Sunday, December 6, 2020               (today’s lectionary)
You are mine
Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God!
My son-in-law is fasting once a week. I thought of Mahesh Chavda, who told us years ago that fasting once a week for a year is 12 days more than a 40 day fast! He also told us about a time when he had failed to remove a bag of potato chips from his cabinet during one of his own 40 day fasts. The chips began to talk to him, “I’m salty, I’m crunchy!” So he devoured the entire bag of chips on the 15th day of his fast. Then he resumed his fast.
Fear not to cry out and say, “Here is your God! He comes with power and rules by his strong arm, and he feeds his flock.
His openness about this simple “resumption,” rather than beating himself around the face for his failure, freed me to fast regularly and well-enough, once a week usually on Mondays, for several years. Before my days of centering prayer, it provided a measure of stillness day after day, mostly during the week after the fasting itself was over.
My son-in-law Aki, who is gifted and skilled in martial arts and other areas of extreme physical activity, pointed out that fasting is the only typical spiritual practice that makes him uncomfortable, at least at first. That in itself is a great benefit, because it’s mostly in discomfort that I am driven quickly to God. “I need you, Lord!”
Near indeed is his salvation, where kindness and truth shall meet; justice and peace shall kiss.
In Isaiah 43, God promises us that he will rescue us from the water and the fire and even slavery. We are safe in his hands, no matter what. So when we cry, “I need you Lord!” he hears us. But there is a challenge as well as a comfort in that passage, because God says he does these things for us because … “YOU ARE MINE.” We are not slaves or victims to other circumstance, because we are already HIS.
According to his promise we await new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells.
So of course my challenge is to not get ahead of God and rescue myself from water and fire and slavery. And it’s also to find ways day after day to follow God’s two great commandments: Love the Lord and love his kids. All of them. I am his, and those are his instructions for how to live my life.
(Isaiah 40, Psalm 85, 2 Peter 3, Luke 3, Mark 1)
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