Dear People of St. James’,
This week, our church calendar challenges us to throw ourselves, body and soul, into two of the essential disciplines of the Christian life: feasting and fasting.
First, feast. To feast is to take all of your good stuff, your best stuff, and to bring it to the table. But, it’s not just for you or for those close to you. It’s for the stranger who might just become a friend; it’s for the estranged who needs to be reconciled with you. To feast is to share in abundance, knowing from whence it comes, and knowing that our abundance does not simply belong to us.
Feasting is a discipline because we often don’t feel like feasting. We might feel like it would be wiser to save what we have, to store it up because life is full of scarcity. We might feel like it might be wiser to save up our energy for work already planned, instead of expending it on a holy opportunity to connect with strangers or those who are close to us whom we might take for granted. Feasting may feel to some like foolishness. We need church community to teach us how to feast and to share our abundance in a way that pushes back against the habits of conspicuous consumption and the hoarding of abundance that mark our culture.
The prophets remind us that fasting is a discipline that must be geared toward the liberation of others. In fasting, we place limits on our own freedom so that others might be more free. What kind of fast in your life might prove liberating for your own spirit and for the others in your life? One year a close friend of mine gave up alcohol for Lent and pledged to calculate the money she saved and to give that amount to a good cause. Good, right? But, reflecting on that season later, she also found that in forgoing social drinking she was able to listen with greater empathy to her friends and partner. She was more open to their stories, and the healing of relationships that flowed from that listening was as liberating as the money she saved and put into relief and development work.
This week, we are called to take our feasting and our fasting seriously. Even if you don’t come to the church for pancakes and frivolity on Tuesday, how will you keep the feast this week? What kind of Lenten fast will you choose for sake of the liberation of others?
Rev. Eileen
