Author Archives: Greg Johnston

The Fox and the Hen

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The Fox and the Hen

 
 
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Sermon — March 16, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

The word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision,
“Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield;
your reward shall be very great.” (Gen. 15:1)

If I had to identify the most pervasive scams of 2025, I’d pick two. The Scammy Award for Most Pervasive Con would be split between the “‘I’m Your Pastor’ Gift Card Email” and the “‘Notice of Toll Evasion’ Text.” You may have encountered one of these. I actually received them both this week. Both of them are designed, like all scams are, to exploit human emotions.

The pastor scam preys on our goodness and our relationships. It’s been around for a few years now. You get an email from an account with a name claiming to be your pastor, who says they can’t talk by phone right now but they really need you to do them a favor to help someone out. They need you to buy a few hundred dollars in gift cards and send them the numbers by email, so they can give them to a person in need. If you buy the gift cards and sending the numbers, there’s no way to get the money back. You were just trying to help your pastor out, and you were robbed.

The more recent toll evasion scam preys on our fear of judgment. “You have an unpaid toll bill on your account,” one text message I got this week reads. “To avoid late fees, pay within 12 hours or the late fees will be increased and”—here’s the worst part—“reported to the DMV.” At this point, I get 3-4 of these a week. But you can understand how it would work. I might have missed a toll, you might think. Maybe my EzPass was on the fritz? I really don’t want to have to deal with the DMV, so okay, sure, I can pay ten bucks. (PSA, if you ever see one: these are both always scams. And anyway, in Massachusetts we call it the RMV, right?)

These cons have none of the charm of The Music Man. They’re a numbers game, spamming the world with so many emails and so many texts that surely someone will pay. But they prey on the same deep-seated human traits that were so well known to the con artists of old: the desire to be helpful to a person you love; the embarrassment of questioning a confident authority figure; the fear of being seen as the kind of person who doesn’t pay a toll, and the desire to avoid the DMV.

Many religions built on these same traits. But I want to suggest to you today that the good news that Jesus came to share is that we have things exactly the wrong way around. People often act as though God were an eternal con man in the sky. We often act out of the desire to please God by being helpful, or out of the fear of divine judgment. But in fact, in a world of wily foxes, the only thing God wants is the chance to protect you like a hen, sheltering her chicks under her wings.

It’s Jesus who gives us this image of the fox and the hen, of course. And there’s some irony in it. The Pharisees come to warn Jesus to leave Galilee, because Herod Antipas, who rules Galilee, wants to kill him. The warning is superfluous. Jesus is already on his way out of Galilee, toward Jerusalem. But he won’t find safety there. He’s already predicted that’s where he’ll meet his fate. The danger is real: Pontius Pilate and Herod Antipas really do think that Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem to seize the throne, and they see him as a threat.

But Jesus isn’t there to launch a coup. He’s not there to outfox Herod. He says that he’s the other half of a pair familiar from folk tales around the world: If Herod is the fox in this story, then Jesus is the hen. Even in the city, we know who wins that fight. But Jesus isn’t worried about Herod’s threat to himself. He’s talking about his chicks: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem!” he laments. “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.” Herod isn’t only a “fox” because he wants Jesus dead. He’s a fox because he’s preying on the people, exploiting and oppressing the beloved chicks of God. And Jesus the hen isn’t only the victim of this predator; he’s the one who’s going to protect his people from the threat.

This is the pattern all throughout our readings today. Again and again, you see the enemies who attack and exploit the people of God and the God who tries to defend and protect them.

So our Psalm today repeatedly invokes the “evildoers” who “came upon me to eat up my flesh,” the “army” that is “encamp[ed] against me,” the “war” that “rise[s] up against me.” (Psalm 27:2-4) And the Psalmist turns again and again to God for safety: “The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom then shall I fear? the LORD is the strength of my life; of whom then shall I be afraid?” (Ps. 27:1) The two sides don’t act in the same way. God is not an avenging warrior, but a shelter and protector.

