| | The Scripture is living and active and sharper than any two edged sword. The Spirit of God makes its relevance felt in every time and circumstance. As I read Isaiah 58 again recently it struck me that this passage is quite relevant to our contemporary situation. So much of American evangelical religiosity is designed toward our own convenience and fancy, and it is excessively individualistic. The fasting, if you will, the religious exercises that we engage in are so often aimed almost exclusively at our own individual felt needs, and designed toward our entertainment (vs. 3b). We pick the time and length of service, the style of music, and the content of the preaching, according to our taste, whim, and expedience. We choose churches according to which one has the programs that we think will satisfy us, and make us feel full spiritually. And then we wonder why God seems so distant (vs 3a).
The passage gives a particular example of this misguided fasting that also happens to be very relevant to today. We make the Christian Sabbaths, the Lord's Days, weekend days for our entertainment, and in doing so we turn a community day of rest into a day for non-Christians and even our own brethren to serve us in the market places, at golf courses, in the movie theaters, and at restraunts. When the Holy commandment requires both our rest and the rest of our "man servant and (our) maid servant", we make it a day for our own pleasure and for employing man servants and maid servants to serve and entertain us. And how often do the few hours in the morning that we take to "go to church" become occasions to quarrel about a style of music that bothers us, or the preacher that isn't addressing our felt needs? To borrow a New Testament example, when we come together is it really for the Lord's Supper? (1 Corinthians 11). Do we "fast only to quarrel and to fight, and to hit with a wicked fist" or do we come together to edify, to lift up, and to submit to one another in the fear of the Lord.
Even when considering the most apparently pious expressions of American evangelicalism it seems that our contemporary situation fits in all too nicely with the contrast that made in verses 5 through 12, between a fast of mourning and putting on sackcloth and ashes, and a fast of spreading the light and power of the gospel. We can get very good at making all our fasts, all our religious exercises, those of personal sorrow and repentance over sin, of going to confession as it were, of tending to our own felt needs of guilt relief and a good dose of individual spirituality, and never turn outward to service, to acts of mercy, to sharing the gospel with others and celebrating the reality of the gospel in our own lives and our collective corporate life as a church body. The fasting that God requires is not our individualistic fasts of endless introspective guilt trips, or of thrill seeking exploitations or of bickering amongst ourselves over personal preferences. The fasting God desires is that we should turn and do justice and mercy to the poor and oppressed. That we should inconvenience ourselves for the relief of the less fortunate. That we should put aside our own pleasures and free up our servants as well to "call the Sabbath delight, and the holy day of the LORD honorable". We are in desperate need, and our nation and our world is in desperate need of this kind of fasting.
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| | Posted 6/26/2008 12:12 PM - 36 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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