Central Lutheran Church - Elk River
Central Lutheran Church - Elk River
Rhythm: Fasting with Pastor Ryan Braley
What happens when we deliberately disrupt the rhythm of consumption in a world where virtually anything can be delivered to our doorstep within hours? This episode dives deep into the countercultural practice of fasting and how it shapes our spiritual lives.
We begin by examining "the water in which we swim" - our culture of immediate gratification where indulgence is celebrated and boredom can be avoided with a few taps on a screen. Against this backdrop, we explore how fasting has faded from Christian practice since the Enlightenment as spirituality became increasingly focused on the intellect rather than embodied practices.
Through biblical examples and personal reflections, we unpack three powerful ways fasting transforms us. First, it makes us more attentive to our deeper longings beneath surface-level desires. Are we building lives for our resumes or our eulogies? Second, fasting reveals our attachments and compulsions, offering freedom from the things that subtly control us. Finally, it teaches compassion by allowing us to briefly experience what millions face daily - hunger without certainty of when the next meal will come.
The spiritual discipline of fasting isn't about earning God's favor or following rigid rules. Rather, it's about waking up to the cultural currents shaping us and creating space to become the deep, mature people our world desperately needs. Whether you've never fasted before or it's a regular practice, this exploration will challenge you to consider how temporarily abstaining from food might reshape your relationship with God, yourself, and others in surprising ways.
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Please pray with me. God, we give you thanks this morning for your presence here in this time and place. We take a minute just to acknowledge that you are here with us. And, god, this morning would you continue to make us aware of the things in our life that shape us and the kind of people we're becoming? Would you give us awareness of these things? And, god, by your Spirit you come and transform us and make us into the kind of people that this world so desperately needs, and we thank you for this beautiful morning, the sunshine, and for the person next to us, on our right and our left, and we just ask you to bless them as well, and we give you thanks this morning in Jesus' name. Amen, amen, you can be seated. Thank you, pryor Morning everyone. How are we doing? Good, my name is Ryan, I'm the pastor here at Central and it's great to be with you guys this morning. Don't forget, after this, we're going to have a ribbon-cutting ceremony over here and we have some donuts, which does remind me that we are talking about fasting this morning, and so we're in the middle of our rhythm series and our rhythm for this morning is and I'd ask some of you, hey, if you can come this morning, fast it. I'm not going to have you raise your hands because I would defeat the purpose and shame those who didn't. But no shame if you didn't. No need to feel, but maybe you weren't here, didn't get the email. But some folks in this room are fasting. They came this morning and experienced some kind of fasting, but that's our rhythm this morning.
Speaker 1:So our sermon title this morning is fasting and, oh sorry, title this morning is fasting and oh, sorry about that, sorry, my bad, my bad. Fasting. Oh gosh, oh my gosh, this is terrible. Fasting is what we're talking about this morning. Oh my gosh, this is terrible. I think the fasting there we go okay there. By the way, no joke, my boys came home from college yesterday and they wanted chipotle for dinner and they brought crumble cookies home. So I have a crumble cookie and a chipotle burrito bowl in the fridge at home waiting for me because I'm also fasting.
Speaker 1:But I want to talk about fasting this morning and rhythm. So our sermon series is rhythm how the things that we do shape our lives. A rhythm is a strong, regular, repeated sound or pattern or movement. It's a thing we do over and over again. So the sunrise and the sunset, the tides going in and out, the ways in which we live our lives, our heartbeat these are rhythms and we engage in these all the time, and these things shape us. Of course, the great oh, by the way, this is great.
Speaker 1:Last week, I said, hey, I'd love for you to engage in some rhythms or some repetitive things that will help shape you. And I said, maybe, get up early and do some thankfulness at night. Many of you emailed me and told me what you did, which is awesome. I got a text from Amanda Stoltman. I said, hey, can I share this? Yeah, so she texted me hey, ryan, two things.
Speaker 1:One Warren and I decided our new rhythm was going to be to play a game of some sort together every evening. It's a great rhythm. Help shape you, build relationships, community, these kind of things, multiple apps, youtube tutorials, ai searches and an instruction booklet. Later we're in our Mahjong era. I love it. Anybody play Mahjong? Am I saying it right? Mahjong, great. They told me I could share that with you guys this morning.