Paul makes the same kind of rhetorical move. There are those who are the “enemies of the cross of Christ,” whose whole purpose is shaped by “destruction,” whose minds are set on “earthly things.” They seek satisfaction and chase after glory. But “our citizenship is in heaven,” Paul writes; our highest allegiance is not to any ruler or nation on earth, but to God, and it is from there, from heaven, that we await a “Savior.” Not someone to destroy our enemies but, again, someone to save us from them. Someone who can say to us, as God says to Abram, “Do not be afraid…I am your shield.” (Genesis 15:1)

These are not symmetric pairs: fox and fox, army and army, enemy and ally. We get the fox and the hen, the army and the refuge, the enemy and the Savior. There are the all the forces of evil and death that do their best to destroy humankind—and there is a God who wants to shield us from them.

And this is what Jesus is going to do. He has a little time, for now, for small miracles: he can cast our demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, but then he’s got to go on to finish his work. The fox is near, and he needs to go gather his chicks, to protect them not only from Herod, or from Pilate, but from the greater power of Death itself. He will shelter the chicks from that fox. His disciples and the people will be safe. But he himself will die, just as the Pharisees tried to warn him that he could. On Good Friday, he’ll die; and on Holy Saturday he’ll rest in the grave; and then on Easter Sunday, on the third day, he’ll finish his work. And in some mysterious way, just as the hen’s self-sacrifice might protect her chicks from the fox, Jesus’ death and resurrection work to overcome the power of death. Jesus goes, of his own free will, to die, and he rises again, and opens the way for us to rise. This is how he resists evil; how we wins the ultimate victory at the very moment that he seems to fail.

Technology has changed. New forms of government have come and gone. But Jesus lived in a world made of human beings just like us. He lived in a world of people who saw raw power as the measure of a leader’s strength. He lived in a world whose rulers tried to dominate the people of neighboring lands. He rejected those rulers, those foxes who used their cunning for their own gain. But he also rejected their way. He didn’t respond to violence with violence, or to power with power. He stretched out wings of love, not to push against his foes, but to protect his people from harm. When given the choice, Jesus chose the side of the weak and the powerless, not the mighty and great.

And this is true for you. God is not an eternal Santa Claus, making a list and checking it twice. God is not working on the same emotions as a scammer does, not trying to manipulate you into doing good deeds, or to scare you away from bad ones. God is trying to protect you, to give you some shelter and some strength. And there’s only one thing that God needs us to do: not to run away.

“How often I’ve desired to gather you together,” Jesus says, “and you were not willing!” And that’s the work we have to do. Not to scatter through the world like chicks. But to accept the hen’s embrace, to shelter under her wings. To accept protection, and to try to live with the courage that it brings: to know that even though the world is full of foxes, full of struggles and pain, there is another and a better way than the way of cunning domination. There is a way of love that leads through the cross all the way to the empty tomb, because on the third day—at the end of the long journey of Lent, at the end of the long journey of this life—Jesus will finish his work.

Lent with LLMs

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New AI (artificial intelligence) software has been all over the news for the last few years, and in the last few months I’ve found it popping up everywhere. Suddenly Google has Gemini in my Gmail inbox, Microsoft has a Copilot prompt when I try to type in Word, and Apple tells me that Apple Intelligence will help summarize my texts, which really makes me ask—Isn’t a text message succinct enough?

Depending on whom you ask, we may be only a few years away from artificial general intelligence systems that can perform most human cognitive tasks, and will forever transform the way we work and live. Or the current AI tools that we have, based on “large language models” (LLMs), may be an environmental catastrophe based on plagiarism and theft. Or they may be mostly irrelevant to your daily life.

This week, I want to reflect on a “Lenten Lesson from LLMs.” In what ways are human beings and AI alike? How are we different? And what might that have to do with Lent?

A few weeks ago, a colleague in another part of the church shared with me an AI chatbot that had been designed specifically to answer questions about the church. It worked by searching publications by the Episcopal Church and Episcopal publishers like Forward Movement, and then by feeding all of that into ChatGPT with some additional guidance, and giving you a helpful response. He knew I worked on an app that made it easier for people to use our church’s various lectionary cycles, so he asked me for some additional data to help it give useful answers to questions like that.

