to calibrate our will with the will of God. From time to time, I don’t know about you, but there are times when you go home, and you want to spoil yourself with some good dessert and something you know you’re not supposed to eat. The other day, my wife came home. I don’t know if you know, but she started working as a pharmacist technician. She was working at the CVS pharmacy in Billerica, and this woman came, and she told my wife her last name, which she just could not understand at first. Sometimes some last names are just very difficult to understand. So, she asked her, “Ma’am, could you tell me your last name again?” And she got pretty upset. She looked at her in the eyes and said, “What, you can’t hear?” 

From time to time, your boss is not acting just with you, and sometimes there’s some situation that gives you stress and depression. You come home; you feel like you want to go to your freezer and dig into a gallon of ice cream. But how often do we actually, after we did that, we feel like more guilty or shameful, rather than satisfaction or happiness. Not that we cannot do that sometimes just to release the stress or find some revenue to find some pleasure. However, St. Augustine, one of the early church fathers, said this in his book Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” In other words, we can truly find our happiness and satisfaction only when we live in a deeper and loving relationship with God. There are so many things available to give us happiness in a way, but we know that they cannot truly satisfy deepest need and hunger for God.”

In our reading today, Jesus fasted for 40 days and 40 nights, and the Bible says he was famished. He was extremely hungry. He was panting. He was almost on the verge of death at the time. And the tempter came and probably whispered in a small voice, you can turn this stone, not just one stone, but stones into bread. And some commentators saying, well, you know, in a way that maybe Jesus can only satisfy one bread, but this tempter is saying that you can turn these stones into multiply them into many breads and go and be the victor among your people and do the political king thing in your nation.

But Jesus refused to given in to that temptation. Instead, he says, “No, a person does not live by bread alone, but by every word from God.” He’s not saying that we don’t need the bread or food to sustain our lives. We all need that, but what he’s saying is ultimately our identity and who we are as we are created by the image of God. We can only find true happiness when we rely on the grace of God, and we rely on every word from God for us. Therefore, John Wesley also talked about fasting this way. “Fasting is a way which God has ordained for us to receive God’s unmerited mercy. God is not obligated to give us anything, but God has promised to freely give us God’s blessing.” When we fast, we do not fast to earn the favor of God, thinking “This is going to change something about us.” As Wesley says, it could be a way that God somehow, by God’s grace, conveys the message of God to us that we are below the children and that we can empty ourselves so that we can be filled with the love and grace of God for us.

I want to finish this sermon with a story. There was a wealthy man one day, he came to visit a Zen master in Japan. He came to Zen master seeking great wisdom, what he had to do in his life, and to accumulate more, and maybe just find more happiness. And the Zen master said, “Well, can talk about that over a cup of tea? And he brought her to a room, and he started pouring tea into the cup that he gave to this man. He came to the half full, full, and started overflowing on the cup of tea. And this man said, well, stop, can’t you see that what you’re doing is overflowing already? And the Zen master answered, “You are actually just like this cup full of tea. There’s no room for you to grow and learn. So, you go home when you feel like you were empty, when you’re ready to learn, you can come back.”

In our lives today, how can we empty ourselves so we can be filled with the presence of God today? You ask, are you facing some important decisions in your life, and you feel like there’s no way what you need to do and you’re dealing with the uncertainty of the future? Maybe it’s a time to fast in a way that we can empty ourselves and let the love of God flow into our hearts and guide us into attraction. May God bless us in sharing these words, in God’s people say.
 
Amen.