Speaker 1:Anyway, so that's, but rhythms, are these things that shape us. Aristotle said that what we do kind of shapes who we are. It was reinterpreted as we are what we repeatedly do. If you weren't here last week, I encourage you to go back and listen to this sermon. But the things we do, good or bad or otherwise, they shape who we are and how we become, and actually they shape our desires, the things that we long for and love. The more we do these things, they shape us. We're surrounded by habits and rhythms and liturgies that shape us. So it raises the question what things are shaping you and forming you? I chatted about this too. Yeah, we're all being formed by something, just so you know. You're all being shaped by, formed by something Paul encouraged you don't be conformed or shaped by the mold of the world or this present age, but be instead renewed of mind and offer your bodies as living sacrifices. That's what we're going to try to do with this rhythm series, and so the problem is we don't always know what's shaping us.
Speaker 1:Remember this story? I'll tell it quickly if you weren't here last week. But these two fish are swimming along in the water and this old, wiser fish swims by. He goes hey, young fellows, how we doing Not good. And he goes fellows, how's the water today? And the two young fish look at the old man. They look at each other and they go what the heck is water? So the idea is that the things in our lives that are most obvious are the hardest to notice, and we're being shaped and molded by things. We don't always recognize it and it's tough.
Speaker 1:So this morning I want to talk a bit about the water in which we swim. I think the pastor's job is to help interpret the culture. You're probably aware of all these things. I want to just name them the water in which we swim, our culture we're in, and how Christian formation can go opposite that or upstream from that. Then we'll talk about what is fasting like, the practice and, biblically and historically, what is it? And then, why should you fast? How can not eating shape us spiritually in any way? I'm glad you asked. So here's the culture in which we live in, just so you know.
Speaker 1:So if you wanted to, let's say, make some waffles, but you're like, I don't want just any waffles, ryan, I want waffles in the shape of a keyboard, you can have that. You can have it right now On Amazon. You can buy a waffle-shaped keyboard or a keyboard-shaped waffle maker. Yeah, yeah, instantly. You can have it today or, let's say, one night. You know what you have this inspiration like. I just you know what I want. You know what I'm really longing for in my life that's missing in my life right now 1,500 ladybugs yeah, you can have that. You can have that right now on amazon, and if you live close to a warehouse, you can have it, like by this afternoon. Or let's say like, no, ryan I am.
Speaker 1:I love to sleep, I like to take a nap, but I like, I want like a nice pillow, not any pillow, but a. I want a nice pillow shaped after my favorite food, a beautiful salmon filet pillow. You can have that. This is for when your comfort levels are below sea level. Ooh, yeah, that's what this is for. And let's say, you know, when you want something like that, you can have it. What about when you want to learn how to dance, but you want it to be holy and sanctified dancing? You can have this book Dancing with Jesus. I'm not kidding, you have it on Amazon tonight. This is for those of you that your dancing is so bad, it's a sin. Oh man, these jokes are just going to get better and better all morning long.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can have it instantly. Almost anything at your fingertips, you can order it and it's there almost immediately. You can have it Now. Maybe you can't afford this $95,000 beautiful painting of the Chechen leaders Chechen Republic leaders but you can have it if you wanted to. Yeah, this is a painting of the Chechen Republic leaders on sale right now at Amazon for $95,000. Now, maybe you can't afford that, but if you wanted it, you could do it and if you could afford it, you could have it almost immediately. Now, I know you know this.
Speaker 1:We live in unprecedented times where you can have almost anything to your fingertips, and it raises the question, then I think we should ask this is how we become aware of the water in which we swim. What is this doing to us? The days of Amazon, of Uber, I can have a ride instantly in my house. Uber, I can have food, uber Eats instantly. I can stream any movie TV show endlessly if I wanted to. It's at my fingertips. I can have a dopamine hit any moment I want it. Dopamine hit after dopamine, hit after dopamine hit. In fact, we can avoid boredom like never before in human history. We can avoid boredom instantly if we wanted to. That's the water in which we swim. What is this doing to us, though, how is this shaping our souls, our lives and our desires? How are these rhythms shaping the kind of people we're overcoming?