I hadn’t used the tool before, so I opened it up. I asked a few questions about the church and our faith, and it seemed to give some useful replies. It tended to give a link to some official resource or church website, most of the time, which I thought was especially nice. And then I turned to the topic at hand: “Could you draft me a bulletin for the service of Morning Prayer today?”

Word by word, the bot began to reply. It provided a decent outline of the service, including the text of many of the prayers. It gave helpful references to pages of the BCP. And in the middle of the service, it told me there were usually three readings, and that they could be found in the Revised Common Lectionary entry for the day. “Hm,” I wrote back, “Shouldn’t I use the Daily Office Lectionary for Morning Prayer?” “Yes, I’m sorry. We are currently in Year Two of the Daily Office Lectionary, which can be found on page…” “… Wait a minute. Aren’t we in Year One?” (I briefly wondered whether I was wrong.) “Yes, I’m sorry,” it said again, “Because [here it inserts a correct explanation!], we are in Year One of the Daily Office Lectionary. The readings for today are…” And it names three random readings, which are not the readings for the day.

At this point, I start to wonder whether I’m crazy. “Are you sure? I don’t think those are the correct readings.” “I’m sorry,” it replies… and then lists three more readings, also completely wrong.

This was a scary experience. It wasn’t scary that the AI was wrong about how to find the readings for Morning Prayer; that’s a fairly complicated and not particularly important thing to need to do. What was scary is that the AI tool was confidently incompetent: it cheerfully and repeatedly hallucinated answers with no basis in reality, and reported them to me in the exact same tone and with the same level of confidence as its other, correct, answers about the church. It had no ability to reflect on or recognize its own limitations, and while it gave very polite apologies when I pointed out its mistakes, it plunged right back in to making them, nevertheless.

Lent should train you to be the opposite of this kind of AI.

Here are three things you might take away from Lent, that our AI friend would do well to learn:

  1. Learn your limits. On Ash Wednesday, we are reminded of our mortality, of the fragility of our bodies and the shortness of our time on earth. On Good Friday, we come face to face with the fact that we, like Peter and all the disciples, have often abandoned and betrayed our God. Throughout Lent, we test the limits of our willpower and endurance, again and again. Each one of us has things of which we simply are not capable, but it takes real reflection and self-examination to learn what those are.
  2. Admit when you need help. In Christian life, humility is the goal, not pretension; it is better to admit what you do not know or what you cannot do than to pretend to know what you do not know or to be able to do what you cannot do. There are times when “fake it ’til you make it” is good advice, but there are also times when “act like you have no idea what you’re doing and ask for help” is even better, because it’s true.
  3. Apologies without change are missing the point. In Hebrew, the word for repentance is teshuvah, which means “turning” or “returning.” To repent is not simply to apologize; it is to recognize that you’re following the wrong road, and turn back onto the right path. If you find yourself apologizing for the same thing to the same person again and again, that might be a sign that your wheels are stuck in a rut: you’re trying to turn back onto a better road, but there’s something keeping you in place, and something else in your circumstances needs to change before your wheels can stuck.

Our current AI tools are useful in many ways; just a few days before my unfortunate AI encounter, Michael had used the same tool to learn much more about the Nonjuring Schism and its relation to the Episcopal Church than his seminary professors had taught him or I could give him off the cuff. (And you could learn that, too!)

But what’s missing the most from these tools, right now, is what makes us the best human beings, what virtues we try to practice during Lent: reflection and self-examination, humility and the ability to ask for help, genuine repentance and the recognition that we need to change our ways. Few people would name these as the technical breakthroughs we need as the adoption of AI grows; but I sometimes wonder whether these ways of cultivating grace might be the most important technologies of all.

Temptation, Failure, Grace

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Temptation, Failure, Grace

 
 
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Sermon — March 9, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

In March of 1522 in the Swiss city of Zurich, a priest named Ulrich Zwingli participated in an event that led to outrage and condemnation. Personally, I think there was a missed opportunity for a great Hollywood film to be made on the 500th anniversary, because the name alone is made for the silver screen. The events of that Lent, 503 years ago, became known to history as The Affair of the Sausages.