Speaker 1:We live in a culture of indulgence. Friends. Not only can you indulge, we're told and we're taught it's actually a moral virtue to go ahead and indulge. Why would you stop yourself? You should indulge. This is good for you, you can have it. If you want it, you can have it, go for it.
Speaker 1:And we live in a world that's genuinely crafted by engineers brilliant people, for you to consume stuff. They're in labs building things for you to consume them. You know this already, but the food industry figured this out a long time ago. They make foods that are addictive when you eat them. That's why you can't eat just one Lay's potato chip. They're engineered to not just eat just one Foods.
Speaker 1:We have pills to sort of cure any ailment Just one little pill and you can kind of cure almost anything. And products that are designed to kind of fit your hand or you know, to be used and indulge in your every whim. And it's incredible, in fact, if you sneeze near your phone, your phone is like oh, based on your respiratory needs, I'm going to send you a 12-pack of Himalayan sea salt infused Kleenexes. Same day delivery. What's happening Now? I'm not opposed to these things, it's just delivery what? What is what's happening now? I'm not opposed to these things, it's just whatever.
Speaker 1:It is what it is.
Speaker 1:It's the water in which we swim, but what is this doing to us?
Speaker 1:How is it shaping us? One of the things it does is it actually disconnects us from our body's natural rhythms, because we can have anything. So it's sort of our, our spirit, our body and our mind. It's all kind of becoming disconnected. And so we live in a time of disembodied spirituality as well, and this goes back a long ways. But our spirituality, our internal lives, our soul lives are disconnected from our bodies and our rhythms that our bodies have.
Speaker 1:Back in the ancient world that was not the case. In the ancient world we had rituals you know, if you read Leviticus like their rituals of worship engaged the senses, their bodies, their sights, their smells, their hearing. It was incredibly rich and vibrant. They were an embodied spirituality. They had feasts and food as worship. What was the incarnation of God as a human? But an embodied spirituality. Our bodies matter. Sacraments are embodied spirituality. But we live in a time and place where, for a variety of reasons, we're sort of disconnected from our bodies.
Speaker 1:Now this sort of begins around the Enlightenment, and actually fasting as a practice began to wane during the Enlightenment, around the 15, 16, 1700s. Any historians in the room you know this is true and there's all kinds of reasons for this. But around this time our spirituality and our formation of our spiritual lives began to focus solely on the mind and the intellect. And this is how we approach formation, how Christian practices mostly focus on the mind, for many reasons, but one of which is because we had this gentleman who had this incredibly wise thing to say. Anybody know who this is?
Speaker 1:This is Rene Descartes. He says cogito ergo sum, which means I think, therefore I am. He's trying to understand how to know that you exist. That's too much to get into right now. But he sort of doubts everything which you can do. You can just sort of doubt that anything exists. But one thing you can't doubt is the fact that he's doubting. Oh, I can't doubt that I'm actually engaging in this intellectual activity of doubting. So I think I'm doubting, therefore it should be. I doubt, therefore I am. But so he's like oh, so the basis of existence according to Rene Descartes, who was very influential in this part of the Middle Ages was thinking is why and how you know you exist. So because of that, we begin to emphasize the intellect and the mind and our whole lives being a center around the mind. Look, in this room. This room is built like a lecture hall, it is what it is. But, uh, because much of our practice is like intellectual information, trend, you know, transactions. So because we have this disembodied spirituality, this is the water in which we swim and around this time fasting begins to go away because the body practices were not as important.
Speaker 1:John Wesley, you know the founder of the Methodist movement, who lived around the 1700s. He says this, I love this. He says, hey, I fear there are now thousands of Methodists who have entirely left off of fast they stopped fasting who are so far from fasting twice a week they fast not even twice, or not even once in a excuse me, not even once, not even twice in a month. Let me try that one more time. I fear there are now thousands of Methodists who don't even fast at all, who are so far from fasting twice a week, they don't even do it twice a month. And if you're like, far from fasting twice a week. They don't even do it twice a month. If you're like, oh, twice a month is pretty good actually, like I mean, come on, how many people fought twice a month?
Speaker 1:But back in the day folks would fast twice a week. In fact, in the didache didache is this book it's like one of the earliest christian manuals for spiritual practices like how do you live as a christian? Well, they wrote a book called the didache. It's like founding sort of apostolic book about like an instruction manual, how to be a christian, and they recommended fasting twice a week. And in the middle ages they were like, oh, not even twice a week, not even twice a month. I won't have you raise your hands, but how many of you fast? Maybe maybe once a month, maybe once a year, kind of thing. So fasting goes away. These are the rhythms in which we are, the water which which we swim. Now, biblically, the Jews would fast twice a week. Again, in the Didache they recommended fasting Wednesdays and Fridays, and the fasting in the Bible was mostly stop abstaining in some ways from food and drink.
Speaker 1:In the Bible there was lots of folks who fasted. Moses fasted for a long time and he met with God on the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments. He fasted for a long time. And he met with God on the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments. He fasted for a long time. David fasted when he found out that his son was going to die. He fasted and wept and cried and mourned and asked God begged God to let his son survive. He fasted. Esther also fasted Before she met with the king. Remember the story of Esther. She met with the king to plead for the lives of the Jews, of all of her fellow Jews. Her and the Jews all fasted for a long time. Elijah fasted when he ran from Jezebel. He fasted when he was hiding in the cave, fasted and prayed to God. Jesus fasted we heard that read this morning. He fasted for 40 days in the desert. Sort of a supernatural His and Moses' probably some kind of a supernatural fast for a long time. Paul fasted.
Speaker 1:All these people fasted. They would do it privately. Most of the time they wouldn't tell people when they were fasting. There was also corporate fasting. Esther's story, for example, was corporate fasting. Leviticus they were commanded to fast once a year on the Day of Atonement. The whole nation fasted Corporate fasting. There was regular fasting once, twice a week there was also sort of ad hoc, you know, momentary fasting, like for needs. The entire city of Nineveh fasted and repented when Jonah comes and tells them to do so.
Speaker 1:So there's all kinds of ways to fast. It was mostly fasting from food and from drink. Now, fasting is not a biblical command. There's no command to fast in the scriptures. Jesus does say this on the sermon on the mountain says hey, when you fast, then he gives them some instructions for how to fast, but it's not a commandment to fast. He's just saying, because it's such a regular part of their lives, you say, hey, when you do this, here's how you can do it. So here's how you fast, but fasting is not. Here's how you fast, but fasting's not an biblical command. So before I go any further, I want to say, hey, here's a couple things that fasting is and a couple things that fasting is not. Is that fair enough?
Speaker 1:All right, fasting is abstaining in some significant way from food or drink. It disrupts the regular rhythm of our eating. So these rhythms that are shaping us, these liturgies of the world that the world, this present age, has given us, they shape us. This is one of them Eating three times a day. We have this rhythm of eating. When you fast, you're disrupting that rhythm and in doing so it can become a teacher, because it reveals how much of our peace and our comfort may come from this pleasure of eating not good or bad, but to be aware of, it's the water in which we swim in. So it becomes a teacher in that way. So break those rhythms that form you and just see what it's like, what's the relationship like? It's also about formation, not through the brain, as in like the middle ages on, but through the stomach. So it's an embodied spirituality. So this can demonstrate how clever our body is in getting its own way. When you're hungry, like I gotta eat, I gotta eat, I gotta eat yeah, it's the body asking for its own way, and sometimes we're hungry we're not actually hungry, you don't need food, but we just so. Through fasting you begin to have like this spiritual formation through the stomach and realize because it how much of my body demands its own way and how much I give into it. Fair enough, all right.
Speaker 1:Fasting is not dieting. I know it's lake season and then beach season. We all want to look good in our bikinis. Well, not we all, but some of us. I will wear shorts, not a bikini. It's not dieting. We're a culture obsessed with image and I get it. I'm not going to go into a lecture about image and positivity, I'm just saying it's not dieting. It's not a way.
Speaker 1:Now there is fasting as a diet, like in the culture today, especially like intermittent fasting. By the way, fasting was for a long time thought to be harmful for the body. It's actually not Now. Too long of it, yes. Or for those of us in the room or that you know who have an unhealthy relationship with food and maybe have suffered from different eating disorders, that's different. I don't mean that that's unique and that might be not the best rhythm for you to engage in, but in general, it's not dieting, it's formation.