It was just five years after Martin Luther had nailed his 95 Theses to a church door. The Protestant Reformation was in its earliest days. But one thing was clear: more and more Christians, clergy and laypeople alike, were beginning to question the commandments of the church. And this was particularly true for the Church’s teachings on things like fasting during Lent. The Church had developed an intricate system of rules for which foods could be eaten when, and which could not. But this seemed to have little to do with the good news. Jesus and his disciples were accused of not fasting enough, in fact, and the Apostle Paul made compelling arguments that Christians had been freed from these kinds of legalistic practices by God: “by grace [they had] been saved through faith, and not by works of the law.” (Eph. 2:8)

And so one night in 1522, Zwingli was invited to the home of a local printer whose workers had been laboring day and night to publish a new edition of the Epistles of Saint Paul, and they shared a meal during which, despite the Lenten ban on the consumption of meat, they ate a few slices of smoked sausage.

The public was outraged. The printer who hosted the meal was arrested. But Zwingli took a public stand. Fasting or not fasting, he argued, was a matter of individual conscience, not something that the Church could demand. Fasting could not save a Christian’s soul; by grace they had been saved, through faith. The Bishop was furious. But Zwingli’s view convinced his fellow-citizens, and he went on to lead the Reformation in Switzerland, at least until his death.

Now, the Episcopal Church is a Protestant church. But we’ve also always occupied a kind of middle way between the most outspoken Protestants and the Catholic tradition. And so at Coffee Hour this week, you might hear people chat about whether they’re “giving something up” during Lent or “taking something on” or simply going about their lives as usual. So I thought it might be interesting today, as we begin this season of Lent, to try to draw this all together; to ask whether there’s a way to understand the spiritual benefits of adopting a Lenten discipline while still embracing the freedom Zwingli found, five hundred years ago, in the good news that he was saved by the grace of God, and not by his own hard work; the freedom to eat a sausage, even during Lent.

The whole practice of a Lenten fast starts with our Gospel story today, in which Jesus fasts for a season of forty days. No ordinary person can go without food for so long, of course, but the Catholic and Orthodox traditions have always had certain regulations around eating and fasting during these forty days. And many people choose to fast from a particular thing for the duration of the season. So, for example, I’ve heard of people here fasting from chocolate, coffee, alcohol, Amazon.com, and the reading of novels, among other things.

There’s an important subtlety here. There’s a difference between giving up something you think is bad, and something you think is good. You can give up something that’s bad, a habit or a vice, any time, and Lent offers a great structure to start. But to fast is to give up something good, temporarily, and plan to take it up again at Easter. So the medieval practice of giving up meat during Lent wasn’t about ethical vegetarianism; they didn’t give up meat because they thought it was bad, but because it was good, and hard to give up. And the same is true if you fast from chocolate, or coffee today.

So why would you do that? Here’s the thing: The goal is to give something up where the stakes are low; where it doesn’t matter if you cheat, because the thing you’ve given up is fine on its own; but that’s enticing enough that it can teach you something about how you respond to the cycle of temptation, failure, and grace. So I want to say a few words about temptation, and failure, and grace.

Jesus has been fasting for forty days and he’s “famished.” (Luke 4:2) And now, the temptations begin to come. The devil entices him—You’re the Son of God… Why don’t you just turn this hard stone into nice, soft bread? The devil shows him the kingdoms of the world: I’m a pretty well-connected guy; just, worship me, and I’ll give you however much political power you please. (Hm.) And the devil takes him up to the top of the Temple—Aren’t you always going on about being the Beloved Son of God? Jump off! God won’t let anything bad happen  to you.

Jesus easily resists. But temptation is harder for us. It doesn’t appear with a pitchfork and horns. It doesn’t all come at the end of forty days. Temptation appears in different times and in different ways. And one of the purposes of fasting during Lent is to understand how the dynamics of temptation work out for you. When does that little voice appear that says “Oh, surely it’s not that big of a deal…” Is it when you’re hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired? With a certain group of friends, or a certain family member? When you experience the temptation to break your Lenten fast, you can ask the usual questions—the who/what/where/when/why of its appearance, and then the how, as in, How do you resist it? Jesus quotes repeatedly from the Psalms, and that works for him. What’s going to work for you?

And what is it like when it doesn’t work? Failure isn’t a part of the story of the temptation of Christ, but none of us is Christ. We fail. So what’s that feel like for you? What’s it like to try to abstain from Amazon for six weeks and finding your finger inexorably drawn to the orange button tempting you to “Buy Now.” Do you feel the heat of shame when you fail? Do you immediately start to rationalize it to yourself? If you find that you succeed easily in a forty-day fast—if you never give in, if you never fail—then maybe you should try something harder next time, because failing at Lent is a really important part.

Failure is important because it unlocks the third and most important step: grace. What do you do after things go off the rails? How do you get back on the horse? How do you admit that you’ve failed, and start again—not by rationalizing it or by hiding it in shame, but by accepting that you’ve messed up, and you are loved, and you can go on, nevertheless? Jesus raises the bar of perfection. Jesus makes resisting temptation look easy. But Paul lowers the bar completely to the floor. Salvation doesn’t  depend on your perfect Lenten fast. Salvation doesn’t depend on your good deeds. It’s simple, for Paul: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9)

This is the kind of good news that led to the Affair of the Sausages. Those Swiss workers, after all, had just finished printing an edition of the Epistles of Paul. And what they had found in those letters, again and again, was the message of God’s grace. They discovered that they didn’t need the Church’s whole system of penance and indulgence, fasting and good works. Paul had set the bar so low that all they needed was to put their trust in what God had already done for them, because “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” (Romans 10:13)

Even as imperfect, limited human beings, they would be forgiven and loved and saved by God, free of charge. And so are you. And so that’s the third thing about which Lent invites you to reflect: What does it feel like to be forgiven, and accepted, even when you fail?

Life is full of temptations, small and large, but they exist on a sliding scale. If you fast from social media during Lent, and find yourself logging in to scroll—that’s okay! The point is to learn how to face the bigger temptations in your life, the ones that really do matter. The temptation to gossip about the secret of a friend. The temptation to violate the trust of someone we love. The temptation to let ourselves be overwhelmed with apathy in the face of a suffering world. Temptation is a fact of human life. But Lent is a chance to play, a chance to train, a chance to experiment, to learn about how temptation works for us. To learn how failure feels for us. To practice accepting the grace that comes, inevitably, even after our worst mistakes, freeing us from the fear and the shame of being imperfect people, for as “the scripture says, ‘No one who believes in [God] will be put to shame.’” (Romans 10:11)

Freed to be Yourself

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Freed to be Yourself

 
 
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Sermon — March 2, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Last week, I went on a short trip to London, and after getting four hours of airplane-seat sleep on the way over, spending the day with my one- and three-year old nieces, going to a conference with a few hundred people, flying back on a plane full of British teenagers on a school trip, then making it through church and confirmation class, on Monday I somehow strangely found that I was coming down with a cold. Who could’ve imagined?

It wasn’t a bad cold, not at all. But it gave me that feeling that a head cold or allergies often do, of a kind of fuzzy barrier between my brain and the world. Do you know what I mean? As if there was a layer of gauze in front of my face, and I just didn’t feel myself. So although I wasn’t particularly tired, and I didn’t have a particularly sore throat, or much of a cough, I just didn’t quite feel like myself.

And then over the course of the week, I finally felt a little better each day, until finally, on Saturday, I woke up feeling like myself again, and it was as if a veil had lifted from before my face.

There’s a question that I have sometimes when I read these two stories about Moses and Jesus, in which they are transfigured and a divine light shines from their faces: Is this a process of addition or subtraction? In other words—In these moments, is God adding to their faces something new, some holy light that wasn’t there before; or is God taking something away, removing some outer layer that had obscured the divine spark within? Is the Transfiguration like putting on a layer of makeup and looking extra good—or is it like recovering from a cold, and suddenly finding that you are yourself again?