Speaker 1:Formation, it's spiritual formation. It's not just dieting, it's also not earning anything. You're not trying to like get god's favor and love you already. You already have his love. He already died on the cross for you. It's already finished. Your salvation is fine, don't? You're not earning salvation. We wake up in the morning not to make the sun rise, so that we're awake to see it rise. So it's also not. You're not negotiating with God for things like trying to strong-arm God like Lord. It's been 36 hours, no tacos for me. How about that Tesla? I was asking for God, the one with autopilot, so I can literally let Jesus take the wheel. That Tesla, you're not earning, you're not strong-arming, you're not coercing God. It's not that at all. It's formation, it's waking up to the water in which we swim. It's abstaining from food in these ways to break the rhythm and to sort of see what's there.
Speaker 1:I love what Amy Johnson Frickholm says. She says I've come to see that certain form of fasting as the antidote to obsessive behavior involving the body, indulgence, the culture we live in. How can I wake up, sort of pause it and then look and see where I'm at and how God wants to form me in this world? The world is desperate for deep people. It needs mature people who know how to lead and love and give and be strong and courageous, and we need the acknowledgement or knowledge of the water in which we swim. Okay, so here's the question then why fast? What are we doing? Why would I even bother? How does not eating inform my spirituality in any way? Well, I've got three things to say. I'll go kind of fast so, and they'll invite us to this next seven days to experiment with it, some more to fast, some more If you can, if you haven't, try it again.
Speaker 1:One thing that fasting does fasting makes us more attentive. So some of us don't know who we really are. We don't know ourselves all that well. Fasting can kind of help us understand ourselves a little bit better, like who am I and what's going on inside of me and where is my heart pointing? Well, here, go and look in the mirror. Fasting oftentimes can be like this for you Like, hey, just pause for a minute and stop eating and see what's going on in your spirit, in your life, in your body, and become more attentive.
Speaker 1:So fasting is about bringing attention, becoming more attentive. It's listening to the cravings of your body, the physical cravings, like oh, that's interesting, what's happening there. It's a very gentle stop in our indulgent culture. Like, just pause, you don't have to eat right away, you don't have to buy all those things, we don't have to go along with the culture. Just pause and hit the stop button and examine what's my relationship with food, for example. What is it? Am I using food in any way to kind of comfort myself in ways I shouldn't? Or do I have a healthier relationship with food or not? Or just comfort itself? Do I enjoy comfort? I know I do. We live in a culture that's just obsessed with comfort and fair enough. But what is this doing to me? So fasting helps us become more aware of ourselves. It brings attention, awareness to our desires and our lungs, our hungers, physically.
Speaker 1:Here's the deal, though not just physically. When you have these physical desires of like eating, I'm hungry, I'm hungry. If you can slow that down and pause, you can look a little bit deeper inside the self and you can begin to hear hungers and desires and lungs are deeper down, beneath the surface of your life. We all have these surface level desires and hungers. We all have them. When am I going to eat next? When's my next food going to be? When's my next meeting? Oh, I got to mow the grass, I got to go pick up the groceries, my kid has to be taken to baseball practice.
Speaker 1:These are all fine, but they're shallow desires and longings. You have deeper beneath them, deeper longings and desires. What are those? Do you know them? Have you looked in the mirror? What are they? What do you desire for and long for deep beneath, fasting in many ways is withholding surface level desires, so you can listen to your deeper desires. Does that make sense? Because we're obsessed with these shallow ones and there's a lot going on. Many folks live up here. They don't go deeper. I long to be a good person, to raise healthy kids, to have a life of meaning, to give myself away, to be a valuable member of our community, to have deep friendships, to be a good husband and love my wife and to serve all of you. These are deep longings I have. I deeply long for meaning and goodness, and of you, these are deep longings I have. I also long just I deeply long for meaning and goodness and justice. These are deep longings. And what are they saying to me?
Speaker 1:The great david brooke says this about these kinds of things like humans can only point their lives in, one of two directions is that we can either live for our resume or we can live for our eulogy. You can, can't do both, he says. And our culture is obsessed and overemphasizes the resume, things like success, your IQ, your empire, your productivity, your achievements. We love to build our resume, don't we? And the problem is we do this at the expense, often, of our eulogy. Eulogy values are things like community, goodness, strength, compassion, justice, courage, faithfulness. So what are we doing? Where is our attention going? Are we building resumes or eulogies?