The answer may be different, of course, in the two stories. Moses has been up on Mount Sinai with God, receiving the Law, basking in the divine presence. And you can almost imagine him as an iron left in the fire, heating up. He’s been immersed in holiness for 40 days, and when he returns, he glows—like the iron pulled from the fire, he is himself a source of heat and light. And the people are afraid. He has to veil his face; he has to hide that light. He needs something to obscure his holiness so that the people are not burned. But whenever he goes into the Tabernacle to be with God, he lowers the face again, and it’s as if his holiness is continually renewed by returning once again to the presence of God.

For Jesus, it seems to be the other way around. Jesus goes up a mountain, too, but in this case, he’s the source of light. As he’s praying, it seems that an invisible veil has fallen away. His face is changed, and even his clothes become “dazzling white” (Luke 9:29). In this moment on the mountain, Jesus’ true nature is revealed. A voice comes from the cloud that overshadows the disciples, and says, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” (9:35) And they are stunned.

When Moses comes down from the mountain, it seems like addition: the Spirit of God has added something to Moses to infuse him with a holiness that is visible and palpable. When Jesus goes up on the mountain, it seems more like subtraction: the Spirit seems to take away something that otherwise hides the divine reality of who Jesus is.

But we didn’t only hear two stories of change, today. There was a third, this strange story of a boy who’s been possessed by an “unclean spirit.” Now, we could speculate about the medical details of his condition, but that would miss the point. There is some spirit, Luke tells us, some outside force, that’s in control. It oppresses him, it makes him act unlike himself. And Jesus frees the boy from the thing that is controlling him. He heals him, he restores him to wholeness, and the boy’s true self, no longer weighed down by the power of this spirit, is revealed. It is the miraculous version of recovering from a cold: The greatest miracle Jesus does is to allow this boy to be himself, as he really is. The boy is revealed just as Jesus was: he is himself, exactly as he is.

This is the beauty and the promise of the Transfiguration for us. We are not Jesus. But sometimes in our spiritual lives, we are like Moses, and what we need is to spend some time in the presence of God, and be filled with God’s holy warmth and light, so we can bring those back down to the world. And sometimes, we’re like the boy; sometimes we need to be freed from the things that are weighing us down, so that we can be revealed as ourselves, as we truly are.

It’s occasionally been observed that churches are full of quirky people. And it’s true. I’m sure I’ve said it before, but if you’re sitting in a church on a Sunday morning in Boston in 2025, you must be at least a bit unusual. (In a good way!) In a statistical sense, just by virtue of being among the small fraction of the population who regularly go to church, you’ve proven that you’re kind of strange, but that actually misses the point. Here’s my thesis: Every human being is kind of strange; faithful Christians are just more willing to admit it. In a healthy church community you should expect more quirkiness than in the world outside, because the nature of the Gospel is that it frees us to be ourselves.

We come here into the presence of God, and we hear that God is love. We hear that God loves us, as we are in our inmost selves, and not as we pretend to be. And at our best, we can lower the veil for a moment that hides our faces, and see one another as we really are. For a moment, together, we can see the glory of God “as though reflected in a mirror,” and we can be transformed, growing from glory into glory. (2 Cor. 3:18) We can absorb a little bit of the radiance of God, and more importantly, we can be freed from the unclean spirits of judgment and criticism that afflict us in the world. We can be ourselves, and we can be a little weird, thank God. Because God wants us to recover from our life-long spiritual cold. God wants to set us free from the things that keep us from being our true selves. God wants us to lower the veil, and to let our faces shine with the radiance of God’s own love and light.

And this may sound like a frivolous thing, like a whole sermon built around the slogan “Keep Austin Weird.” But I think it’s the most serious thing in the world. I genuinely believe that the message of God’s unconditional love is good news, and I genuinely think that is has the power to change the world: not by giving us a new burden, a new commandment to love one another as God has loved us; but by releasing us from the burdens the world puts on us to be anything other than the people we truly are.