Speaker 1:Jesus' response to the devil when he comes is oh yeah. By the way, we should ask the question at least what are my deep desires and longings? What are yours, the deep ones? Not just for the next meal, that's fine, those are fine, but what are your deep ones? Jesus responds I love this.
Speaker 1:He says again, the devil takes him to a very high mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of the world. This is resume building. If you ask me, he's like hey, all this I'll give it to you. If you bow down and worship me, most of us are like yo, I'll take it, thank you. How's that for a fat resume? Jesus knows better. Though he's like hey, listen, the deep longing was not to have an empire. He didn't want that. He had a deeper desire, long away from me, satan. For it's written worship the lord, your god, and serve him. Only jesus knows his meaning comes from god alone, not from the empire building. So how can we be more aware? What are deep longings? How can fasting make us aware of the shallow ones and also the deeper ones? What kind of a life we're living.
Speaker 1:The second thing is this Fasting can also give us freedom, believe it or not, as oftentimes these rhythms can help free us up. Because when you fast, you immediately become aware of all the like, the most prescient symptoms, like I feel a little dizzy, I'm hungry, I feel like I might pass out, I think I'm starving to death. No, no, you're okay, it's fine. But immediately all these symptoms come to the surface. Why? Because we have these attachments to the rhythm of eating. So fasting can slow it down. So Frickholm says I love it. She says, as I meditated on the panic that set through in that morning, when you first begin to fast, you might have this panic sense.
Speaker 1:I could see all the ways that I use food for comfort, to assuage boredom, to ease fear in social settings or to compensate for feelings of loss. I could see that food was a drug for me and I was addicted to it. I began to see fasting as a way to help me learn about the addiction and to invite grace in to free me from it. Because by becoming aware of our addictive relationship to food and most of us are kind of have this addictive relationship to food Try stopping and you'll see you'll become more of it. But by becoming more aware of this relationship with food, I can become better aware of other addictions and compulsions and attachments that I have in my own life. We all have these things addictions, attachments, compulsions. These are things that I do without thinking, things that I do without the care or concern for others or even myself. They occupy my time, my focus, my energy. If your whole day is built around a thing that's an addiction or an attachment or a compulsion and fasting can, can I be aware of those and feel free?
Speaker 1:Now, coffee is a wonderful thing. I love me some coffee. You might say I'm addicted to coffee, but I've learned this by myself because I've done some digging. I'm not so much addicted to coffee as I am the sensation that caffeine gives me. Coffee is whatever I just I have this deep longing that I assuage, that I numb with coffee. I want to be alive. Like. I want to feel things Like. I can't handle being bored, I can't handle like having a blasé board. I gotta feel I gotta have. Like everything to the 10s or 11s. Ask my wife or ask Sonia. Like no, we gotta do 10. Everything to the 10s or 11s? Ask my wife or ask Sonia, like no, we got to do 10. I got to feel everything.
Speaker 1:You know, I have this probably sometimes unhealthy attachment to like having to feel, sense everything and be alive and have all the feelings and the emotions. It's like this thing I have. That's my confession to you. Now, coffee's not bad or good, it's fine. I mean, coffee is good but coffee's fine.
Speaker 1:But I noticed in my own life I have these addictions that I try to numb out my sense of actually sort of my existential dread that lives deep in there, that I'm trying to. But that's for my psychotherapist. But anyway, moving on, uh, and if we're not careful, these compulsions, these addictions can can make us into robots where we just do things without thinking about it, without exploring, exploring it, and we're not free. Addictions and compulsions and attachments, they're like idols that we worship that promise freedom but they only enslave us. So what are your attachments? You don't have to say it out loud. What are they? Do you know what they are as you fast and become aware of them over here, like, what are my deep desires and longings Over here? What am I addicted to in an unhealthy way? What are my attachments?
Speaker 1:Jesus says this I love it. That same story. He was loved by the Spirit to be tempted. Hey, if you're the Son of God, turn these stones into bread. If you're in here fasting this morning, maybe you could use some bread. He'd been fasting for 40 days and he was hungry. He was physically hungry and food can be an addiction. I've got to have it. But he says to him no man or woman shall not live by bread alone. These attachments cannot give us life. They can't. I need every word that comes from God to feed me and sustain me. Fasting can sort of show us that the last thing is this Food and fasting can teach us about compassion.