There is a weight of expectation that seizes many of us and dashes us to the ground. There is a veil we use to hide ourselves in shame, praying that nobody really find us out. There is an epidemic of anxiety driven by the brutal judgment of social media and dating apps. There is a real crisis of masculinity driven by our failure to say that to be kind and compassionate and vulnerable is, in fact, to be a man, and a better man than the one who’s brash and arrogant and rude. There are a thousand small ways in which we veil our faces so that the world cannot see us as we are, and every one of them is a lost opportunity for light to shine in the world. And while I don’t want to go through a whole list, I really do think that there are dozens of social and political effects of our basic inability to believe that God loves us, and that God’s grading us with a rubric that’s nothing like what we would call success.

So Lent begins this week. And Lent is a good time to make an honest reckoning of who we are. Lent is a good time to let go of some of the ways in which we hide our true selves in shame, and to let the veil disappear. Lent is a good time to act with great boldness, as Paul says; to be who we really are, as God has made us and as God loves us. To turn toward the Spirit of the Lord, knowing that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,” (2 Cor. 3:16) and to let ourselves be freed from the burdens that hold our spirits down, so that we stand before God and be transformed from one degree of glory to another.

Is Such the Fast That I Choose?

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The seasons are changing—and I don’t only mean the sudden warmth outside. (Okay, maybe “warmth.”) This Sunday is the last Sunday after the Epiphany, and the celebrations of Mardi Gras/Fat Tuesday will soon move on to the solemnities of Ash Wednesday. In other words, this is the final News & Notes before Lent begins.

Conversations this time of year often include the question, “What are you giving up for Lent?” Some people choose to fast from something they enjoy; others take the opportunity to permanently turn away from something they regret. Many people choose to “take something on,” a new spiritual practice or act of service.

Whether you’re still wondering about a Lenten fast or practice, or you’ve already decided—or even if you aren’t planning to change a thing!—I want to invite you to think about the words of Isaiah in our first reading for Ash Wednesday.

Isaiah describes his people’s practices of fasting, more than 2500 years ago: practices of piety and self-humbling, intended to appease their God. And then the prophet says—speaking in the voice of God—

5                Is such the fast that I choose,
                                    a day to humble oneself?
                  Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush,
                                    and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
                  Will you call this a fast,
                                    a day acceptable to the LORD?

6                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?
7                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?

(Isaiah 58:5-7)

With these words, God reorients our attention. God looks at our practices of repentance and piety—our bowing down and kneeling, our foreheads marked with ashes, our many pious words—and asks: “Is such the fast that I choose?” Is this what will please God? Or is it something else? Is it humbling ourselves that turns us toward God? Or is it embracing someone else?

Lent is a season of reconciliation, in which we seek to restore our relationships with God and with one another, by participating in Christ’s work of reconciliation. In truth, this is always the work of the Church—Lent is just a season that focuses our attention on it in a special way. We always run the risk of turning Lent into a self-improvement challenge, a way of taking on a project that’s about individual spiritual growth or moral improvement.

But God doesn’t seem so concerned with our attempts to reconcile ourselves with God. God seems more interested, here, in our reconciliation with one another. Is not this the fast that God wants us to 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?” God envisions our fast not as a way to improve ourselves, but as a way to improve the life of someone else. And this is why fasting and almsgiving have often been linked: you can take the money you don’t spend on chocolate in Lent (on alcohol, meat, coffee, whatever the case may be) and spend it charitably instead.

So if you’re trying to figure out which small luxury or minor vice you might give up this Lent—or if you’re wondering what practice it is that you might take on—I wonder whether you might take some time to reflect on these words: “Is not this the fast that I choose… 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?”

These are big demands, and noble goals. Perhaps we can only begin to answer them in small ways. But this is the fast that God has chosen, for us: to turn outward, this Lent, not inward; to reflect on our mortality and our imperfection and to make them the basis for solidarity with our fellow human beings, because what’s true for one of us is true for all of us: We are but dust, and to dust we shall return.