Speaker 1:Compassion. So we live in a connected world. I eat, so does the entire world. We all eat. Right, raise your hand. If you eat on a regular basis, fair enough. Half of you. The other half of you owe me a. What's the secret? I don't know how you're living. Yeah, we all eat.
Speaker 1:This is one of my favorite snacks. I get it from Target. Where's Greta? Yeah, greta, I see Greta every Friday at snack. These are wild protein chips made with chicken breasts and egg whites and chicken bone broth. Oh, they're delicious, they're really good. 13 grams of protein.
Speaker 1:I'm kind of a weirdo when it comes to my food. I eat weird things. We all eat, but here's the thing Most of the world doesn't eat how I eat. They don't, and fasting can teach us about how to have compassion, because most of the world lives in the state I'm in now. I'm hungry now and I'm thinking about where's my next meal. Maybe you're hungry. Where's my next meal Now? Imagine not knowing when it would come or not having this giant bag of wild protein chips at your fingertips. Well, most of the world lives like that. They don't know where the next meal will come from. Fasting is uncomfortable and it helps you enter into what it's like to be hungry on a regular basis.
Speaker 1:For example, did you know that 733 million people in 2023 suffer from severe hunger? That's one in 11 people suffer from severe hunger One in 11. There's more than 11 people in this room. So odds are, several people in this room have suffered from severe hunger. Half half of all child deaths are due to malnutrition. Half of child deaths are due to malnutrition and not enough food, not good food. Half.
Speaker 1:Kelsey Duesderman works for Feed my Starving Children. She told me that every day, every day, 6,200 children die of malnourishment Every day. I don't tell you this to make you feel guilty. We need to know these things. And how does this shape how we eat and what we do with our food? I was told Pat Hackman's the chair. Where's Pat? She works with CARE. She's the board of directors of the chair. Yeah, a CARE food shelf here in town. In 2024, they served 34,000 people at CARE. That's local 34,000 people they serve at CARE. You know our population isn't even that big for Elk River. People are hungry even around here. I also learned from Pat and from Jennifer Castle that CARE gave away one million pounds of food last year. That's a lot of food. People are hungry.
Speaker 1:So how can not eating make me more compassionate? Well, compassion means to compati is the Latin word. It means to suffer alongside of it, to enter into the suffering of other people. Being hungry is awful to live reality for a lot of people. So I got a boogie here.
Speaker 1:But when we eat and fast, we should ask the question hey, how does my eating impact the world around me? Where is my food coming from? Where is it sourced from? How do the farmers grow it? Is it any kind of systems that are not just? Are there any farmers who are maybe underpaid, and you know, one of the biggest forms of slavery in the world is actually agriculture. They will hire cheap, cheap, cheap labor in places that are sometimes inhumane.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, at least be aware of it. Ask the question how does my eating impact the world around me? You can also ask this how can I feed others? Can I go volunteer at care with Pat and Jennifer and Heather Cleaver? How can I help? How can I give food away? My wife and I, we don't give out money when we see people on the street that are asking for money for a variety of reasons, but I love to give out food. I'll take people to lunch and dinner and buy them food, and you can do that. But dinner and buy them food, and you can do that, but how can we feed other people?
Speaker 1:So, uh, fasting can help us be more aware of like the world, this connection, but I can have this in any moment, but a lot of folks can't whoop. How symbolic was that? Yeah, so here's how we'll close. We live in a world where you can buy 1500 ladybugs in a moment if you wanted to. We swim in a sea of indulgence and satisfying every appetite.
Speaker 1:But what is this doing to us. Our spirituality is mostly formed with our brains, but how can we embody and sort of live out physically our rhythms that shape us? Fasting, even just a little bit, can help us be more aware of our deep longings in our life, the things that we long for, and help us build a life of. You know, that's worthy of a good eulogy and it makes us aware of, like our attachments and the things we're addicted to, or that we that consume our thinking all the time, and what's our relationship with these things, and also can help us enter into this compassionate relationship with the whole world and the folks that don't get to eat very often, because, friends, the world needs deep people who are aware of the water they swim and the gift of Jesus, and our prayer is that that would be us today, in the days moving forward, amen.
